Chinese Bias for Baby Boys Creates a Gap of 32 Million | Hacker News Reader

Chinese Bias for Baby Boys Creates a Gap of 32 Million

nytimes.com

33 pointspeter12340 comments

I wouldn't be surprised if China started to become more aggressive militarily as this generation enters the proper age. An imbalance of men that don't have mates has caused problems for societies in the past, and they solved those problems by putting all of this pent up aggression to use.

My step-mother was Chinese, and came from a very large family, with very strong family values. That was usual. They also ran a very successful business. Also usual. Fukuyama's "Trust: The Social Virtues and The Creation of Prosperity" confirmed that large Chinese families work well as the basis of a business (but larger scales can be problematic).

It was only when a 24yo postgrad from China moved into my sharehouse that the changes to China hit home to me: due to the one-child policy, she was an only child, and she was the focus of her parents, and all her grandparents. Although a sweet girl, she was also startlingly childish and selfish. That's just one anecdote. But only children do have a tendency to be spoiled (I was an only child myself, and I was certainly spoiled).

These two experiences illustrated for me the fundamental change that is transforming China - from family to individual. I think this consequence of the one-child policy is far more significant than the gender imbalance. What will it mean?

(I apologize if I've offended anyone with this sensitive topic; it's not my intention. I'm connecting some of my own meaningful experiences with large scale changes, and I welcome refutation/refinement.)

It's not a binary issue, and you can't just say A > B = problems.

There are ~1.3 billion Chinese, but let's assume the this issue covers 1/3 of the population. So it's (1300/3 + 32/2) vs (1300/3 - 32/2) which works out to 4350:4318. Now we might guess that there will be large numbers of men that don't ever have a relationship. But, what people forget is relationships don't always last. People die, or get divorced ect. So what ends up happening is women will spend a higher percentage of their life in a relationship and while some men will never marry this is "normal" and they can still have relationship with women throughout their lives.

If anything expect women to marry younger and female widows to be in higher demand than males widows. Granted, if the male to female ratio ever reached 2:1 there would be issues but this is still a minor imbalance.

This mathematical illiteracy is a pet peeve of mine. It's unfashionable to talk in a meaningful mathematical unit (percentage). We see this crap in global warming propaganda (tons of carbon dioxide emitted or kept from being emitted) with no mention of what this is as a percentage. You see it in vaccination schedule defense. (1000 kids died of this disease in the last 5 years because they weren't vaccinated). You see it a lot with state and government budget issues. (This program brought in $1.2 million to the economy of state of California, and now they're cutting it). None of this sounds nearly as sexy if put into the perspective of percentage, but of course, then you couldn't stir up the sheep.

This imbalance is very common around the world. I don't understand why the press gets so anxious about it re: China. India has a similar surplus, like 20 million extra boys in the 0-14 range.

In places like South America there is often an imbalance favoring males before age 15 which shifts over to females from age 20 onwards. It doesn't mean war or revolution -- just a lot of urban violence and early deaths of males as they compete for mates. It's not pretty but neither is it a dire international problem.

Yes. Vietnam needs to start working on an H-Bomb now. I mean that. The ironic aspect of it, of course, is that in modern economies, women are much more valuable to the old folks than men.

Any reason why this got downmodden? Just curious.

My take: the suggestion that anybody should be pursuing nuclear weapons to solve socioeconomic issues.

Yeah, I don't know, but I'm being serious. Vietnam and China are ancient enemies, and Vietnam is the likeliest source of stolen brides. A few h-bombs, pursued for the exact same defensive reason that France and the UK had, could prevent demographic dislocations, between wildly disparate world powers.

Maybe, but you're also forgetting that the one child policy means children are even more prized. Immigration makes more immediate sense.

The problem is most preventable in rural areas and the cities more to the west. Places like Shanghai don't have such an imbalance.

The more likely solution, as opposed to using them for wars, it they get used for domestic construction projects: highways, railroads, etc. This has already been the case.

China is working hard on this problem. Its illegal to know the sex of a child during pregnancy. Some get around the issue, but I have personally seen it upheld pretty well. I knew the sex of my child before he was born, in Shanghai. But I was only allowed to know because I was an American and was in a hospital that catered to foreigners. The locals seem to have mostly settled in on the fact that they aren't supposed to know.

