China, India grapple with the consequences too many men | Hacker News Reader

China, India grapple with the consequences too many men

mercurynews.com

135 pointsbmmayer1179 comments

Many decades back there was scaremongering among the western nations that overpopulation in China and India will lead to hunger all over the world, which lead to a lot of programs that may have actually lead to US / Europe sponsoring these technologies to become widely available in China and India.

Ford Foundation is often cited as one of the main culprits pushing the ultrasound technology in these countries, the result of which is the current situation of skewed gender ratio.

Upward mobility of women (in search of grooms) leads to more and more frustrated men at lower levels, leads to more crime and overall desperate situation.

Sadly many recent articles follow the typical propaganda based approach and look at blaming patriarchy etc.

src: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/04/what-money-can... https://www.amazon.com/Unnatural-Selection-Choosing-Girls-Co... http://indiafacts.org/was-ford-foundation-culpable-in-aborti...

> Ford Foundation is often cited as one of the main culprits pushing the ultrasound technology in these countries, the result of which is the current situation of skewed gender ratio.

The spread of ultrasound technology in China and India, did not result in the current situation of skewed gender ratios. You're confusing the underlying cause (desire for male labor or heirs) and a healthcare tool.

How that technology was used, may have had a role in amplifying or accelerating the result (they could still just kill the baby girl after birth). Obvious, simple proof: ultrasound tech didn't cause the same extreme gender skew outcome in the US, Germany, France, UK, Russia, South Korea or Japan, those nations chose not to disproportionately kill baby girls despite having ultrasound tech (that's also the case for nearly all nations).

China and India should have widely available ultrasound tech. All nations should.

Being quite familiar with China, I second this. I don't know about India, but in China it was the combination of a cultural necessity to have a son and the one the child policy that lead to the current gender imbalance. In the bad-old-days, many girl babies were simply discarded and often died. The problem cannot be blamed on ultrasound tech.

Ultrasound is widely available in China, but it is illegal for a doctor to tell the parents the likely gender.

You're right, but considering that most doctors are ridiculously underpaid and bribes are commonplace, parents can find out of they really want to.

At birth the human male female ratio is 1.05 men to 1.0 women. Every nation in history has dealt with this with minimal issues, saying a very slightly higher ratio is going to cause problems seems vastly overstated. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_sex_rat...

> Every nation in history has dealt with this with minimal issues.

Well generally the oversupply of males at birth was resolved using centuries of non-voluntary conscription warfare and high rates of workplace death. So there probably were some issues for the guys who died, or worse.

That says the world "at birth ratio" is 1.03, and the article says Dongguan has a ratio of 1.18. I haven't crunched the numbers, but after a quick glance at the other countries, I'd be willing to believe Dongguan is within the top percentile. Doesn't seem "overstated" to me.

Two at birth numbers are listed in different columns 1.03 and 1.07.

That's at birth. But infant female survival is higher than male. So when you consider both numbers the ratio is basically exactly 1 to 1.

Infant female survival is most certainly not higher than male in India and China. If a girl is born, her birth is often not even reported, which makes it difficult to establish the exact scale of the problem, but you can kind of extrapolate from the extreme gender imbalance in some regions of China.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_infanticide_in_China

>Many decades back there was scaremongering ....

I can't wrap my head around the fact how people did and still dismiss this as scaremongering. On a site like HN, non less, where most people should know the properties of exponential growth.

I mean, how much fantasy, how much wishfull thinking and how much ignorance is needed to not see this ending in catastrophe?

Sorry if this is insulting. I have no other way to express it. Just what makes you think it isn't a absolute massive problem, and isn't the root of most of humanities problems?

Are you saying that [population explosion was a real problem] so it was right for the countries to [fix the problem in the short term, even if it leads to skewed gender ratios]?

If so, I think we clearly disagree what should have been done during those decades.

If the western countries (primarily the colonizers and the US) came up with good foreign policies that truly worked for the upliftment of China and India, instead of shortsighted approach of providing ultrasound tech, probably those countries may have been a better place, in terms of gender ratio, and probably, world would have more Indians and Chinese. But it'd have slowed down the growth on its own.

Apparently, it could have been worse.

"Study finds millions of China's 'missing girls' actually exist":

https://www.cnn.com/2016/12/01/asia/china-missing-girls/inde...

There's some youtube videos (can't find them right now) from video bloggers (right term?) that live in China, and there are many Chinese women that Chinese men won't marry (apparently older women). This is despite the fact that men out-number women. There's a cultural aspect that may not be taken into account that may be exacerbating this issue.

It's interesting that there is a similar imbalance in China and India (~35m). That implies to me that the imbalance was not caused by the one child policy, but by sonograms and abortions.

I could be wrong but the sonograms and abortions are also just a side effect. The real problem is that neither place puts much importance on gender equality. Women have even less opportunities than men over there, compared to the West. That said, things have improved and continue to improve though the pace is really slow

Gender equality in China is much better after decades of the one child policy. Businessmen who would have raised their sons to take their place raised their daughters that way with no sons.

I work with powerful Chinese businesswomen and they are no nonsense tough customers. They also do not have any of the delicate mixing of sexuality and asexuality that American businesswomen need to strike - the Chinese women are all business all the time.

Did you see the recent group photo of the 19th Congress, with apparently zero women?

That's skewed by the fact that Xi is the first Chinese leader to be born after the establishment of the PRC.

So you won't see any product of the one child policy begun in 1979. It will be quite some time as CCP leaders tend to run on the old side of things.

Assuming that there are about 2 million Chinese who are millionaires or higher, your annecdote only affects up to 0.11602610587% of the population

I was under the impression that gender equality in Chinese society is much better than the west in some respects, espescially the amount of women in STEM.

In some aspects China is more sexist towards women: - girls are still less desirable simply because their children do not carry the last name - people still believe older women = less value whereas older men = more value - women who aren't married by 30 are considered "leftovers"

But in some areas less sexist than western society - you don't take your husband's last name when you marry - you're not expected to quit your job and become a housewife when you have children - girls are expected to be good at math, science and engineering just as much as boys

I think it is quite easy to imagine a sexist society where that particular manifestation of sex difference doesn't exist but others do.

You have the correlation backwards, believe it or not.

Great writing, lots of sources, in http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

> Do we find that “countries that lack gender equity in school enrollment” and “stereotypes associating science with males” have fewer women in tech?

