American women are both incredibly dogmatic and anxious about our mothering.

When Amy Chua described her intense efforts to push her two daughters into high achievement in school, in music and, hence, in life, she caused an uproar among many Americans who consider her methods bordering on child abuse. (What? No playdates!?)

Two new studies do point out that there are costs to tiger mothering.

A study by professor Desiree Qin and colleagues was published this month in the Journal of Adolescence and is titled, "Parent-Child Relations and Psychological Adjustment Among High-Achieving Chinese- and European-American Adolescents."

Qin looked at survey data on 295 Chinese-American and 192 European-American ninth-graders at Stuyvesant High School, a well-regarded public magnet school in Manhattan.

Chinese-American teens reported lower levels of psychological well-being, less family cohesion and more conflict with their parents, on average.

The ethnic differences on psychological adjustment disappeared once family conflict and cohesion were controlled for, suggesting "such perceptions may be a key factor in understanding the high academic achievement/low psychological adjustment paradoxical pattern of development among Chinese-American adolescents."

"(Chua) said Western children are not happier than Chinese ones," Qin told the New York Daily News. "But at the same time, research from our study does show that when parents place a lot of pressure on their kids, the children are less happy."

Tiger mothering works, in other words. But having a mom or dad who constantly push you to perform well can also take a toll.

It takes a toll on the moms as well.

Labels: Asia, China, culture, Maggie Gallagher, motherhood, parenting, universities

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Over the past three decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female — in fact, almost universally female. The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe — and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls. ...

Social Implications
The consequences of medically abetted mass feticide are far-reaching and manifestly adverse. In populations with unnaturally skewed SRBs, the very fact that many thousands — or in some cases, millions — of prospective girls and young women have been deliberately eliminated simply because they would have been female establishes a new social reality that inescapably colors the whole realm of human relationships, redefining the role of women as the disfavored sex in nakedly utilitarian terms, and indeed signaling that their very existence is now conditional and contingent.

Moreover, enduring and extreme SRB imbalances set the demographic stage for an incipient “marriage squeeze” in affected populations, with notably reduced pools of potential future brides. China’s persistently elevated SRBs, for example, stand to transform it from a country where as of 2000 nearly all males (about 96 percent) had been married by their early 40s to one in which nearly a quarter (23 percent) are projected to be never married as of 2040, less than 30 years from now, according to a 2008 analysis by the demographer Zeng Yi and colleagues in the journal Genus. Such a transformation augurs ill in a number of respects. For one thing, unmarried men appear to suffer greater health risks than their married counterparts, even after controlling for exogenous social and environmental factors; a sharp increase in the proportion of essentially unmarriageable males in a society with a universal marriage norm may only accentuate those health risks. In a low-income society lacking sturdy and reliable national pension guarantees for the elderly, a steep rise in the proportion of unmarried and involuntarily childless men begs the question of old-age support for that rising cohort. Economists such as Gary Becker and Judge Richard Posner have hypothesized that mass feticide, in making women scarce, will only increase their “value” — but in settings where the legal and personal rights of the individual are not secure and inviolable, the “rising value of women” can have perverse and unexpected consequences, including increased demand for prostitution and an upsurge in the kidnapping and trafficking of women (as is now being witnessed in some women-scarce areas in Asia, as reported by Mara Hvistendahl in her new book Unnatural Selection).

Finally, there is the speculative question of the social impact of a sudden addition of a large cohort of young “excess males” to populations with sustained extreme SRBs: depending on a given country’s cultural and institutional capabilities for coping with this challenge, such trends could quite conceivably lead to increased crime, violence, and social tensions — or possibly even a greater proclivity for social instability. (For a decidedly pessimistic but studied assessment of these prospects, see Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer’s 2004 book Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population.)

All in all, mass sex selection can be regarded as a “tragedy of the commons” dynamic, in which the aggregation of individual (parental) choices has the inadvertent result of degrading the quality of life for all — and some much more than others. ...

