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China’s boy-girl imbalance Here is an article that caught my eye from the Wall Street Journal about some of the effects of China’s “One Child” policy, a policy that has led to a significant imbalance, as high as 60-40, between men and women. Yet another reason, you might think, to resist the coercive nonsense of some of the population control folk.
Mind you, perhaps one reason for a relative dearth of marriage-potential Chinese women is that many of them, as far as I can tell, seem to be in New York at the moment. I have been in Manhattan for a business trip – here until Friday – and I have never seen so many beautiful Asian ladies in my life. And I am off to San Francisco for the weekend, where the Asian population is even more pronounced.
Good to be back in the USofA, by the way. New York is as magnificent as ever.
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You know, if China annexed Siberia, then the surplus men could be sent north as pioneers, and those who survived the still-freezing conditions could then send away for some beautiful mail-order asian brides! A win-win situation, except for russia. But it seems like you can’t please everybody…
The UK should import as many Chinese girl babies as they can get their hands on. Once the overhead of raising the original batch has been absorbed, they would would be adding far more to the economy than, say, a bunch of weapons trained Somalian youths. The aesthetic gain would just be a happy side effect.
A nice basis for a sci fi story, I think.
As a first generation ABC [American Born Chinese], it makes sense to me. The article focuses on those who are in competition for brides. These are the upper cohorts in achievement. They will absorb the majority of the available brides. The problems will come with the cohorts who are not capable of economic competition for a partner. Keep in mind that this is going to be a not insignificant group of people, equivalent to a sizable fraction of the population of our own country.
While the process of socialization [cultural, not political] proceeds from childhood, it is not completed until a stable family unit is formed, focusing the attention of the male on the future. It seems to hold constant across cultures that young males who have no stable pair bond, and no reasonable hope of ever achieving one, revert to being pack or gang animals. The gang replaces the family. I’ll let you look at the examples, and they are obvious on both sides of the Atlantic, and elsewhere in the world.
The primary societal effect is enhanced aggression in place of family building efforts. That is not good for any society, even or especially one as controlled as Mainland China. Hundreds of millions of males who will never marry, and those are most likely to be those on the low end of the intelligence and achievement spectrum; means social chaos. The Chinese Public Safety Bureau is going to be busy in the next decade or so, and the regime that they support may not survive. And I will note the traditional means used by regimes facing internal problems and a surplus of males involves foreign wars. I do believe that from their point of view, we and our interests in Asia are the foreigners. The traditional phrase describing that situation is, I believe, “interesting times”.
As far as the abundance of Chinese women in New York; if you get a chance, visit Vancouver, BC. Vancouver is informally known as Hong-couver, because thousands of the middle and upper class in Hong Kong; once Britain agreed to cede Hong Kong back to China and after HM Government ruled that the British passports held by Hong Kong subjects were NOT valid for them to come to Britain, immigrated to Vancouver. I also have never seen so many beautiful Chinese women before in my life.
In this country, we have benefited from the one child policy, in a very tangible way. I have two nieces who were adopted from China while toddlers. They are growing up into insanely smart, capable young women. There is a large subculture of Americans who have adopted Chinese girls. In fact they have revitalized Chinese culture in parts of this country. I expect great things from these adopted new Americans as they grow up. And I am extremely happy that they were saved from the likely fate of orphanage children in China.
Subotai Bahadur
One of the problems of a lack of marriages is the lack of kids, which exasperates the 4-2-1 problem China currently faces. China’s socialist paradise can’t keep it going if there aren’t enough kids to go into the workforce and produce. They will need to start looking outside China (Vietnam? Cambodia?) for women to bring back to China to marry.
Roue le Jour: The UK should import as many Chinese girl babies as they can get their hands on.
You could do a lot worse. One of my oldest friends has an adopted Chinese daughter. She’s very smart and very cute (now 11 years old).
So is her twin sister, adopted by a family in Alabama. (The Chinese didn’t know the girls were twins; they were foundlings, left in different places a few weeks apart. My friend happened to see photos of the other girl, and noted the resemblance. DNA confirmed the suspicion. They’re both named “Meredith”.)
The Boy-Girl imbalance is much less important than the old-young imbalance. There is a point when the Chinese are simply going to run out of young people, and they will hit the same aging population issues of the west, except to a much greater extent and when they are a lot poorer. If they can cope with this at all, it is going to have some peculiar consequences (China importing workers in large numbers from Africa, for instance).
Michael, you are probably very correct in the long run of things, but in the shorter term (like the next decade or so), I think that Subotai’s point about young males and war is very valid.
There is, I believe, an informal migration by Chinese into Siberia to log and mine. Assets are being bought. The Chinese invasion is economic.
Japan’s economic invasion was just the dry run. China will create an empire if it likes it or not.
p.s. I had the very good fortune to work with a one time Miss Chinatown Vancouver. Not only beautiful, smart, kind and elegant but a voluptuous figure and jazz dancer to boot… 8-/
I must have been reading this,website for too long:
When I read “the best thing to do is import as many Chinese girl babies as possible” my first thought was “Yes! Then we can learn how they’re made, manufacture them ourselves and export them to China at a vast profit…”
That’s a pretty significant demographic problem and one that doesn’t bode well for China’s neighbours. A country with a high proportion of frustrated young men is not going to be all that stable.
It was Mark Steyn who suggested that China might become “the first gay superpower since Sparta”.
Whoops- we can still do that! I understand that these China-girl units can end up recreating versions of themselves, so in 15 to 20 years time, the best of these units can be auctioned off to the strongest warlord in the region!
There are reports of Chinese
kidnapping/smuggling women out of North Korea, where the sex-imbalance is less pronounced. I foresee another potential problem: once they do begin “importing” women as wifes and mothers, they begin making a generation of children who are half-Chinese.
Mainland China is notoriously ethnically homogeneous. Will they suffer from the discrimination seen in Asian societies towards “biracial” kids?