> No. Galpin investigated the percent of women in computer classes all around the world. Her number of 26% for the US is slightly higher than I usually hear, probably because it’s older (the percent women in computing has actually gone down over time!). The least sexist countries I can think of – Sweden, New Zealand, Canada, etc – all have somewhere around the same number (30%, 20%, and 24%, respectively). The most sexist countries do extremely well on this metric! The highest numbers on the chart are all from non-Western, non-First-World countries that do middling-to-poor on the Gender Development Index: Thailand with 55%, Guyana with 54%, Malaysia with 51%, Iran with 41%, Zimbabwe with 41%, and Mexico with 39%. Needless to say, Zimbabwe is not exactly famous for its deep commitment to gender equality.

> Why is this? It’s a very common and well-replicated finding that the more progressive and gender-equal a country, the larger gender differences in personality of the sort Hyde found become. I agree this is a very strange finding, but it’s definitely true. See eg Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Sex Differences In Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures:

>> Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (n = 17,637).

> In case you’re wondering, the countries with the highest gender differences in personality are France, Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. The countries with the lowest sex differences are Indonesia, Fiji, and the Congo.

As far as what I heard is that in cultures where a woman can choose watch she wants to do, most will not choose tech.

Whereas, in countries where women are expected to do what society wants them to do, they are forced into tech because that is where the money is, and is how they can best help feed their families.

"[Chinese] Tech companies also often tout the attractive women they’ve hired as incentives for more men to come on board, according to the HRW report. Both Tencent and Baidu were noted to have posted to their social media accounts interviews with male employees who cited having beautiful women around them as an incentive for working there"

https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/23/17272620/chinese-tech-com...

Let's not forget the gender pay gap, which imo is the main culprit

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014759671...

"In contrast to the United States and European countries, China has witnessed a widening gender pay gap in the past two decades."

China is a still a very patriarchal society. Much more so than the US or EU.

I got that sense as well. I don't have numbers to back it up, but in grad school and where I currently work, there were very few women, yet it seemed like the ratio of Chinese men to Chinese women was closer to equal than the overall ratio of men to women.

In business, too -- there are proportionately more female billionaires.

I think you’re both right. Placing less value on baby girls and allowing people to kill their baby girls are together causing there to be less baby girls.

Of course? Government knows this. It is illegal for doctors to tell the gender before birth in India. In fact, due to weight of it, it is one of the few illegal activities regularly checked by authorities and media, and the culprits are given harsh punishments.

The claim about the one-child policy is just that it increases the attractiveness of selective abortion, since you only have one chance at a son.

At least in China, it has nothing to do with sonograms or abortions. Chinese doctors are not allowed to tell parents the gender strictly. Female babies are killed after they are born.

It's like quoting a wikipedia article, but there was an episode about this in a LastWeekTonight type show[0]. Two takeaways:

1. One of the southern states (that I'm from) ranks super-high in killing baby girls, despite what one would think intuitively.

2. Doctors offer Levi's style buy 1, get 2nd 50% off style packages for sex-determination test + abortions (both of which are banned). To ensure that parents-to-be get both, they lie that the foetus is a girl.

[0] http://www.satyamevjayate.in/female-foeticide/femalefoeticid..., scroll down for the episode

> killing baby girls

Sorry to nitpick, but female foeticide (sex-selective abortion) would be better described as “aborting female fetuses.”

Rant incoming - this isn't targeted at you, but my observations on this.

I've always found it ridiculous that effectively 1 planck-time can be the difference between a collection of cells and a human and therefore the difference between selfish rights and outraged sorrow.

The idea that you can draw the line arbitrarily along a child's development other than the very moment of inception and call one a self-centered right and the other murder is preposterous.

The very fact that it is the premeditated interference that prevents the baby from continuing to develop should be the light-bulb moment for most discerning and logical individuals. You literally have to kill the baby to stop it from becoming a fully-formed version of itself - that is literally it. You have to kill it to stop it from getting to a point that you 'begin to feel bad'. It is ridiculous.

The fact that, when unimpeded, that baby will grow into an adult individual should be a pretty obvious reminder to people of what they're actually doing.

I've been saying this for a little while, but I'm sure a time will come when society collectively looks back on this period and shudders at the horror of it all.

Thank you for saying this. It had always disturbed me how people change the name of what is quite literally ending another human life to something else as a means to soften or discard the moral implication associated with said action. It's disgusting.

Truth be told though, this renaming-bad-things-to-make-them-passable phenomenon isn't only limited to killing unborn children, and it has been going on for a long time.

'War'...what is it good for?

You may not want to hear this, but the line isn’t so fine or instant in anything except the law. When dealing with laws and regulations you ultimately have a somewhat arbitrary quality because that’s the nature of a line. Speed X is fine and dandy on the roadway, speed X+1 can get you pulled over and heavily fined. What’s the practical difference in 1 kph? Essentially nothing, except that for reasons beyond that difference of 1, a line had to be drawn.

Rational people don’t think that some magical process occurs between one instant and the next as a fetus goes from “ok to abort legally” to “illegal to abort.” The law also isn’t as involved in the spiritual or emotional content of the debate, but the practical implications. As such, law represents a compromise, hopefully a reasonable one.

Part of the problem is that some people look at a fetus and think, “small baby” and others see a potential baby. For some there is a moral imperative to support that potential, and for others there isn’t. Yet others look at a newborn and see a person, others see a potential person. The problem is that this debate is ultimately too emotionally charged for the hard biological reality to enter for most.

As a result, the law picks viability of the fetus as a line, not because of some magical transformation, but for practical reasons. It does this because outlawing abortion in no way stops abortion, it just drives it underground. The law also recognizes that the mother is a fully viable and developed person with their own rights, and (this is going to sound harsh) playing host to a parasitic organism.

Needless to say none of what I’m saying goes over well with people who don’t have a strong background in biology. The idea that the life of the mother might matter more than the life of another potential person doesn’t sit well with some people. The idea that even newborns are less “people” and and more “grub-stage people” tends to be downright offensive to many.

> Needless to say none of what I’m saying goes over well with people who don’t have a strong background in biology. The idea that the life of the mother might matter more than the life of another potential person doesn’t sit well with some people. The idea that even newborns are less “people” and and more “grub-stage people” tends to be downright offensive to many.

It doesn't go over well for many people with a strong background in biology either, to be fair.

This particular argument tries to skirt the issue by attempting to deny the existence of humanity and, less directly, "real" life by essentially stating that vulnerability removes your right to humanity. If you follow through the principle of the argument this is undeniably its core. For an overwhelming number of obvious reasons, this doesn't stack up either.

Denying the humanity of a fetus isn’t denying the humanity of people, and I said nothing about it not being “real life” either. We routinely kill and eat real life that is far more intelligent and empathetic than newborns, but it’s ok because they’re not people. Pigs for example, are intelligent and feeling creatures.

