The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [51]
Unlike India, where sex ratios of children have become steadily more imbalanced over the past half century or more, in Korea, between 1995 and 2000 the number of young boys recorded in the census for each 100 girls fell from 115 to 110.
MISSING BRIDES
Jiang Jin, a thirty-one-year-old mother of three, has decided to live an undercover life in Beijing—babysitting her sister’s children for a thousand yuan per month—rather than return to her hometown in Jiangxi and face the penalties for having had three children in violation of China’s one-child law. Enforcement of the law is looser in China’s countryside. Families are often allowed two children. Still, authorities in Jiangxi would fine her perhaps up to five thousand yuan, she says, to register her illicit kids and send them to school. “If you don’t pay the fine,” she said, “they take your house; they sterilize you.”
Jiang Jin’s predicament is not unusual. Like many other Chinese, she wanted a boy, and kept having children until one came. Other Chinese have resorted to more radical solutions. When Deng Xiaoping instituted China’s one-child policy in 1979, his intention was to limit the size of the population so that it would peak at 1.2 billion before shrinking to 700 million by the middle of this century. But he didn’t foresee one of its most notorious consequences. The systematic killing of girls, as families who had a baby girl got rid of her to make space for the boy they needed to take the bloodline to the next generation. While families in some rural areas were allowed to have two children, it still forced parents with one girl to ponder abortion if they happened to expect another. In 2010, China’s Academy of Social Sciences reported that 119 boys were born for every 100 girls.
This, paradoxically, means that girls in China will eventually become very expensive. Today, China is “missing” tens of millions of women. This poses a different demographic challenge: what to do with millions of Chinese men who will fail to marry—what the Chinese call guang gun, or “bare branches.” Economists at Harvard estimated that by 2020 there will be 135 men of marriage age—twenty-two to thirty-two—for every 100 potential brides, aged twenty to thirty. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimated that by 2020 there would be 24 million men of marriage age without a spouse. The chance that a man over age forty in the countryside would find a spouse would be virtually zero.
This bodes ill for China’s development. The lopsided sex ratios are likely to result in higher crime rates, increasing the number of frustrated and unmoored young men prowling the streets. It will increase the incidence of prostitution, and thus probably of HIV, and increase economic uncertainty for millions of men who will likely reach old age without heirs to care for them. The imbalance will also deepen regional disparities as women from the poorer regions in inland China are drawn to the wealthier coast to find both jobs and better pickings in the marriage market.
Researchers have even suggested the sex imbalance pushed Chinese households into a race to save more, so their sons would have money to compete in the increasingly tight marriage market. This enormous savings rate has contributed to China’s accumulation of some $2.5 trillion in foreign exchange reserves at the end of 2009. If one can believe Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, China’s gender imbalance helped inflate the global housing bubble, as the mass of Chinese savings sloshing through the world’s financial system kept interest rates low and fueled the boom in housing prices all over the world.
Beyond marriage imbalances, China’s disregard for women is squandering a valuable resource. Women accounted for more than half