China's Children

Excerpt from "China Grapples With Legacy of Its 'Missing Girls': Disturbing Demographic Imbalance Spurs Drive to Change Age-Old Practices"

    Written by Eric Baculinao

    Published by MSNBC News http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5953508#story

By the early twenty-first century, China was experiencing a critical shortage of females in its population. According to census reports (an official count of each state's population taken every ten years) for 2000, there were 116.9 males for every 100 females. In the "four years of age and less" category, the number was 120 males to 100 females.

"For centuries, Chinese families without sons feared poverty and neglect. The male offspring represented continuity … and protection in old age."

Because of historical preferences for sons, for centuries China's ratio of males to females has been abnormal when compared to ratios of male to female populations in the developed world. Confucius (551–479 bce) was a famous Chinese teacher and philosopher in ancient times. His ideas have been followed for centuries by Asian societies. The Confucian value system praised men over women. Only males could participate in important religious and family rituals. Further, it was believed family continuity could be sustained only through male family members. Girls were considered property of their fathers. In their late teens, they were married in arrangements planned and forced upon them by their parents. At the time of marriage, the girl became the property of her husband and was required to care only for the husband's relatives. Therefore, a girl was viewed as being an expense—rather than of value—for her birth family. As a result, it was common practice to kill some baby girls at birth, a practice called infanticide. If not killed at birth, some daughters were abandoned or neglected when babies or toddlers and died.

During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the Chinese government strongly encouraged population growth and frowned upon infanticide and neglect of girls. Those decades brought the male-female population ratio more into balance than it had ever been before. However, believing the way to economic prosperity and modernization was a slower population growth rate, the government in the 1980s enacted a formal family planning policy and ordered a limit of only one child for each family. The Chinese government offered married couples a monetary incentive not to have children. The practice of female infanticide, abandonment, and neglect increased as families were desperate for their one child to be a son. Modern technology played an important role in prenatal sex selection. Portable ultrasound scanners (machines that produce images of a developing fetus) were commonly used. The scanners produced an image of the baby being carried within the mother. As early as three months into pregnancy, the sex of the baby could be determined. If the baby was a girl, the parents could decide whether or not to end the pregnancy. Many chose to abort (to apply a medical procedure to expel the fetus from the mother's womb) the female baby in hopes their next pregnancy would result in a boy. This most severe form of discrimination against the female gender led to the worst shortage of girls in China's history.

The following excerpt is from "China Grapples With Legacy of Its 'Missing Girls.'" The excerpt examines China's gender crisis—the imbalance in males to females in the population—that was brought about by discrimination against girls.

Things to remember while reading excerpts from "China Grapples With Legacy of Its 'Missing Girls'":

• For centuries in China and other South and East Asian cultures, preference for sons has caused a shortage of females.
• The severe shortage of Chinese girls at the start of the twenty-first century had been influenced by continued son preferences, required family planning, and the one-child-only policy that dominated the 1980s and 1990s, and by life-extinguishing discrimination against girls through sex-selected abortions.
• The large imbalance between numbers of males and females resulted in the disruption of social and family structure causing many Chinese males to be unable to marry.

Excerpt from "China Grapples With Legacy of Its 'Missing Girls'"

BEIJING—China is asking where all the girls have gone.

And the sobering answer is that this vast nation, now the world's fastest-growing economy, is confronting a self-perpetuated demographic disaster that some experts describe as "gendercide"—the phenomenon caused by millions of families resorting to abortion and infanticide to make sure their one child was a boy.

The age-old bias for boys, combined with China's draconian one-child policy imposed since 1980, has produced what Gu Baochang, a leading Chinese expert on family planning, described as "the largest, the highest, and the longest" gender imbalance in the world.

Ancient practice

For centuries, Chinese families without sons feared poverty and neglect. The male offspring represented continuity of lineage and protection in old age.

The traditional thinking is best described in the ancient "Book of Songs" (1000–700 bce):

"When a son is born, Let him sleep on the bed, Clothe him with fine clothes, And give him jade to play … When a daughter is born, Let her sleep on the ground, Wrap her in common wrappings, And give broken tiles to play …"

After the Communists took power in 1949, Mao Zedong rejected traditional … arguments that population growth would eventually outrun food supply, and firmly regarded China's huge population as an asset, then with an annual birth rate of 3.7 percent. Without a state-mandated birth control program, China's sex ratio in the 60's and 70's remained normal.