All I’m doing is failing to put human life on a pedestal, while acknowledging the difference between what something currently is vs its potential. A fetus isn’t a person, it’s something with the potential to become a person. Biology and the law both recognize that, religion and sentiment don’t.

> Denying the humanity of a fetus isn’t denying the humanity of people...

That's a leap from my statement.

> All I’m doing is failing to put human life on a pedestal, while acknowledging the difference between what something currently is vs its potential.

You've only restated that vulnerability removes right to humanity.

> A fetus isn’t a person, it’s something with the potential to become a person. Biology and the law both recognize that, religion and sentiment don’t.

A fetus is a person who's not reached the stage where you can meaningfully communicate. Your argument assigns humanity to lucidity, which is ridiculous.

Additionally, biology doesn't recognise that "it’s something with the potential to become a person", biology merely explains the building blocks, process and method. To say otherwise is to really attempt to twist mere observation to suit your viewpoint.

> The idea that you can draw the line arbitrarily along a child's development other than the very moment of inception and call one a self-centered right and the other murder is preposterous.

Not preposterous at all. The line is clear: viability outside the womb.

As a woman, I deem legal and safe abortion an exercise of my second amendment rights. If I determine that a separate individual has taken residence inside me contrary to my wishes I have the right to defend my person against that intrusion. Of course I first ask for the person to leave and find suitable accommodation elsewhere. Oh you can't leave on your own? I still don't want you here -- leave, leave now. No? Well I will stand my ground.

I really don't see why (mostly) men have no philosophical qualm with defending their home against a fully alive intruder, yet can not understand why a woman might wish to exercise a similar right over her own body.

The below may sound a bit harsh, but I'm trying to be clear - apologies in advance. I've got nothing against you or any circumstances you've been in.

> Not preposterous at all. The line is clear: viability outside the womb.

That's not an argument that makes any sense at all, nor does it stack up when put under scrutiny.

What about the viability of an infant that you arbitrarily decide you wish to eject from the home? You ask them to leave; well they can't walk. You ask them to find suitable accommodation elsewhere; well they can't talk. You tell them to feed themselves. Oh, you can't leave on your own? I still don't want you here -- leave, leave now. No?...

What about the viability of a minority group that the government decides they don't want in their country? Lets say it's a bunch of Jews, eh? Follow through with your principle and see where it leads you.

So I'd argue that this is an argument of selfishness, lack of responsibility and willful foolishness - traits which are considered highly unhealthy to self and society.

Putting that aside, the other issue is that this argument completely skips the point at hand - human life. As a society, we deal with human life carefully for a reason - it's beautiful and important - it's something to be cherished and nurtured. Arguments like these try do deny this fact by looking the other way.

I don't take "personal responsibility", "unborn fetuses are people", "human life matters", etc. arguements in favor of removing women's rights to abortion seriously so long as they completely disregard and/or contribute directly to (and they do, either by omission or by party association): widespread systemic poverty, child hunger, regressive sex education, anti-women legislation and philosophies, destruction of social safety net, constant victim blaming, lies and misinformation campaigns on the LGBT community, and cutting education budgets.

So long as all of those things are being attacked, women need to be having as many abortions as possible.

> widespread systemic poverty, child hunger, regressive sex education, anti-women legislation and philosophies, destruction of social safety net, constant victim blaming, lies and misinformation campaigns on the LGBT community, and cutting education budgets.

> So long as all of those things are being attacked, women need to be having as many abortions as possible.

Putting aside the bizarre and unfounded argument you just gave - all you've done is again looked the other way when it comes to taking human life. It's like you're sticking your fingers in your ears and loudly proclaiming "lalalala!".

> It's like you're sticking your fingers in your ears and loudly proclaiming "lalalala!".

It's absolutely not like that, in fact this is a spot on description of your response.

Politicians who hate LGBT (by words and/or by legislation), fight to regress sex education, fight to made women's health care difficult to acquire, cite obnoxious BS like "family values" while cheating on their wives, soliciting homosexual encounters in restrooms, literally actually molesting children and defending the molesters, unambiguously defending the act of rape (rather than strictly refuting allegations), unanimously voted against net neutrality, budget cuts for education to fund tax cuts for the wealthy, cut the social safety net for impoverished people like single mothers, fetishizing the struggle of poor people with social Darwinism while denying biological Darwinism as fact, all this with waves of jobs bring automated away.

These politicians play lip service to the abortion crowd and get the abortion vote. You can't call yourself "Pro Life" if you want to try to force women to carry unwanted children with one hand while making the world as shitty as possible for both the single mothers and their children with your other hand. You're the one who is sticking your fingers in your ears and loudly proclaming "lalalala!". The entire abortion platform is set up to fuck us all over as soon as the child is born.

I've demonstrated that I actually care about human life, at least 100x more than you. You care about human being born. You immidietly don't give a shit about them the second after they're born.

> These politicians play lip service to the abortion crowd and get the abortion vote. You can't call yourself "Pro Life" if you want to try to force women to carry unwanted children with one hand while making the world as shitty as possible for both the single mothers and their children with your other hand. You're the one who is sticking your fingers in your ears and loudly proclaming "lalalala!". The entire abortion platform is set up to fuck us all over as soon as the child is born.

You're conflating completely unrelated politics with the point I'm making, as well as assigning them to me.

> I've demonstrated that I actually care about human life, at least 100x more than you. You care about human being born. You immidietly don't give a shit about them the second after they're born.

No you haven't. You're assigning to me the broad spectrum of stupidity of a political viewpoint and not addressing the argument at all.

> You're conflating completely unrelated politics with the point I'm making, as well as assigning them to me.

Nope, you can't vote in favor of banning abortion without voting for every shitty way republicans want to fuck over minorities. I didn't conflate them, they merged themselves together decades ago. I can't take any anti-abortion arguments seriously so long as they are attached to a long list of horrendous anti-human agendas. At this point, it's extremely difficult to consider the anti-abortion agenda to be anything other than about controlling and discriminating women. If you sincerely cared about babies, you would be completely disgusted by the way they are treated and supported after birth. But you literally only care that they pop-out alive.

There's no argument to consider because nothing about your position is sincere.

> Nope, you can't vote in favor of banning abortion without voting for every shitty way republicans want to fuck over minorities.

You've set aside reason.

> If you sincerely cared about babies, you would be completely disgusted by the way they are treated and supported after birth.

I am. However, despite this fact I'm not sure you can look past your hyperbole to discuss the points rationally.

> But you literally only care that they pop-out alive.

