SPEAKING
FREELY A
farmer needs a wife in China and
India Lauren Johnston
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
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Alongside high profile
allegations of philandering, China's bachelors
have been getting bad press. Recently blamed not
just for China's property bubble, they have also
been ascribed responsibility for the resulting
savings rates aggregating to help cause global
macroeconomic imbalances. If it turn out that
China's most powerless might in fact be rather
quite powerful, the topic warrants greater
attention, least of all since sex ratio biases
have yet to reach their social peak.
Sex
ratio at birth usually ranges from 102-106 live
male births per 100 live female births. Modern
technologies and restrictions on childbearing help
to explain why China's sex ratio has increased
significantly over recent decades. Between 1982
and 2005 the
ratio jumped from 107 to
120, and in some provinces to higher than 130. In
absolute numbers, the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences has predicted that by 2020 China will
have more than 30-40 million more boys and young
men than women under the age of 20.
In
reality the figures translate in poor and male
farmers populating women-poor rural villages,
hidden from worldview, but whose attempts at
social mobility, not to mention basic human
satiation, may produce much broader influence. And
it is not only China. The world's second-most
populous nation, India, similarly faces a crisis
with its sex ratios. The last four national census
surveys point to rapidly increasing disparities
between men and women: The child sex ratio dropped
from 962 (girls to 1,000 boys) in 1981 to 945 in
1991, to 927 in 2001, and according to the latest
census, in 2011, the ratio decreased further, to
914.6.
The consequences of "missing
women", a phrase coined by Indian Nobel Laureate
Amartya Sen in 1990 and a whole new meaning of
"gender gap", in China's case have been linked to
high savings rates creating a property bubble in
the race to secure homes fit for a choosy future
bride. Concurrently they have acted to suppress
domestic consumption levels. The phenomenon of
rising "bride prices" - bride prices in some
villages are reported to have exceeded 100,000
yuan (about US$16,000) - and also rising frequency
in cases of girl kidnapping. The risk of increased
violence against and rape of women is also
reported to have increased.
Beyond China
and India's borders, the influence of this
emerging heirs race, or "bachelor effect", may be
more widespread than realized. It may be that the
same race for "heir race" for a bride lends itself
to motivate the army of migrant workers
increasingly found across the developing world.
Could even the incredible pace of infrastructure
construction be connected to the drive to return
home with maximized savings and a better chance in
the heirs race?
The problem of missing
women in any case is very much first and foremost
a human one, inducing extreme deprivation as well
as direct and latent familial loss. Since the
global demographic weight of countries in which
the phenomenon is magnified, China and India
especially, its scale is exaggerated. Further, the
challenge is by definition mathematically
exponential. Finding innovative solutions toward
alleviating this overall additive contradiction
may help to induce important longer-term
stabilizing economic and social multiplier effects
going forth.
Conceptually, applying Sen's
notion of hunger and famine to sexual famine and
competition in heir-creation could help in
implicitly shifting attention toward the matter of
human deprivation and loss, and the lack of
broader adequate social institutions. This
contrasts the case of lonely men and property
bubbles, as in a recent Sydney Morning Herald
article. Sen for example talks of "Starvation is
the characteristic of some people not having
enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic
of there being not enough food to eat." The
different relationship traditions of China's
minority Mosuo village might radically suggest the
same in the case of a broader hunger for a mate.
Rather more realistic longer-term
solutions could include a more deliberate set of
policies seeking to raise the status of
agricultural regions, and even more so
agricultural practice. For example, the
establishment of elite and practical agricultural
colleges in urban frontiers for farmers may help
in the longer-term to raise the broader education
levels of China's farming heirs, without needing
to challenge the more narrow and pre-defined
academic route into Chinese universities. These
could produce a series of more certification-based
agricultural trades that also help to increase the
quality of China's food produce.
For
years, Asian countries have offered scholarships
to their elites to study abroad on the condition
of returning to work for the state. Similar
programs could start in high schools for men of
farming families, the future of China's
extraordinarily and arguably increasingly
important food-producing sector. These could help
to form the microeconomic policy partner of
broader reforms to increase the development of
China's inland provinces. Similarly, a leveling of
entry criteria into elite urban universities
between provinces - long angering applicants
outside of Beijing and Shanghai - may offer the
double advantage of reducing rates of "left women"
- educated urban elites - while also facilitating
social mobility of rural men, though this too
could backfire twice over were rural and urban
women to ultimately dominate the candidate
frontier. It may be a similar story in India.
A TV show in China follows a match between
a middle class urban lady and her migrant worker
partner. The bigger story behind it is rather more
akin to Australia's TV show A farmer needs a
wife. Chinese and Indian TV producers might
well replicate the format, in partnership with
Australia's next series even, beginning a parallel
process of highlighting the positive side of life
in the country. This may simultaneously serve to
reduce the sense of shame that can deter a woman
in the urban elite from marrying a rural
sweetheart. China especially has a long recent
history of successful experimentation in cities
such as Wenzhou and Shenzhen, and more socially in
places like Shanxi's Yichang, whose residents have
taken part in a "two child policy" experiment
since 1985. Immigration authorities may tease out
the potential of experiments in gender imbalance
easing policies, giving preference for example to
foreign women in issuing work visas in rural
regions.
Whatever the program,
microeconomic policies that can help engineer an
gender steady state in China and India for the
short and longer term would (it seems both
directly and indirectly) serve the collective
future well, as birth controls have indeed sought
to do all along. If onward research on bachelor
effects finds similar aggregated economic effects,
policies inducing institutions that can serve to
normalize sex ratios may prospectively even do as
much, even more, to pre-emptively stabilize the
global economy going forth as traditional economic
policy instruments. This particularly given the
expected future scale of influence of China and
India in the world economy. The human strains of
an intensified heirs race could also be treated in
the process, while the micro-foundations of
macroeconomics may again need to be re-visited.
Lauren Johnston is a PhD
Candidate at Peking University, founder of
Sinograduate and a freelancer for the Economist
Intelligence Unit.
Speaking
Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows
guest writers to have their say.Please
click hereif you are interested in
contributing. Articles submitted for this section
allow our readers to express their opinions and do
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