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There is another graph here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/File:China_single_age_population_pyramid_2020.png https://en.wikipedia.
by stefan_ 5y ago
There is another graph here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/File:China_single_age_population_pyramid_2020.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...
Which shows a massive male surplus particularly in the young demographics, way larger than you would biologically expect. How can we claim this policy has no effect if clearly people are still killing female infants?
- faitswulff 5y agoInteresting how the assertion that Chinese people kill infant girls en masse goes completely unchallenged without nuance on this site.
- HDMI_Cable 5y agoAre there any other explanations for the massive male surplus?
- faitswulff 5y agoIs adoption murder? Abortion? Why is it easier to imagine that Chinese people murder infants than it is to imagine literally any other scenario? Why is it easier to assume that a massive sex imbalance is the result members of a particular group of people being psychopaths rather than the result of some systemic cause? Hmm.
- eloisius 5y agoI think the systemic cause was clearly pointed out: the one child policy.
- faitswulff 5y agoAnd the killing of children follows, naturally
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kbelder 5y agoNaturally.
- prepend 5y agoInfanticide doesn’t mean psychopaths. It’s been practiced, and I think super bad, by many cultures. I don’t think that means the culture is full of psychopaths. Also, I assumed the reason there was no evidence posted for the Chinese infanticide claim is that it’s extremely common and has been known for a long time. I just assumed everyone was aware. It doesn’t mean people killing literal babies, but does mean stuff like more abortions of female embryos. [0] Wikipedia [1] has a more general article with more links to sources. [0] https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-child-policy-led-to-forced-abortions-30-million-bachelors https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-chil... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_China
- faitswulff 5y agoThis is the only reply worth reading. Even then, abortion is not infanticide.
- prepend 5y agoThat’s an important distinction. And why I called out that much of the ratio imbalance is due to abortion and not literally people killing their baby after birth, although this does occur nonzero and is really horrifying to me. Ancient cultures practiced it much more frequently and I think shows how different cultures have different values for life.
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoTrue story: when we got pregnant in Beijing, our first ultrasound that could tell the sex of the baby, the technician was hinting at it (look there!), but she wasn’t allowed to say it out loud.
- jokethrowaway 5y agoYes, abortion is murder and a new human being is formed at conception. It's just convenient to call it something else not to appear monsters. If a girl were adopted in China she would still show up in this dataset. I haven't heard about foreign adoption being popular in China (like it would be in eg. Africa), so the unbalance is likely to be the result of aborting/killing baby girls.
- faitswulff 5y agoMoving the goalposts. It certainly is not "killing female infants."
- seanmcdirmid 5y agoForeign adoptions from China were popular a decade or two ago, now they pretty much don’t exist. Still, those flows should have had some effect on today’s numbers.
- toxik 5y agoThe question was if it was NEEDED, not if it had any effect.
- throw0101a 5y ago> How can we claim this policy has no effect if clearly people are still killing female infants? No effect ≠ no need. The intended purpose was to reduce birth rates for population control. This was being accomplished before the the policy even came into effect.
- himlion 5y agoKilled, or just unreported? Probably both, but I guess more unreported.
- hutzlibu 5y agoCan you raise a unreported child in china? How would that work? With no papers at all and the communist buerocrats also really likes paper about everything. ?
- bellyfullofbac 5y agohttps://thediplomat.com/2015/03/chinas-hidden-children/ https://thediplomat.com/2015/03/chinas-hidden-children/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/11/30/researchers-may-have-found-many-of-chinas-30-million-missing-girls/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/11/30... It's also China, where they put toxic stuff in watered down milk to make it look as foamy as protein-rich good milk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal , i.e. a place with a lot of corruption and where gaps are possible.
- alisonkisk 5y agoAre you suggesting that China is somehow unusual in poisoning the populace? Are you aware of Superfund? Nestle, who convinced mother's to starve and poison their babies with formula and dirty water that replaced and then blocked lactation?
- MandieD 5y agoUp until Covid stopped business travel, my Chinese colleagues brought home as much infant formula or follow up milk powder for toddlers as they thought they could get away with when visiting HQ in Germany, and always asked us to bring some with us when we went there. Lots of stores here had limits on how much you could buy at once because of that.