I recently learned about the Mosuo, which have no gender bias.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo

Very interesting.

However, this kind of thing: "Most significantly, when children are born, the father may have little or no responsibility for his offspring..." -- that's terrible.

That WP paragraph "Walking marriages" somehow reminds me of Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress". Harsh indeed.

Well the child doesn't have the actual father as a parent but he/she does have the males of the family. It's just a different way of raising kids as a community that we just aren't used to.

Many cultures are like this - and it isn't as terrible as you would think. Even some European cultures practice the godfather system - where the godfather serves as the traditional western father figure instead of the biological dad himself.

There are many other cultures (particularly southeast Asian) where the father is removed from the equation and the child is reared by other male relatives. The father in this case will get to raise someone else's child, so it all works out in the end.

You should've read the next paragraph...

"This does not mean, however, that the men have no responsibilities for children. Every man will share responsibilities in caring for all children born to women within their own family, be they a sister, niece, aunt, etc. In fact, children grow up with many “aunts” and “uncles”, as all members of the extended family share in the duties of supporting and raising the children."

32 million disenfranchised men, unable to find a wife, and start a family in 18 or so years?

The stuff that revolutions are made of.

I've heard this theory floated before. The people proposing it have a good point. They have to find something to do with all of these young men or trouble could emerge. I guess an alternative strategy would be to bring back monasteries. If this is too discordant with the official ideology of the state, they could send them to graduate school in science. ;|

"If this is too discordant with the official ideology of the state, they could send them to graduate school in science."

LOLOL. Would be even funnier if it weren't so true: http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/04/intercourse-and-intelligenc...

A depressing statistic: "only 65% of MIT graduate students have had sex."

There's a fairly obvious explanation that I didn't see mentioned anywhere in the abstract: assortative mating. People tend to have sex with people of roughly the same intelligence, socioeconomic status, and interests. As you go down the tails of the bell curve, there are fewer people of the same intelligence with similar interests.

If you have an IQ of 100, 68% of the population is within one standard deviation of you. Your chances of meeting someone you feel comfortable with in high school are pretty high. But if you have an IQ of 145 (3 stddev), only about 3% of the population is within one standard deviation of intelligence of you. Add to that the constraints of it being a member of your preferred sex, being reasonably attractive & socially compatible, and wanting to have sex, and it's no surprise that most such people don't find suitable mates until they enter college, which purposely brings together people of similar intelligence.

And if you have an IQ of 175 (5 stddev), less than 1 in 10,000 people is within one standard deviation of intelligence. (Though this is a bit meaningless, as IQ distribution has fat tails when you get past about 145.) Then add in that super-intelligent people often have very narrow and deep interests, and that males are overrepresented on both ends of the bell curve (there are both more male morons and male geniuses than female ones).

This also explains why the smartest men were most likely to hire a prostitute. If they had no chance of forming an emotional connection with a woman, why not pay her to leave afterwards?

Personally, I had about zero interest in 90% of girls in college. They were just inane. And this is at Amherst, which already selects for pretty smart people.

No, valid, currently normed IQ test yields a credible score of 175.

Anyway, IQ is orthogonal to rationality,

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...

http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...

and sufficient rationality might explore the implications of the submitted article without any reference to IQ tests.

That's an interesting analysis, but I disagree on some points. My ideas:

1) people tend to have sex with people of roughly the same attractiveness. Only a fool would fail to realize that there's a sexual market out there, and one's price in that market is mostly dictated by looks, not intelligence or interests. (disclaimer: I live in Southern California, and I realize that I may sound overly superficial).

2) Sex and stable romantic relationships are way different things. It's true that people tend to start relationships with people of roughly the same intelligence, socioeconomic status, and interests... but come on! I would not turn down a funny, hot girl just because she's an English major who's not interested at all in Quantum Field Theory! I probably would not want to marry her, but some NSA fun once in a while is refreshing...

