New Study Shows Extent of Gender Imbalance in China
By SHARON LAFRANIERE
Published: April 11, 2009
BEIJING - A bias in favor of male offspring has left China with 32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls, creating "an imminent generation of excess men," a study released Friday said.
For the next twenty years, China will have increasingly more men than women of reproductive age, according to the paper published on-line by the British Medical Journal.
"Nothing can be done now to prevent this," the researchers said.
Chinese government planners have long known that the urge of couples to have sons was skewing the gender balance of the population. But the study by two Chinese university professors and a London researcher provides some of the first hard data on the extent and the factors contributing to the disparity.
In 2005 , they found, China had more than 1.1 million excess male births. There were 120 boys born for every 100 girls. This problem seems to surpass that of any other country, they said - a finding they wrote that was perhaps not surprising in light of China's one-child policy.
They blamed the imbalance almost entirely upon decisions by couples to abort female fetuses. The trend toward more male than female children intensified steadily after 1986, they said, as ultrasound tests and abortion became more available. "Sex selective abortion accounts for almost all the excess males," the paper said.
The researchers said the disparity was sharpest among one-to-four year olds, a sign that the worst imbalances among the adult population lie ahead. They also found greater distortion in provinces that allow rural couples a second child if the first is a girl or in cases of hardship.
Those couples were determined to ensure they had at least one son, they noted. Among children born second, there were 143 boys for 100 girls, the data showed.
The Chinese government is openly concerned "about the consequences of large numbers of excess men for social stability and security," the researchers said. But "although some imaginative and extreme solutions have been suggested," they wrote, China will have too many men for a generation to come.
They said enforcing the ban against sex-selective abortions could normalize the sex ratio in the future.
The study was conducted by Wei Xingzhu, a Zhejiang Normal University professor; Li Lu, a Zhejiang University professor, and Therese Hesketh, a University College London lecturer.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/world/asia/11china.html?ref=global-home
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
My Thoughts
You know it's a slow news day when I start talking about China's one-child policy.
I wonder how the geniuses in the Chinese Communist government couldn't forsee this.
No comments:
Post a Comment