Chinese Girls
China has the most severe shortage of girls compared to boys of any country in the world today, as documented by China's surveys and censuses up to 2000. This article evaluates data on sex ratios in China since before the founding of the People's Republic, and shows that the relative dearth of girls has become more extreme during the last two decades, and that the problem is real and not merely due to undercounting of girls. Daughters are lost primarily through sex-selective abortion, secondly through excess female infant mortality, and thirdly through neglect or mistreatment of girls up to age three, in cities as well as rural areas. Until recently, the dearth of girls was confined to second or higher-order births, but now couples in some provinces are using sex-selective abortions for first births. Maps show the geographical concentration of life-threatening discrimination against girls and its spread over time. Son preference, low fertility and technology combine to cause the loss of daughters in China today, and compulsory family planning and the one-child policy exacerbate the problem. The discussion includes what the People's Republic of China has done to ameliorate life-threatening discrimination against girls and what further steps might be taken to improve the situation.
China is reported to have a severe shortage of females in its population. However, concerns have been expressed that Chinese data are faulty and paint an alarming picture that is false. This article documents the evidence for the shortage from Imperial times, through the pre-Communist period and entire half-century of the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the 2000 census. It evaluates and analyses sex ratio data for this whole period, and puts China in global and comparative perspective. It is demonstrated that any errors in the data are minor and that after they are accounted for, the shortage of females in China is real and extreme. By establishing what would be 'normal' sex ratios in an East Asian population, it is shown how China indeed deviates from normal.
The article explores the origins and causes of the 'missing-girl' phenomenon and argues that it constitutes a real problem. The basic cause is strong son preference, which has resulted in a shortage of females for centuries or millennia. During the 1950s to the 1970s, when fertility remained high, the Chinese government vigorously promoted male-female equality and greatly reduced the life-threatening effects of the culture's son preference. Female infanticide and severe neglect of girls leading to their untimely deaths were reduced to the lowest levels ever seen in China.
In the late 1970s, however, as fertility dropped, family planning compulsion increased and the one-child policy was introduced, China's media reported a resurgence of female infanticide. Since then, the shortage of girls has again become extreme, this time primarily because of sex-selective abortion, and also female infanticide and neglect of young daughters. China is not alone; several other East Asian and South Asian countries have also been experiencing greatly distorted sex ratios at birth, though they do not have a one-child policy or required family planning. In all cases the problem can be traced to continuing strong son preference, rapidly declining and then low fertility, and the availability of various means to achieve the desired sex composition of children, or the desired sex of an only child. The article discusses what is and is not causing China's dearth of girls and highlights what the government is doing to ameliorate this problem and what further contributions they and others could make.
In recent decades, some journalists, scholars and Chinese public officials have discounted the notion that China has a severe shortage of girls by commenting that people hide their daughters (not sons) from being registered or counted, in the hope of being able to try again for a son. It is known that births are underreported in most data sources, and it is argued that female births are less completely reported than male births (Gao 1993; Tu 1993; Zeng et al. 1993; Peng 1993; Croll 2000: 28-30). The high reported sex ratio at birth (SRB) of the 2000 census, 116.9 boys per 100 girls, would at first appear to support this argument but the fact that it is entirely consistent with the sex ratio of counted infants, 117.8, given higher female than male reported infant mortality (China NBS 2002, Vol. 2: 196, 570, 713) suggests that births are no more underreported for one sex than the other, at least in relation to the reporting of infants.
The picture is also mixed for sex-selective underenumeration of children. In the 1990 census, there was no more undercounting of young children of one sex than the other (Banister 1992: Table 2; Johansson and Arvidsson 1994: 67-73). The uncounted boys and girls at age 0-4 in 1990 were counted by the time they were 5-9 in the 1995 one per cent survey, and again at 10-14 in the 2000 census. The sex ratios of these cohorts were almost as distorted when fully counted as when the children were undercounted. Girls who were "missing' from the 1990 census, as shown by distorted child sex ratios, did not re-emerge in subsequent censuses more than uncounted boys. However, in some more recent enumerations girls have been undercounted more than boys of the same age, for example at ages 1-3 in the 1995 one per cent survey (China NBS 1997: 11). This may also be the case in the 2000 census: if a correction is made for this possible tendency, the sex ratio of the population aged 0-4 would be about 117-118, instead of the counted 120.
Demographers define the 'sex ratio' as 'males per hundred females'. Normally, if a national population has not been hugely affected by sex-selective international migration or mass-slaughter of men in warfare, the sex ratio of the population should be 94-102. Examples of world regions with normal population sex ratios include Europe (96), North America (97), Latin America and the Caribbean (98), Australia and New Zealand (99), Africa (100), Southeast Asia (100), and the least developed countries as a group (101) (UN Population Division 2003).
In all populations, more males than females are conceived and more male than female foetuses miscarry spontaneously. A normal SRB can be as low as 100-104 in populations with high rates of spontaneous abortion and stillbirths, such as seen in high-quality Swedish data for the eighteenth century (Johansson 1984) and in some Sub-Saharan African populations today. In Caucasian and Asian populations where no prenatal sex selection is practised, the SRB is in the narrow range 105.0-107.0. For example, the annual recorded SRB in Japan during 1980-2000 was 105.2-106.0 (Japan IPSS 2002; UN Annual). The recorded SRB in Taiwan was 105.0-106.0 under Japanese administration during 1915-1940 when female births became more completely registered than before (Taiwan Province 1946: Table 78; Barclay et al. 1976: 611). Today the highest normal SRBs of 106-107 are recorded primarily in some European populations with low fertility, a total fertility rate (TFR) of 1.0-2.0 births per woman, and very low mortality (UN 2004).
