China's "Boy Imbalance"

A shortened version of this essay was originally posted to A-P-C July 3, 2004, following the release of National Geographic's documentary, "Lost Girls of China".

Much has been written about the growing imbalance between male and female children in China. Official estimates show the surplus of males growing to 25 million by 2030. China has reacted to this problem by instituting several gender-biased programs such as the recent "Care for Girls" program.

But is this imbalance as serious as so many here in the West believe? And is it as serious as the Chinese Government would have its citizens believe? Before answering these questions, let's first look at how the Western media is presenting this problem. I take as a case-study Lisa Ling's "National Geographic Explorer" segment on China and its adoption program, entitled "Lost Girls of China".

Lisa spends considerable energy furthering the misconception regarding China's male "imbalance". Granted, much has been written in the West about the imbalance and its implications for China, but several key things have not been considered in the discussion. Having traveled and lived in China a large percentage of my time over the last six years, I offer you additional facets of this problem.

Lisa spends a little time on the apparent kidnapping of women for sale as "wives" to men "unable to find wives", ostensibly due to a shortage of women due to the one-child policy. In reality, the kidnapping problem has absolutely nothing to do with the one-child policy, a surplus of males, or any other demographic imbalance. It has everything to do with economics: the men who are paying for kidnapped wives are in China's lowest economic segment. Women in China, just like their counter-parts in the West, seek to improve their economic status through marriage. A man with no job, no money, and no future (a key driver in women seeking marriage) will find it very difficult to find a woman willing to marry. Sometimes (and admittedly it is very infrequent) these economically disadvantaged men will act illegally and kidnap a woman to act as his wife. Although this occurs infrequently, it has nothing to do with an imbalance between men and women in China. It is important to remember that prior to the imposition of the one-child policy in 1980, the ratio of men to women was about equal. Thus, the first "children" of the policy are just now reaching the age where they are marrying and having children themselves. In a country the size of China's, it is simply not possible for the population to have shifted so dramatically so quickly that wives are already scarce. In another two decades the imbalance is projected to be 25 million men, or only about 1.6 percent of the entire population. With China's divorce rate at 21% and rising, this small surplus should have no problem finding marriageable partners among the singles and the nearly two million females joining China's divorced population each year.

Lisa also interviews school kids and asks them if there are more boys and girls in their school. Again, this is a very imperfect indicator, since China does not have a "free" public education program. Each parent must pay fees for their children in school (a powerful incentive to obey the one-child policy), and many families, especially in the poorest areas of China, are not able to afford to send their children to school. In this case, there is a preference to males, since it is logically assumed that boys will be able to utilize an education more than girls. Many girls are thus absent from the schools.

Additionally, in the upper "optional" grades after ninth grade, many of the girls drop out to look for work. This was borne out in an interview I had with the high school daughter of a Jiangxi orphanage director. I asked her if there were more boys than girls in her school. She replied that in the lower grades there had been more girls than boys, but now there were fewer girls because so many had left to seek work in the city.

For my part, I have surveyed scores of elementary aged classes, and never seen an imbalance. Neveretheless, I recognize that classroom surveys are a very faulty indicator of population ratios.

So, what is really going on here? Does China have a population imbalance or not? In order for an imbalance to develop, female children would need to be removed from the population. This can be done in two ways: prenatally, or post-natally. The most likely means of removing unborn girls from the population is through abortion. The problem with this solution, however, is that few doctors will disclose the sex of a child to a couple. Lisa shows this in her piece. I have interviewed scores of young couples with newborn children, and not a single couple was able to learn the sex of their child before it was born. The penalties involved for violating this law are severe, including loss of one's profession, fines and jail. Perhaps in cases of close personal relationships would the doctor violate this law, but certainly not enough to allow for the abortion of the millions of girls it would take to swing the balance significantly. That leaves post-natal elimination of girls.

