Sex ratio discrepancy declines – Baby steps to narrow gender imbalance

The third eye: Gender imbalance not as bad as we thought

By Huang Daohen

More than 24 million Chinese men of marriageable age could find themselves without spouses in 2020, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said last year. But things are not as bad as they may seem.

While the female population lags in census figures, study shows there are girl babies hidden every year in order to get around the nation’s birth-control policy.

One example cited by Britain’s The Daily Telegraph is Fu Yang, a 47-year-old man living in a small village outside Xiamen, Fujian Province. Fu said he had had seven daughters within 10 years.

To keep them, Fu said he had to flee across three provinces and hide some of the girls with friends, but “we have a decent respect for life. In China, we think that when you have a child it is like dropping a piece of your own body from you, and we never considered the other options.”

What happens is that the unplanned baby girls usually do not get registered with the authorities when they are born. Fu said the families would wait until they are 6 or 7 and by then, the local governments tend not to care as much.

While his family may be an extreme case, there is evidence to suggest that it isn’t all that rare.

Liang Zhongtang, a demographer and former member of the expert committee of China’s National Population and Family Planning Commission, found that people might be hiding roughly 3 million babies from the government each year.

According to Liang’s research, in 1990, the national census recorded 23 million births. But by the 2000 census, there were 26 million 10-year-old children, an increase of 3 million.

“Normally, you would expect there to be fewer 10-year-olds than newborns, because of infant mortality,” he said.

Liang’s findings suggest that the gender imbalance may not be as severe as the statistics suggest.