Abstract
At one period or another of their history, various populations have experienced disparities in their sex distribution but these did not have a far-reaching impact because they were temporary. However, in China’s case this sex imbalance is likely to last and may provide an important opportunity to study the demographic and social consequences of this imbalance. Future changes in the sex structure of China’s population, determined by the sex ratio at birth and excess female mortality, especially at young ages, are difficult to predict. Is the current masculinization of the Chinese population simply a transitory imbalance that may be reabsorbed in the near future? Is it part of a cyclical process with alternating phases of troughs and peaks? Is it conceivable that the masculinization process will continue over the long term? And is such a sex imbalance socially and demographically sustainable?
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Notes
- 1.
Statement by a young Chinese, taken from the International Herald Tribune dated 18 Aug 1994.
- 2.
Given the age gap between spouses, men usually being older than women when they marry (Casterline et al. 1986), an increase in the birth rate ultimately leads to a scenario where male cohorts of marriageable age are smaller than the corresponding female cohorts. Conversely, if the birth rate falls, the male cohorts on the marriage market are larger (Cabré and Esteve 2004; McDonald 1995).
- 3.
This emigration also led to a shortage of women in the Vietnamese diaspora during the 1980s and 1990s (Goodkind 1997).
- 4.
Information given to me personally by the Chinese demographer Li Shuzhuo and the Indian demographer Aswini Nanda.
- 5.
The mean age gap between spouses at marriage in China can be approximated by the difference in mean ages at marriage by sex. In 2000 the mean age at first marriage was 23.5 years for women and 25.6 for men.
- 6.
For details of the hypotheses used in the projections presented here and their results, see Li et al. (2006).
- 7.
Chinese cultural traditions still require a bride price to officialize a marriage (Anderson 2007), which includes transfers from the groom’s parents to the bride’s as a compensation for rearing costs and the loss of rights over their daughter. A further consideration, particularly after agricultural de-collectivization when families could again profit from the sale of surplus production, is the loss of a bride’s contribution to farm labour (Brown 2003). The social liberalization brought on by economic reforms has seen a sharp rise in the bride price, thereby reinforcing the commercial transaction aspect of marriage.
- 8.
The bride price comprises all the goods transferred from the groom’s to the bride’s family at marriage. In societies where women do not physically leave their group after marriage, the amounts involved are small, but they are large in societies with patrilocal and patrilinear systems (Ghasarian 1996). This explains why the bride price is widespread in China, while the dowry, composed of the goods that the bride’s family gives to the husband or his family, only represents a small portion of the total gifts exchanged for the marriage.
- 9.
Hunyin moshi de bianqian. Available at http://www.tydao.com/sxsu/qiao/3.3.htm. Accessed 13 Sept 2012.
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Attané, I. (2013). Conclusion: What Demographic Perspectives for China and the World?. In: The Demographic Masculinization of China. INED Population Studies, vol 1. Springer, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00236-1_12
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