In my experience with the Chinese people, there is one thing that is readily apparent across all spectrums of Chinese society: they love children. Again, I see no evidence (newspaper reports, criminal prosecutions, etc.) that indicates that millions of young girls are being killed each year. There are no bodies, I see no arrests, etc. Where are all these dead girls ending up, if that is what is happening? I staunchly disagree with anyone that thinks the Chinese are killing their daughters on such a wholesale level. So, if the girls are not being aborted or killed after birth, how is the imbalance occurring, if indeed it is?

A partial answer can be found when one looks at the Family Planning program in China. It starts when a woman conceives. The government has set up a number of incentives to encourage a family to register the pregnancies with their local Family Planning official. The first and most important incentive is the child's ID card. This card allows the family to access the medical services of their area hospital for prenatal examinations, delivery services, and post- delivery exams. By registering a pregnancy before it comes full term, the family is given an ID card at no cost. This ID card is required (if enforced) by the hospital in order to have the child there, something highly desirable for safety reasons. Although we assume that most Chinese have their children at home, this is not the case. Fears of complications compel most mothers to have their children in the hospital. But what does a family do that decides not to keep their newborn daughter? Since that daughter has filled their allotted "slot" with the Family Planning office, if the birth was registered there is only one way to be allowed to have another child: report to the Family Planning office that the child died. Following the death of a child, the Family Planning office will erase the child from the records, and the family will be allowed to have another child. In other words, many of our daughters were probably reported as having died by their birth parents. The effect of all this would be to exaggerate the mortality rates of young girls in China, resulting in the belief that there is a population imbalance developing. In fact, however, the girls are not removed from the population. They are living in China's orphanages or informally adopted by other families.

Lisa mentions that she believes 100,000 girls a year are found in China. It is important to remember that this figure approximates the number reported to the police. But that number is not anywhere near the total number of girls found. Why? Because most are never reported to the orphanage. In my research for adoptive families, I have had the opportunity to interview hundreds of "finders", the people involved with discovering the child. In talking with them, nearly all of them indicated a temptation to simply keep the foundling themselves, and not report the finding to the police. One finder had to protect a set of twins from a woman who was intent on taking one of the twins home with her. A woman approached me in an airport, and after learning who I was, and seeing my two adopted daughters, confessed that she had "adopted" her daughter after finding her at two days old on the street. One orphanage director I know also has an "adopted" daughter that was a foundling. It seems likely that for every girl found and reported to the police, 7 to 10 girls are quietly adopted by the community that found them. Thus, a large and growing segment of China's girls are invisible to the statistics and records of the government. These are in fact the "hidden girls".

But again, although they don't show on Chinese governmental censuses and records, they do exist. Since they have not been removed from the population in reality, the "imbalance" is overstated by their numbers, which is at this time unknown. Doesn't the Chinese government know this? Of course. But it is in their best interest to perpetuate the myth of an imbalance in order to increase the intrinsic worth of female children, and thus reduce the causal reasons for female abandonment. They want families to think that women will become scarce so that the families will be motivated to keep their daughters. Thus the Chinese government freely publishes statistics that perpetuate the belief that an imbalance is occurring.

A recent example is this story, taken from the Xinhua News from October 24, 2006. This government story details how difficult it is for some couples to find "flower girls" for their weddings. The reason, according to this story, is the scarcity of young girls in Guangzhou and other cities.

Now, anyone traveling to Guangzhou can see that this story is misleading on its face. There is no shortage of "flower girls" in China (for one, the vast majority of Chinese weddings don't use Western "Flower Girls", but follow traditional Chinese protocol. Only "westernized" couples are beginning to adopt elements from western weddings. Thus this issue is largely moot). Any adoptive family can watch the morning exercises of the school children on Shamian Island to see that there are plenty of "flower girls". For Mr. Long's story to be an accurate representation of the state of things in Guangzhou, the imbalance would need to be considerably higher than 118 to 100. I have no doubt that this story may have been true for his family, but it does not reflect reality in Guangzhou, or anywhere in China. But it does make one believe in a shortage, and that is the point.

There is an imbalance between boys and girls in China, but I believe that the extent of that imbalance is unknown. Until China is able to look into every country farm house and every high-rise apartment, there will remain unknown millions of "hidden" children. Until the extent of this population is known, it is difficult to know what the imbalance truly is.