3) Grad students at MIT should be rather smart, driven people. They should be surrounded by people of the same intelligence and interests, and they still don't get laid much. Your cute analysis does not explain this.

1.) I think it's both. People have sex with folks of the same attractiveness, but they don't ignore intelligence. Could you imagine an MIT grad student having sex with a trailer-trash bimbo of slightly-below-average attractiveness? (Yeah, that's a bad mental picture.)

3.) They've had less time to be surrounded by people of similar intelligence and interests. The virgin rate among MIT grad students is roughly the same as the virgin rate among average high schoolers. That's consistent with the hypothesis that MIT-caliber grad students can't find anyone until they get to MIT, and then they follow the normal rules of chance & dating & random hookups that most people do in high school.

A doctor friend of mine told me about removing contraceptive IUD's from Chinese women who are living in the US and now want to have more kids. The IUD's are designed to be permanent (not the same as US IUD's) and the women are forced to get them after they've reached their child quota in China. The interesting thing is that some doctors outside China probably perform more of these removal procedures than Chinese doctors ever do.

"Nothing can be done now to prevent this" That's not true. Nothing that wouldn't land someone in the Hague maybe.

There is a long Chinese cultural preoccupation with having legitimate descendants who will carry on the clan line (that is, have the same surname as the father). This is expressed in Shang era bronzes from almost 3,000 years ago that I have seen in museums. The inscriptions on the cast bronze objects, which were often given as rewards to faithful subjects who achieved glory in battle or the like, include expressions of a wish to have children and grandchildren for countless generations.

The common saying is

不孝有三，無後為大

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B8%8D%E5%AD%9D%E6%9C%89%E4...

indicating that the very worst way that a child can be disobedient to a parent is to not give the parent descendants.

If the law of supply and demand also applies in this market, the boys-girls gap in the next generation would be smaller.

However, given the thousands-years cultural norm that prefer boys over girls, it's likely the gap will likely persist for a long time to come.

Anyone has some ideas on what to do with this problem?

Actually, cultural preferences can change. This blog entry commenting on the NYTimes article mentions that both Japan and Korea have in recent decades begun to prefer daughters:

http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2009/04/boy-trade-in-china.php

Induce another large country, e.g. India, to prefer baby girls.

Surprisingly, India also has an unbalanced ratio, and AFAIK, the root problem is the same: cultural.

Sex Ratio: At birth: 1.12 male(s)/female under 15 years: 1.098 male(s)/female 15-64 years: 1.061 male(s)/female

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/10/04/country_facts/main...

I've heard that this had lead to an increase in human trafficking, namely women in poorer countries like North Korea being "imported" and taken as brides.

The simplest solution would be a large scale war. Actually, it is the only solution. Nothing good will come of this.

"Only solution" is a bit harsh. What about homosexuality, or robots?

On the former, investing in a chain of gay friendly bars or websites in China might be a good idea. It looks like the laws are getting a bit more lax in that area[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosexuality_in_China

Wouldn't this also have an impact on China's morality laws? Maybe this will push same-sex relationships and all of the accompanying impacts (child rearing, financial planning, legal contract/consideration) to the forefront far faster than would otherwise occur...

The anti-war solution? Monogamy is probably out the window.

- "Full service" Chinese sperm banks (mildly nsfw) http://www.inquisitr.com/20953/sperm-donation-in-china-comes... - Special friends (like Japan) http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070313230107AA... - Robots

Better (and cheaper) than the alternative.

Read the comments on the first link, it's a fake.

Monogamy is probably out the window.

I disagree, seeing as it's a shortage of women, meaning that multiple men would have to share a female partner. Polyandry is utterly impractical, as men would rather go to war than be stacked up by the women. Sharing is worse/more humiliating than having no wife at all.

Polygyny tends to ensue in societies when there's a shortage of women, because women are the reproductive bottleneck and, therefore, much more valuable. If the women are "underutilized" (sorry for the crude term) the group will not repopulate fast enough. Polyandry, on the other hand, does not result from a shortage of females. Crime and unrest do.

It's not Chinese bias, it's one-child policy bias against the Han Chinese

So in other words -- 32 million baby girls were murdered.

One Day, severe Justice will be served to these people.

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