Several southern Indian states have achieved even more impressive population control (below replacement level fertility in a part of India that accounts for about 30% of the population) without any coercion at all. Even in northern states, fertility is dropping at a pace that has surprised demographers. I bet fertility would have dropped in China the same way voluntarily.
As in other parts of the country, village customs dictate the groom's family pay the bride's family a set amount -- known as cai li -
I know China is a big and diverse country. Perhaps that is why I've heard of the Chinese custom for the bride's family to pay huge sums to the groom's family. And the proverb: "Raising a girl is like watering some else's garden."
Is this a case of different regions with different customs?
Generally you'd pay a bride price rather than a dowry in China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_marriage#Six_Etiquette). Sayings like the one you quoted are not due to paying money to the groom's family, but rather because the girl becomes part of the groom's family.
There are probably a regions where the reverse is true, and dowries are common, because China is a very large and diverse place. Maybe near Mongolia? Certainly not in the major cities though.
Birth control (and one of its consequences, older population) are unfortunately only one side of the coin. Interestingly, Mother Nature "regulates" the population in a way that in peaceful times 51 to 52 percent women are born but at the war time, more male babies are born.
I suppose, the same (proportion of ~ 51:49) would happen in China despite birth control. The real problem is "Female Infanticide", due to bias in many "patriarchal" societies towards women as being somewhat inferior to men.
This should be obvious. Look what happens in a culture where the wealthy/powerful are allowed 4 wives, on top of there already being a shortage of females.
Look what happens in a culture where the wealthy/powerful are allowed 4 wives, on top of there already being a shortage of females.
What specifically does happen? In the culture I live in, there is aspirational lifelong monogamy as an ideal, and practical serial monogamy as a commonplace lifestyle, but I don't know what happens in a society with a highly skewed ratio of males to females. Especially, I don't know what happens if some men can have four wives and others none at all.
In the late Ottoman Empire ~3% of men had more than one wife. Keep in mind that the wife's legal position was better than in most of Europe too. In cultures where the husband is expected to support wives and progeny it gets expensive fast. OTOH there are a lot of places poorer than e.g. Saudi Arabia. In places where the father is further along the continuum to useless sperm donor, like W. Africa promiscuity and the prevalence of multiple concurrent sexual selationships makes it very different.
How do you suppose they are going to get to the west? swim (to the East)? walk over mountains (to the West)? I have heard this "use the surplus males for war" theory several times. The "too many males part" adds up, but the rest does not.
Far more likely, is to use the 32 million man surplus for domestic infrastructure projects, which is what they are already doing.
It doesn't work like that tho'. The only reason men want steady jobs is to raise families. It's the genetically-programmed provider instinct. If that is being blocked then men will revert to aggressive competition. We're all mammals.
In a country with no form of social security, the only retirement "savings" for families is to have sons that can support them in their old age. Selectively aborting females (or female infanticide where selective abortion becomes difficult) becomes a "rational" decision in such cases. While I disagree with the logic on how they've approached this situation, I can see it happening in most post-feudal societies that are trying to industrialize.
This is going to seriously screw over China. You have the 4-2-1 problem: 4 grandparents living off of 2 parents who are living off of 1 child. It obviously will not work, China doesn't have the wealth to support the welfare and Chinese parents demand retirement and this sort of support from their children.
China collapses in the 2020's due to demographic pressure and inequality. Demographic trends are all but unavoidable.
Thanks to its 30-year-old population-planning policy and customary preference for boys, China has one of the largest male-to-female ratios in the world.
That makes no sense whatsoever. The population-planning policy aimed at reducing total population, not the number of girls. The male-to-female ratio is skewed because of female infanticide, not "customary preference for boys".
The sad truth is, millions of chinese families killed their newborn girls in order to ensure that their one alloted child would be male because they believed in male superiority. They are now confronted with a self-perpetuated demographic disaster, and the western journalists, as usual, white-wash it in culturally relativistic terms.
Could this level of unbalance have an effect on our genes? I've read of species that fluctuate, every 5-10 years, the genetics odds of male/female based on the gender ratios of the population.
It seems possible it could happen to humans if this got out of hand in the future.
Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.
To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.
In other words, throughout most of history, most men did not have offspring. Although 32 million surplus males is a lot, it probably will not have a profound effect on the gene pool.