Then in the early '80s, China began enforcing an ambitious demographic engineering policy to limit families to one-child, as part of its strategy to fast-track economic modernization. The policy resulted in a slashed annual birth rate of 1.29 percent by 2002, or the prevention of some 300 million births, and the current population of close to 1.3 billion.

'Missing girls'

From a relatively normal ratio of 108.5 boys to 100 girls in the early 80s, the male surplus progressively rose to 111 in 1990, 116 in 2000, and is now is close to 120 boys for each 100 girls at the present time, according to a Chinese think-tank report.

The shortage of women is creating a "huge societal issue," warned U.N. resident coordinator Khalid Malik earlier this year.

Along with HIV/AIDS and environmental degradation, he said it was one of the three biggest challenges facing China.

"In eight to 10 years, we will have something like 40 to 60 million missing women," he said….

China's own population experts have been warning for years about the looming gender crisis.

"The loss of female births due to illegal prenatal sex determination and sex-selective abortions and female infanticide will affect the true sex ratio at birth and at young ages, creating an unbalanced population sex structure in the future and resulting in potentially serious social problems," argued Peking University's chief demographer back in 1993.

Prenatal sex selection

The abortion of female fetuses and infanticide was aided by the spread of cheap and portable ultra-sound scanners in the 1980's. Illegal mobile scanning and backstreet hospitals can provide a sex scan for as little as $50, according to one report.

"Prenatal sex selection was probably the primary cause, if not the sole cause, for the continuous rise of the sex ratio at birth," said population expert Prof. Chu Junhong.

A slew of reports have confirmed the disturbing demographic trend.

• In a 2002 survey conducted in a central China village, more than 300 of the 820 women had abortions and more than a third of them admitted they were trying to select their baby's sex.
• According to a report by the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the vast majority of aborted fetuses, more than 70 percent, were female, citing the abortion of up to 750,000 female fetuses in China in 1999.
• A report by Zhang Qing, population researcher of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the gender imbalance is "statistically related to the high death rate of female babies, with female death rate at age zero in the city or rural areas consistently higher than male baby death rate." Only seven of China's 29 provinces are within the world's average sex ratio. Zhang Qing's report cited eight "disaster provinces" from North to South China, where there were 26 to 38 percent more boys than girls.
• In the last census in 2000, there were nearly 19 million more boys than girls in the 0-15 age group. "We have to act now or the problem will become very serious," said Peking University sociologist Prof. Xia Xueluan. He cited the need to strengthen social welfare system in the countryside to weaken the traditional preference for boys.

Gravity of imbalance beginning to be felt

The hint of "serious" problems ahead can be seen in the increasing cases of human trafficking as bachelors try to "purchase" their wives.

China's police have freed more than 42,000 kidnapped women and children from 2001 to 2003.

The vast army of surplus males could pose a threat to China's stability, argued two Western scholars. Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. Den Boer, who recently wrote a book on the Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population, cited two rebellions in disproportionately male areas in Manchu Dynasty China.

According to their analysis, low-status young adult men with little chance of forming families of their own are much more prone to attempt to improve their situation through violent and criminal behavior …

The growing crime rate in China which is being linked to China's massive "floating" or transient population, some 80 million of which are low-status males, seems to add weight to their observation.

Girl Care Project

The imbalance has spurred some official efforts to shift public opinion.

The "Girl Care Project" is described as a multi-pronged approach to encourage the birth of girls, although some experts complain that it's being framed in terms of the future needs of men.

"That's too male-oriented and discriminatory of women," said Dr. Gu, the population control expert.

According to one estimate, over the next decade, some 40 million Chinese men will be unable to find wives due to the "scarcity" of females, thus the growing number of so-called "bachelors' villages" in various parts of China.

"This project ought to be seen as a way to foster more respect and concern for women and girls," Gu said.

