WUNRN
CHINA - POPULATION CENSUS ANALYSIS -
SEX RATIO: "MISSING GIRLS"
Article
first published online: 11 September 2013
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China's New Demographic Reality:
Learning from the 2010 Census
By Yong Cai
China
conducted its sixth modern census in 2010, recording a total of 1.34 billion
people. The data confirm that China has entered a new demographic era
characterized by prolonged low fertility, persistently elevated sex ratios,
rapid aging, massive urbanization, and widespread geographic redistribution.
Extremely low estimates of infant mortality suggest problems in recording
deaths.
The data indicate that fertility remains well below replacement level—probably
as low as 1.5 births per woman—even after controlling for under-reporting of
births, which is common. Since the early 1980s, China’s sex ratio at birth has
been above the normal level of around 105 males per hundred females born.
Despite considerable investment in strategies to alleviate this imbalance, the
census data offer little evidence of improvement. The sex ratio for persons born
after the 2000 census is 118 or more males per hundred females. The total
number of “missing” girls in China has risen to more than 20 million.
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In sum, the 2010 census
again confirms that the recorded sex imbalance is not a statistical artifact,
but a reality. The total number of “missing” girls in China has risen from
about 8.5 million revealed by the 2000 census (Cai and Lavely 2003) to more than
20 million (Cai 2013). Facing this substantial problem, the Chinese government
has deployed a number of measures to correct the imbalance, such as banning the
use of prenatal sex-determination technology and launching a “Care for Girls”
campaign.
To date, however, these
policies have not been very effective (Greenhalgh 2013; Li 2007). Sex-selective
abortion, though illegal, is not difficult to obtain. The Care for Girls
program, though it might have improved girls’ status within the family, has yet
to change people’s desire to have a son. The roots of the problem are
entrenched in the social institutions of the patrilineal family system.
Fertility decline, urbanization, and improvement in education are slowly
changing these institutions, but son preference remains strong in rural
While there are some
positive signs, such as a decline in the sex ratio of higher-parity births,