The Demographic Bomb
Opinion Editorial by Stephen Browne -
May 4, 2009
30 ratings from readers
If you think China's growth as a superpower is a source of concern, wait until you learn what kind of demographics they've got cooking. Their one-child policy is a recipe for testosterone-driven catastrophe.
Since my childhood in the 1950s, I’ve seen a lot of disaster
scenarios come and go.
I’m old enough to remember when the crises
de jour were overpopulation, global cooling bringing on the next Ice
Age, and the possible extinction of blondes by the year 2000.
So you could say it takes some pretty solid evidence, backed by
real quantifiable data, to get my attention.
Unlike popular crises such as global warming, which are based on
computer modeling and cherry-picking of the data, demographics is
pretty straightforward.
A healthy demographic for a stable population — i.e., one breeding at replacement rate, or zero population growth — looks like a
barrel when graphed with population numbers of men (on one side) and women (on the other) along the horizontal axis,
and age along the vertical axis. To support a healthy economy, the graph
should show a bulge in the middle, indicating more people in their
productive years.
A bulge at the bottom means a lot of kids who
aren’t productive at present, but will be in time. A bulge at the
top means a lot of unproductive old people who are a drain on the
economy, which will also cruelly self-correct in time.
The latter scenario, with more old people than young and a low
fertility rate, is the problem faced by all Western nations with the
exception of the United States. Mark Steyn has written about this, in his book America Alone,
with as much wit and humor as one can mine from a fundamentally
depressing situation.
There is, however, an even more alarming demographic scenario in
other parts of the world. For years I have been trying to find data
on the gender imbalance caused by China’s one-child policy, since
way before I started to see it in print.
Reports filtering out
of China over the past few decades have indicated that families
restricted to one child were choosing to have a boy by either
sex-selective abortion or outright female infanticide.
The reasons for a preference for sons lie in traditional Chinese
culture. In China, sons are parents’ old-age insurance. Confucian
notions of filial piety require sons to support aged parents,
while daughters leave the family entirely, severing all bonds of
obligation upon marriage. Traditionally, even a widow’s remarriage
rights were controlled by her husband’s family.
So when the Communists announced, and brutally enforced, the
one-child policy in a long-term attempt to reduce the population,
families chose to have sons in preference to daughters.
Obviously, not
everyone chose that alternative. Ultra-sonograms are not widely available in
the provinces, not all parents can bear to kill their babies, and
there is reportedly widespread covert disobedience to the law in
rural areas. And slightly more than 50 percent of
all fetuses are male, due to natural causes
Nonetheless, the overall effect of the policy has been to skew the
gender ratio. The question I’ve been trying to find data on for
some years now is, by how much?
Well, now there are some figures: around 32 million extra boys in
China (with an overall sex ratio of 1.15 males for each female), and getting worse in the younger, not yet pubescent age
groups.
Therese Hesketh, a lecturer at the Centre
for International Health and Development at University College
London, and Qu Jian Ding, have published a study on the subject. Its conclusion is: Since the one-child family policy began, the
total birth rate and preferred family size have decreased, and a
gross imbalance in the sex ratio has emerged.
The funny thing is, while the study is from 2006, the article about it on MSNBC is from only a few weeks ago. Look around, and you find the Western media seem to
have noticed this trend in China only recently. It gives me no pleasure to be ahead
of the curve in this case.
The MSNBC article summarizes the point of the more technical BMJ
article reasonably well. Briefly, the gender imbalance in
post-pubescent males is very bad now. It’s going to get much worse
over the next ten to fifteen years as more boys grow up and experience that
volcanic hormonal surge we all remember so fondly.
Many media articles quote Hesketh thusly: “If you’ve got
highly sexed young men, there is a concern that they will all get
together and, with high levels of testosterone, there may be a real
risk, that they will go out and commit crimes.”
I don’t know if this is an example of that charming British
understatement, or just plain dense. These numbers are not just a
recipe for a high crime rate; this is a portent of war, revolution,
and chaos on a scale not seen since World War II.
Oh, and by the way, some reports indicate India may be
experiencing the beginning of a similar gender imbalance for the same
reason, a preference for sons expressed in sex-selective abortion and
female infanticide.
In a future column, I’ll explore the historical precedents for
such demographically-driven social unrest, and why we’re likely to
see a repeat performance in Asia over the next ten years.
Stephen
Browne is a writer, editor, and teacher of martial arts and
English as a second language. Currently he is working as city
reporter at a small newspaper in North Dakota. He is also the
founder of the Liberty
English Camps, held annually in Eastern Europe, which
brings together students from all over Eastern Europe for intensive
English study using texts important to the history of political
liberty and free markets. In 1997 he was elected an Honorary Member
of the Yugoslav Movement for the Protection of Human Rights for his
work supporting dissidents during the Milosevic regime. His
regularly-updated blog is at rantsand.blogspot.com.
