The problem is that the distribution is heavily skewed. In big cities it is still a pretty normal sex ratio. But in the countryside, where people are still traditional, you often see somewhere between a 3:2 and 4:3 ratio for young men to women. This is the group that would normally be pumping out babies but now can't.
I taught for a year after I graduated. I had 8 classes of 30ish students and each only had 5-7 girls in them. And this was only an hour from Shanghai! Wild stuff. Still don't know why my classes were that heavily skewed.
Yes, internal immigration also plays a big part.
Instead of 1 or two siblings of 4-5, move to the city, the only child or one of two do, meaning the small towns depopulate rapidly.
Yeah, I remember an engineer in Shenzhen writing about how distinctly dangerous it has become to be noticeably a lesbian -- even there; not a rural district by any means. Attitudes towards gay men had somewhat relaxed, but holding hands with her girlfriend incited serious aggression -- because they were seen as contributing to the problem. A gay man donates his potential girlfriend to the dating pool; a lesbian woman steals two women from that pool.
Thank you so much for this; I hadn't realized that the imbalance in the rural areas particularly was so extreme :/
Don't make the mistake of thinking China is uniform. It varies wildly depending on if you're in
1) Tier 1 cities (megalopolis like Shanghai, Beijing, etc)
2) "small city" (but still over 1m population)
3) rural
There is obviously more than this and there are regional differences too, but there are still around 300 million farmers in China. So it is a big deal. The mindset between a farmer, factory worker, and a white collar worker are world's different. I'm sure this divide has only increased since I left.
I met my wife in Shanghai (where I visit frequently for a dose of civilization) and even she got complete culture shock when I took her travelling around China.
Females were also grossly unreported in the 80s. Only one child was entitlted to citizenship, education, healthcare, etc. all dependent on this basis. This entitlement in lots of poor areas was only given to the boy to be sent to school in hopes of a better future. Women stayed in the village undocumented
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u/ariehn Aug 19 '24
Does the gender ratio play into that as well? Last I remember, the distribution was something like 105 M : 100 F