China's Gender Bias
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By 2020, it’s estimated that 20 million single Chinese men will be left without Chinese brides due to many abortions caused by the one-child policy and a long-held preference for boy babies over girl babies.
This problem has serious ramifications for rural Chinese, where the discrepancy between the sexes is much higher. The country-wide rate birth rate is 113 boys for every 100 girls as of 2005. The sad thing to me is that the differences were actually less when the policy was first implemented, meaning that the situation is getting worse due to the increase in ultra-sound technology.
Sex-selection abortion, which is abortion based on gender, is illegal in China, but this doesn’t seem to have stopped people from performing back-door abortions, creating yet another problem due to the lack of safety for the women involved.
South Korea, Tawain, and India all have similar problems with their birth rates, even without the same sex policy, suggesting that this problem has encompassed greater parts of Asia.
According to this MSNBC article, the consequences are far-reaching for China. With such a large number of unmarried men, some experts believe that there will be huge consequences for China regarding prostitution, human trafficking, and AIDS. The human trafficking results not only from human prostitution, but from men trying to buy their wives, possibly in the same sort of style as a mail-order bride.
In Northeast Asia, the Confucian ethic may actually be part of the problem. In the West, we tend to have a type of kind-hearted viewpoint towards Confucius, but in Confucianism, it is very clear that the male reigns supreme.
Even in South Korea, which is definitely becoming more of an economic powerhouse, men are always treated more favorably than women and parents are often genuinely upset when the first child is a girl. The reasons for this involve the traditions involving property and land. Usually, the eldest male child will move in with his parents to support them in their old age. If a couple has only daughters, it is likely that they will live with their husband’s parents instead.
