On Tue, 14 Jan 1997, Lizsue wrote:

So what if, to balance their male-female ratio, the PRC marched fifty
million men into it?

I thought the male-female ratio imbalance happened when:

1) A family has a daughter.  They wanted a son, but it's usually illegal to 
   try again.
2) They pretend they have no kids.  Census takers can't count the daughter.
3) The parents have a son.  Census takers can count him.  They think the 
   family has more boys than girls.
4) The parents enroll the daughter in school.  To the census takers, a five 
   year old girl has appeared out of nowhere.
5) If enough families do this, there's a big imbalance among babies, none 
   among schoolchildren, and so a smaller imbalance in the total population.
6) Some foreigner misreads the census and blames the imbalance on female 
   infanticide instead.

But I'm probably wrong.

	You are pretty logical here, but the error lies in between
statement 1 and 2. The family doesn't _pretend_ to have no children.. they
actually _have_ no children. When unwanted female children are born in
rural villages, often they are simply disposed of. Infanticide in Asia has
always been a big problem involving female infants. I won't say it's
routine, but I won't say that it's infrequent, either. It happens far too
often for any westerner to be comfortable with.

	In Korea, for example, there were entire villages whose response
to years with lean harvests was to drownd every child under a year old in
the harbor. This was referred to as `sending them back to our ancestors'
and the standard way to excuse it was by telling themselves that the
children would be re-incarnated when times got better.

	Sad.. but it still happens. India, Korea, China, Vietnam,
Cambodia.. any Asian nation with a remote rural area and a tradition of
male supremacy and a fear of the death of the family name tends to have
this problem crop up on a regular basis.

	Ed Becerra

	"Dreamers may die, but the dream is eternal..."