- whoevercares 5y agoIt’s just matter of couple hundreds RMB “pay the toll”
- TimPC 5y agoMisread graph. Removed comment.
- robjan 5y agoThere is still a male surplus and culturally people still prefer to have boys because they carry their family name. Girls are married out of the family and if your one child is a girl there will be nobody to look after you in your old age.
- thefounder 5y ago>> there will be nobody to look after you in your old age. What a sick, selfish society. If you can't take care of yourself maybe it's time to go?
- jacquesm 5y agoWhat a sick little comment. The world is a lot larger than the rich West and historically children were what we have - in some wealthy places - a social security system for. But in many places where the state is barely functional and family ties are strong children tend to take care of their elders, because that's how it's been traditionally. The best way to reduce that factor in how many children people have is to up the standard of living, which more or less automatically reduces the number of children people will have because they no longer need to worry that much about their old age. On another note: those societies have - of necessity - much stronger family ties than that same rich West, so something valuable is lost along with the social needs.
- thefounder 5y agoIt looks like in China it's even a law[1] that old people use to take advantage of their children. Just because it's a "tradition" doesn't make it good. It's been a "tradition" to beat your wife and children as well in many parts of the world or even worse. If you are miserable why would you like to make your children's life miserable as well? [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7422934/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7422934/
- dan-robertson 5y agoWasn’t their some policy saying that rural mothers could have a second child if their first was a girl? If they each had the maximum number of children, it would lead to an average of about 1 boy and 0.75 girls per rural mother.
- lozenge 5y agoYes, the article saying the one child policy remained untill2016 is an oversimplification. There were already exceptions introduced including when both parents had never had any siblings.
- areyousure 5y ago50% B + 25% GB + 25% GG = 0.75 B + 0.75 G. Can you think of a law ("stopping rule") that could even get the expected number of boys higher than the expected number of girls?
- dmichulke 5y agoFor gambling it would would work if you do a "double or nothing" type of bet. Unfortunately, you'll be quickly rate limited by birth capacity, even if you somehow manage to double the amount of children per birth. Also, asymptotically, you'll still be around a 50% split.
- waterhouse 5y agoAssuming no selective-abortion shenanigans, every child you have is expected 50% male, 50% female (barring e.g. unusual men who only produce sperm of one gender—I think that exists but is extremely rare), so there's no possible strategy that leads to an uneven gender split, probability-wise. But I think there were selective-abortion shenanigans, and that the policy was effectively in response to them. If we assume each family wants, as its first objective, to maximize the number of sons, and, as its second objective, to maximize the number of daughters, then each selective-aborting family would have exactly one daughter followed by one son under such a policy.
- infinity0 5y agoYou should always compare the data against other countries before jumping to hasty conclusions based on your own prejudices and confirmation biases. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:China_single_age_population_pyramid_2020.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:China_single_age_populati... - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USA2020dec1.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USA2020dec1.png The proportional male surplus in China is just over double that of the US. Of course there is something different happening in China, but asserting that this is mostly due to people "killing female infants" is ludicrous. By your logic, there "only" about 2/5 (portionally) of female infants getting killed in the United States as well.
- kec 5y agoThe natural ratio between male and female births averages around 51:49, the US is almost bang on this number. China is currently closer to 55:45... clearly there is some unnatural pressure going on.
- vagrantJin 5y ago> How can we claim this policy has no effect if clearly people are still killing female infants? Strong statement. Evidence please.
- kube-system 5y agoNot exactly “killing infants” but abortion. https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-child-policy-led-to-forced-abortions-30-million-bachelors https://www.npr.org/2016/02/01/465124337/how-chinas-one-chil... https://www.bmj.com/content/338/bmj.b1211 https://www.bmj.com/content/338/bmj.b1211
- faitswulff 5y agoAbortion is not the same thing as killing infants. The racism that's tolerated on this site is very telling.
- carlhjerpe 5y agoWhile I agree that abortion isn't killing infants, I don't get the racist part about this.
- faitswulff 5y agoThe racist part is the simple unchallenged assertion that Chinese people are so inhuman as to kill their infant children en masse.
- kbelder 5y agoThey indisputably did, though. No fact can be racist. Not because they're inhuman, of course; that sort of behavior has happened all throughout human history. It's just that, with China in the 20th century, the scale was huge.
- 5y ago