Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Rural gender imbalance in China will worsen








Source: Taipei Times



The problem of too many men and not enough women in Chinese villages is likely to become much worse, a researcher warned.

China has 32 million more men aged under 20 than women, a paper published last month by Therese Hesketh of University College London. Her research suggests that rural areas, where the imbalance is greatest, will be further affected because of women “marrying out” and going to live in cities.

“It looks as if high sex-ratio areas, particularly in central China, are likely to get worse. Because of migration, we are hearing again and again that women are going to urban areas and staying. In rural areas that will exacerbate the sex ratio very markedly,” she said.

“In the past, migrants have tended to go back home to permanently settle. But women [now] are finding partners in urban areas and not going back. Men are unable to do that. Urban women will not marry a migrant man; men can’t marry up,” she said.

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Too many taboos that will never change are causing the problem. Every family must have a son. So under 1-child policy rule, every family has a son. And in rural area men can't marry up. So they have to marry a farm girl too. It's the whole class society thing. There are no farm girls to begin with and if there are any, they're gone. The poorest farm girl can go into the city and find a husband, especially is she's beautiful. The poorest farm guy? He needs to find a poorer, uglier farm girl.

It never ends.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I find it odd that there's over 30 million more men in China since you still can't choose the gender to give birth to. And I doubt 30 million women are sent down the river.

Anyway, that's the situation now and I think the Chinese goverment need to market their situation better.

Currently everything is about status and the attitude "West is the best"

The Chinese goverment needs to put the brakes on human sex trafficing, reduce the number American influenced advertising and increase the values of "what's inside" that counts.

Degenerasian said...

Not sure how this has anything to do with the West. The Chinese have always wanted boys for thousands of years.

Although I agree that there probably aren't 30 million girls being sent up the river, girls are being aborted in huge numbers.

Also the Chinese believe a women can do certain things before sex to improve their chances of having a boy. Things like eating certain heavy foods or having sex at a certain time in the monthly cycle and other things. It may not help that much but it doesn't take much to skew the statistics.