Download CHINA_GIRLS - Mr. Grande`s World History

Pre-Modern World History, Mr. Grande
Unit II: China—Dynastic cycles and philosophy
Modern Asia's Anomaly: The Girls Who Don't Get Born
Celia W. Dugger, New York Times, May 6, 2001
NEW DELHI:
WOMEN are making strides in both India and China, which together are home to a third of humanity. They are
living longer and are more likely to be able to read and write than ever before. In democratic India, more than a million women
have been elected to village councils in the past decade.
Yet, despite this progress, female fetuses are being aborted at startling rates in China and across broad swaths of India, new
census data shows. As the population of girls relative to boys has tumbled in northern and western India over the past decade,
these regions have begun to catch up with China's dismal statistics. The spread of ultrasound technology in these societies, with
their strong preferences for sons, has made it easy to find out the sex of a child before birth and to abort unwanted daughters.
But why is this bias against girls so pronounced in large parts of South and East Asia when it is not in many other regions of
the developing world? What is it about China and these areas of India, with their radically different histories and forms of
government, that explains this terrible convergence? And why, even now, don't the women themselves — more likely than ever
before to be literate — insist on giving birth to their girls?
Economists and demographers are beginning to grapple with these questions and say there are likely to be many complex
factors at play. But some think the answer lies in a particular form of patriarchal family, common in most parts of both regions. In
such families, the daughter's responsibility to care for her parents largely ends at marriage, while the son's lasts for life. And in
India and China, where there is still no universal, government-sponsored social security system, the question of who supports
aging parents is very important, these researchers say.
"The grown woman can be useful," said Monica Das Gupta, a demographer at the World Bank in Washington who has cowritten papers on this subject. "She can work in the fields and be a good mother, but the fact that she's educated and employed
doesn't change her value to her parents, who won't benefit from all that."
Intriguingly, Ms. Das Gupta, who studied family patterns across the developing world, says that in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin
America and Southeast Asia, daughters and sons share the job of caring for their aging parents — and in these regions the sex
ratios are normal.
In most parts of both India and China, where more than two billion people live, it is generally a son who carries on the family
line, inherits ancestral land, cares for his parents as they age and performs the most important ceremonial roles when they die. In
India, the son lights his parents' funeral pyres, helping set their souls at peace. In China, he cares for his parents' spirits in the
afterlife so they do not wander for eternity as hungry ghosts.
In contrast, a daughter in either society typically leaves her natal family after marrying to become part of her husband's
family, moving in with them and tending to her in-laws. "There's a traditional expression used in China," said Li Shuzhuo,
director of the Population Research Center at Xian Jiaotong University in Xian, China. "Daughters are like water that splashes out
of the family and cannot be gotten back after marriage."
Before ultrasound, girls were sometimes victims of infanticide, but much more commonly they were victims of neglect —
not fed as well as boys or taken to the doctor as quickly. But the advent of sex-selective abortions has added a new and definitive
means for acting on a prejudice against girls — and statistics reflect the results, experts say.
Normally, women around the world give birth to 105 or 106 boys for every 100 girls. But according to China's latest census,
there were 117 boys born for every 100 girls in 2000, up from 114 in 1990.
And in India, the early 2001 census data show that in the north and west, which include some of the richest states, the ratio of
girls to boys, from birth to age 6, has declined sharply in the same decade. In Punjab the rate has fallen to 793 girls per 1,000 boys
from 875; in Rajasthan from 915 to 865; in Gujarat from 928 to 878, and in Maharashtra from 946 to 917. The overall rate in
India fell from 945 to 927
Discrimination faced by girls both before and after birth has contributed to the fact that 50 million to 80 million more girls
and women might have been alive today in India and China, according to demographers and economists, had they received
treatment equal to that of boys and men.
Each country has its own policies or customs that may well have intensified the problem. In China, pressure to abort girls has
been increased by family planning rules that limit couples to one or two children. In India, the sizable dowries that families pay to
get daughters married add to the financial burden of raising girls. But in both societies, Ms. Das Gupta and Professor Li maintain
in a paper they co-wrote, the kind of patriarchal family system prevalent in much of India and China is the root of the preference
for sons, who are needed to provide security for parents in old age. It is a theory that echoes in the words of ordinary people in
Punjab, India's richest agricultural state.
The boy is like the lamp of the family, and everybody wants it lit continuously," said Jaswinder Kaur, a women's health
worker in Daffarpur. "The woman realizes that her value goes up with the birth of sons and down with daughters."
India and China both prohibit sex-selective abortions, but the practice is hard to police since the pregnant women and those
who perform the abortions have every incentive to keep the secret. But the numbers from the new census have drawn wide
attention in India. Some officials are saying the law must be more stringently enforced; women's advocates call for a social
movement against customs like dowry.
The high priests of the Sikh religion recently announced that anyone who becomes a “kudi-maar”— daughter-killer — will
be excommunicated. Punjab, which now has the lowest proportion in the nation of young girls to boys, has a large Sikh
population.
The experience of South Korea suggests that urbanization, modernization and rising prosperity may help loosen the bonds of
traditional family life, said Minja Kim Choe, a demographer at the East-West Center in Honolulu. Figures there, she says, show
the ratio there seeming to peak in 1990 at 117 boys per 100 girls and declining to 110 by 1999. While that’s still high, it is better,
she said. South Korea's economic transformation, she believes, is gradually weakening the patriarchal family system as people
become more independent economically and socially from their families.
But China and India are still mainly agrarian societies, and it is likely to be a long time before these lumbering behemoths
can hope to sec such benefits.