From the UK Telegraph comes this story of a Punjab anti-abortion/choice campaign that, ironically, is designed to shame pregnant women into carrying girl babies to term:
Khrishan Kumar, a civil servant in the northern Indian state of Punjab, stalks pregnant women. If he hears even a hint that someone plans an ultrasound test to discover whether their baby is a girl, he arrives on their doorstep.
Women in Nawan Shahar district, where he is deputy commissioner, fear his telephone calls and surprise visits and dread their names being added to his “watch list”.
But his inquisitive methods are helping to stamp out female foeticide, a practice so widespread in India because of the preference for sons rather than daughters that The Lancet recently estimated that 10 million baby girls had been terminated in the past 20 years.
“What kind of society are we building?” said Mr Kumar. “One without any girls? One where parents kill their own child in the womb just because she’s a girl?”
The gender ratio of babies has fallen to fewer than 600 girls for every 1,000 boys in the Punjab, a predominantly Sikh region, partly because for the equivalent of £10 even poor farmers can afford a scan to determine the sex of a foetus. Worldwide, 1,050 female babies are born for every 1,000 boys.
As a result, Punjab is suffering from a shortage of brides […]
Residents have taken little notice of legal and religious edicts banning abortions on the grounds of gender, but Mr Kumar has found that social embarrassment – or the threat of it – has proved a much more powerful deterrent. In Khothran village, his determination to restore the normal sex ratio is bearing fruit. In December 2004, the ratio in Khothran was the equivalent of 787 girls for every 1,000 boys. By last December, the figure stood at 897.
A 24-hour helpline enables villagers to call Mr Kumar’s office if a woman is contemplating a scan or an abortion. Volunteers are then dispatched, or Mr Kumar telephones, ostensibly to ask after the woman’s welfare – but actually to alert her to the fact that she is being watched.
Sometimes, officials go further: in one case, they arranged a mock funeral procession outside the home of a woman who had terminated her female foetus. Waving black placards, volunteers said prayers for the dead baby and shouted “girl-killers” at the family.
“They almost died of shame,” said Paramjit Kaur, a local child development worker. “And it scared everyone else too. They’ll all think twice about getting a scan done now.”
To change perceptions, pictures of female role models such as the Indian-American Columbia astronaut Kalpana Chawla and the tennis star Sania Mirza have been pasted around the village. Many Indians have viewed girls as liabilities because large dowries have to be paid on marriage. Sex determination tests have been illegal since 1994 but doctors continue to perform them.
Officials say that, with humiliation and encouragement, attitudes have finally changed […]
Jaspal Singh Gidda, another local official, said the campaign had capitalised on Punjabis’ admiration for Britain, where most families have a relative. “Since they love the UK so much, we point out how prosperous it has become without killing its baby girls in the womb,” said Mr Gidda. “They’re stumped.”
This creates an interesting question for American feminists, who often advocate for abortion as a universal women’s right—but who, in this case, run up against a scenario wherein it is the women who wish to have prenatal scans and choose whether or not to keep a child (her reasons are somewhat culturally-specific, but such could be said about all cultures where choice is an option: in the US, some women may feel they simply aren’t ready to be mothers, or that they would first like to pursue a career, etc), and the government, by way of civil servants, who are trying to “shame” them out of their ability to choose.
I suspect that one answer American feminists would give to this choice/shame dilemma is to argue that what needs to change is the underlying social structure wherein boys appear more valuable to families than girls—a characterization that, unfortunately in this instance, works on a different metric that, say, China. Because here, the problem seems to one of economics: girl babies grow to be married, and the dowry culture puts a financial strain on the family of the bride.
Which raises the question: how is choice — when it is influenced by the fear of financial hardship (a reason often cited by American feminists for the availability of abortion is that an unwanted child could put an undue financial strain on either the state or the mother herself, dooming both mother (father) and child to a life of poverty, which in turn can result in a spiral of bad schooling, a greater potential for criminality, etc.)—any less worthy of protection in Punjab than it is in, say, Peoria?
A second answer American feminists might give would be to try to change the underlying social structure of the dowry system; but to do that would be to impose on thousands of years of established Indian culture a new paradigm that a) decreases the value of women (in the crass market sense)—and b) it does so to a culture in which women do not necessarily feel oppressed by the dowry system.
Can American feminists argue that these Indian women—a culturally separate Other—have been forced, by a long-standing patriarchal culture, to act against their own will? That is, that they have been conditioned to become anti-feminists, even as they have long maintained their right to choose (a condition long associated with feminist ideology, and a choice that is now being taken from them by social engineers who maintain that it is in the state’s interest to literally “shame” these women into giving over control of their uteri for the greater good—much like anti-abortion protesters stand in their bubble outside of abortion clinics here in the states and wave placards showing pictures of aborted fetuses?)