Considerations for the Future
There is, however, one country thus far that has managed to return from grotesquely imbalanced SRBs to normal human ratios: South Korea. As explained by Woojin Chung and Monica Das Gupta in 2007 in Population and Development Review, there is still considerable dispute about the factors involved in this turnaround, with many institutions and actors ready to take credit (as the old saying goes: success has many fathers). Available evidence, however, seems to suggest that South Korea’s SRB reversal was influenced less by government policy than by civil society: more specifically, by the spontaneous and largely uncoordinated congealing of a mass movement for honoring, protecting, and prizing daughters. In effect, this movement — drawing largely but by no means exclusively on the faith-based community — sparked a national conversation of conscience about the practice of female feticide. This conversation was instrumental in stigmatizing the practice, not altogether unlike the way in which nationwide conversations of conscience helped to stigmatize international slave-trading in other countries in earlier times. The best hope today in the global war against baby girls may be to carry this conversation of conscience to other lands. Medical and health care professionals — without whose assistance mass female feticide could not occur — have a special obligation to be front and center in this dialogue.

Labels: abortion, Asia, China, demographics, gender, girls, Hong Kong, India, population control, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam

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A fresh government poster went up the other day on the alley wall not far from our front door in Beijing. I barely paused at the cheery patriotic exhortations across the flag—Is that a sign I’ve been here a while?—and my eye fell instead on a curious thing about the family: it has two kids.

I first noticed that two-kid families had begun popping up in advertisements for KFC and General Electric a little over a year ago, but political advertising is something else entirely. The Party has held much of China to a one-child-per-family policy for thirty years, and, by and large, it still does. Some parts of the program are comically antique: a Beijing mother reminded me today that families with one child in the capital are still automatically eligible to receive a monthly “reward” from the state for adhering to the one-child plan. The amount hasn’t changed since it was set in 1979: five yuan a month, about seventy-nine cents. (It doesn’t go as far as it once did, now that China is the world’s largest consumer of Rolls Royces.)

But the Party propagandists may be on to something. Two-child families may not be so far over the horizon after all, because of a growing consensus that economic pressures demand a change.

Labels: aging, children, China, demographics, economics, one-child policy, population control

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Can a love letter written in the height of newlywed bliss save a marriage down the road?

The Chinese government hopes so, and it’s betting a national campaign on it in hopes of stemming the populous country’s rising divorce rates.

Under the “China Post” program, newlywed couples can drop off sealed love letters to each other in one of China’s state-run post offices, and the government will deliver the letters back to them seven years after their wedding day.

The idea was the brainchild of Beijing post office branch manager Sun Buxin, who thought that reminding couples at the “seven-year-itch” mark of why they fell in love in the first place would be the extra spark needed to stay together, and away from divorce court.

Divorce rates in Beijing alone have grown from 11,582 in 2004 to 21,013 last year, according to Chinese government data. Nationwide in China, a total of 1.96 million couples applied for divorce, up 14.5 percent from 2009. ...

In case a handwritten note is not enough, China has extended its marriage-saving mission to the courts as well. Courts there last month changed the country’s marriage law to ensure that property bought by the groom before the marriage would not be shared in the event of the divorce, a move they hoped would entrench the institution.

Labels: China, divorce, divorce reform, economics, Marriage

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"You promised me that you would get married when you are 30 years old. You should keep your words," said Fang Yun's father on the phone.

Fang Yun is a designer working in an interior decoration company in Beijing. Fang Yun is his screen name, meaning "living as free as the clouds and at the same time with some discipline." ...

Fang resigned from a job in his hometown in Hubei and came to Beijing in 2008 only because he could not stand his parents pressure to get married. However, this only exacerbated the situation and made the old couple angrier. "Nothing but getting married and having a baby is the greatest filial piety," reprimanded his father on the phone. ...

Fang plans to get married next year and fulfill the desires of his parents. He hopes that he will meet his future wife through parents' introduction and finish his wedding in his hometown. After that, he can live a life just like his parents wish.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", China, grandparents, Marriage, men, parenting

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Sallying forth into the ancient battleground of extramarital affairs, China’s top court appears poised to side with wronged wives against philandering husbands and greedy mistresses.

Under a draft interpretation of China’s marriage law, expected to be issued in coming weeks, mistresses would not be allowed to sue their married lovers for reneging on promises of money, property or goods, said legal experts who have reviewed the language. Nor would wayward husbands be allowed to seek the courts’ help in retrieving money or goods that they bestowed upon mistresses.

But wives could sue to recover money or property that ended up in the hands of a “little third,” the colloquial term for a mistress. ...