The program aims to end pre-birth sex selection, as well as "attacking the criminal activities of drowning and abandoning baby girls [while] rewarding and assisting families that plan to give birth to baby girls," reported The People's Daily, China's leading paper and the flagship of the Communist Party.

Benefits for girls

The pilot program is being launched in more than a dozen of China's poorest provinces, with funding split between the national and local government.

Leading the way is Fujian province where some $24 million has been allocated for distribution among nearly half a million households, with some 100,000 girls to be exempt from school fees.

Under the program, couples who limit themselves to two girls would receive a combined annual pension of about $150 for the rest of their lives. Preferential treatment in health care, housing and employment would also be provided.

A recent glowing report in the The People's Daily cited a village where new houses for beneficiaries worth more than $2,300 each were built along a "Family Planning Basic Policy Street."

China's birth control policy is now "a diversified mechanism," according to Population Vice-Minister Zhao Baige, which allows for one-child in the cities, two in the rural areas, and three in ethnic regions, with no limit in Tibet. "To normalize the sex ratio, illegal sex determination and sex-selective abortions must be strictly banned," Zhao declared recently.

An American demographer, who has been closely following China's population program and who spoke on condition of anonymity, lauded China's "coming to grips" with the problem.

"Still, they are in a deep dilemma—emotional and policy dilemma—because the solution to the problem will conflict with other parts of their population strategy to reduce birth rate or some of the measures could perhaps make the problem even worse," warned the demographer.

"We still have a lot of work to do," said Dr. Gu. "There's no road map yet on how to achieve the goal of normal sex ratio."

What happened next …

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, government policies in China demonstrated a movement toward solving the problem of the male-female imbalance. Such policies must overcome the centuries-old anti-female traditions. Population Vice-Minister Zhao Baige in 2006 described China's birth control policy as diversified since it allows for city-dwelling families to have one child, two children in rural areas, three in ethnic regions, and an unlimited number in the region of Tibet.

Programs were put into place that ranged from encouraging Chinese to allow the births of all females to supporting families having girls with school fee exemptions, provisions for healthcare and housing, and favored treatment for jobs. Still, with the shortage of females in the early twenty-first century, it was estimated at least forty million males will be unable to find wives and establish families.

Did you know …

• A few countries in the twentieth century experienced a severe shortage of males. Russia, North Korea, and Vietnam experienced a significant male shortage due to warfare in the last half of the twentieth century. Many women in the countries remained unmarried, and widows had to raise their children alone.
• The only nations in South and East Asia that do not have a serious shortage of girls are Japan, North Korea, and Mongolia. Although women in these societies experience discrimination in everyday life, employment, and politics, the life-threatening practices, such as sex-selective abortion and neglect of female infants and toddlers, are not embraced socially or legally.

Consider the following …

• Discuss the numerous problems that could result in societies that have significantly more men than women.
• What explanations could be given for the importance of females not increasing in countries with severe imbalance of male-female population?

• What reactions could be expected from Americans as they learn how extensive female infanticide and neglect is in South and East Asian countries?

For More Information

BOOKS

Cohen, Myron L. Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Evans, Karin. The Lost Daughters of China: Abandoned Girls, Their Journey to America and the Search for a Missing Past. New York: J. P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000.

Kruger, Rayne. All Under Heaven: A Complete History of China. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2003.

WEB SITES

Baculinao, Eric. "China Grapples With Legacy of Its 'Missing Girls': Disturbing Demographic Imbalance Spurs Drive to Change Age-Old Practices." MSNBC News. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5953508#story (accessed on December 12, 2006).

Sobering: Thoughtful and serious.

Self-perpetuated: Practice continuing on its own momentum.

Infanticide: Killing of infants.

Draconian: Severe.

Lineage: Descent in a family from generation to generation.

United Nations: International organization founded in 1945 composed of most of the countries in the world.

Degradation: Harmful practices.

Prenatal: Before birth.

Sex-selective abortions: Termination of pregnancy as soon as the baby's sex can be determined by ultrasound scanning.

Fetuses: Babies still in the mother's womb.

Disproportionately male areas: Regions with significantly more males than females.

Transient: Continuously moving from place to place.