In any case, China is changing quickly and I think this will be a short-lived problem. It results from a system where upon marriage, the woman goes to live with the man and his extended family, often cutting off contact with the family she was born in to. This means that raising a daughter become an expensive proposition with no benefit in the end. The addition of a dowry- origionally meant to provide a young wife with what may well be her only personal property, but which is now sometimes a cash grab by the husband’s family- only makes things worse. It’s not so much that women arn’t valued, as much as raising a daughter is expensive and come sometimes mean lifelong debt, etc. for an entire family.
Your collegues come from a different socio-economic background than those that are the subject of the book, which I presume to be peasants and rural communities (I’ve not read the book so I could be wrong). Attitudes on gender in URBAN China today is not so far removed from the west, and in any case middle class urban dwellers are well off enough to be able to afford 2 children. The issue that the OP is talking about will arise in the countryside, where it has been official policy for some time that another child was allowed if the first one turned out to be a girl. The surplus of unskilled, uneducated farmer’s sons with no prospects for the future will be the problem.
One has to give credit to the Maoists though, modern attitudes, even though they are conservative by western standards, are still light years ahead of what they were in 1949(essentially medieval).
The post-WWII baby boom is going to bite a lot of nations in the ass really soon. So far the only nation that I’ve seen singled out for being hard-hit is Japan–their baby boom was more of a baby spike, really.
Anyway, that and the push for land-owning rights for rural farmers are going to be bigger issues for China in the near future than the girl shortage.
What I found amazing was their steadfast belief that the 95% figure was a slanderous fabrication. One of these people grew up in Xinjiang, the son of an enginerr transplanted to the hinterlands as part of the ongoing effort of the Chinese govt. to ethnically cleanse them. What I find most impressive about the Maoists is their astonishing success at inculcating and inuring hundreds of millions of people.
And where in that article is the evidence for ethnic cleansing? I assume that you and I have the same definition of the term, namely the violent expulsion of an ethnic group from an area in order to replace them with another?
The Non-han population of XingJiang has tripled since 1949 and the growth rate of the non-han population far outstrips that of the rest of China, as the one child policy doesn’t apply to non-Han peoples. It is evidently another hollywood inspired myth like the “ethnic cleansing” of Tibet.
The article links to broader definitions of ethnic cleansing, and there has certainly been violence. And what difference does the birth rate of non-Han populations make if govt.-sponsored (often should read “compelled”) Han migration outstrips it? Prior to 1949, Han Chinese made up around 5% of the population in the region. Presently they make up slightly more than 40%, and are now the only group with a plurality. That’s pretty remarkable if the other ethnic groups are outbreeding them 3:1.
Well, were the non-Han population forcibly expelled? Were their lands and properties expropriated en-mass? Did millions of Uygurs and Khazaks flee across the border to joing their co-religionists in Central Asia, a relatively easy task for nomadic pastoralists? No, and in fact the rapid growth in population seems to indicate that they are doing rather well. The fact that a lot of Han moving into XingJiang is no more ethnic cleansing than the mass migration of Latinos into the US, as you claim. The rapidity of the recent move is simply a result of a rapidlly growing Han population in China proper and massive Chinese investment in XinJiang’s infrastructure, particularly roads and railways, that did not exist before 1949.
A similar problem is already occurring in the most depressed areas of the former East Germany, but for a different reason: migration rather than births. Due to poor job prospects young women are emigrating to West Germany in search of jobs while young men tend to stay put even if it means staying on the dole. Result: in the young adult age group in some areas there are as much as 100 men to 78 women. And the remaining male population seem to be a bad self-selected group - the IQ scores of military age young male East Germans have declined measurably in the last few years. So there are a lot of young men there who can’t get jobs, can’t get girls either, and aren’t too bright. The consequences for society and economy in these areas seem to be dire.
Right. Well, this is a terribly unrewarding hijack, and I’ve about as much interest in further debating what appears to be a defender of Maoists as I do chewing glass. You want to start another thread, I might feel masochistic enough to drop in, but let’s drop this here, shall we?
You are describing something which has been a feature of Chinese society for thousands of years and had persisted under Communist rule. What reason do you have to believe it is changing?
Because there’s a lot of farmers and not a lot of land.
It HAS changed in the cities. How much of this was directly due to the communists is perhaps debatable, but until farming becomes more automated and less labour intensive it will continue to persist in the countryside.
The Chinese communist model of industrialization is no different from the Soviet one, despite the fact that the Chinese communists came to power on the backs of the peasants. The rural agrarian economy was nationalized and its squeezed-out surplus output used to accumulate industrial capital. It’s not a pretty proccess but at this point it is starting to look like a done deal. China is an industrialized power, and the peasants, knowingly or not, are going to be looking for some collective payback. The goverment knows this, thus Tax cuts and increased investment in the countryside but I question how much of the benefit will trickle down to the peasants through the layers of corruption and graft.
Because it has already changed in the cities? Because that is how Europe used to be, and it changed? Because EVERYTHING in China is changing at breakneck speed?
Ethnic cleansing may not be the right word, since the ethnic groups you mentioned are not being shipped out forcibly, but neither is it analogous to Latinos migrating to the US. In China, the government has deliberately set out to either move or provide incentives for Han Chinese to move to Xingjiang or Tibet in order to forstall any moves towards indepedence or unrest. In Mexico and other Latin American states, governments may turn a blind eye and provide minor, indirect support for illegal immigrants crossing into the US, but it’s hardly the result of a policy directed at changing the racial make-up of the US.
I predict violence as unmarried men w/o families are more prone to crime and according to some evolutionary biology that I’ve read men become violent and start thieving to attract women in a situation like that. As someone else said, buying wives from overseas will become more popular too. There is already alot of that when N. Korean women try to escape and get to China they become slaves.
I’d predict immigration of women if it becomes a major problem. On the other side, I’d predict more rebellions due to all the pissed off males.
