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Bare Branches
By Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer
MIT Press, 329 pages, $35
Our country is preoccupied with terrorism. But looking ahead, terrorism may be only one of our problems.
China and India between them have 2.3 billion people. Although both nations have embraced some aspects of a market economy, one of them, China, is ruled by autocrats who manage a large military establishment. The People’s Republic wants to control Hong Kong more than Hong Kong wants to be controlled and harbors aggressive tendencies toward Taiwan. Both India and Pakistan, though engaged in diplomatic talks, wish to control Kashmir, and each country has nuclear weapons to back up those desires.
In Bare Branches (MIT Press, 329 pages, $35), Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, two political scientists, add a new and perhaps profound dimension to this problem. Both countries have many more men than women, the result of a longstanding preference for male children that has led to sex-selective abortions and, in many areas, the neglect and premature death of female children. A high “sex ratio,” in the authors’ view, spells trouble.
The sex ratio refers to the number of men and women in a society. Ordinarily more male than female children are born, so the average sex ratio across nations is about 105 (i.e., 105 men for every 100 women). China and India have much higher sex ratios; in China it is more than 118 for children under the age of five.
During the first half of the 20th century, the Chinese sex ratio fell, and the Communist leaders who took power around 1949 proclaimed the equality of men and women, releasing concubines from servitude. Even so, the sex ratio began to climb in the second half of the 20th century, especially during the 1980s. The change came despite (the authors would say, because of) a policy that urged parents to have only one child.
A case of too many males, which may spell trouble ahead.
It is Ms. Hudson and Ms. den Boer’s view that limiting children to one per family makes the desire for a male child even more urgent. They believe that, using the ultrasound technology available in China since the late 1970s, families have been aborting female fetuses and possibly killing newborn female infants by direct infanticide or deliberate neglect. Many Chinese scholars dispute this view, arguing that females are simply undercounted in government surveys because families take pride in having (and therefore announcing) a son.
To support their case, the authors note that infant mortality in China is higher for females than for males, a reversal of what is the norm in most countries. (Male infants are more vulnerable to disease and ordinarily die at higher rates than females.) The higher death rate of females can only be explained, the authors believe, by deliberate interventions based on a preference for boys.
Boys are preferred in China, as they are in most countries, for many reasons. A young boy can help more readily with farm labor; he is thought to be more likely to support aged parents; and he carries forward the family name. China has outlawed prenatal sex identification, but like most bans on popular ideas, it had not worked.
The result appears to be that China now has 41 million more men than women. These surplus men are concentrated in the youthful age range of 15 to 34. They are over-represented among poor, transient and unemployed men who will be drawn together into “bachelor subcultures.” Citing other scholars, Ms. Hudson and Ms. den Boer speculate that the young-male surplus will translate into higher rates of crime and violence and possibly more political instability. If the government recruits surplus men into the armed forces to keep them under control, it may become more willing to engage in aggressive military actions.
These things may happen, and they may not. We have no reliable information from the modern world as to whether high sex ratios lead to military aggression or political instability. There are good grounds, however, for thinking that crime rates will grow if the ratio of young men to older men increases sharply; that has happened in the U.S.
The authors neglect one offsetting benefit of having more young men than young women. In the U.S., a high sex ratio is statistically associated with high rates of marriage and low rates of illegitimate births. This argument, first made by Marcia Guttenberg and Paul Secord and amplified in other studies–and in my book, The Marriage Problem–arises from the laws of supply and demand.
If there are a lot of men for young women, then the women will trade sex in exchange for what they value, which for most women is a stable relationship–that is, marriage and two-parent child care. But if men are scarce and women abundant, then women will lose their bargaining power and exchange sex for whatever is available: one-night stands, illegitimate children or even prostitution. In the U.S., African-Americans have a very low sex ratio, and the consequences of that fact are obvious.
Now, how this works out in practice depends on the culture in which men and women grow up. In the dominantly male Wild West, as reported by historian David Courtwright, there was a lot of violence. Ms. Hudson and Ms. den Boer repeat this finding. But they do not repeat Mr. Courtwright’s other observation: namely, that in Wild West towns there was a strong tendency to respect decent women. When a married woman approach a group of men in a tough town with a high sex ratio, the men would call out “church time!” and lapse into respectful silence. By contrast, the Chinese community in the U.S. during the 19th and early 20th centuries, also with a high sex ratio, kept women in something akin to concubinage.
Ms. Hudson and Ms. den Boer acknowledge the work of Ms. Guttenberg and Mr. Secord but choose to ignore it, along with the work of other scholars who have continued research into sex ratio and marriage. “We thus disagree” with these analyses, the authors write, but do not explain why.
Nevertheless, Bare Branches is an impressive and comprehensive account of sex ratios, especially in China, and may well give us reason to worry more than we have about that country’s future and–in a globalized world–our own.
James Q. Wilson is the chairman of AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers.
