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Also - Analysis of China One-Child
Policy - Women's Rights Without Frontiers:
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CHINA - GENDER IMBALANCE -
PREFERENCE FOR BOYS - SOME WANT GIRLS
By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Nov 3, 2010 (IPS) - Although Li Xiaoxue and her
husband, Dai Chunlin, are already happy parents to a young boy, they plan to
skirt China’s one-child policy by having another baby. And like a growing
number of affluent, urban Chinese, their fingers are crossed for a baby girl.
"If my son wants to work in a place far from us when he
grows up, the daughter can stay and take care of us," says the 34-year-old
Li.
She and her husband own a software company in Beijing that
earns the couple about 500,000 yuan (74,828 U.S. dollars) a year – enough to
afford circumventing the one-child policy. Under this policy, couples need to
pay a fine, based on families’ annual income, that has been reported to range
from 45,000 dollars to more than 100,000 dollars.
"And it’s too expensive to raise a boy, especially in
big cities like Beijing and Shanghai. We have to buy him an apartment at least.
Otherwise it will be difficult for him to find a girlfriend," Li adds.
Li and Dai are not alone in their wish for a girl of their
own. In China, where a historical preference for boys has led to a dramatic
gender imbalance, attitudes about having girls are beginning to change in urban
areas. According to a 2009 survey of 3,500 prospective parents in Shanghai, 15
percent of those interviewed wanted a baby daughter compared to 12 percent who
wanted a baby boy. The rest had no preference.
Li says many of her friends also hope to have a baby girl,
aware that China’s gender imbalance has reached dangerous levels. She also
views as outdated the attitude that girls cannot accomplish as much as boys.
"Girls can also inherit a family business," she says. "They can
be as able as men."
Several factors have contributed to changing these
attitudes, sociologists and demographers say. A booming economy in the last
decade has created more opportunities for woman, particularly in the cities.
Rising incomes have rendered moot the traditional reasons for wanting a boy –
namely that a boy will earn more money to support his parents in old age.
Others, like Li, think that the cost of raising a boy is too
great and feel that a daughter is better equipped to take care of them in old
age.
China’s gender imbalance remains potentially calamitous. In
2005, the last year for which data is available, there were 119 boys born for
every 100 girls. In some areas, the ratio was as high as 130 males for every
100 females.
In rural areas especially, the historical preference for boys
has led to a number of societal ills, including selective abortion,
prostitution and human trafficking. China has a surplus of some 32 million
boys.
But as attitudes change, some demographers have suggested
China could follow a path blazed by neighbouring South Korea, where a dramatic
shift in gender attitudes has taken place in the last 20 years. In 2006,
Korea’s gender ratio was 107.4 boys born for every 100 girls, down from a peak
of 116.5 boys to every 100 girls in 1990, according to a 2007 World Bank study.
(Demographers consider a 105 to 100 ratio normal).
Beginning in the late 1980s, Korea experienced many of the
same changes China is undergoing today. Major shifts in the country’s economy
created opportunities for women in the work force, changing long-held attitudes
toward women’s role in society. In the 1970s, the Korean government launched a
campaign to change the public’s attitudes about gender and in 1987 it banned
doctors from revealing the sex of a foetus before birth.
China still has a long way to go before it can match Korea,
however.
A study in 2010 by the government-supported Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences named the gender imbalance among newborns – not
overpopulation – the country’s most serious demographic problem. "Sex-specific
abortions remained extremely commonplace, especially in rural areas," the
study said.
The study attributed the gender imbalance to China’s
three-decade-old one-child policy and to a poor social security system. Wang
Guangzhou, one of the study’s researchers, said the imbalance could lead to men
who earn lower incomes having difficulty in finding wives, according to the
English-language ‘Global Times’ newspaper.
"The chance of getting married will be rare if a man is
more than 40 years old in the countryside. They will be more dependent on
social security as they age and have fewer household resources to rely
on," another researcher, Wang Yuesheng, told the ‘Global Times’. The
paper, citing the National Population and Family Planning Commission, said
abductions and trafficking of women were "rampant" in areas with too
many men.
But Zheng Zhenzi, director of the Institute of Population
Research at the Guangdong Academy of Social Sciences, says that although
attitudes about having a baby girl are changing in the cities, the preference
for boys in rural areas remains firmly in place.
At the same time, Zheng told IPS that China has made great
strides in terms of gender equality. There are a growing number of women in
government administrative positions, legislation on gender equality continues
to rise and there are more women receiving education at high levels.
"Most women today have equal status as their
husbands," Zheng says. "But there is still a long way to go."