Bride Shortage of 24 Million!

I blogged about China's one child policy here. Today, CNN has a report stating that China will be short 24 million brides by 2020.

This is a result of the one child policy and China's cultural preference for male heirs. It's going to cause huge social upheaval in China.

Whenever one sex outnumbers another, life is difficult. Historicly we've only seen this occur during periods of exploration- men would set out to explore, and the women would follow years or decades later. Part of why the West was wild is the lack of women. Women provide a calming influence, and give the instinctive male urge to protect an outlet. When a man has a family to raise, he channels his energies into providing for them. When he lacks that stabilizing force, crime increases.

And this isn't something humanity has grown out of. The city I work in has a HUGE immigrant population (approx 1/3 of the population has immigrated to Canada in the last 15 years). When the immigration first started happening, it was all men; coming to Canada for the jobs here. Most of them have been upstanding citizens and regularly send large portions of their paycheques home.

But there are always a few bad apples, and that's true here. Crime rates in this city skyrocketed- at one point we had the highest per capita crime rate in Canada. Fast forward a few years, and these men have obtained their permanent resident card, or even their citizenship, and their wives and children are moving here. Crime rates have been dropping for the last few years. This hasn't been studied, but I think there is enough evidence to suggest a correlation between single young men and crime rates.

And I fear that's what China has to look forward to. That will be the legacy of its one-child policy

The saddest part of this article is that the Chinese government is ignoring these dangers- they have no interest in changing their policy. It is to remain in place. They are already facing catastrophic demographic failure. Waiting won't fix anything; it will only make it worse.

Actually, I changed my mind.

The saddest part of this whole story is that the one child policy has prevented 400 million births. And knowing that China forces abortions if a women has more than one child, and that people will choose to abort a female child in hope of having a male, a large portion of those 400 million were not "prevented" they were murdered.

Missing Girls

Just read this article in the NY Times. As I imagine most people are aware, China has a huge problem with sex selected abortion. As a result of the enforced one child policy, the cultural preference for boys, and recent developments in technology, baby girls are often aborted.

A recent study shows that in the 0-20 age range, China has 32 million more boys than girls.

32 million!

People are talking about the huge social ramifications this will have on the country- potential for increased violence without the "calming and settling" influence of women, increasing demographic decline but no one is talking about the psychological impact this will have on the country.

I can't imagine the trauma the mothers and fathers who've been forced to abort their daughters are going through. We know abortion has long range traumatic effect- post abortion syndrome for example. Generally that impacts on the individual level, but when the country's policy is to abort children, that impact has to expand the the national level. How does an entire country heal from those scars?

And the other part that saddens me (which the NY Times article never talked about) is the loss of all those lives. Those little girls were killed as a result of official government policy! And more and more are being killed every day.

The study says that China is trying some "imaginative and extreme scenarios" to fix the gender imbalance. Here's one they should consider: CANCEL THE ONE CHILD POLICY, and CRIMINALIZE ABORTION.

Is that innovative and extreme enough?

And, as a side note- if there is nothing wrong with abortion, why are we concerned that the Chinese are aborting themselves into extinction and self imposing genocide on themselves? The hypocrisy of the pro-choice mentality shows itself once again.