China’s economy may be booming, but China is facing a shortfall of an essential resource…women.
To put it in perspective, that’s the equivalent of all the males in the metropolitan areas of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas/Fort Worth and Atlanta not being able to find a woman to marry.
“Bare branches.” That’s how the Chinese refer to these Chinese males who will never have families because they cannot find spouses. It’s an apt metaphor-bare branches-unmarried men who will have nothing attached to them. There will be no wife, no children.
Researchers offer some insight into the common characteristics of “bare branches”:
– Belong to predominantly the lowest socioeconomic class
– More likely to be underemployed or unemployed
– Transient with few ties to the community
– Transient males that commit proportionately more violence than non-transient males
– Live and socialize with other bare branches, creating distinctive bachelor subcultures
– Commit more violence-often under the influence of alcohol and certain drugs
– Predisposed to risk taking (Valerie Hudson, 2004 “Bare Branches”)
Read that list again and ponder the impact that 24 million men with these characteristics might have on a society. Some experts go so far as to argue that such a sex ratio imbalance in a population has regional and global security implications.
“The security logic of high-sex-ratio cultures predisposes nations to see some utility in interstate conflict….Conflict is often an effective mechanism by which governments can send bare branches away from national population centers, possibly never to return.” (Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. DenBoer, 2004)
So where did all the females go?
In 1979, China implemented their “one-child policy.” As part of the policy, couples were told by the government when they could marry, that they were to have one child, and that contraception and sterilization would be dictated by the local “family planning” authorities. Since then, sex selective abortion of females and female infanticide (the killing of young female children after birth) has become rampant.
The preference for sons is a widespread problem in many cultures, driven by the belief that a son is integral to one’s future financial and social wellbeing. It is a problem that has existed for centuries and is not unique to just China. But in the process of the Chinese government forcing down the birth rate at the same time ultrasound technology has become widely available, immense cultural pressure comes to bear on Chinese parents to determine the sex of their unborn child and terminate the pregnancy if it is a girl. When the one-child policy meets a cultural preference for boys and widely available ultra sound technology, the result is one of the worst examples of gender abuse in the world.
Was the one-child policy necessary ?
Steven Mosher, a pro-family expert on China, makes the case that it was not.
“I have long argued that the one-child policy, besides being a gross violation of human rights, was demographically unnecessary. Birth rates in China in the late seventies were already falling fast. Even in the absence of the one-child policy, they would have continued to fall-probably to near present-day levels–as a result of China’s urbanization, industrialization, and rising levels of education. And this would have happened without the tens of millions of forced abortions and sterilizations that the state has imposed .”
Using internationally respected data, we at UFI ran the numbers. Note China and the year 1979, the start of the one-child policy. As Mosher points out, the fertility rate of China was already dropping rapidly. The most dramatic decrease in the fertility rate, from 5.9 to 2.9, occurred between 1970 and 1979. Note also the other countries in the region-countries who did not have a one-child policy-experienced similar declines in fertility rate.
Source: UN Demographic Yearbook: Historical Supplement 1997; UN Demographic Yearbook: Each Census 1985-2003; UN World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision Population Database; UN Data: A World of Information; Taiwan: Yearbook Department of Statistics
The destructive mindset and resultant policies continue
China has pledged to keep its one-child policy in place until the year 2050, a policy which it admits is “related” to the large sex imbalances in the country-a sex imbalance that in some areas is as high as 140 males to 100 females.
Over the coming months, the United Nations will be hosting meetings, negotiating conventions and reaffirming treaties that rubber stamp unnecessary population control policies. They will do this claiming that reducing population is crucial to the progress of developing countries-a point that empirical data does not support.
The UN Human Rights Council will continue to turn a blind eye to the gross human rights violations committed against women and their unborn children in China. The UN’s own UNFPA is complicit and openly supports and condones China’s one-child policy.
Feminist organizations worldwide, those who claim to champion the rights of all women to control their bodies, will barely mention and usually flat out ignore what is happening to their fellow females in China. Why? Because standing against what is occurring in China would shine a light on their pro-abortion policies, stymie their efforts to push legalized abortion, for any reason, upon the entire world, and would force them to acknowledge, that for a radical feminist, a desire to “control one’s own body” only moves one direction-towards abortion.
The Good News: We can all help stop this!
With the help of all of our United Families International readers and dedicated supporters, we will have UFI representatives present at upcoming UN meetings. UFI will continue to stand against policies that harm our families and our unborn children. We will work to educate delegations and provide policy makers with relevant and crucial information. The anti-family forces are relentless in their efforts and we will be relentless in our efforts to push for policies that support and protect marriage and families.
Thank you for taking the time to educate yourself on these issues and please speak up in support of the family whenever possible. Your influence can be felt! The families of the world need you.
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