Where did you get this from? You're just saying random things. I can only assume you're either in a confused rage or you're just trying to misdirect the discussion to prevent rational thought about what I'm saying.

Nope, I'm the rational one here. Rationality would show that you should focus on fixing several of the endless things wrong with this world rather than isolate "baby murder" in a vacuum in a comically distopian with a hypocritical fashion.

I know you're exactly what you're saying. Baby murder bad, why refusing to acknowledge that baby murder abolishionist don't actually care about making the world a better place.

Amen.

If I do not control what happens to my body, what freedom do I have? I am not advocating that I individually control the expulsion of an entire group of people at a national level. I demand only control over my own reproductive function.

Women in these United States of America have no paid maternal leave unlike all other countries except 2 others, we have the highest maternal mortality rate in the developed world on par with Sri Lanka, and until Obamacare rolled around did not have automatic pre-natal care in our health insurance plans. Why should I relinquish my right to self determination for a nation that cares so little for my successful motherhood? The US at a policy level has no skin in the game, yet a large group of its citizens want to tell me what do? Screw that...

We tolerate all sorts of nonsense in the US that ends people's lives in the name of freedom. Just look to the pro-2A crowd. They take no societal accountability for the lives of people in their policy preferences. Why should I accept any less for myself?

> If I do not control what happens to my body, what freedom do I have?

This argument is again one that rejects the moral responsibility to the human child growing in the body. The notion that discontent with the situation justifies killing a human doesn't stack up.

The point about the broken USA healthcare system will never justify the killing of unborn children. It also serves as a first-world excuse that is essentially based around inconvenience.

Finally, the argument that "others do horrible things so therefore why can't we do this horrible thing too" doesn't make any kind of sense either.

It's not really horrible at all, terminating unwanted fetuses. What is horrible is being complelled against your will to bring an unwanted child into this world without the desire or ability to care for it, then knowing how backwards and broken the first world is, let alone even considering the third world, then there are some fucked up religious people who expect you to be a slave to their ideologies, even in a place that's suppose to be so nice they call it the first world.

> It's not really horrible at all, terminating unwanted fetuses.

This is the crux of the issue though, isn't it. The desperate attempt to de-humanize the child so that, in some twisted way, it's OK to kill it before you feel bad.

> you feel bad.

I only feel bad for those poor women living as a slave to their authoritarians husband in theocratic distopias and the women who are forced against their will, in the face of a system stacked against both them and their children, to bear an unwanted child because you value the life of the unborn over the lives of the living.

>Not preposterous at all. >The line is clear: >viability outside the womb.

It doesn't work this easy way. Many people are unviable outside the womb due to illness, trauma or age-related troubles, and yet they are considered humans, anyway. More to that, many (probably, majority) countries have laws punishing for refusing aid to such humans.

Unless you were raped, tou did invite that individual into your body, so it’s technically not an intruder.

They didn't invite you, so it's also none of your business.

Birth control is not 100%.

I’m not about to have an abortion debate on HN. My nitpick was an attempt to clear up any confusion of terms involved. The OP referenced an episode about female foeticide which is, by its definition, different from infanticide. Morality of either is irrelevant.

The confusion has since been cleared up, so there’s no need to drag it on.

(I'm not sure if I'm giving you the right context, or if you already know about it, etc etc, so blanket apology if required)

I understood and didn't take offence at the nitpick mainly due to the fact that foetus vs baby is an important argument in the pro-choice vs pro-life debate in the US; the "women should be allowed to control their bodies" side is usually presented with "should they be allowed to kill a baby to control their body", etc.

No apology required. ;)

Yeah, I had read and understood the context and ended up unsure of where to nest my rant so that it was most relevant to being discussed but least intrusive. I think I've missed the mark on that so sorry for the confusion.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, but I was referring to female infanticide, not foeticide.

The state you’re from ranks highest in female infanticide?! That is terribly sad.

Super-high. Pretty sure there is a handful worse than us, if it matters..

And if it was the highest in female abortions it would not be sad?

The end result is identical, and despite being able to see a difference, nonetheless I feel the same way about both situations.

Abortions should be reserved for only the direst of situations.

I think that the comment above mentioned killing baby girls because that is a thing. The killing of live born baby girls. You are right, that is different from aborting fetuses. Both these things happen.

I personally think this is a good idea. It is better for the well being of the child if parents love him/her instead of having an unwanted child.

Female child is expensive in India and Indians are poor hence not all can afford the luxury of female child.

I absolutely hate the objectification of women as vaginas for our boys. All the discussion around the topic is "we need vaginas for our boys" who will produce babies if we kill all girls?

That’s a terrible justification, girls are only a luxury because society make them to be. Through western societies and modern China, it’s already proven that other than physical strength, women are capable of receiving and making good use of education, can generate decent amount of income to support themselves even without a husband, can rise to leadership in many different fields. But in India and rural China, the opportunities for girls to develope are ripped away from them because of traditional beliefs. Hence growing into “luxury” women who have no skills or desirability other than being vaginas to men.

Indian parents who do not like girl child will agree with you. Even the most conservative parents do not doubt female ability. It is just that they prove less valuable than male child for following reasons. 1. Parents have to spend more time/money to ensure her safety. 2. The money she earns does not become part of the family but goes to her husband as she leaves house. 3. You invest on her education she get a great job and buys a big house. You don't get to live there her husband gets that house. 4. If she is educated she wants more educated husband which means you have to pay more dowry as there is more competition for highly educated grooms.

Even if your daughter is that kickass smarty pants you stand to lose.

PS - All these problems mellow once the income level of people rise significantly as people marry through love marriage etc. But there are other skews because majority of Indian girls fall in ugly category hence men compete for 5% of girls in love marriage market where as no one goes after the 95% one. Check this : https://www.singledudetravel.com/2013/12/indias-shocking-lac...

again, all the points you listed which make girls more "luxury", I could also argue that society make them the way it is. 1. parents have to spend more money/time to ensure her safety -- because boys in india often don't receive enough education on respecting girls and that they're not objects. Sure, women are more vulnerable to sexual assaults around the world, but it's not like every day I walk from home to school or home to work that I have to worry about getting raped in Canada. 2. the money she earns does not go to the family -- in western cultures, boys don't give money to their parents either. On the opposite spectrum, in modern days China, both boys and girls are expected to share some income with their parents, so the problem that boys = more money for the house does not exist 3. you don't get to live in the house -- again very similar to point 2, in western countries, you don't get to live in your boy's house either 4. with more educated husband you have to pay more dowry, this is a very specific indian thing which I cannot begin to understand as there are already less women than men. In the parents' minds, girls are worth less hence making them having to pay to get rid of their daughters. If girls worth more to them, the situation would perhaps change (again, see families with educated girls that have decent jobs in modern days China, often demanding the groom to pay for the house and car)

When you venture into "people should change their mentality" logic you are likely to meet with disappointment. I am saying this with utmost respect for your thought process though. The very reason it is a common mentality is because "it works so far".