As Cathy Young points out in April’s Reason, an December 2005 article by the feminist legal scholar Linda Hirshman, appearing in the American Prospect, “boldly assailed the truism that, when it comes to full-time mothering vs. careers, it’s a good thing for women to have a choice.” In fact, as Young notes, Hirshman “earned a spot in Bernard Goldberg’s book 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America by declaring that women who leave work to raise children are choosing “lesser lives.”
However, I raise this issue not to claim that activist / progressive American feminism has, on the whole, re-embraced what David Brooks described as “an unapologetic blast of 1975 time-warp feminism” (in a 1976 interview with Betty Friedan, French feminist Simone de Beauvoir asserted that “no woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children…because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one”—a position that Hirshman seems to be echoing, but one that Friedan found appallingly wrongheaded), but rather to point up that certain strains of American feminism themselves are capable of applying social pressures on women to behave in a particularl culturally-managed way, and that today’s women, many of whom (particularly the most educated) have been reared in an empowerment milieu, would feel some degree of pressure to choose work over family.
As Young notes, “Hirshman wants to tell women to set aside their own preferences, including the desire for more than one child, for the sake of the feminist revolution”—which observation, it seems to me, raises an important question: How is this dynamic different, other than by way of its specific aims and ideas about the “proper” role of women in a given society, from the cultural dynamic that animates the dowry culture of Punjab, a culture that envisions for women different roles, and which is now being assailed by those who wish to remove choice from the women’s arsenal of cultural empowerment?
Once again, I’ll pose the question to some of the internet’s prominent feminist authors as a way to gauge their thinking on what I consider to be a complex issue that surrounds the intersection of identity politics and multiculturalism, which at times must necessarily collide with a desire for certain claims to universality by members of those identity groups (whose very existence serves as an glancing rebuke to the idea of universals in the first place).
Amanda? Jill? Barry? Roxanne? Trish? Cathy? And Lauren (wherever you are…?)
(h/t Allah; Stop the ACLU)
A skewed male/female ratio is also particularly problematic in a place like Punjab, where young men with no prospect of marriage and no civilizing influence of a woman are more likely to become political extremists.
This is outrageous, without a good supply of women to exploit I am nothing.
And, should they offer an opinion on the issue, would the argument be different if the aborted children in this case were predominantly boys rather than predominantly girls? It might be rather ungenerous of me, but I’d suspect that it might be. I’m curious to see what the responses are.
Although it’s a complicated issue, I’d have to say that I think the folks doing the shaming are the good guys in this fight. You shouldn’t abort babies based on sex. Period. But I’m not a feminist, and so I don’t have to wax Solomonic on this one.
I don’t know why no one gets the bright idea to educate the daughters as well as they do the sons, and ditch the fricking dowries.
Feminists are incredibly phony, doing nothing where women’s rights are genuinely violated (like women being stoned to death in the Muslim world).
On India, here is an article on why Bush’s visit is a watershed event.
It will be interesting to see what the feminists say (if they say anything at all) and I strongly suspect that The Colossus is right that the feminists’ responses (should there be any) would be different if the abortion decision were pro- rather then anti-baby girl.
Beyond that, there’s not much of interest. It’s hardly news that one cannot form a logically consistent pro-choice position. To support general abortion rights, one must be a hypocrite at times.
I don’t care just how we maintain our iron grip over their uteruses, just so there’s a constant supply of new babies for our strangling needs. You never know when you’re going to run out of kittens.
I don’t see whats the big deal. Women have a right to choose. And its an awful thing that they are forced to choose to abort girls, as shown by the effectiveness of the shaming punishment.
Well, if there’s a surplus of marital age males, there seems little point in a system that includes a dowry for marital age females. The free market would suggest a switch in which party brings the loot to the marriage. I expect feminists would agree to that proposition, as even they would recognize which side of a slice of bread is buttered.
Utterly hilarious. No matter what phrase you insert after “forced to choose”, you have complete incoherence.
English don’t be first language your, actus?
“Men are expendable; women and children are not. A tribe or a nation can lose a high percentage of its men and still pick up the pieces and go on as long as the women and children are saved. But if you fail to save the women and children, you’ve had it, you’re done, you’re through! You join Tyrannosaurus Rex, one more breed that bilged its final test.”
–RAH
I think that captures best what is going on here. They do have a choice. And there is coercion and pressure going on.
Actually it’s not. It’s my second.
China is a problem. China and India together having the same sort of population imbalance, that there is a recipe for World War III, methinks.
Which would make Kubricks line that ‘If I have to die for a word, I want mine to be poontang’ seem prophetic.