One in five Chinese marriages ends in divorce, but the rate has been ticking upward, especially after divorce procedures were streamlined and a requirement that couples first produce a letter from employers or neighborhood committees was dropped in 2003.

Labels: adultery, China, divorce, Marriage, men, women

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...In interviews with the San Francisco Chronicle, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times, among other outlets, the self-proclaimed “Tiger Mom” seemed to turn into a pussycat….

In these interviews, Chua made a number of points:

* Her book is not a how-to guide for raising child prodigies, but a memoir.
* As discussed in the memoir, her views on parenting evolve, culminating with her “retreat[ing] from the strict ‘Chinese’ approach” (after a rebellion by her younger daughter, Louisa Chua-Rubenfeld, when Louisa was 13).
* Editors at the Wall Street Journal, not Chua, were responsible for the piece’s inflammatory tone and headline — which fail to adequately reflect the book as a whole. ...

But last night, I actually read Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother — in a single sitting. It’s an excellent read: provocative, engaging, and often very funny. Chua is brutally honest, not just about others, but about herself. And after reading the book, I have to (somewhat reluctantly) agree that the initial WSJ piece doesn’t do it justice. The “excerpt” is really a collection of the book’s most inflammatory, anti-Western-parenting portions, collected from far-flung chapters. It lacks the nuance and the narrative arc of Chua’s full memoir.

That said, Chua should send flowers and chocolate to whoever at the Wall Street Journal put that excerpt together. It’s a brilliant provocation, in the manner of early Ann Coulter (before she became a self-parody), and it worked wonders in terms of raising Tiger Mother’s profile. Chua’s book might not have become a buzz-generating bestseller without that essay. Every book publicist in America should study the rollout of Tiger Mother as a lesson in how to market a book.

Labels: Asia, China, culture, motherhood, parenting

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The cover of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" was catnip to this average parent's soul. The memoir, the text says, was supposed to have proved that Chinese parents are better at raising children than Western ones - but instead it portrays "a bitter clash of cultures, a fleeting taste of glory" and the Tiger Mother's humbling by a 13-year-old. As a hopelessly Western mother married into a Chinese family, living in an area that generates immigrant prodigies as reliably as clouds produce rain, I was eager to observe the comeuppance of a parent who thought she had all the answers.

And, in many ways, "Tiger Mother" did not disappoint. At night, I would nudge my husband awake to read him some of its more revealing passages, such as when author Amy Chua threatened to burn her older daughter's stuffed animals if the child didn't improve her piano playing. "What Chinese parents understand," Chua writes, "is that nothing is fun until you're good at it." By day, I would tell my own two daughters about how Chua threw unimpressive birthday cards back at her young girls and ordered them to make better ones. For a mother whose half-Chinese children played outside while the kids of stricter immigrant neighbors could be heard laboring over the violin and piano, the book could be wickedly gratifying. Reading it was like secretly peering into the home of a controlling, obsessive, yet compulsively honest mother - one who sometimes makes the rest of us look good, if less remarkable and with less impressive offspring. Does becoming super-accomplished make up for years of stress? That's something my daughters and I will never find out. ...

In Chinese parenting theory, hard work produces accomplishment, which produces confidence and yet more accomplishment. As Chua notes, this style of parenting is found among other immigrant cultures, too, and I'm sure many Washington area readers have seen it, if they don't employ it themselves. Chua's older daughter, Sophia, a pianist, went along with, and blossomed under, this approach. The younger daughter, Lulu, whose instrument of Chua's choice was the violin, was a different story. The turning point came when, after years of practicing and performing, Lulu expressed her hatred of the violin, her mother and of being Chinese. Chua imagined a Western parent's take on Lulu's rebellion: "Why torture yourself and your child? What's the point? . . . I knew as a Chinese mother I could never give in to that way of thinking."

Labels: Asia, childhood, children, China, motherhood, parenting

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A lot of people wonder how Chinese parents raise such stereotypically successful kids. They wonder what these parents do to produce so many math whizzes and music prodigies, what it's like inside the family, and whether they could do it too. Well, I can tell them, because I've done it. Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover

• have a playdate

• be in a school play

• complain about not being in a school play

• watch TV or play computer games

• choose their own extracurricular activities

• get any grade less than an A

• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama

• play any instrument other than the piano or violin

• not play the piano or violin.

