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Chinese Bias for Baby Boys Creates a Gap of 32 Million
- nopinsight 18y agoIf the law of supply and demand also applies in this market, the boys-girls gap in the next generation would be smaller. However, given the thousands-years cultural norm that prefer boys over girls, it's likely the gap will likely persist for a long time to come. Anyone has some ideas on what to do with this problem?
- dmoney 18y agoInduce another large country, e.g. India, to prefer baby girls.
- ced 18y agoSurprisingly, India also has an unbalanced ratio, and AFAIK, the root problem is the same: cultural. Sex Ratio: At birth: 1.12 male(s)/female under 15 years: 1.098 male(s)/female 15-64 years: 1.061 male(s)/female http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/04/country_facts/main3328865.shtml http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/04/country_facts/main...
- oneplusone 18y agoThe simplest solution would be a large scale war. Actually, it is the only solution. Nothing good will come of this.
- gojomo 18y ago"Only solution" is a bit harsh. What about homosexuality, or robots?
- mattmcknight 18y agoOn the former, investing in a chain of gay friendly bars or websites in China might be a good idea. It looks like the laws are getting a bit more lax in that area[1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_China http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_China
- gojomo 18y agoActually, cultural preferences can change. This blog entry commenting on the NYTimes article mentions that both Japan and Korea have in recent decades begun to prefer daughters: http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/04/boy-trade-in-china.php http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/04/boy-trade-in-china.php
- marcusbooster 18y agoI've heard that this had lead to an increase in human trafficking, namely women in poorer countries like North Korea being "imported" and taken as brides.
- feverishaaron 18y agoI wouldn't be surprised if China started to become more aggressive militarily as this generation enters the proper age. An imbalance of men that don't have mates has caused problems for societies in the past, and they solved those problems by putting all of this pent up aggression to use.
- mynameishere 18y agoYes. Vietnam needs to start working on an H-Bomb now. I mean that. The ironic aspect of it, of course, is that in modern economies, women are much more valuable to the old folks than men.
- mynameishere 18y agoAny reason why this got downmodden? Just curious.
- pstuart 18y agoMy take: the suggestion that anybody should be pursuing nuclear weapons to solve socioeconomic issues.
- mynameishere 18y agoYeah, I don't know, but I'm being serious. Vietnam and China are ancient enemies, and Vietnam is the likeliest source of stolen brides. A few h-bombs, pursued for the exact same defensive reason that France and the UK had, could prevent demographic dislocations, between wildly disparate world powers.
- Retric 18y agoIt's not a binary issue, and you can't just say A > B = problems. There are ~1.3 billion Chinese, but let's assume the this issue covers 1/3 of the population. So it's (1300/3 + 32/2) vs (1300/3 - 32/2) which works out to 4350:4318. Now we might guess that there will be large numbers of men that don't ever have a relationship. But, what people forget is relationships don't always last. People die, or get divorced ect. So what ends up happening is women will spend a higher percentage of their life in a relationship and while some men will never marry this is "normal" and they can still have relationship with women throughout their lives. If anything expect women to marry younger and female widows to be in higher demand than males widows. Granted, if the male to female ratio ever reached 2:1 there would be issues but this is still a minor imbalance.
- diN0bot 18y agoI recently learned about the Mosuo, which have no gender bias. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo
- benhoyt 18y agoVery interesting. However, this kind of thing: "Most significantly, when children are born, the father may have little or no responsibility for his offspring..." -- that's terrible. That WP paragraph "Walking marriages" somehow reminds me of Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". Harsh indeed.
- dangoldin 18y agoWell the child doesn't have the actual father as a parent but he/she does have the males of the family. It's just a different way of raising kids as a community that we just aren't used to.
- lucumo 18y agoYou should've read the next paragraph... "This does not mean, however, that the men have no responsibilities for children. Every man will share responsibilities in caring for all children born to women within their own family, be they a sister, niece, aunt, etc. In fact, children grow up with many “aunts” and “uncles”, as all members of the extended family share in the duties of supporting and raising the children."
- potatolicious 18y agoMany cultures are like this - and it isn't as terrible as you would think. Even some European cultures practice the godfather system - where the godfather serves as the traditional western father figure instead of the biological dad himself. There are many other cultures (particularly southeast Asian) where the father is removed from the equation and the child is reared by other male relatives. The father in this case will get to raise someone else's child, so it all works out in the end.
- irinotecan 18y ago32 million disenfranchised men, unable to find a wife, and start a family in 18 or so years? The stuff that revolutions are made of.
- kurtosis 18y agoI've heard this theory floated before. The people proposing it have a good point. They have to find something to do with all of these young men or trouble could emerge. I guess an alternative strategy would be to bring back monasteries. If this is too discordant with the official ideology of the state, they could send them to graduate school in science. ;|
- Rod 18y ago"If this is too discordant with the official ideology of the state, they could send them to graduate school in science." LOLOL. Would be even funnier if it weren't so true: http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/intercourse-and-intelligence.php http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/intercourse-and-intelligenc... A depressing statistic: "only 65% of MIT graduate students have had sex."