> this is a very specific Indian thing which I cannot begin to understand as there are already less women than men.

It is because parents just don't want to get rid of the daughter. They want to use her as a currency to get related to a much richer family than them. That is what makes it a far tougher market.

Think of it like this. You might think you get more sex as 20 year old because of your youth. But in reality a 20 year old is likely to sleep with girls between 18 to 20 year old. But if you are 40 year old your target set becomes 20 to 35 which is much bigger and very likely you might get more sex partners than 20 year old.

If you are a girl with income level X you want a husband whose income level is 2X. The boy can chose any girl from income levels < 2X. In fact higher up you are on economic level you can point your finger to a girl and pick her to marry.

The single "I am not getting a wife" people are essentially at the poorer spectrum they are not uniformly distributed. These are the people sending "show bobs and vegene" messages on facebook !

There are a bunch of subsidies\welfare programs available for female children alone... Its much cheaper to raise a female child than to raise a male child, and dowry is no longer mandatory, it largely comes into play when you're trying to marry up (like say the groom earns 5-10x the wife's salary)

In any sensible country such programs would be seen as unconstitutional most certainly in USA. But of course in India sectarian discriminatory laws is a norm. In India if you rape a brahmin child you get N years in prison. If you rape a child from prescribe list of castes you get N+3 years in jail.

> like say the groom earns 5-10x the wife's salary Correct and all girls pay this dowry willingly. No one has forced them to marry up. They can marry equal or below.

> hence not all can afford the luxury of female child.

Heh, another fix for that is to work towards making a female child not a luxury

How could the one child policy create a gender imbalance? Every child born has a 50% probability of being either gender.

Female children can be a burden in that a dowry is expected to be paid at a marriage in certain cultures and males might be expected to support the parents in certain cultures for another source of preference. There is also the culture that might prefer lineage to be passed down via males and some cultures prefer a male child to help in rural area manual labour around the home. These are mentioned in the article a bit - add to that the ability to determine the gender of a baby before birth and the ability to perform an abortion after determining gender and while technically against the rules in both nations, a gender based abortion will help create the gender imbalance. There's also a natural slight skew to having male babies among humans, it's much closer to 50/50 on conception but by birth it's not due to higher female mortality in the womb.

China actually has the opposite dowry problem: it's the male side that's expected to pay, and because of the skewed gender ratio, prices have risen. There are now families who don't want to have a son because they wouldn't be able to marry him off.

The assumption in this case would have been that the birth parents are made aware of the gender before birth and then are able to make a decision as to whether to abort and attempt for a male, or keep the female feotus.

why is this comment down voted by people? When I was born doctors were forbidden for reveal the gender of the baby. If anything I actually think one child policy helped the gender imbalance, before then, people could have how many ever children they want and abort how many ever baby girls they desired.

Female infanticide.

Just reading about this and looking at a sex ratio map, https://www.mapsofindia.com/census2011/female-sex-ratio.html , there is a massive difference between a diagonal line between the North and the South. North India is what is described as dominated by patriarchal religions like Islam, Christianity, Islamicized-Hinduism and Urdu-Hindi languages whereas South India and North-East India practices animist or ancestor worship Hinduism (less Islamic/Christian influence) and speak Dravidian or Austro-Asiatic languages. It is like two separate countries. The North seems to be a terrible mess with well below normal female births.

I am Hindu, and I have no idea how you got this off track. See https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/2001_Cen... for religion, and this map for GDP per capita https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Indian_s... . The first map seems to have zero correlation, while second at least a little.

> I am Hindu, and I have no idea how you got this off track

I have studied Hinduism and India in detail. I'm sorry that you feel my analysis is incorrect, but I can try to explain. Firstly, the census data you linked to still relies on the British definition of "Hindu". It may come as a surprise to many Indians including those that would describe themselves as "Hindu" that in fact, the term Hindu was popularized by the British and just meant "non-Muslim". That definition even originally included Buddhists and Sikhs.

" The British government created a compendium of religious laws for Hindus, and the term 'Hindu' in these colonial 'Hindu laws', decades before India's independence, applied to Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs.

Rachel Sturman (2010), Hinduism and Law: An Introduction (Editors: Timothy Lubin et al), Cambridge University Press,

Beyond the stipulations of British law, colonial orientalists and particularly the influential Asiatick Researches founded in the 18th century, later called The Asiatic Society, initially identified just two religions in India – Islam, and Hinduism. These orientalists included all Indian religions such as Buddhism as a subgroup of Hinduism in the 18th century. These texts called followers of Islam as Mohamedans, and all others as Hindus. "

There is little in common with the "Hinduism" practiced in say, Uttar Pradesh with the "Hinduism" practiced in Kerala. In Kerala, Hindus even eat beef from cows which would be considered a sacrilege in Uttar Pradesh. This is why the term Hindu does not really communicate any information other than "non-Muslim" and even that is debatable since parts of the "Hinduism" practiced in places like Rajasthan bears a great deal of resemblance to Arabic-Islamic culture.

Hinduism should in fact simply be generalized as "Dharmic Traditions" instead. I think that would also reinvigorate the philosophical traditions, and ideas that each region of India has.

However with that said you're also ignoring the very real fact that a "Hindu" of Kerala, Adi Shankracayra, is in fact a pan-indian philosopher worshipped from North to South, and from East to west. He in fact established pan-Indian/pan-dharmic institutions all over India from the south up-to Kashmir, to both the western and eastern parts of "India". This pan "India" narrative also plays a huge role in Indian mythology where mythological characters like Augustya rishi are worshipped, or at the very least understood as great human beings, all over India among the "Hindus". Not to mention the monuments, places of worship, and religious features that Hindus believe, similarly, have a pan-"Indian" presence.

The problem is that Indian politics is fundamentally based in the idea of Kautilya's Mandala politics, and saptang rules which take into account variable relationships, and is rather less reductive/zero sum in comparison to Machiavellian strategies. This political strategy invariably also plays a part in the spread of various Dharmic ideas, and institutions.

You are right that Hinduism is very diverse is India(especially between North India and South India), but there are few thing wrong in your view.

> Firstly, the census data you linked to still relies on the British definition of "Hindu".