Indeed.
If China didn’t have the same sort of preferential treatment toward boys going on, I might have a boy and a girl instead of two girls. As it is, I’m thinking about going back for more. Not that I could personally put much of a dent in the pool of girls in need of adoption over there, mind you.
Quite telling Actus’ acknowledgement that it is girls, as opposed to fetal tissue or whatever euphemism for less-than-a-person, who are being aborted.
At what point did I become one of the Internet’s prominent feminist authors? And I’ve never been much of a multiculturalist. But you knew that already.
Like all religions, the Hindu religion has its positives and its flaws. A big flaw is that it helps perpetuate the caste system. On a practical level, the “untouchables” are the ones most burdened with a dowry. On another level, the entire dowry system, regardless of caste, equates women with property.
“The Lancet recently estimated that 10 million baby girls had been terminated in the past 20 years.”
In other news, The Lancet recently revised its global population estimate to 91 googleplex.
But Roxanne, part of my concern here is that the dowry system no more equates women with property than does some strain of feminist thought, which calls for individual sacrifice in service of the greater good: cogs in the machinery of revolution, if you will.
Which strain of Feminism are you referring to?
The quality of feminism is not strained.
As the squad leader of the Deep Thought Airborne Philosophy Squad (Aristotlean) pointed out; under the reality painted by Hirshman, women have *less* freedom now than they did before Second Wave feminism started. Even in the ‘40’s women could work in a variety of fields if they chose to. Now, though, they MUST be career women or they threaten the very fabric of modern existence.
Roxanne has a very good point. Feminism is not a single set of ideas, it breaks down into different groupings. You’ve got liberal feminism (liberal in the classical sense), marxist feminism, radical feminists, gender feminists, and probably a few more that I’m missing. Most of the regulars on here would probably qualify as liberal feminists, even if they don’t consider themselves feminists.
Regarding the dilimma Jeff has posed, the answer you get from a feminist is going to depend on which type of feminist you ask, as well as what his beliefs about abortion are.
I am a liberal feminist and pro-choice. In my view, this breaks down into two questions, one regarding what the law ought to be, and one regarding the optimal social outcome. Legally, I think that women should have the right to abort a fetus on any grounds. I also think that they should be protected from activities that fall into the category of harrassment and stalking. On the other hand, those who disagree with their decision have the right to ostracize the women and express their disapproval–they just shouldn’t be allowed to follow them around and harrass them about it.
Socially, I think that the dowry system is ridiculous, and that families should focus on educating their daughters so that the girls can grow up to be self-supporting, and marry whom they choose, when they chose. That’s bucking centuries of social practice, but there’s plenty of precedent for it. It hasn’t been that long in western culture since the purpose of having daughters was to marry them to rich men with good connections. The twist in India is that the practice is still going on in a society that has access to ultrasounds and safe abortions.
Well, really the system is inherently unfair to those without the means to afford an ultrasound. They should, therefor, be extended the right to abort their baby post-delivery.
I find it kinda ironic that here in the US, pro-life organizations use ultrasounds to help convince women to keep their unborn, while in India the technology is doing exactly the opposite.
But, how are we sure that they are truly girls? The fetal tissue hasn’t had the time to decide its gender preference yet.
This has been the practice in China for a few years, now, as well.
Yes. And that has been discussed at length in previous threads. I invite you to read the following threads here, here, here, and here.
Let’s just assume I don’t need tutoring on the differences between feminists, and let’s further assume that I posed the question to a variety of feminists who I believe approach feminism each a different way—and that I did so in order to get a breadth of opinion on the matter.
As to Roxanne’s question, though, my post uses as an example the strain of feminism advocated by Hirshman in an article from Dec of 2005. There are several other similar strains that would likewise argue that women who don’t believe in certain activist feminist ideals are “in denial”. Those strains should do to carry the conversation forward.
You ask, I answer.
Damn, Jeff… you should post the reading list at the beginning of the thread next time.
You should also consider that the conversation going on in the comments isn’t just with you. Scroll back through and tell me if you think all the comments above reflect a nuanced understanding of feminism. If not, then cut me some slack for establishing a context for my own comments. I wasn’t trying to insult you.
Why do the comment threads about feminism always have to turn into a catfight?
Scroll through the comments of the posts Jeff points you to and ask if the entire exchanges between the feminist ladies and the PW dudes and dudettes reflect in totality a “nuanced” understanding of feminism. Most of the commenters here read and were party to those discussions, and if you scroll through some of the downright silly jabbing at the ladies, you’ll find “trying unsuccessfully to get intelligent, introspective discussion from feminist types across the board” is a recurring theme.