- nostrademons 18y agoThere's a fairly obvious explanation that I didn't see mentioned anywhere in the abstract: assortative mating. People tend to have sex with people of roughly the same intelligence, socioeconomic status, and interests. As you go down the tails of the bell curve, there are fewer people of the same intelligence with similar interests. If you have an IQ of 100, 68% of the population is within one standard deviation of you. Your chances of meeting someone you feel comfortable with in high school are pretty high. But if you have an IQ of 145 (3 stddev), only about 3% of the population is within one standard deviation of intelligence of you. Add to that the constraints of it being a member of your preferred sex, being reasonably attractive & socially compatible, and wanting to have sex, and it's no surprise that most such people don't find suitable mates until they enter college, which purposely brings together people of similar intelligence. And if you have an IQ of 175 (5 stddev), less than 1 in 10,000 people is within one standard deviation of intelligence. (Though this is a bit meaningless, as IQ distribution has fat tails when you get past about 145.) Then add in that super-intelligent people often have very narrow and deep interests, and that males are overrepresented on both ends of the bell curve (there are both more male morons and male geniuses than female ones). This also explains why the smartest men were most likely to hire a prostitute. If they had no chance of forming an emotional connection with a woman, why not pay her to leave afterwards? Personally, I had about zero interest in 90% of girls in college. They were just inane. And this is at Amherst, which already selects for pretty smart people.
- mattmaroon 18y ago"Nothing can be done now to prevent this" That's not true. Nothing that wouldn't land someone in the Hague maybe.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- jhancock 18y agoThe problem is most preventable in rural areas and the cities more to the west. Places like Shanghai don't have such an imbalance. The more likely solution, as opposed to using them for wars, it they get used for domestic construction projects: highways, railroads, etc. This has already been the case. China is working hard on this problem. Its illegal to know the sex of a child during pregnancy. Some get around the issue, but I have personally seen it upheld pretty well. I knew the sex of my child before he was born, in Shanghai. But I was only allowed to know because I was an American and was in a hospital that catered to foreigners. The locals seem to have mostly settled in on the fact that they aren't supposed to know.
- 3pt14159 18y agoThe anti-war solution? Monogamy is probably out the window. - "Full service" Chinese sperm banks (mildly nsfw) http://www.inquisitr.com/20953/sperm-donation-in-china-comes-with-a-special-touch/ http://www.inquisitr.com/20953/sperm-donation-in-china-comes... - Special friends (like Japan) http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070313230107AAlIVdC http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070313230107AA... - Robots Better (and cheaper) than the alternative.
- ComputerGuru 18y agoRead the comments on the first link, it's a fake.
- banned_man 18y agoMonogamy is probably out the window. I disagree, seeing as it's a shortage of women, meaning that multiple men would have to share a female partner. Polyandry is utterly impractical, as men would rather go to war than be stacked up by the women. Sharing is worse/more humiliating than having no wife at all. Polygyny tends to ensue in societies when there's a shortage of women, because women are the reproductive bottleneck and, therefore, much more valuable. If the women are "underutilized" (sorry for the crude term) the group will not repopulate fast enough. Polyandry, on the other hand, does not result from a shortage of females. Crime and unrest do.
- raintrees 18y agoWouldn't this also have an impact on China's morality laws? Maybe this will push same-sex relationships and all of the accompanying impacts (child rearing, financial planning, legal contract/consideration) to the forefront far faster than would otherwise occur...
- tokenadult 18y agoThere is a long Chinese cultural preoccupation with having legitimate descendants who will carry on the clan line (that is, have the same surname as the father). This is expressed in Shang era bronzes from almost 3,000 years ago that I have seen in museums. The inscriptions on the cast bronze objects, which were often given as rewards to faithful subjects who achieved glory in battle or the like, include expressions of a wish to have children and grandchildren for countless generations. The common saying is 不孝有三，無後為大 http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%8D%E5%AD%9D%E6%9C%89%E4%B8%89%EF%BC%8C%E7%84%A1%E5%BE%8C%E7%82%BA%E5%A4%A7 http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%8D%E5%AD%9D%E6%9C%89%E4... indicating that the very worst way that a child can be disobedient to a parent is to not give the parent descendants.
- est 18y agoIt's not Chinese bias, it's one-child policy bias against the Han Chinese
- RK 18y agoA doctor friend of mine told me about removing contraceptive IUD's from Chinese women who are living in the US and now want to have more kids. The IUD's are designed to be permanent (not the same as US IUD's) and the women are forced to get them after they've reached their child quota in China. The interesting thing is that some doctors outside China probably perform more of these removal procedures than Chinese doctors ever do.
- bint 18y agoSo in other words -- 32 million baby girls were murdered. One Day, severe Justice will be served to these people.