Imbalanced Sex Ratios, Excess Males, and Human Trafficking in China
The natural sex ratio at birth today stands at around 105 boys per 100 girls. However, in some parts of the globe, the ratio of boys to girls is heavily skewed towards men. China’s 2021 birth sex ratio, for instance, was 110 boys for every 100 girls. This phenomenon of excess males to females was documented by Amartya Sen who, in 1990, wrote a piece for the New York Review on skewed sex ratios producing more men than females. In his piece titled More than 100 million women are Missing he rejects the divide between Eastern and Western cultures as a definitive explanatory factor and views the problem through a combined cultural and economic analysis. What can explain the significant imbalance in the at-birth sex ratio between boys and girls? One biological study at the National Academy of Sciences concluded that throughout the entirety of pregnancy, the female mortality rate was generally higher than that of males. Another explanation offered is that of environmental factors (for instance, adequate healthcare or quality of education) in developing states. Such factors can lead to women dying at a greater rate than men, leading to a skewed sex ratio towards men in a population.
A third explanation, although rejected by Amartya Sen, is the idea that a state's culture impacts skewing sex ratios. One prime example of a country that illustrates this point is China.
Preference of Sons over Daughters and Governmental Policy
Chinese preference for sons over daughters has long existed throughout the state's history. Sons are not only seen as labourers within families they are also, once older, seen as primary caregivers for older relatives. Male offspring are considered best suited to continue the family name and lineage. In contrast, daughters are taught to be good, respectful, obedient, and subservient housewives to their husbands. Ultimately, not having male offspring within a family would be considered humiliating. Such a dominantly ingrained belief has led scholars to suggest that it is the primary cause of female infanticide. Moreover, studies have shown that in families where parents strongly prefer males, daughters receive worse treatment and care by the parents in terms of medical treatment and allocation of food. This patriarchal cultural belief, therefore, undeniably influences the ratio of boys to girls at birth. Yet, it is not the sole factor in explaining the imbalance. State policy also plays a role in radically skewing the sex ratio between males and females at birth.
The late 1970s saw the Chinese state institute a new and radical fertility policy among its ethnic Han population limiting couples to just one child. With the introduction of this extreme fertility policy, the government had hoped to curb China's growing population to just shy of 1.2 billion by the end of the 20th century. Couples who disobeyed the policy and had a second child without official permission would face fines, whilst obedient single-child households could see longer maternity leaves offered as an incentive. Though the law did have a curbing effect on population growth (China’s birth rate dropped from 2.75 births per woman in 1979 to around 1.5 per woman in 2000) the policy has been widely criticised for contributing to issues such as forced abortions and female infanticide.
The advent of ultrasound technology in the early 1980s contributed to an increased availability of sex-selective abortions. This new technology allowed doctors and mothers to better determine the sex of a foetus approximately 20 weeks into a pregnancy. One powerful study by researchers Li, Yi, and Zhang suggests that for birth cohorts between 1991 and 2005, there were an additional 7 extra boys per 100 girls. Other estimates reported that by 2000, the ratio had skewed so much towards males that the ratio stood at a high of 120 boys to every 100 girls. Even worse, in some regions of China in the same year the figure stood as much as 130 or more boys per every 100 girls. Consequently, such skewed sex ratios have resulted in more than 35 million women “missing”.
Consequences of China’s Excess Males and Human trafficking
What, then, are the ramifications for such a skewed sex ratio? From a human-rights abuse perspective, quite a considerable number. In a state where strong cultural Confucian values heavily emphasise the importance of family and the institution of marriage in society a high-sex ratio skewed towards boys can, as concluded by scholar Therese Hesketh, leave large portions of young men single and unable to have families. In certain parts of China, the skewed sex ratio has led to an excess of young men by approximately 20%, a problem in rural parts worsened by the tendency for these women to “marry up” with husbands who come from a better educational, financial, or social background. This issue has a subsequent problem of generating fertile ground for radicalisation and resentment among groups of young single men, leading to potential organised aggression, anti-social behaviour, and crime. This hotbed of pent-up violence and aggression has seen states such as China, in an effort to deal with this “youth bulge” issue, openly recruit excess males into law enforcement or the military to put the men to work. With this glut of unmarried men comes another, and considerably worse, ramification resulting from skewed sex ratios and an excess of men: increased demand in the sex-trafficking trade.
In China, the inability of excess males to find wives fuels the abusive industry of selling women and girls. Men seeking to find a wife will browse the internet to find websites offering foreign brides, potentially paying upwards of $8000 for specialised “marriage tours” to find a partner. For the women who end up coming to China as an ordered bride, it can often be a significant gamble; some are essentially trapped and trafficked into marriage. Moreover, it's not just internally within China where local gangs and highly organised criminal organisations subject women to the abuses of human trafficking, many of the forcibly trafficked women into Chinese marriages originate outside of China in surrounding South and Southeast Asia. As stated in a Congressional-Executive Commission on China report, women and girls forced into marriage and sex exploitation come from all over the region from states such as Myanmar, Cambodia, Indonesia, North Korea, Pakistan, and Vietnam. NGO Human Rights Watch, in their investigation into bride trafficking from Myanmar, revealed that once purchased as brides, women and girls would not only be held as prisoners, as sex slaves, but are also pressured to have children as fast as possible.
The issue of imbalanced sex ratios, in conclusion, driven by a combination of problematic government policy and patriarchal cultural beliefs has created the perfect conditions for human rights violations and will continue to do so as China grapples with the problem it imposed on itself throughout its history.