Nuclear bombs and population bombs
Ever since news of North Korea's nuclear bomb test broke, I've been surveying students for their reaction to the developments. Some laugh at it in an "oh, my redneck cousin, we don't like to talk about him" sort of way, while others actually have serious commentary.
An older student from Jilin Province, near the border of China and Korea, recounted her talks with Korean refugees and ethnic Koreans in her hometown, who told her about the treatment North Koreans receive if they are forcefully repatriated: beatings, and a nasty bit of torture that involves stringing a sharp steel cable through the victims' ear, then lining him/her up with other refugees who are similarly impaled and marching them back across the border. This story corresponds with similar accounts featured in Western newspapers.
I had earlier in the class suggested that Chinese welcomed the North Korean girls in order to address the "woman gap" in China's periphery and the student agreed, noting that in many restaurants she went to in Jilin the majority of the waitresses were beautiful North Korean girls who had fled the DPRK and found homes with Han Chinese and Chinese Korean families. For North Korean women, even marrying a humble rural Chinese brings with it the promise of prosperity, and thanks to the woman gap, there's more than enough demand for Korean brides.
The woman gap is basically the shortage of young women available to marry young men in the Chinese periphery (which one may conceptualize as the countryside plus underdeveloped cities). Although the gap is exacerbated by the One Child Policy, it's worth noting that other factors are in play. Rural and semi-rural Chinese families are generally allowed more than one child provided that at least one of the children is a girl, so it's common for Chinese in the countryside to have one boy and one girl.
What happens in these families is a gender-based division of labor, with the boys working on farms or in rural factories, and the girls being sent to study at universities and colleges in the cities. The boys rarely receive a proper education, and, furthermore, they often contribute their wages towards their sisters' education, so they remain lower class workers and cannot save for a better future. The girls, in turn, become educated, and attract male suitors with similar education levels -- that is to say they don't marry boys from their hometown. The parents invariably bless these arrangements, since a daughter who marries up will be able to better provide for them.
Unfortunately, this leaves many single men in the countryside without any women to marry, and into this gap step foreign women like North Koreans, Vietnamese, Thai, Mongolians, and Russians from the far east. Some of these women, especially North Korean women, will marry Chinese willingly, while others are reportedly the victims of kidnappings.
The paradox of this trend is that if Chinese girls from the periphery married men from the periphery, then the One Child Policy would ensure a woman gap in urban areas thanks to the Chinese desire for sons above daughters, which, in a single child context, has resulted in the 110:100 birth ratio of boys to girls, a ratio becoming even more uneven as Chinese families with the right amount of renminbi (Chinese currency) or guanxi (connections) pair up "illegal" sex-selection and twin-producing* fertility drugs or pay the fines to have a second (or third!) male child. Further note that the boy-to-girl imbalance seems to be driven primarily by urban births instead of rural practices, meaning that the ratio within cities might be (in a rough estimate) closer to 125:100, meaning there are that many more urban men looking to take rural girls as wives and mistresses.
In the end, China is left with a surplus population of millions, potentially hundreds of millions, of impoverished single men in the periphery. History, both Chinese and otherwise, suggests that conflicts can easily arise when such a large and "disconnected" population vents its frustrations within society. And while most modern societies can offer diversions to reduce the possibility of conflict, China possesses very little in the way of social capital or ideology to keep these men content.
The DPRK's nuclear bomb -- and the regime that built it -- may be the stuff of nightmares, but China's woman gap is the stuff of revolutions. Observers should take neither one lightly.
* In the States I encountered about as many twins in my lifetime as I have encountered in China after roughly three years. There's some strange chemistry going on.
Note: This entry has been modified and made public since its original posting.
An older student from Jilin Province, near the border of China and Korea, recounted her talks with Korean refugees and ethnic Koreans in her hometown, who told her about the treatment North Koreans receive if they are forcefully repatriated: beatings, and a nasty bit of torture that involves stringing a sharp steel cable through the victims' ear, then lining him/her up with other refugees who are similarly impaled and marching them back across the border. This story corresponds with similar accounts featured in Western newspapers.
I had earlier in the class suggested that Chinese welcomed the North Korean girls in order to address the "woman gap" in China's periphery and the student agreed, noting that in many restaurants she went to in Jilin the majority of the waitresses were beautiful North Korean girls who had fled the DPRK and found homes with Han Chinese and Chinese Korean families. For North Korean women, even marrying a humble rural Chinese brings with it the promise of prosperity, and thanks to the woman gap, there's more than enough demand for Korean brides.
The woman gap is basically the shortage of young women available to marry young men in the Chinese periphery (which one may conceptualize as the countryside plus underdeveloped cities). Although the gap is exacerbated by the One Child Policy, it's worth noting that other factors are in play. Rural and semi-rural Chinese families are generally allowed more than one child provided that at least one of the children is a girl, so it's common for Chinese in the countryside to have one boy and one girl.
What happens in these families is a gender-based division of labor, with the boys working on farms or in rural factories, and the girls being sent to study at universities and colleges in the cities. The boys rarely receive a proper education, and, furthermore, they often contribute their wages towards their sisters' education, so they remain lower class workers and cannot save for a better future. The girls, in turn, become educated, and attract male suitors with similar education levels -- that is to say they don't marry boys from their hometown. The parents invariably bless these arrangements, since a daughter who marries up will be able to better provide for them.
Unfortunately, this leaves many single men in the countryside without any women to marry, and into this gap step foreign women like North Koreans, Vietnamese, Thai, Mongolians, and Russians from the far east. Some of these women, especially North Korean women, will marry Chinese willingly, while others are reportedly the victims of kidnappings.
The paradox of this trend is that if Chinese girls from the periphery married men from the periphery, then the One Child Policy would ensure a woman gap in urban areas thanks to the Chinese desire for sons above daughters, which, in a single child context, has resulted in the 110:100 birth ratio of boys to girls, a ratio becoming even more uneven as Chinese families with the right amount of renminbi (Chinese currency) or guanxi (connections) pair up "illegal" sex-selection and twin-producing* fertility drugs or pay the fines to have a second (or third!) male child. Further note that the boy-to-girl imbalance seems to be driven primarily by urban births instead of rural practices, meaning that the ratio within cities might be (in a rough estimate) closer to 125:100, meaning there are that many more urban men looking to take rural girls as wives and mistresses.
In the end, China is left with a surplus population of millions, potentially hundreds of millions, of impoverished single men in the periphery. History, both Chinese and otherwise, suggests that conflicts can easily arise when such a large and "disconnected" population vents its frustrations within society. And while most modern societies can offer diversions to reduce the possibility of conflict, China possesses very little in the way of social capital or ideology to keep these men content.
The DPRK's nuclear bomb -- and the regime that built it -- may be the stuff of nightmares, but China's woman gap is the stuff of revolutions. Observers should take neither one lightly.
* In the States I encountered about as many twins in my lifetime as I have encountered in China after roughly three years. There's some strange chemistry going on.
Note: This entry has been modified and made public since its original posting.