ANTI-FEMINIST!!!!
Ardsgaine —
Sorry. I often forget that there are new readers who haven’t been following along with what was a pretty fiercely argued debate about how we can define feminism and distinguish it for purposes of fruitful debate.
Right on, Sarah.
When my mother was a girl, my grandmother told her that her education was her dowry.
[Incidentally, my grandparents also put my father through college. Education may have been my mother’s dowry, but my dad’s degree was my family’s ticket into the middle class.]
I’m not interesting in calling Indian women who abort female fetuses “anti-feminist” or “feminist” in any way – this isn’t a political problem. In any case, I think Jill’s basic premise is correct. The shaming, while it produces immediate positive results, does not solve the issue of social class, be it gender-based or caste-based. The birth of girl children is still mired in shame and simply being female remains quite literally a burden.
I once read about a billboard (I have no idea of its accuracy) that read “It is better to pay 500 Rs. now than 50,000 Rs. later.” Meaning that if you get amniocentesis and abort a female fetus now, you’ll save much more in the long run. Fucked up, no? Beat that, Suze Ormond.
This is one of those cases that I think perfectly shows how feminism and cultural relativism cannot coexist—see also FGM and suttee.
Still, while I’m not content to leave the situation as it currently stands, I’m not satisfied with letting the shame game, or presenting the shame game, as a good way to solve the real underlying issue. When we consider the generally low social value of women in, as Roxanne notes, the poor, the hungry, and the underclass of Indian society, you come up with a nasty intersection of conditions that provide rather tangible incentives for only giving birth to children that will “pay off” in the end.
Read, skip OVER the downright silly jabbing.
You think the dowries devalue girls? That just makes boys as dowry acquirers rather than dowry burdens.
Let me preface this comment by acknowledging that I”m no Indian scholar.
I was lucky enough to travel to India five years ago and while there, learned that many Hindus are converting to Buddhism and Christianity specifically to avoid the social stigma of being an “untouchable” Hindu. See, once you leave that faith, the general society doesn’t hold you to those rules. That’s the way it was explained to me by several Indians.
So, while education is a great liberator for some women, I’ve been lead to believe that an “untouchable’ with a PhD from Harvard U. would still be treated as an “untouchable.” Unless, of course, they converted.
Jeff,
No problem.
I read up to about halfway through the comments at the second thread. After I went to the link that Lauren provided on the varieties of feminist ideology, I gave up. If I ever bring up the subject of differentiating between brands of feminism again, feel free to airmail me an ass-kicking.
It’s worse than some of you realize. In China and India, they are well into the second generation of this phenomena, and approaching the third. Much of the extra men from the first generation are marrying women from the second generation, making things even worse for the second, and eventually the third generation. I have long been highlighting this issue (for at least the past ten years) as being potentially very dangerous. After all, what does a society do when it has a surplus of males? It launches wars of conquest, to either seize land and women, or kill off the surplus. When you also realize that much of Africa is going to be seriously depopulated in the next twenty years from AIDS and societal disruption, it is really quite sobering. It is very easy to imagine India and China at war with each other, fighting for control of central Africa in the coming decades.
I’m a firm believer in social pressure, as opposed to laws, to accomplish social change. The “shame game”, though, focuses its attention on the wrong behavior for correction. As you say, it’s the society-wide attitude towards women that needs to be improved. Liberalization, though, will only come about in the overall context of increasing standards of living. India is experiencing a great economic boom right now, and I’ve seen a lot of articles lately on the breakdown of centuries old traditions within their society. Hopefully, dowries and arranged marriages won’t survive much longer.
Nothing to disagree with there. Just unlikely to occur as long as a large segment of Indian (and as amany have noted also Chinese) society continues to prevent the creation of living breathing women. As misogynistic a practice as there ever was.
What if the practice did not involve the problematic issue of abortion and was instead done by pre-selecting only y-chromosomal sperm? Would the intent not still be odious?
Contrary to what Roxanne said upthread, dowry is most prevalent among upper-caste Indians; gender relations among the lower-castes tend to be more egalitarian. The people who practice dowry tend to be well-educated, so the idea that educating girls will end the practice is a non-starter. Much of the time, you’ve got a girl with an MBA forking over a fat wad of cash, along with a ton of household appliances, so she can marry a dude who’s a doctor. Dowry and sex-selective abortion are not the province of the poor and the hungry; on the contrary, they’re the province of the well-heeled and comfortable.
The new gov’t of India last year began providing free and/or subsidized education for girls. So they do recognize there is a problem, even if it will be hard to overcome the social pressures to keep girls (and some boys, for that matter) out of school.