Throughout life in normal populations, males die at slightly higher rates than females because of innate biomedical, genetic factors (Mosley and Chen 1984; Coale 1991; Li, Zhu and Feldman 2004). Therefore, in normal Asian and Caucasian populations today, the sex ratio declines from 105-107 at birth to 102-107 at ages 0-4, and for the population aged 0-14 a normal sex ratio is 100-106, lower for higher-mortality populations and higher for low-mortality populations.
Sex ratios in China
Population sex ratios in China do not fit the category of 'normal.' For centuries or even millennia, China's population has had an abnormal shortage of females. Evidence from China's last dynasty, the Qing dynasty 1644-1911, indicates a shortage of girls in families from the highest social classes to the lowest (Lee and Wang 1999). The dearth of girls was caused by female infanticide immediately after birth (drowning, exposure, suffocation, abandonment) or by untimely childhood deaths through selective neglect or maltreatment of girls.
Why were some daughters killed, abandoned, neglected, or maltreated to death in old China? The main reason was a strong Confucian value system that honoured almost all males over nearly all females. Important religious and ancestral rituals were reserved for males. It was believed, and still is today, that the family lineage can be continued only through sons; this attitude is especially strong in Taiwan and southeast parts of the Chinese mainland (Poston et al. 2000; Yang and Chen 2003). Men but not women owned property. A girl was owned by her father and a woman was controlled by her husband and his family. At marriage in her late teens, a daughter was lost to her natal family as she married out to a different village and thereafter worked for and cared for her husband's relatives. A daughter was generally seen as costing more to her parents than they would ever get back from her. Therefore daughters, at least some daughters, were treated as expendable.
Due to China's one-child-rule, 117 boys are born for every 100 girls in China, a ratio that many fear will result in serious issues once these boys and girls grow up to become adults. Ultrasounds for non-medical purposes (such as to know the sex of one's child) is illegal in China and is being strictly enforced. Read more from the Christian Science Monito
China's little emperors, the adored only children born out of the one-child family planning policy, are set to disappear after a single generation.
Anxious about the burden of a greying population and a widening gender imbalance, family planning authorities are considering scrapping a policy that they fear could become a demographic timebomb.
The world's biggest population of 1.3 billion lives on only 7 per cent of the arable land on Earth and is already straining scarce land, water and energy resources. The number, however, is likely to fall from the middle of this century, prompting worries among about how to slow the decline.
Zhao Baige, Vice-Minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, spoke of the need to relax birth-control policies and said: “We want incrementally to have this change.”
She was careful not to refer specifically to the one-child policy, which has attracted widespread criticism internationally for its draconian implementation that has even included forced abortions and sterilisations.
China was serious about relaxing its family-planning rules, although Ms Zhao declined to give a timetable. “I cannot answer at what time or how, but this has become a big issue among decision-makers,” she said - a clear indication in China's opaque system that a policy change is on the cards.
The one-child policy was implemented in the 1970s in a belated attempt to limit a population running out of control after Mao Zedong exhorted his people in the 1950s and 1960s to have large families, saying that more people meant a stronger China. He also believed that China could overcome its enemy at the time, the United States, with a human wave in case of war.
Tough birth-control policies are credited with preventing about 300 million births in China and helping to push the country towards greater prosperity. That achievement has come at a cost. A traditional preference for boys - seen as the only way to carry on the family line and a necessity for the farming families that make up the majority of the population, has resulted in a widening gender imbalance.
Experts estimate that 119 boys are born in China for every 100 girls, compared with the normal average of 107 boys born for every 100 girls. With nearly a quarter of the total Chinese population expected to be 65 years or older by the middle of the century, the little emperors will have to bear the burden of supporting this rapidly ageing people lacking proper pensions.
Ways to avoid a new population spike while preventing such imbalances are under serious study. The Vice-Minister said that research teams must consider the strain of China's huge population on its limited resources as well as population attitudes and just how much of a social net the Government could afford to provide without the traditional reliance on large families to care for the aged.
Surveys show that 60 per cent of Chinese under the age of 30 want no more than two children, and only a very small number want more than three. The average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime has fallen to 1.8 in China today - from 5.8 in the 1970s, and below the replacement rate of 2.1.
The headache for family planners comes from a combination of the huge numbers and entrenched traditions. The population is set to grow to 1.5 billion people by 2033 with birthrates likely to soar over the next five years.
Already many people are ignoring the rules - particularly the 150 million or more migrant workers who travel from poor rural areas to work in the more affluent cities and who can more easily escape the eye of officials.
China began relaxing the one-child rules a decade or so ago. Farmers whose first child is a girl are allowed to try again for a boy, although many already ignore that. Couples in a second marriage may also have another child. Those who flout the policies face a stiff fine - often several multiples of their income - or, in the case of government officials, dismissal.
‘We’re so glad we had a daughter’
Song Xiaoshi and his wife are the doting parents of a three-year-old girl. Mr Song, a highly educated Beijing office worker, is thrilled that their one child is a daughter. “A girl has closer ties with her parents,” he said, “and in the city we don’t need sons to work in the fields. In fact, when a boy grows up and gets married he has to buy a flat and his parents must help him, so this brings more worries about money.”
Mr Song is one of a growing younger generation that appreciates the birth control policies. “I would have wanted another child, but the problem is that this brings a very heavy financial burden.” His wife stopped working when their daughter was born and the couple could be stretched if they had a second.
Mr Song regards the one-child policy as necessary, but added: “Having a child is very good for our marriage. It creates a bond. So, if it were possible, I might still want to have a second child.
“Still, it’s a difficult decision.”
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