At 01:02 AM 1/15/97 -0700, Edward Becerra wrote:

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

I was thinking more of parents who aren't so extreme - preferring a son 
enough to try again and bribe local cops or whatever, but not enough to kill 
a daughter.  Or ones who wanted a daughter but wanted a son a bit more.

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.

No kidding.  It's just that there's more than one reason for gender 
imbalances, but some people just look at census figures and automatically 
think imbalance only means people are killed.

	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'

Yuck.

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

Some Asian nations (if you're counting the Middle East) actually have most 
of the imbalance come from immigration.  When, say, Pakistani jobs are 
scarce for some reason single men are often more likely than single women to 
move to Saudi Arabia for example and send money back home for their parents. 
And then the Pakistani imbalance might make it look like male infanticide 
(less male folks than female) even if there's actually less girls than boys 
that year.

I'm not saying infanticide isn't a big factor in these imbalances, just that 
there are other ones as well and a lot of the time if you look at thw wrong 
numbers you could get really confused.

male supremacy and a fear of the death of the family name tends to have
this problem crop up on a regular basis.

Ick.

	Ed Becerra

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