I don’t know what to think about Ardsgaine’s hope that Indian women should be educated so they can marry whom they choose, when they choose. I agree that 13-year olds shouldn’t be sold off in marriage. That seems pretty universal. But most of the Indian people I know had at least semi-arranged marriages, and some completely arraged. It is a social construct that is interesting to me, and I can’t say it is wrong.
Hmmm.
(Please understand that I know relatively little about India and it’s culture.)
1. India passed a law within the last couple years that outlaws large dowries. Generally dowries are, or hopefully “were”, so large that no single nuclear family could afford it. So the entire extended family would have to chip in both for the sums up front and for the collective debt. Exactly how much debt is incurred depends on the relative financial stability of the family in question but it can reach into the levels of a few years income for that family.
2. I’m uncertain as to how prevalent female infanticide is in India. Perhaps it’s practiced more in Punjab. Or perhaps it’s practiced less in Punjab. If anyone with good overall numbers could post them I’d appreciate it.
3. This isn’t just a matter of dowries however. A dowry is a part of it but a bigger aspect is the financial support of the parents during their elderly years. A daughter leaves her family and joins her husbands. In a traditional household she doesn’t have a source of income separate from her husband so she must prevail on him for the support of her parents. A fairly dicey proposition.
IMHO this is the biggest reason for female infanticide in China as I don’t believe the Chinese conduct marriages with dowries any longer. *shrug* but I could easily be wrong on that account since China is very large and a huge portion of that country’s population is still very rural and very traditional.
4. I’m curious as to the overall gender ratios in India and not just the Punjab. In China, as of 2003, Ghangzhou had a gender imbalance of 145 boys for every 100 girls in middle school. The Chinese government estimates about 70 million unmarriageable men simply because their financial situation isn’t good enough to attract the relatively fewer available women.
Note that this is a semi-official number so I frankly expect it’s very much low-balled.
5. While India shouldn’t have much of a problem, China is heading for a serious meltdown. The female infanticide coupled with the One Child policy is going to cause real problems in about 35-40 years. At that time the current generation will be trying to retire while being replaced by far fewer workers. So the Chinese will have spent so much effort to build up their economy, only to see a portion of it crash due to a lack of workers.
Additionally the population demographics are such that in 35 years or so the average age in China will be somewhere north of 60, due to the One Child policy, and a huge number of Chinese men under the age of 50 will have to resort to prostitutes. As you can imagine such a circumstance will also make the STD problem, including AIDS, a catastrophe.
Even if the One Child policy is already ended now, the effects will still be felt in about 35 years time. Even so the ending of that policy still will not affect the cultural issue that results in the devaluation of girls so that will probably continue even in secret if necessary. Prior to sonograms the Chinese would simply wait until after the birth to dispose of the child by wrapping her in a wet blanket and leaving her outside to take a chill and die.
So in about 35 years time China will have to deal with about 600 million aging workers, a vastly reduced incoming workforce with significant social issues.
6.
Agreed. There’s already some side effects happening in China near the North Korean border. There are human smugglers in China that transport North Korean women into China to become brides for local Chinese farmers. I believe the price is around $300 USD. The women however were misled into these propositions being deceived into thinking that they were being transported into China as laborers, not incipient brides.
When a Chinese farmer is willing to spend 1-2 years income for a smuggled North Korean wife, that tells you a lot about the availability of local women.
7.
Dowries aren’t the problem. Excessively large dowries, driven by a me-too beat-the-Jonese attitude is. I believe India outlawed excessive dowries, but enforcement is probably less than strict.
As for arranged marriages. I used to work with a guy from India named Rajiv who actually liked the idea of his mother finding the right woman. *shrug* it takes all kinds as I would be appalled by that sort of thing.
8.
Frankly Jeff IMHO I think most aspects of cultural conservation, or their overturn, are pushed by women. Look at how wayward girls are treated in some Islamic countries. The men aren’t necessarily the ones conducting the “honor killings”, many mothers and sisters are involved too. Here in America the essential driving force for cultural change is often women. Where women seek to preserve cultural issues they generally are retained.
Partly because I think men really don’t give a damn about most of that. Women tend to set the parameters for relationships and men generally have to conform to these parameters in order to succeed. If women started requiring men to wear knee britches and hose tomorrow, there’d be a line of men into the nearest clothing stores to buy knee britches and hose.
9. So. Are Indian women being forced to chose, or are they chosing of their own will? If it’s the latter, then isn’t this something that feminists want? That women be given a choice and, if they choose to abort, to have that choice both protected and lauded?
Instead of a patriarch deciding that a wife or daughter should abort a child, isn’t it possible that the person making that determination is a woman? If that’s the case then it’s not an example of male oppression but a cultural issue amongst women.