I'm using the term "Chinese mother" loosely. I know some Korean, Indian, Jamaican, Irish and Ghanaian parents who qualify too. Conversely, I know some mothers of Chinese heritage, almost always born in the West, who are not Chinese mothers, by choice or otherwise. I'm also using the term "Western parents" loosely. Western parents come in all varieties.

All the same, even when Western parents think they're being strict, they usually don't come close to being Chinese mothers. For example, my Western friends who consider themselves strict make their children practice their instruments 30 minutes every day. An hour at most. For a Chinese mother, the first hour is the easy part. It's hours two and three that get tough. ...

Western parents try to respect their children's individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.

Labels: Asia, childhood, children, China, culture, motherhood, parenting

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Thirty years after it introduced some of the world’s most sweeping population-control measures, the Chinese government continues to use a variety of coercive family planning tactics, from financial penalties for households that violate the restrictions to the forced sterilization of women who have already had one child, according to a report issued by a human rights group.

The report, published Tuesday by Chinese Human Rights Defenders, documents breadwinners who lose their jobs after the birth of a second child, campaigns that reward citizens for reporting on the reproductive secrets of their neighbors and expectant mothers dragged into operating rooms for late-term abortions.

Not uncommon, according to the report, are the experiences of women like Li Hongmei, 24, a factory employee from Anhui Province who was at home recovering from the birth of her daughter when a dozen men employed by the local government carried her off to a hospital for a tubal ligation. “I promised I would have the surgery when I got better but they didn’t care,” Ms. Li said in a telephone interview. “I screamed and tried to fight them off but it was no use.” ...

On Monday, the director of the National Population Family Planning Commission sought to put to rest any speculation about a change in the status quo, saying the current policies would remain in place through 2015. ...

The report cites a number of recent cases that have wiggled through the media controls that normally filter out stories about family planning excesses. Last April, more than 1,300 people in Puning city, in Guangdong Province, were held hostage in government buildings in an effort to force women who had had a second child to undergo sterilization. The detainees, it turned out, were mostly elderly people whose daughters had left town to evade family planning restrictions. The campaign was so effective, according to a government Web site, that 3,000 sterilizations had been carried out by the fall.

Labels: children, China, class, demographics, economics, population control, women

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If you see someone eating four fried dough sticks as breakfast on Thursday, he or she might be single.

The cold, windy Thursday is Guanggun Day, or single stick day, as the digits in the date "11.11" resemble four lonely sticks. ...

According to Xu Lei, a marriage consultant in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang, more and more young people choose to delay getting married.

"In the past 10 years, the age of Chinese people getting married for the first time has gone up from 20-25 to 24-29," he said.

Among the reasons for this include young people being faced with more pressure in employment and buying houses.

Huang Yaoguang, 27, who works for the carmaker BYD, said his priority was his career. "Without a house and money, no one would want to marry me," he said. "As a man, my career is paramount."

On the other hand, as the only child in their family, many are not willing to be bound by wedlock too early, said Hu Shensheng, a sociologist with the Shanghai University.

"Young people, women in particular, are afraid of getting married," he said.

"When a woman is getting married, she would consider having a baby. But having a baby would affect her promotions."

Hu also pointed out that it could be hard for the elite group to find the other half. "Excellent as they are, they tend to aim too high," he said.

Whatever the reasons, singles also provide an opportunity for a new round of singles advertisements. For instance, China' s websites were full of advertisements about Singles' Day, such as the advertisement of the "mobile phone especially for bachelors" .

Labels: China, economics, Marriage, work/family policy

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Eighty percent of North Koreans who flee across the Yalu River and escape to Northeastern China are women. Ninety percent of those women will become victims of sex trafficking once they arrive. They flee their homes to avoid devastating poverty and an erratic, oppressive regime. But instead of finding a new life across the border, the women are targeted by traffickers and often sold into marriage. Victims who dare complain find themselves repatriated back to North Korea, where they are thrown into gulags or executed. Chinese President Hu Jintao will travel to the U.S. early next year; ask President Obama to tell him stopping North Korean trafficking into China should be a priority.

