Intervention Begets Crisis

China has long practised a one-child policy, in attempting to come to grips with its burgeoning population. To the extent that it has managed successfully to slow down its birthrate and with it, its unbridled population growth it can congratulate itself. On the other hand, there is a current and serious shortage of women of marriageable age in China, and the situation is deteriorating. The population is forecast, under present conditions, to reach 1.5 billion, from its current 1.2 billion, by 2033.

China does understand it has a problem. After all, there is a positive spin-off from fewer females being available to marriage-aged males, for these males will remain single, and there will therefore be fewer families to reproduce. On the other hand, these unattached males may feel themselves to have been cheated, with their futures somewhat lacking. If they're farmers with no one to help out on the farm; no wife, no future field hands, what will all these disaffected single males turn to?

In any event, while urban Chinese appear to have accepted the single-child rule, country people and farming communities have had their own ideas, and there has been a constant struggle between the Chinese bureaucracy overseeing this project and the families who insist on more than one child. Latterly, while the one-child policy has remained constant in urban centres, those living in the country have seen a slackening of the rules where they may now have up to two children per family.

Like most societies which have had strictures placed upon them, the Chinese do not take kindly to state interference of this kind. And like India, where the state also went to great lengths to discourage unbridled population growth by forced sterilization, male children were seen to have greater value than female offspring, resulting in a greater male to female ratio. Before technological advances which could identify fetal gender in uteris, unwanted baby girls were simply left to die. Now they are being aborted in favour of baby boys.

It's estimated on the basis of current lop-sided gender statistics that in fifteen years' time one in ten males will be single due to an utter lack of female counterparts. That's quite a leap, from the fear of too many mouths to feed in an ever-growing population, to reducing that fear and synthesizing instead a large, restless and dissatisfied population of men with outcast futures, a threat to the stability of the society as a whole.

The gender imblance has gone from 118 boys to 100 girls in 2005 to the current 130 boys to 100 girls in some areas. Chinese tradition favours boys, seen as future family breadwinners. Daughters leave home to cleave to their husband's families. In a culture where the younger generation venerated the older generation and had a responsibility to care for them in old age, daughters were throw-away old-age insurance in single-child families.

Trade in women and kidnapping of girls has become a growing problem, particularly in rural areas where poor farmers are unable to attract brides; young women would far prefer urban life and their declining numbers now give them choice. Overseas adoptions of female children once so popular in the West has come to a screeching halt, as China seeks to ensure that their girls grow up in China.

Greater numbers of farmers are abandoning their farms and moving to towns and cities. The largest mass migration in the world's history is taking place within China.

Forfend one perceived crisis, launch another.