Gender Imbalance and Population Control: Two Problems that I wish weren’t related

An article over at Nature has left me in a bit of a thought-knot about China’s One Child policy. Or really, more than the tool of the One Child Policy itself, how the tool has been (mis)used in China.

If you tire easily of exposition, the thought-knots (and a cool graph!) are after the jump.

A common female name in China, Laidi, encapsulates one of the country’s biggest problems of population management. It means ‘a little boy is following’, betraying the widespread longing for a son. But tight restrictions on family size have meant that, for many, that son never follows.

This article already makes me sad, in a “We still don’t know how to advise parents to make boys” kind of way.

The reasons for the Chinese preference for a son are deep-seated, especially in rural areas. The motivation is partly economic: a son may be considered able to work harder in the countryside, or be more likely to get a lucrative job in the city. In part it is about welfare: a son is duty-bound to look after his parents in their old age, whereas a daughter’s obligations are transferred to her in-laws when she marries. The importance of a male heir is also a legacy of patriarchal Confucian culture. (emphasis mine)

Sigh… At least they acknowledge the patriarchal culture? Even if it’s a token sentence? Even if they didn’t state: “because boys are valued more highly”? I guess I understand trying to rationalize this preference logically, but in reality I think it’s a bit more complicated (and a good deal more subconscious) than “if I have a boy, he can work harder in the field.”

The one-child policy has had a dramatic impact: the birth rate per woman dropped from 5.4 in 1971 to 1.8 in 2001, and is even lower in urban areas. But the effectiveness of the policy varies. Resistance in rural areas has led to an allowance of a second or even third child, particularly among ethnic minorities. “It’s rather like a one-child-and-a-half policy,” says Christophe Guilmoto of the Research Institute for Development in Paris. “In many areas, you’re entitled to a second birth if the first is a girl.” Moreover, he and Isabelle Attané at the National Institute for Demographic Studies, also in Paris, say that “birth control is slipping out of the hands of the regime’s cadres, and coercive measures are failing”¹. The Chinese government has now shifted its emphasis from coercion to voluntarism, with a focus on health issues and education rather than population control per se. (emphasis mine)

One-child-and-a-half policy? A second child if the first child is a girl? I guess that means that a girl counts as half of a child. Again, depressing in a number of knotted-together ways.

Hesketh says that the dominant cause of the sex-ratio imbalance is sex-selective abortion, which could account for around 95% of the ‘missing females’. “Ultrasound scanning is readily available, even in poor rural areas,” she says. Sex-selective abortion is illegal but hard to police. Hesketh feels that stricter enforcement could have a big impact, but new techniques for determining fetal gender could add complications. “The new method is now DNA blood testing, which is much more convenient than anything else,” says Guilmoto. “It’s not common in China yet, but things may change rapidly.”

I can’t see too much of a difference between infanticide and sex-selective abortion, in this scenario. Thus I don’t think it’s particularly significant that there are “hardly any infanticides anymore!”, because female lives are still being lost. (NB: In case anyone wants to start with the “pro-lifing”, banning abortions in China would not solve this problem, either. It would just shift the balance to infanticide, or some other method. There’s a much deeper problem here, and that’s that the culture that doesn’t value some lives as highly as others.)

Actual thoughts after the jump.

In 2006, Hesketh and Zhu Wei Xing of Zhejiang Normal University in China warned that the male–female imbalance could cause serious social tension and disruption in the future³. In China there is a strong expectation that young people will marry and have a family, whereas Hesketh predicts that over the next two decades this may be impossible for up to 15% of men. The imbalances are greatest in poorer, rural areas, and because women from this background will be able to ‘marry up’, it is mostly the poorest men who will find themselves with no marriage prospects. Already, she says, 94% of unmarried people aged between 28 and 49 are male.

Thought knot time: A callous part of me that’s more interested in population control doesn’t really see this as a problem. China would propagate its population problem much more readily if they preferred girls over boys, as girls can go on and have more children in turn, while boys can’t (without aid). To put it a different way, a population with fewer boys than girls can have many more children than one with more boys than girls. If what they really want to do is control population, the Chinese have done (are doing?) a bang-up job.

Nonetheless, it’s a bit tragic that so many families have been making so many decisions about which lives, and which people, are more valuable. The decisions of a billion people add up, you might say. I don’t know where you can easily jump in to begin describing this destructive cycle. Say a government that has property and inheritance laws that exclude women, perhaps because of a culture that doesn’t value women (but where does this culture come from?) Then you get families that have to have boys. Then you get preemptive gender-based abortions, gender-based infanticide, and preferential emergency/medical care and food rations for one gender over the other. Eventually, it seems, you also create a problem for the very gender you were trying to promote in the first place.

“This trend could lead to increased levels of antisocial behaviour and violence,” Hesketh says. “When young men congregate, the potential for more organized aggression is likely to increase substantially, and this has worrying implications for organized crime.” Already, girls have been abducted to become future brides for families with a son. Female trafficking is on the increase, says Hesketh, and so too is the sex industry. But she cautions that it is very hard to attribute cause and effect when the economic situation in China is changing so fast.

Two things: Woo, more treating women as a commodity! Trick question: Is it better to be treated as a worthless commodity (and denigrated and trafficked) or as a scare and valuable commodity (and abducted and trafficked?) Methinks, neither.

Also, it doesn’t surprise me that the poor (men) would receive the brunt of the consequences for the accumulated decisions of their people. These things generally tend to get shunted down to the bottom of the totem pole. This isn’t necessarily the best plan (for those who want to keep the power), because giving these people less and less eventually gives them nothing left to lose, a potentially volatile situation. Or so I would naively think.

To me, all of this would point to the strange notion that maybe it is time to start valuing both genders equally. If women in China were thought to have the same intrinsic worth as men, maybe we’d start seeing that reflected in who made it to adulthood. If women were allowed more freedom in what they did after marriage (or before) maybe we’d see more families choosing to embark on the formerly “losing” venture of having a daughter.

I think maybe we’re getting there:

The Chinese government is eager to change attitudes, and has been running a ‘Care For Girls’ campaign, which promotes the value of daughters, for the past decade, even in remote rural parts of the country. Legislation has made it easier for girls to inherit, and some provinces have introduced perks and incentives, such as waiving school fees, for daughter-only families. Such efforts may now be bringing results. According to the results of a 2005 micro-census, the sex ratio at birth has already stopped increasing; in fact, Hesketh suspects there is “probably a small downturn occurring”. The next national census in 2010 might provide a clearer picture.

It troubles me a bit, but less than it probably should, that it is only as the consequences for the non-female portion of the population come clear that we see a change in how women are viewed. This suggests a sort of “women as commodity” view that will perhaps favor women while they are “scarce”; however, once women are again at parity in the population, who’s to say that their “value” will not decrease again? Still, legislative changes are real changes which will hopefully level the balance of power in China somewhat. I am optimistic because I think these effects tend to snowball: that is, once women gain a bit of equality, they can use that to gain still more rights and/or men could start to view them as more equal, and so on. Perhaps this is delusional, but I can think of worse states to spend time in.