I recently read an article on the BBC News website about the effect of gender on China's population. The article claims that for every 100 girls born in China, 119 boys are born. Now why is there such a wide gap? Chinese families typically have a bias towards having male children. The Chinese government urged families to have sons instead of daughters causing a large population imbalance. Due to societies set gender roles it was thought a male child would be more likely to succeed in life. The cultural norm in Chinese society is that male children are of more value than female children. This idea has caused Sex-selective abortions to rise since the mid 80’s. I have read plenty in the past history classes about families preferring to have male children, but I find it really disturbing that families will go as far as aborting the pregnancy once they know it is a female fetus. Even more disturbing is that there is a selective female infanticide after the babies are born. The end result of all this population skewing will cause China many problems into the future.
The consequences of this skewing are that tens of millions of the new male population will have no females to marry to. Researchers from the British Medical Journal found that the Chinese government is openly concerned “about the consequences of large numbers of excess men for social stability and security.” How will these men feel like when they grow up and are part of the excess population? They might react badly to the situation and feel that they are of no worth to the society, or have no legacy to give to their child. In this case the gender stratification of Chinese society has caused an unknown future for the country. It is too late to prevent the situation because the population differences started growing 20 years ago. I imagine the only way to fix this situation would be either lots of female immigration or lots of males being forced to leave the country. The Chinese government must also denounce the use of sex-selective abortions so that the population may balance out further in the future.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8451289.stm)
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/world/asia/11china.html)
-Zachary Lewkowicz
-post 1 Apr24-
Very interesting example. Can you relate it to any of our readings on gender and sexuality?
ReplyDeleteJeff: I was mainly relating my example to Lorber's idea of gender stratification. Lorber says that this stratification ranks men above women, and that whatever men do is valued more than what women do. This stratification seems to be embedded into Chinese society. So much that families are trying not to have female children.
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