Surplus males: The dangers of Asia's preference for sons

PROVO, Utah When security scholars survey the most worrisome potential conflicts in Asia, they should keep in mind a variable to which they might not have given much thought: the sex ratios of the countries involved.

The most populous nations in Asia, including China, India and Pakistan, have acted upon their deep cultural preference for sons by culling daughters from their populations through the use of ever more efficient sex selective technologies. Amniocentesis and ultrasound as a precursor to sex selective abortion have been joined by sperm-sorting technologies that increase the probability of conceiving a son.

The identification of the sex of a fetus and sex selective abortion are both strictly illegal in all these countries. But legalities tend to yield before strong, socially approved and culturally rooted desires, and have proved a surmountable barrier. Doctors or technicians may not legally be able to tell you the sex of your fetus, but for a bribe they can smile or frown, light a cigarette or crush one out as they examine your ultrasound.

The technology to select male offspring before birth began to spread in the late 1980s, and the birth sex ratios began to rise. In China, the official ratio is 117 boys born for every 100 girls, but the reality is probably 120 or more. In India, the official birth sex ratio is 111-114 boys per 100 girls, but spot checks show ratios of up to 156 boys per 100 girls in some locales. For comparison, normal birth sex ratios are 105-107 boys born per 100 girls.

The mortality rate for girls and young women is also much higher than normal in these countries, further exacerbating the deficit. For example, the U.S. Bureau of the Census estimates excess deaths among Chinese females in the first year of life alone to be close to half a million. In India, almost one million more girls than boys die in the first five years of life.

The sheer scale on which daughters are being culled from Asia is unprecedented in history. But if societies are indifferent to the fate of these daughters, then let us turn our attention to the fate of their prized sons.

The bottom line is that there will be appreciably more young men in their societies than young women. Using conservative estimates, in 2020 India will have about 28 million more young males (aged 15 to 34) than young females. In China, the figure will be closer to 30 million; in Pakistan it will probably be 3-5 million.

In China there is a term for such young men: guang gun-er, or "bare branches" on the family tree - males who will probably not raise families of their own because the girls who should have grown up to become their wives fell victim to female infanticide.

The "bare branch" populations in China and India, comprising about 12 to 15 percent of their young adult males, will be overwhelmingly poor, uneducated, unskilled and possibly unemployed. Throughout the millennia in which son preference has been effected in China, India and Pakistan, the bare branches have been one of the most volatile elements in society, frequently causing great social instability through crime and violence, and when uniting in a common movement, an important threat to the government itself.

In Chinese history, for example, the Nien Rebellion, the Black Flag Army, the Boxers, the Eight Trigrams Rebellion and even the famous Shaolin fighting monks were all essentially bare-branch collectives doing what they did best: using force to acquire the resources otherwise denied them.

The Nien, for example, came from an impoverished province where the sex ratio was 129 to 100. They began as petty bandits and smugglers, but soon coalesced into larger criminal brotherhoods. At the height of the rebellion, their leaders could boast of an army of more than 100,000 bare branches, which controlled an area populated by 
almost six million persons.

Bare branches tend to congregate in the cities in vast "floating populations." For example, in China's liudong renkou, or floating population, 80 percent are under age 35, and 72 to 80 percent are male. China is already experiencing a tremendous increase in crime, and 50 to 90 percent of the crimes in the large cities are committed by bare-branch migrants. Over the course of history, Chinese rulers' response to the bare branches was to battle them, expel them or co-opt them as soldiers. All Chinese governments have understood that the bare branches are a formidable club - if it is in your hand it can be useful, but poised over your head it is a serious security threat.

Indeed, the very type of government to which a nation can aspire is affected by a sex ratio abnormally favoring males. History demonstrates that such societies cannot be governed by anything less than an authoritarian political system. Furthermore, high-sex-ratio societies typically develop a foreign policy style crafted to retain the respect and allegiance of its bare branches - a swaggering, belligerent, provocative style.

Societies with a very low status for women cannot emulate normal sex-ratio societies either in terms of the form of government or in their tendency towards peacefulness. Any attempt by normal sex-ratio societies to project their own security logic onto a high sex-ratio society leads to miscalculation. Abnormal sex ratios do not in themselves cause conflict - the sex ratio of Rwanda in 1994 was normal, for example - but they definitely create societal instability and severely aggravate conflict when it does arise.

Peace and democracy may be as elusive as girl babies in this region where almost 40 percent of humanity resides.
 

Valerie M. Hudson is a professor of political science at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah. 

Andrea M. Den Boer is a lecturer in international politics at the University of Kent, Canterbury, England. 

Their book "Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population" is published this month.