And if anyone wants to question this particular scenario then I’ll point out the vast number of Indian men whose mothers arrange their marriages. People are people all over the world. Do you really think the mother in law doesn’t intercede?
Hmmm.
Frankly what I’m most curious about is the relative popularity of fundamentalist, and somewhat militant, Hinduism.
No offense to anyone but if fundamentalist Hinduism takes hold in India then I wouldn’t bet a nickel on the chances for Islamic countries to survive the next couple of decades. Looking at the map it would be relatively straightforward for an Indian army to march from India all the way to Algeria without ever having left an Islamic country.
Add to this a rising disproportionate number of men…
I don’t know much about the history prior to the Kuomintang, but I don’t think dowries have been commonly practiced since that time, if ever (for all I know). It’s not just infanticide, though, it’s that AND abandonment AND gender-selective abortion. Moral issues with the practice of any of those aside, the issue of gender imbalance in China is worthy of ongoing attention; in that respect you’ve hit the nail squarely on the head.
From what I’ve read, Mao pretty much promised equality for all people, and then went ahead with business as usual as far as women were concerned even while he was establishing a new priveledged class.
I don’t know if this has come up yet, but in terms of population control it is far more effective to abort more of one gender than to abort babies without such consideration. Even more so does aborting more girls decrease population as their contribution to reproduction is far more involved and time consuming. Put another way: the population of an island with one man and one-hundred women is going to increase much more rapidly than the population of an island with 100 men and one very sore woman. In nations like China and India where population control is a major issue, there is a very pragmatic argument for aborting as many girls as possible.
That being said, I’m not a strong supporter of abortion rights, and find the above sort of argument especially ominous. But how does a fervent supporter of abortion rights (especially uber-feminists)deal with the mass abortion of girls when the argument for it can be made withot reference to religious or cultural imperatives?
Hmmm.
The issue though goes far beyond the question of gender imbalance. To really see the oncoming train-wreck we also need to include the effects of the existing Chinese population wave. Specifically that the current Chinese workforce is the crest of the population wave and that once this workforce ages the following generations are going to be drastically reduced. I know this was the intended effect of the One Child policy but the numbers of unintended consequences are going to be extremely far ranging.
1. In 35 years or so there will be about 600 million elderly Chinese all needing specialised support services. This situation alone will stress the society to the breaking point since there won’t be enough Chinese workers left to both take care of the burgeoning elderly and provide the workforce to run the Chinese economy.
The result might very well be the single greatest die-off in human history.
2. There’s no national healthcare system. Instead it’s largely on a cash basis though the Chinese government has forced some private companies to provide healthcare benefits. But the major point of manufacturing in China is based on cost so adding to the cost of business in China has a net negative effect when coupled with severe energy uncertainty.
So what this means is that aging Chinese worker is putting the bulk of his current earnings into savings accounts to pay for the costs of his retirement or healthcare costs when he gets older.
3. The Chinese banking system is largely government owned and operated with an enormous amount of NPLs (Non-Performing Loans). What has happened is that the Chinese workers have put their earnings into savings accounts, and the Chinese government has raided those savings accounts to loan money to badly managed and money-losing government owned businesses. The current estimate is around $2 trillion dollars in bad debt that the Chinese banks have offloaded onto private equity companies a la Enron. This is to make the bank’s books look good enough for foreign and domestic investors.
The Chinese banking system is living on borrowed time and they must find a source of money that can fill the enormous hole they’ve dug in their finances.
4. Since the current Chinese workforce represents the crest of the population wave when it starts to draw on the savings accounts it won’t be in dribs and drabs. It’ll be wholesale pressure on these bank accounts as the aging workforce draws on this money to pay for healthcare and aging related costs.
The other issue is that the following generations are all much smaller than the current workforce so the amounts of money being deposited by these generations will very likely be smaller than the amounts being drawn. I.e. there will likely be a net negative in the banking system as the deposits will be far outweighed by the withdrawls. Included in this is the propensity for saving levels to drop as prosperity conditions improve. People generally learn to save money when they’ve been exposed to financial hardship. Financial prosperity tends to diminish this attitude.
…
Couple all this with the gender inequality issue where following generations will find it increasingly difficult to find wives and girlfriends and you’ve got a recipe for massive social instability and upheaval.
Perhaps China can pull it all off. But I don’t see it happening without simply printing as much money as possible to cover the banking system’s red ink. But that would make for a highly inflationary economy which would devalue the savings of the aging workforce, which would vastly increase the level of instability. One way the Chinese could prevent some of this would be the implement a Western style support program such as Social Security and/or Medicare. But that would also negatively impact the reasons for conducting business in China and saddle the smaller following generations with a huge load of debt.