No. Here are the results of 2011 Indian Census(10 years after the earlier map, but almost same percentage of Hindu):

Hinduism (80.3%)

Islam (13.7%)

Christianity (2.3%)

Sikhism (1.7%)

Buddhism (0.7%)

Jainism (0.4%)

Other religions (0.7%)

Religion not stated (0.2%)

> In Kerala, Hindus even eat beef from cows which would be considered a sacrilege in Uttar Pradesh.

Everywhere there are Hindus who eat beef and Hindus who resorts to violence against people eating beef. But, yeah, you are right in that it is more common in the south to eat beef(specially in one state).

But still, what is your point? That female foeticide is done by one type of Hindu and not other? This also does not hold much water, as Kerala has lowest percentage of Hindus in the South and highest female to male ratio in India(also one of the most educated, most rich, most socialistic).

Very well explained! Difficult for many in India to grasp this. Extremely easy for those not from India, to fall for the usual explanations of 'Hinduism'

In all honesty this seems more a problem with Western Academia, and Indology departments than with "Hinduism" itself. It seems the West cannot free itself from the impulse to create divisions.

Perhaps a better analysis would be to learn from India and it's diversity of thought, rather than to set arbitrary boundaries, and create division between people which the West is so apt at doing. It seems though that the West is still incapable of comprehending, or learning from an infinitely variable world.

Generally speaking I was under the impression that Islam and Christianity in particular are significantly better represented in southern India, especially if you consider political influence.

Is it the religion playing a role or education/wealth?

You see the same divide between North and South India with education and wealth, Southern India is more educated and wealthy compared to the Northern regions.

Religion encourages education or not which affects wealth.

This divide extends into politics too.

The North is dominated by a centre-right democratic party and a far-right nationalist party, whereas the South is a cacophony of center-right to far-left parties

> The North is dominated by a centre-right democratic party and a far-right nationalist party, whereas the South is a cacophony of center-right to far-left parties

Literally the two most left-eing democratic governments in the history of the entire world are two different states in the north of India. One of those includes the second most populous region in the entire subcontinent.

Indian politics doesn't really map cleanly onto a Western left-right polítical spectrum, but if people insist on trying to do it, at least do it somewhat accurately.

What is it to have a democratically elected communist party?

Curiously, it carries across the boarder to Pakistan [EDITED OUT: which appeared to have had fewer than 550 females per male in 2013] [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_inequality#/media/File:...

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio#/media/File:20...

That's a map of a composite "gender inequality" score, which is about employment and earnings ratios, not actual sex ratios.

Here's one for sex ratios: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio#/media/File:20...

I don’t think that chart means what you think it means. In any case can you clarify your comment? 550 females per male?

You posted a link to gender gap index (access to health, jobs etc), not birth rate.

>[the north is] dominated by patriarchal religions like...

Perhaps not so curious after all.

> In India, there is the opposite effect: Because brides are scarce, families are under less pressure to save for expensive dowries.

So weird. Note that it says "less" pressure, not no pressure. Women are in short supply, yet their culture still requires the bride's family to pay the groom to take her? More evidence that those macroeconomic supply and demand curves are nonsense.

> More evidence that those macroeconomic supply and demand curves are nonsense

You'll throw out reams of evidence because it doesn't match a marriage "market" in a developing country undergoing a cultural shift?

That's an interesting observation, because the equivalent of dowry has mostly disappeared in China due to the gender imbalance. And in some cases even the reverse (groom's family paying a dowry, in cash or real-estate) is demanded.

I believe the groom demanded to be paying for car and house is actually majority of the cases in China these days, especially in cities. Women have decent income themselves, most parents only have a single child, so why should mine (girl) be worth less than yours (boy) while there are plenty of men to be chosen from with a short supply of women

You logic fails to understand that part of supply/demand theories is that external forces (like cultural influence) can have a major influence.

This might just be what it is like to be in the middle of a curve that will eventually reach 0.

Perhaps in a few decades the dowry will be flipped or gone altogether, but it takes a while to change culture - even when you have macroeconomics on your side :)

Supply and demand curves are microeconomic, not macroeconomic. Also, they predict continuous changes to equilibrium (what we're seeing here) and not sudden jumps to zero (what, I agree, isn't happening.)

Bribes help women get better husbands. Unlike USA marriages in India is about family ties and hence it is important that an uneducated unattractive women gets a good husband. She has to pay the premium of dowry to get a husband who otherwise will not marry her.

An educated engineer girl in India can easily marry a waiter without dowry but her inherent greed for wealth makes her seek someone who is even richer and she pays for that using dowry.

Dowry system is essentially greed of females and not males.

The concept of arranged marriage and bribes aka dowry is not a girl's fault, it's the society's / cultural stupidity, the greed of parents to earn money off their son and take revenge for the dowry they pay for their daughters How could you reach such a tangent cause for an effect?

I’ve not experienced social dating outside of the southwest of the US, but if you don’t think social, familial, educational, and income factors don’t heavily weigh into marriages, here, then you’re 100% wrong, and need to meet both my mother-in-law, and mother. Also, be aware that past a certain age, women here can pretty much expect full-time interest by their “aunties” in arranging dates to meet potential suitors.

I am pretty sure you are in top 5% people by education, income and thinking. But people like you and me don't really count when we are talking Indian statistics. It is that farmer in Bihar who counts more.

As income levels in India rise this will rapidly go away. But then we are at least 30 years away from that.

P.S. These are not really big problems as the op-ed intellectual yet idiots make them out to be.

>“In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, ...

Why? Two husbands are better than just one. More resources to support the family. Flip a coin and then alternate on the kids.

Multiple wives are allowed in other countries. Why not allow multiple husbands instead? It wouldn't work for everyone but it only has to work for some...

> Why not allow multiple husbands instead?

Read an article (lazy to search it again) which says it is already happening in some North Indian states like Punjab and Harayana where brothers "share" a wife.

True. Our building watchman spends 6 months in Mumbai while his brother 'takes care' of his wife. He then goes back and brother comes on watchman duty. Better its my brother than neighbour he says.

I was about to reply to the parent, where? It's so unreal that you have a first hand example. It came as a shock to me, I wonder what other social phenomenon I have missed.

In case you have missed this phenomenon you might have missed the following too: - People from Harayana actually paying money to smuggle young brides from UP and Bihar. - Bringing brides from outside has become an election promise in Harayana. - There is an active flesh trade going on between Assam/UP/Bihar and Haryana. There is also arbitrage. For example buying brides from Assam at Rs 5000 for UP but then selling them in Haryana for Rs 10,000 - Church is also responsible for moving young children across country. I remember meeting a young girl from Odissa working in a house in Goa. She was brought there by Church. The girl was later rescued for sexual abuse.

