By 2020, 24 million Chinese men will be 'bare branches', unable to find wives

Gendercide is in the news again. The current issue of Time (19th July 2010) has a piece by Hannah Beech reflecting on the scale and the unanticipated consequences of the Chinese government’s one-child policy.

In Chinese culture a principal source of a man’s self-esteem is his ability to marry and found a family, and bear children, thereby becoming a fruitful ‘branch’ of the family ‘tree’. But in ten years time, the mutual reinforcement of the Chinese government’s compulsory one-child policy and the cultural discrimination against baby-girls will leave 24 million Chinese men as ‘bare branches’, that is, unable to find women with whom to found a family.

Ms Beech observes that China’s fertility rate at 1.6 births per woman is ‘well below the normal replacement rate of 2.1’. But ‘the country is also saddled with one of the planet’s worst gender imbalances, largely as a result of women aborting female fetuses due to a traditional preference for male offspring.’ And why are Chinese women destroying their girl babies – ‘the pressure to bear a son is all the greater in China precisely because many families are limited to just one child.’

This is having a huge unintended side-effect – ‘by 2020 there will be at least 24 million ‘bare branches’ – men destined to stay single because there are not enough wives to go around.’ And this in turn is likely to lead to escalating criminal trafficking in women.

A second unforeseen outcome of the Chinese compulsory one-child policy is a radical unbalancing of the age-structure that puts China’s economic development at risk. Beech notes that ‘factories are now facing shortages of young skilled labour.’

A third never forecast social crisis coming down the tracks for China from this ill-judged and unjust social policy concerns the elderly. As there are fewer people being born and not enough women to go around for the forming of families, there are going to be more elderly people to maintain and less workers to maintain them. ‘By 2050, one-third of Chinese will be elderly.’ And the pension support for the elderly is very poor in urban areas and immeasurably worse in rural areas.

The situation is actually far worse than Beech acknowledges but it is encouraging to find that a significant awareness of the nature of the crisis and its scale is percolating into the mainstream international magazines.

Read Time Magazine article here

Sign the Stop Gendercide Now Petition - Help end the lethal bias against baby girls

100 million baby girls are missing - and the number is rising. They were aborted or killed at birth. Why? Because of a preference for baby boys.

It is a human rights violation on a massive scale perhaps the most widespread form of violent anti-female discrimination in the world today.

The mission of Stop Gendercide Now is to highlight the fact that so many baby girls have disappeared through abortion, infanticide, or neglect and to work for political change to remedy this.

By signing the Stop Gendercide Now Petition, you’ll be joining others in sending a strong message to the leaders of countries like China and India, which have deplorable records in defending the rights of baby girls, born and unborn. Your voice can really make a difference.

The number of baby girls’ lives lost through gendercide has risen sharply as cultural pressures against the birth of baby girls are reinforced by harsh inhumane traditions, coercive population control policies as well as political ideologies.

As a result of this, 100 million baby girls who should have been born have been aborted, killed or left to die. It is a human rights violation on a massive scale.

Boy-preference leading to dramatically fewer baby girls being born and surviving is concentrated primarily in China but also in India and other countries.

The mass destruction of girls has produced a systemic gender imbalance in whole populations for example; there are more unmarried young men in China than the entire population of young men in America.

The Stop Gendercide Now Petition puts pressure on the governments of countries with significant sex ratio imbalances:

- To introduce measures to ensure that the killing, fatal neglect or abandonment of baby girls because they are girls is ended.

- To carry out and publish an annual audit giving the sex ratio, the measures put in place to address it, and the progress or otherwise of these measures.

The Stop Gendercide Now Petition will also be copied to the Secretary General of the United Nations calling on the UN to adopt a meaningfully proactive leadership role in ending the horrific practice of signalling out baby girls for abortion and infanticide.

Many steps can be taken. Initiatives can be developed to encourage education for girls: reform of laws and customs that exclude or disadvantage daughters in property inheritance; facilitation of women’s participation in all dimensions of public life; requiring family planning officials, midwives and hospitals to publish the birth sex ratios, and reward advances towards the normal balance of girls to boys.

To read about Stop Gendercide Now and to sign the Petition click here

To join this Cause on Facebook click here

To visit the Stop Gendercide Now blogspot click here

Stories of Loss and Love: The shocking truth about China’s treatment of baby girls

The book Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love* by Xinran eloquently and poignantly tells individual stories and uses them to explain the traditional cultural and modern ideological and consumerist forces behind the abortion and killing at birth of girls, and why they are also given away or allowed to die through neglect.