*shrug* It’s a serious kettle.
China might be able to handle a portion of the excess in a way similar to how they handle the excess of abandoned children: by state-sponsored foster care of the elderly. Right now there’s about a million children (estimates vary; I’ve seen numbers from 1 to 1.7 million mentioned, but there’s no way to know) abandoned there per year, so there may be a scaling problem.
The six hundred million you mentioned just might be the total number of elderly; it’s certainly not anywhere near the number who won’t have children to care for them. Even ten or twenty percent of that number, though, would pose serious problems. This table, for instance, points to an excess of perhaps a hundred million elderly by 2050. Now, by 2050, will all of the population over age 50 be retired? I doubt it. Still, it does serve to underscore the scale of the problem.
Heh. Ironically, the “Indian Roe Effect” is to eliminate… females.
ed,
1. They’ll be left to die. Problem solved. (Hey, this is the country of Mao.)
2. See #1.
3. No question, they have huge structural problems.
4. Dude. Savings accounts? This is China we’re talking about. Average income: $5000. See #1 for what happens when the money runs out.
Japan has the same problem, but is ten times wealthier and planning to use robots.
Hmmm.
1.
It would almost have to be a serious situation since the One Child policy reduces the following generation by quite a bit. Even if everyone married and had their one child and all of those children married, that would still result in 4 elderly people seeking support from 2 younger people. Imagine having to try and financially support your father, mother and your wife’s father and mother in an environment where the healthcare services is largely based on cash.
You’re right though. Intra-familial care is going to be very important in determining the survival rate of the Chinese elderly.
2.
The only problem with that graphic is that it doesn’t give you a proper breakdown in age groups past “50+”.
I’d suggest looking at this.
Another view.
My target was around 2040, but we can take 2050 as the standard to look at. Hmm. I screwed up the numbers, my bad, as I thought it would be about 600 million elderly (age 60+) but it’s closer to 450 million elderly. Which isn’t to say it’s a good thing but that the effects might not be as extreme.
BTW the reason I chose age 60+ as the arbitrary starting point for being elderly is that the healthcare availability in China is far less than in America. Couple this with the much more difficult living and working conditions and the rampant effects of pollution. So I expect that, in effect, people will wear out sooner as bones and joints become stressed from heavy workloads, large amounts of repetitive motion injuries, arthritis, lung ailments, etc etc etc.
In short my definition of elderly is based on a wild ass guess as to when chronic health problems will begin negatively affecting the Chinese working population. It is at that time that the Chinese workers will have to face restructuring their work, shifting to different jobs and/or facing lowering of incomes along with rising living costs as healthcare expenses start to kick in.
Well the sad truth is that it’s already too late for any of these countries, India, China, Pakistan, probably even Iran and the Arab states to reverse the impact of this inbalance so quickly…it’s not just a question of suddenly starting to allow girl babies to be born so now everything is fine and dandy again, as there is a certain momentum to population numbers that takes time to reverse…so they’ll have to live with the consequences of their actions for decades.
Thus, they are probably doomed for at least two generations or so to the total chaos that follows whenever single unmarried men predominate in any society. This is probably even the explanation for all the terrorism and other instability coming from these regions of the world. Higher crime rates, social unrest, wars, all these things are generated by societies with many young single men floating around looking for trouble…
In the old days they would have been able to just go to either barter or steal wives for themselves via the many wars these unbalances societies foster on their neighbors; BUT unfortunately everyone else in their immediate vicinity did the same thing.
So they shot themselves in the foot…and I say good riddance to the threat they posed to our own stable, healthy, balanced democracies…they’ve condemned themselves through their own actions to decades of war and chaos…
I have NO sympathy for them whatsoever and btw, I wish everyone would stop trying to blame women for this latest screwup instigated by men…
Let men take responsibility JUST ONCE for their own actions…
I’m getting so sick and tired of men always trying to blame others for their own misdeeds…
BTW, I don’t think dowry is the reason for abortion of girls as China is the biggest offender and they don’t have a dowry tradition…
Actually a good friend of mine who just immigrated here from China about 10 years ago was just telling me how lucky she is. As she has one son who immigrated with her and she said in China a boy’s family is expected to pay for the wedding, but now that they are in America she understands the bride’s family is traditionally expected to pay…and with the price of today’s weddings it’s equivalent to a dowry to pay for one…same thing…
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that most of the couples I know paid for their own weddings since people are marrying later today (30s) and few expect their parents to pay for a wedding when they marry at that age…
However, I think this whole focus on dowry as a reason for this inbalance is to try to shift the focus away from men as being responsible for this situation and try to blame women…
It’s total bs…
Women have no ability to influence these things in Asia…
Actually on columbia.edu website you can see where husbands are now pressuring their wives in these third world countries to sell their kidneys and other organs for transplants, so the husbands can make money…
So let’s stop trying to shift the blame to women for these situations when we knew darn good and well who is at fault…
NYMOM:
“What stick??!! I’m not holding any stick behind my back. I’m powerless and weak. Stop oppressing me!!”