Same in China. Though I do not believe this is something "already happening". Female infanticide is nothing new in China and India, it started centuries ago, and was worse in old times.

Here is the original article from The Washington Post (this appears to be a rehost by Mercury News): https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/world/too-many-...

It contains more charts and graphics, but also makes use of parallax scrolling that some may find annoying.

Isn’t the consequence usually unrest and war?

Historically that would definitely be true, but there's a couple interesting anecdotes in the article where some of the men mention spending their time holed up alone either on their phone, watching TV, or doing various leisure activities like karoke. In the past they didn't have those kinds of distractions and/or solitariness. The reality is they may just grow old and sad often stuck in their remote village far cut off from any center of power or importance.

Or they just kill themselves eventually out of loneliness and despair.

I was traveling through Karnataka a few years back and was riding a conveyance from the historical site back to my accommodations and passed through a small town on the way. There was a middle-aged (perhaps even late 20s) man lying in the middle of the road, while traffic dodged around him.

The driver told us the man was to poor to start a family and so had gotten drunk and laid in the road to be run-over and killed.

How did the driver know that?

Presumably it was a normal occurence.

Those are two things that can happen, but a more generalized version of that is an increased drive for exceptionalism. Men will take more risks to succeed at all costs because the safe route means failure. That can be mean war, where many men die and the survivors are the exceptional ones. But it can also mean a highly-stratified society with a class of unsuccessful men who will never marry or have children who are likely treated as not much above slave labor.

Wars are killing men, which isn't happening for a while like before. So men population grow fast and there is nothing to decrease it.

Wouldn't your causal mechanism be disproven by the reams of peaceful countries without such imbalances? In any case, the natural overproduction of males versus females at birth is too tiny to explain these gulfs.

As I understand it, the grandparent's argument is that earlier on in history, wars (and violence in general) would cause a reduction in the percentage of males. For example[0], in Soviet Russia following WW2, the ratio of young men/women dropped to 0.7. And that given that the China and India are more peaceful now (for various reasons), this violent force does not come into effect.

I don't understand how your response is relevant to the above argument.

[0] https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/2007_820-4g_Brainerd1.pdf

Peaceful countries with balanced population has better woman rights. What China/India has, isn’t really natural because they tend to abort female babies.

I was just today reading a piece arguing that measures showing historic lows in war deaths are wildly misleading because so much war today takes the form of civil war, rather than inter-state conflict, something which the measures don't cover very well.

At birth, there is a slight bias towards males born. However that is something in the order of 51% male babies to 49% female babies. That is far less pronounced than what is being observed.

That's not too far off from the figures quoted in the article – a 2% difference of 1.4 billion (China's population) would be 28 million, which is not too much less than the 34 million difference quoted in the article.

This is also causing the average age when girls are getting married to go down and it is increasing the age difference between the bride and groom.

Is there currently any country with too many women? I've heard interesting things about Paraguay, which lost like 90% of their men after some really bad wars, and how it changed their society.

The state of Kerala (pop 38 million) in India has 1084 females to every 1000 males according to the 2011 census. https://www.census2011.co.in/sexratio.php

Per Wikipedia, Russia has about 4 million more in the 15-64 demographic. 48m men and 52m women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia

This article seems to have a little more background on why. Wars and alcohol are harder on men than women. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/08/14/why-the-form...

I’ve read quite a few Chinese articles about a trend of Chinese expats working in Siberia marrying with local Russian women. I don’t know how accurate they are so I won’t post them here. It was interesting read though.

I personally know some Turkish people who’ve been in Siberia for years and what they say is the same as yours.

In Russia, men have a higher tendency to die in late middle age due to alcoholism and work-related fatalities. The difference in the "15-64 demographic" is really only visible starting at age 50. In the 20-30 range, there is no real difference.

Historically you can look at the UK after WW1, and possibly other European countries.

The war between Brazil and Paraguay ended some 150 years ago. I'm fairly sure the population has recovered back to the average by now.

The 60-year-old mom who still cooks for her seven sons + her husband... Noooo! learn how to make your own bread - at least.

And now you know why that woman may have aborted female fetuses. Avoidance of the continuation of miserable life for the women of India! Better to have boys that get married, then you can sit back and boss around the daughter-in-law.

Oh whoopsie, everybody aborted the girls? Hmmmm, I wonder why.

It's ridiculous that you assume cooking is a burden for her.

I host family meals regularly and really enjoy cooking for everyone, plus it provides an opportunity for everyone to get together.

Maybe stop looking at everything with such a negative filter.

What's with the ungrammatical title?

It's the MercuryNews title, so not the submitters mistype.

Reminds me that USA Today had a front page heading with technology misspelled as techonolgy

The Mercury News was acquired by the Contra Costa Tribune, and barely has a newsroom any more.

Many of those 'more men' are from villages who didn't like girls. So they are swallowing that on their own, which is kind of re-balancing. By the way, given the tech we have these days, more and more young people seem to be OK to live only with themselves. Let alone VR, if you will.

I wonder what the long term impact will be on their societies. If brides are scarce, would it lead to the betterment of social conditions for women in these (traditionally) chauvinistic societies?

Unfortunately, that's unlikely. I mean it might happen in urban well-developed areas, but if history is any indicator then for most parts of the country women will likely be worse off, and you'll see things like an increase in kidnappings, forced marriages, and shared marriages with multiple men.

Bride kidnapping is already having somewhat of a resurgence in China - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_kidnapping#China

> In one form of a typical qiangqin, the abductor would arrive at a woman's house flanked by around twenty men. While the friends carried the woman away, the "groom" would use scissors to cut off the woman's panties. The woman, struggling to preserve her dignity, would be unable to adequately fight off her abductors. The victim would then be taken to the groom's house, where the marriage would be consummated.

Really bizarre stuff. You’d think in the 21st century, such primitive human practices would not occur anymore.

>>“In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,”

May I suggest a war between the two countries? This problem will be solved. I was being semi-serious but I remember reading about war being more likely since China had so many men.

Wars were preventing overgrowing of populations before. Now technology, peaceful era causing overpopulation of homo-sapiens which is really big problem. Thus I think what you suggest makes sense. Also it will give some people reason to live, distraction, some glory.

Most people were dying from disease (esp in infancy) for most of history, not sure having another war will help there. And I can't tell what's more horrifying, suggesting that we should start some more wars to kill people or suggesting that we should bring back some plagues.

Also while I agree that it's harder to find glory in modern times, and there definitely should be a better outlet for that need, I think war has changed so significantly due to technological advances that people wouldn't find much glory lobbing bombs from a UAV piloting center.