Chapter 3, for example, tells how, when Xinran’s bike got a puncture, she brought it to a woman who ran a small bike repair shop near the radio station in Nanjing where she presented the Words on a Night Breeze programme on women’s issues. They got talking.

The woman told her that before she opened the bike repair shop she had worked as a travelling midwife. Her rate varied for different kinds of birth. For a boy who was a firstborn “I could quote three times the normal rate for that. If the mother was the wife of the eldest son, the birth was very auspicious because it continued the family line, and then it was six times.” And what if it was a girl and the family didn’t want a girl? ‘”If they wanted it put out of the way, you charged sky high”.

Xinran asked her how she killed the girls and the midwife listed three different ways, and then said, ‘”And for women who’d never had a baby boy, just girl after girl after girl until the family were fed up with it, it was simple enough to chuck it in the slops pail”.

Over ten chapters each focusing on different situations where a baby girl was not wanted, Xinran lets us see and feel what it is like to be a woman in China subject to the immense cultural, legal, bureaucratic and ideological pressures that combine to force pregnant women to have their girls aborted, destroyed at birth or neglected or given away.

Any pro-life person who wants to get a feel for the causes of the pressures behind the 100 million missing baby girls needs to read Xinran’s Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother.

* Xinran, Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love, Chatto and Windus, 2010, London.

Gendercide: The Economist’s cover story on the forced killing of baby girls in China

The current issue of The Economist shows how the personal tragedies of women forced to abort girls, have them destroyed at birth, or let die through neglect, are leading to catastrophic social situations in China. The mass destruction of girls has left a systemic gender imbalance in the population where there are more unmarried young men in China than the entire population of young men in America.

The Economist, as its name suggests, looks at the world through the unsentimental lens of economic realities. It specialises in taking a hard look at the facts and figures that are newsworthy. This makes the cover story on its 6th March 2010 issue, all the more astonishing.

On a full-page funeral-black front cover is a pink pair of baby girl’s shoes and over them in huge pink letters a single-word banner headline, GENDERCIDE* and under that a subheading asking What happened to 100 million baby girls? There is a full-page editorial, again headed Gendercide, and the story runs over 4 full pages and a long review of a new book on the same phenomenon. It’s must-read stuff.

The Economist supports legal abortion. But there is something new. It now acknowledges, that ‘the cumulative consequence of such individual actions is catastrophic’, describing the results as 'carnage’.

It’s a breakthrough article for the pro-life community, mainstreaming information and analysis that has been available for 20 years. The 100 million missing baby girls of The Economist’s front-page comes from an article** by Indian economist, Amarta Sen who won the 1998 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on welfare economics.

So what happened to this unimaginably large number of baby girls? The subheading of the editorial sums it up, ‘Killed, aborted or neglected, at least 100m girls have disappeared – and the number is rising’. They were killed by their parents, or given away by them, or died through selective neglect by their parents, especially the mothers under crushing pressure from the traditions and ideologies of their families and local and national communities.

The lethal cultural bias against girls is concentrated primarily in China but also in India, Taiwan and Singapore, in South Korea until the 1990s, in some ex-communist countries and also seems to be reflected in the gender imbalance among Chinese-Americans and Japanese-Americans.

The huge numbers are due to the mutual reinforcement of false and dysfunctional traditional disvalues and modern ideological disvalues, both communist and those of the emerging middle classes. China’s one-child policy, The Economist says, ‘profoundly perverts family life’.

The harrowing effect on the mothers themselves surfaces in China’s shameful suicide rate for women. The Economist article notes China’s female suicide rates are among the world’s worst. ‘Suicide is the commonest form of death among Chinese rural women aged 15-34; young mothers kill themselves by drinking agricultural fertilizers which are easy to come by. The journalist Xinran Xue thinks they cannot live with the knowledge that they have aborted or killed their baby daughters.’

Every pro-life person needs to study this article and the accompanying editorial. You can read The Economist headline article here

* The dramatic word ‘gendercide’ is from Mary Anne Warren’s 1985 book, Gendercide: The Implications of Sex Selection.

** Amarta Sen, ‘More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing’, The New York Review of Books, (Vol. 37, No. 20, 20th December 1990; http://ucatlas.ucsc.edu/gender/Sen100M.html, accessed 11th March 2010)

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