You can blame men for all the problems of the world but it won’t change the simple truth that Ed has pointed out: women perpetuate cultural values, even those that may appear to oppress women. It is the mothers and aunts who cut off girls’ clitorises.
Some cultures recognize the power that women have. Among some Sephardic Jews, if a family cannot afford to educate all of their chidren, they will educate the girls, because those girls will become mothers and educate the next generation.
“What stick??!! I’m not holding any stick behind my back. I’m powerless and weak. Stop oppressing me!!â€Â
The “stick” as you call it is thousands of years of genetic breeding where women who showed the slightly hint of aggressive were either killed or simply never got married…so those traits were simply bred out of us…
It’s the root of the passivity of women in both the west, as well as abroad…
You don’t change thousands of years of selective breeding in a decade or two…
Those women do what they do because they know, like a dog senses what makes his master happy, that it’s what their husbands, fathers and other men WISH them to do…
Okay…
Like Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears and millions of other other westernized trashy women who do what they do because their husbands, fathers and other men WISH them to do…
Okay…
Although, you’ll claim we are all dressing like that to please ourselves…
Of course we are…it’s so empowering for us to be walking around with our breasts hanging out all day…we’ve been trained they are not to feed our children, but to attract men…
Wake up…
Hmmm.
Really?
Like the women of Sparta who would personally kill their son if he showed cowardice? Who would kill an unworthy suitor?
Perhaps like the legendary Amazonians?
Or perhaps like Boudicca? Who lead the pagan armies that slaughtered Romans like a farmer reaps wheat?
Or perhaps like Joan of Arc? etc etc etc.
Frankly I’m amazed that I’m the feminist here.
Well, speaking as a feminist, my own feeling is that women should control their own bodies. Period. Non-negotiable.
That said, I agree withe the woman who said she chose to have an abortion the way a coyote caught in a trap chooses to gnaw off its own leg.
These Indian and Chinese women are making painful choices that will have horrific consequences for their nations and for the world. I do *not* think that the burden for this situation should be placed solely on those women.
That is total nonsense what you are talking aboug the women of Sparta being some kind of empowered women in ancient times. Actually they were the most exploited. Even forced to have sexual relations with different men, when told to do so by their legal husbands…as producing citizens for the state was their primary duty…and all the freedoms (if you want to call it that) of being allowed to run around exercising was directed towards that goal…
Almost like cattle being well fed and then exercised to produce healthy calves…
This is not empowerment.
Those other women you mentioned were freaks…not representative of ordinary women…
Why is it whenever womens’ historical situation is discussed, we always hear about these odd women off the far edge of the bellshaped curve???
When we discuss ordinary men do we compare their lives to King Arthur or Caesar???
I don’t think so…
Oedinary women were not allowed to be aggressive or protest at their situation. Those who did either winded up dead or never married and had any kids…
It’s that simple…it’s like comparing a domestic dog to his ancestor, a wolf. Yes, the DNA sequence still matches up but after centuries of us breeding them for obedience to human beings and killing off the ones who didn’t conform, any resemblance to a dog and a wolf has been long beaten or bred out of them….
Thus, women who would normally be like lionesses protecting their children, instead murder them.
Why…
Because that is what the men in their society wish them to do…
AND women have been bred for obedience and passivity and to ferret out men’s wishes and follow them…
Simple.
So you need to look to MEN for the reasoning behind these murders. Not women…
You know, I look at my wife, her four daughters, my mother, her four sisters, various other women in my life…
Point out the weak and submissive ones for me, would you?
It’s not a question of being openly weak or submissive as many women have this whole passive/aggressive issue going on…Whereby they will claim the interests of men as their own and defend them to the death.
So a woman can be outwardly agressive and STILL be mimicing nothing but her good ‘breeding’.
Actually the women of Sparta, in spite of their status as the WORSE treated of all the women in the Greek city states, were known to agressively defend the status quo and even killed their own children if they didn’t follow it…
AND we’ve had many examples of this, even today, in the places where women are treated the WORSE, there is always some dumb idiot enabling woman defending these men who are the most brutal to women…
Actually, we see this in our own society, it never fails…No matter what horrible crime a man commits there is always his wife, mother, g/f or even female jurors, out there trying to exonerate him…
So it’s not so easy to just point out the legacy of women’s psychological evolution into what we are today by pointing out your female relatives.