The days of finding glory on the battlefield are probably as distant as the days of 90% of people working as farmers to produce food for themselves.

Is Li Weibin’s life common?

i don't think so. rare case.

It's not a rare case at all, especially among male migrant workers.

It is rather rare and illegal to 'buy' a partner, many left-over men will probably be alone for their lives.

I agree, but that is not what was asked.

adamnemecek was asking specifically about the life of Li Weibin, who didn't buy a partner.

Instead his is the live of a hard laborer, living in cramped dormitories, and forever alone, with little/no chance of breaking free from that life.

Unfortunately it's all too common among migrant workers.

I wish China and India would be friends instead of frenemies. Think of the possibilities.

Not going to happen. Pakistan has been China's ally for decades. China won't break that friendship for India. India will never get into a trilateral alliance with the number of issues (terror and political) pending with Pakistan. To top it, China hasn't gotten over the fact that India gave shelter to The Dalai Lama. Then there is the Chinese ambition to take over lands, seas and oceans in and around it. China won't give up it's claim over Arunachal Pradesh, nor will it set Tibet free, nor would it destroy the CPEC that it has built through disputed territory to maintain status-quo. Too many sticking issues that cannot be resolved until and unless China let's go of it's territorial ambitions and stops backing terror sponsors in Pakistan.

Actually Modi is visiting China in recent days. China and India will continue to compete and cooperate. Tibet has been a part of China for many centuries, and the serfs over there has been given freedom by CCP. Maybe some of those old serf-owners didn't like that. In foreseeable future, both China and India will look to increase its influence and there will be more conflicts, see Maldives, but also deals to make, like phone-makers from China continue to invest in India.

Tibet was not part of China for many centuries. It was an independent country before it was Annexed by China in 1951. There has never been any freedom given by China to Tibet. Contrast it with India's liberation of Bangladesh from attrocities of Pakistan. India did not annex Bangladesh when it had all the strength and opportunity to do so.

Chinese influence in India is actually diminishing on the ground. People in India are more aware now than ever before. People here prefer to buy products either made in India or some other country and not from China. Things are changing rapidly on the ground which will take a few years for it to be visible to China. India cannot have the huge trade deficit it has with China right now. To top it, China's persistent support to Pakistan backed terrorism is going down in bad taste with Indian citizens.

Modi is not having an official summit with Xi. This is an unofficial summit over Doklam and other pressing issues. I don't see any positive outcome from this as both parties involved will not be willing to shift from their positions.

Xi wants to consolidate power. Not just within but also by annexing other territories, oceans and islands. This also includes involvement in the power tussle currently underway in Maldives. This is a big gamble because it may end up pushing those countries that weren't allies of China but still had trade to reconsider China as a decent trade partner. Look at the US tariffs imposed on China. Other countries will take the cue once they realise China isn't as powerful as it portrays. It all boils down to if China can be a responsible superpower. Currently, it has everything going for it except that one point. Future will tell if Xi's gamble of alienating trade partners who weren't allies a good move or a bad one.

> There has never been any freedom given by China to Tibet.

It seems you completely ignored my remarks. 95% of Tibetans were serfs before reintegrate to China. After 1951, they became free people have the basic human rights. As in history, Both Yuan dynasty and Qing Dynasty have Tibet.

> Look at the US tariffs imposed on China.

US and China are in trade wars. Trump is playing the 'art of deal' game(not only to China but also Japan and other countries) and he is sending treasury secretary to China to negotiate. This has nothing to do with India/China conflicts or Maldive incidents.

China is still a developing country and it didn't show off to be a superpower. The major agenda is still developing its economy and addressing poverty.

Regardless all the challenges, 21st century can hold two most populous countries in the world.

The serf argument is a Chinese justification for invasion of Tibet. This has nothing to do with "human rights". It was a simple and plain invasion of another country which violated International Laws. You cannot shove that under the carpet with any sort of justifications: even if it is a dislike for social structure. If China really cared about the people of Tibet, it would have done what India did after East Pakistan liberation. It created Bangladesh and allowed the local people to rule themselves unhindered. India did not colonize Bangladesh. In fact, this "reintegration" argument is bogey. India could have used the same "reintegration" argument to justify colonizing Bangladesh as it once belonged to Hindustan in the ancient times. It did not. There is absolutely no justification for invasion and occupation of a territory.

> China is still a developing country and it didn't show off to be a superpower. The major agenda is still developing its economy and addressing poverty.

Are you seriously telling me that the militarisation in disputed South China Sea is not showing off? How about building the CPEC across disputed territory? How about China trying to build roads in the Doklam region? Are all these part of it developing its economy and addressing poverty? Seems more like unwarranted expansion to me.

I don't think any two big countries can be friends instead of frenemies. Think about Soviet Union, China, U.S. back in last century.

> sex-selective technology

Nice way to say aborting female babies.

Or abandoning, also happens a lot, as I learned when someone in my family adopted a girl.

Somehow they couldn't manage to call it "women's health".

heh, just another stroll though euphemylane.

> ...demographers say it will take decades for the ramifications of the bulge to fade away.

heh

Ford Foundation, Evangelical NGOs and World Bank Intellectual Yet Idiots are to be blamed here.

I remember in my childhood government ran this insane propaganda for vasectomy. Government claimed we all would die of hunger unless we stop producing babies. This propaganda was sponsored by people in USA who claimed population was a time bomb. Those fears were totally discredited with time.

Sadly good well off people bought the propaganda where as poor did not. Government even outright lied that vasectomies are easily reversible when in reality those procedures are more complex and not free.

That is why I caution current Indian government to simply ignore the first world problems like Global warming doomsday and instead focus on rapid growth so existing millions can afford to feed themselves and let USA and Europe play the global warming game.

Indian PM is smart and he used global warming scare to get billions from USA and Europe while doing only lip service to actual efforts. China is doing same and better.

Population is a time bomb that is presently exploding. The rate of food production will not keep pace with population, and somewhere between 200-500 million people have died of starvation since the warnings about population in 1968 that likely inspired the programs you are talking about (not all in India and not due to total carrying capacity...)

Global warming impacts the poor disproportionately compared to the rich, because the rich will be able to afford food when it becomes more scarce. This disproportionate impact on the poor is one of the reasons the Pope has called on all of us (and the Wealthy in particular) to be concerned about and act on global warming.

From a self-centered perspective, “don’t divide the farm” — concentrate instead of dilute the wealth flowing to the next generation. I do not believe the poorest are net contributors to economic activity so increasing their number is not the path to national prosperity.

You are wrong and smug Sir.

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