Vietnam has had a problem with women being abducted for sale to Chinese brothels or as brides for many years. Perversely, the gangs are also abducting young boys to sell to childless Chinese families.
I don’t understand how this would work. Is it because a lot of gay men, in times of gender balance, will pretend to be straight and get married and have children? Is it because all the straight men who can’t get women will suddenly decide to jump the fence? Is it an evolutionary argument, that more gay men will be born because there’s a shortage of women for the straight men? Please explain the mechanism here.
At the risk of spoiling one more stereotype:
China’s birth rate is just slightly lower than that of the USA and higher than many European and other countries.
List of countries by birth rate - Wikipedia
Population growth control definitely exists but it is not what some people think. Minorities are not included and many people either get around it or pay the penalty. I know quite a few people with more than one child. The latest case I saw just went to Hong Kong to have the child and it seems the child does not exist as far as China is concerned. I asked what would happen when it was time to enroll the child in school and I was not very clear on the answer but it seems they have a plan. At any rate, China’s birth rate is not what some people think it is.
I do not know about the imbalance in the sexes. Supposing it is what the OP says then it might be a problem but not as big as many seem to think. How many adult people of both sexes in America are single, separated, divorced, etc? Plenty. And they seem to be doing OK except for the ocassional rant on this board saying they can’t find a mate. I really can’t see this as a huge problem.
Well, for one in America the fabric of our society no longer revolves around the family. People can still have a secure, happy and meaningful life without a spouse or children. But China is nowhere near this day. Your family is still very much your life and your livelihood, and an unmarried person is worthy of pity and surely bound for an impoverished and difficult life that amounts to nothing in anyone’s eyes. To this day, unmarried people still do not get the full shebang at their funeral when they die. Their life is considered to have passed with no consequence.
Finally, in nearly every culture in the world, it is the rootless young men who cause problems. From criminals to rebels- it is young men with little investment in society that are the troublemakers.
You cannot just compare crude birth rates. If you have a lot of young people to start with (as a proportion of the population, either because of shorter life exectancy or because of a high birth rate in previous time intervals) you will have a high crude birth rate even if the number of children born to each woman in her childbearing age is small.
The reason why DR Congo is on the top of the list is largely because their life expectancy is so short. Most of the people in the population are under 30. There is no large population of people in the 40-80 age bracked to bring the ratio down, by driving the denominator up.
This is why a population can continue to grow for a couple of generations after the birthrate falls below 2 per lifetime of a woman.
You don’t see the difference between having 5% unemployement where people cycle in an out of the 5% (and some people are voluntarily cycling in and out) and having 20% unemployment? It goes to the next level of misery when you are talking about being able to find a spouse and have children, instead of finding a job.
People understand that they are deprived of things when they are poor. It is just the way life is. But the poor have always had at least a family to look toward. Not having a family, and not having a prospect of one is one very nasty situation. Especially if it is a function of being poor and the governments policies.
Also, China is no America or Europe. Individualism is not valued in Chinese culture, and therefore in their psychology. Everything is big to small, as they say. First you belong to the country, then to your family, and then to yourself. And the very people who will be locked out of the reproduction stakes, are the ones who would be most dependent on their children for support in their old age. In an economy which is changing very rapidly from a cradle-to-grave system to a y-o-y-o system, this is scary to people. Having children to care for you is considered the ultimate secuity.
Minorities are only 7% of China’s population, and they have high birth rates, particularly the Mongolian and Turkic groups. It just means that the birth rate among the Han is even lower than the statistics for China as a whole.
You can’t imagine the trouble that would explode if 20 million Han Chinese started looking for brides amoung a total minority population of less than 100 million. The Muslims wouldn’t like it much. 20 m is a lot of excess men, even for a country of China’s size. And that is what we will have between the ages of 20-30 in about 15 years. The entire cohort will be something like 100m men and 80m women.
India has the same problem, but on a smaller scale because they don’t have the population controls any more. So we have the two most populous countries in the world, with about 40% of the worlds population with large and growing gender imbalances. This is scary to anyone who understands how people really think and feel in most societies.
The only hope is that at least the social stigma that attaches to being unmarried in Chinese and Indian societies is reduced by the sheer number of unmarried men. To some extent this is inevitable.
How will this effect their society?
The correct spelling is “affect”. Different word. Different meaning.