China's Skewed Sex Ratio and the One-Child Policy

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)

Articles

China's one-child policy has been criticized in both the Western popular press and academic works for a long list of associated ills, ranging from human rights abuses in the form of forced abortion and sterilization, to the aging of the population and the creation of a generation of spoiled, antisocial "little emperors." These criticisms are well deserved. However, an associated claim found in the conventional wisdom established by journalists and generalist China scholars should be treated with more scepticism: that the one-child policy, more properly called the birth planning policy, is the main factor behind China's sex imbalance, and that, as a corollary, relaxing the policy would normalize China's sex ratio.

In this article, we argue that examining China's sex ratio in historical, comparative and domestic regional perspective shows the weakness in that argument. While some permutations of the birth planning policy contribute to sex ratio at birth (SRB) imbalances, another crucial driver of the skewed sex ratio is "son preference," a term used for a complex of cultural, social and economic institutions and practices that make it likely that families will choose to have sons instead of daughters. In making this argument, we propose that son preference be treated as an observable and measurable explanatory variable, rather than as an immutable constant. Such an analysis suggests that returning China's sex ratio to natural levels would require attacking the institutional and socio-cultural practices that create incentives for families to prefer having sons.

How Skewed is China's Sex Ratio?

A country's natural sex ratio is calculated using its SRB, sex differentials in mortality, and sex selective migration. Most countries have natural sex ratios that fall within the range of 97.0 to 100.3 males per 100 females.¹Of greater interest here is SRB, which is defined as the number of male live births for every 100 female births. While the worldwide average SRB is 105-107, China's SRB rose dramatically starting in the early 1980s and has remain highly skewed, as Figure 1 shows.

Figure 1:

Sex Ratio at Birth (SRB) in China, 1970-2010

Source:

Based on Bhattacharjya et al. 2008, 1833; Xinhua News Agency 2011.

[Figure Omitted; See PDF]

The official Chinese statistics in Figure 1 tell a shocking...