Kim Hyun-sook, a victim of sex trafficking, spoke recently with ABC News about her plight. She originally went to China to find work, and hoped to send money to her starving family in North Korea. But the broker she paid to smuggle her across the border sold her to a Chinese man for US$2,000, and she was subject to overwhelming physical and emotional abuse. Although she is still suffering from the aftermath of trafficking, she now runs the Coalition for North Korean Women’s Rights, a Seoul-based organization that helps women escape.

Hyun-sook’s enslavement is unflaggingly the rule, not the exception. According to a 2005 report [PDF], China’s disproportionate gender ratio has left many villages with few women, increasing the demand for mercenary marriage. The victims are sold to old bachelors and widowers in these villages, and in many cases, a few men from the same village pool money together to “share” a bride. Locals estimate there are 30,000 to 50,000 North Korean laborers and sex slaves in the region.

The Chinese government has no effective support system set up to deal with this kind of trafficking. Firstly, Chinese law does not recognize these marriages, leaving the women with no legal recognition or rights. Secondly, the government has a ruthless policy of returning the refugees to North Korea — essentially giving them the choice between prostitution or forced marriage abroad and starvation at home.

Labels: China, demographics, forced marriage, North Korea, sex trafficking, sexual assault, women

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Internet chat groups have sprang up where women exchange advice on how to conceive girls.

Rising property prices are driving the change, which is expected to be confirmed by China’s once-a-decade census that started on Monday, because Chinese families must traditionally buy a flat for a son before he can marry.

“My husband and I don’t earn much and I can’t imagine how we can buy a flat for a son,” says Zhang Aiqin of Pujiang in Zhejiang province.

“And it is not only a flat,” says Zhang Yun, a Shanxi province native who lives in Shanghai, alluding to the cost of educating and marrying off a boy. “Sons bring economic pressure ... [but] ‘a daughter is a warm jacket for a mother’ when she is old,” she says, quoting an ancient Chinese idiom to illustrate the fact that many urbanised Chinese think daughters are better caregivers.

Labels: China, demographics, economics, gender, Marriage

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Tina Wang married her first boyfriend in the spring of 2008 because he was pressing her for sex and she did not want to do it outside marriage. By the summer of 2009, they were divorced. "I couldn't tolerate his temper ...we always argued," Ms Wang, 27, says. "I wanted to find someone who would be a better match for me."

Ms Wang belongs to the "post-1980s generation", single children who are the product of China's 1979 family planning policy and the people who are fueling the country's rising divorce rate, experts say.

According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, 1.71 million couples filed for divorce last year, up 10.3 per cent over 2008. There is no specific data on the number of divorces among the post-80s group, but the Chinese Research Association on Youth and Family says 30 per cent of such marriages end up failing.

"The reason the divorce rate is high among post-80s couples is mainly that they value their own interests and rarely care about other people's feelings," says Sun Yunxiao, deputy director of the China Youth and Children Research Center. "They are officially China's first 'Me Generation'."

Labels: China, divorce

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...Culturally speaking, Japan’s fertility problem is a marriage problem: As Japanese women began attending college at greater rates in the 1970s, they began to delay marriage. By 2000, the average age of first marriage for college graduates was over 30. At first, these women simply postponed childbearing; then they abandoned it. Today, college-educated Japanese women have, on average, barely one child during their lifetimes.

These changes created some new cultural stereotypes in Japan. For instance, it is not uncommon to see dogs paraded around in strollers by childless, adult women. But the most prevalent new demographic archetype is the parasaito shinguru or “parasite single.” These creatures are college-educated, working women who live with their parents well into their 30s—not because they are too poor to pay rent, but because they spend their salaries on designer clothes, international travel, and fancy restaurants. The parasite singles are Japan’s biggest consumer group because, unlike real adults, their entire paychecks are available for discretionary spending. Sociologist Masahiro Yamada, who coined the term, explains, “They are like the ancient aristocrats of feudal times, but their parents play the role of servants. Their lives are spoiled. The only thing that’s important to them is seeking pleasure.”

The Japanese government has been trying to stoke fertility since the early 1970s. In 1972, when Japan’s fertility rate was still above replacement, the government introduced a monthly per-child subsidy for parents. Over the years, the government tinkered with the subsidy, altering the amount and raising the age allowance. None of which made much difference: The fertility rate fell at a steady pace. In 1990, the government formed a committee charged with “Creating a sound environment for bearing and rearing children,” the fruit of which was a Childcare Leave Act aimed at helping working mothers.

