On a smoggy morning in Lanzhou, a gritty industrial city in China’s Gansu province, crowds of young men gather outside a half-built construction site. Dressed in torn jeans and dirty shirts and carrying thermoses of tea, they push toward the exterior fence, jostling for the attention of a site manager who hands out short-term jobs.
Most of the men are unmarried and have no families. Finding no work, they drift away from the site and, by midday, congregate at a riverside park, where they trade tea for large bottles of beer, which they gulp down. Many of them soon stumble in circles.
Lanzhou exemplifies a more insidious, possibly more dangerous threat to China’s development than financial imbalances, environmental disasters or unemployment: The People’s Republic has too many men. Today, roughly 120 boys are born in China for every 100 girls, perhaps the worst gender imbalance in modern human history.
Within 15 years, the country might have 30 million men who cannot find wives. That could mean serious trouble.
For centuries, patrilineal Chinese households have preferred male children because men are viewed as better able to support rural families, and boys inherited the land. Some Chinese gender experts, such as Liu Bohong of the All-China Women’s Federation, also argue that there is deep-seated male chauvinism in Chinese culture that leads to a preference for boys.
Infanticide often resulted, which sometimes created gender imbalances. But after taking power in 1949, the Communist Party largely stamped out infanticide, and by the early 1980s, China had a relatively normal ratio of male and female babies.
China’s one-child policy, launched around the same time and still in force with some minor exceptions, has restored the gender imbalance. Families allowed only one child might be aborting until they have a boy. Ironically, as China has become wealthier, rising incomes have coincided with more, not less, sex selection.
Inexpensive modern ultrasounds have enabled parents to learn their child’s sex, and if the baby is a girl, they abort.
The policy has another pernicious effect. As American Enterprise Institute scholar Nicholas Eberstadt has documented, it will turn China, by 2030, into a grayer society than the United States. Yet China still will not be as wealthy as the US and will face a tougher time supporting its senior citizens.
The demand for brides also is fuelling a different type of crime — a growing sex trafficking industry in China, one that is sweeping in girls from such neighbouring nations as Laos, Myanmar, North Korea and Thailand and poisoning China’s image in these countries.
China’s surplus males might be developing into a permanent angry underclass capable of being dangerously exploited. As in Lanzhou, unemployed unmarried men dominate China’s 150-million-strong pool of migrant labour, and most of them have no prospect of obtaining an education or long-term job.
As China faces a wildfire of protests concerning labour and property rights, as well as other issues — the number of “mass incidents”, or large protests, in the country rose more than 500 per cent between 1994 and 2005 — companies or local officials have started hiring members of this male underclass as thugs. This has led to more violent confrontations.
Beijing is beginning to understand the problem. Once loath to reveal breakdowns in social stability, China’s State Population and Family Commission admitted last winter that “the increasing difficulties men face finding wives may lead to social instability”. In response, China could relax its one-child policy, which not only would reduce sex-selective abortions but might head off the early graying of China’s population.
And if China does not care for its bachelors? The past provides a guide. In the mid-19th century, another period when female infanticide created skewed sex ratios in China, a revolt developed across the countryside, in part because young men were unable to find wives and formed into armed bands.
The imperial court crushed the insurgency, called the Nien Rebellion, but it took more than a decade for Beijing to win the battle. Ultimately, these revolts weakened the court and hastened its downfall. It is a lesson China’s current rulers surely have not forgotten.
LA Times