In 2003, Japan passed the “Law for Basic Measures to Cope with a Declining Fertility Society,” followed two years later by the “Law for Measures to Support the Development of the Next Generation.” To get a sense of how daft the Japanese bureaucrats and politicians are, one of the new provisions required businesses to create—but not implement—abstract “plans” for raising the fertility level of their workers.

In the face of 35 years of failed incentives, Japan’s fertility rate stands at 1.2. This is below what is considered “lowest low,” a mathematical tipping point at which a country’s population will decline by as much as 50 percent within 45 years. This is a death spiral from which, demographers believe, it is impossible to escape. Then again, that’s just theory: History has never seen fertility rates so low.

Next to Japan’s, the U.S. fertility rate looks pretty good at 2.06. The massive, continual influx of immigrants we receive is enough to keep the U.S. population slowly growing. But America’s fertility rate has been falling since the founding.

Labels: Asia, China, culture, demographics, Japan, Latin America, natalism, Singapore

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As many as three million Chinese babies are hidden by their parents every year in order to get around the country's one-child policy, a researcher has discovered.

Since 1978, China's government has limited each couple to one child, carrying out forced abortions and sterilizations, and monitoring women's intra uterine devices to control the population.

For parents violating the policy, the penalties can be harsh. Large fines are levied, houses are often demolished and offenders are sometimes jailed.

In millions of cases, families are prepared to take the risk, according to research by Liang Zhongtang, a demographer and former member of the expert committee of China's National Population and Family Planning Commission.

Mr. Liang has discovered discrepancies in China's census.

"In 1990, the national census recorded 23 million births. But by the 2000 census, there were 26 million 10-year-olds, an increase of three million," he said. ...

Policy-makers have warned that millions of frustrated men, who would be unable to find wives, could wreak havoc on Chinese society, leading to a steep rise in prostitution and violence. Mr. Liang said the imbalance was "definitely not as severe as the statistics suggest."

Labels: babies, China, demographics, girls, men, population control

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Sociologist and gay rights activist, Li Yinhe, continues to stun the country with her comments on hitherto taboo topics such as sex and same-sex marriages.

She has submitted, for the fifth time, to the ongoing 2010 annual sessions of the NPC and CPPCC, proposals to allow same-sex marriages, and rescind the ban on sexual orgies as a violation of the Criminal Law of the PRC. ...

In 2006, Li caused a flutter with her support for one-night stands and polyamory (multiple sexual partners). Explaining her stance, she says unmarried people have the legal right to one-night stands. And while it may be morally wrong for married couples to do so, there is nothing illegal about it. ...

She says polyamory offers important evidence for her sociological studies.

"I know of three lovers living together in harmony, in China and in other countries. They are straight and are not jealous of sharing lovers," she says, adding this proves that the human emotion of jealousy stems from social rather than physiological reasons.

Labels: China, gay marriage, polyamory, premarital sex, sex

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More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses in 2020, state media reported on Monday, citing a study that blamed sex-specific abortions as a major factor.

The study, by the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, named the gender imbalance among newborns as the most serious demographic problem for the country's population of 1.3 billion, the Global Times said. ...

Researcher Wang Guangzhou said the skewed birth ratio could lead to difficulties for men with lower incomes in finding spouses, as well as a widening age gap between partners, according to the Global Times.

Another researcher quoted by the newspaper, Wang Yuesheng, said men in poorer parts of China would be forced to accept marriages late in life or remain single for life, which could "cause a break in family lines."

"The chance of getting married will be rare if a man is more than 40 years old in the countryside. They will be more dependent on social security as they age and have fewer household resources to rely on," Wang said. ...

The Global Times said abductions and trafficking of women were "rampant" in areas with excess numbers of men, citing the National Population and Family Planning Commission.

Labels: abortion, China, demographics, one-child policy

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This story beats love at first sight. Two people longed for each other, though they may have never met. They felt connected though they may never have touched. They'd even been given the same first names, though their families were strangers. By the time Meredith Grace Rittenhouse and Meredith Ellen Harrington were finally introduced, love was almost beside the point. Their bond was more mysterious, more fundamental. The Merediths are Chinese fraternal twins who were adopted by two different American families. The girls found each other almost six years ago, when they were 4, and haven't let go since.

Labels: adoption, China, siblings

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