Isabelle Attané

Being a Woman in China Today: A Demography of Gender

The aim of this article is on the one hand, to draw up a socio-demographic inventory of the situation of Chinese women in the prevailing early twenty-first century context of demographic, economic, and social transition, and on the other hand, to draw attention to the paradoxical effects of these transitions whilst taking into account the diversity of the realities women are experiencing. In conclusion, it raises the possibility of changes in gender relationships in China, where there are, and will continue to be, fewer women than men, particularly in adulthood.

The determinants of discrimination against daughters in China: Evidence from a provincial-level analysis

This paper reports a provincial-level analysis of the way in which various socio-economic and socio-demographic determinants influence the decision to discriminate against daughters in China. While most existing studies use the infant or child sex ratio as the only variable to be explained, this study analyses separately the two main discriminatory practices: sex-selective abortion (with sex ratio at birth as a proxy) and neglect of girls’ health care (with excess infant mortality among females as a proxy). The analysis helps to illuminate the circumstances that encourage sex-selective behaviours, which appear to be dictated mainly by extreme poverty, family support to the elderly, and fathers education, together with the social pressure on couples to adhere to traditional values and roles and the constraints on family size. While sex-selective abortion appears to result from long-term strategies to optimize family composition, lethal neglect is the immediate result of economic constraints.

Transitional stages and identity boundaries: the case of ethnic minorities in China

At the advent of the Republic in China in 1911, the minority issue took on its real dimension. Its founder Sun Yat Sen, aware of the fragility of the new Nation-State, and turning a deaf ear to the statistical evidence, tried to minimize the influence of the minorities and to enhance, in his writings and speeches, the demographic supremacy of the Hans. On the contrary, the communist regime since the very start (1949) made a full-fledge recognition (including religion as a criterionr of ethnic minorities. There are now 55 minority groups, amounting to 120 million inhabitants, almost 10% of the population. This article explores the relationship between fertility trends since 1970, as depicted in the single age and sex structures in the 1990 census, and socio-economic, cultural and religious factors. Most sinicized minorities (Manchu, Mongols, Koreans …) have more or less followed the same pace of fertility transition as the Hans, under the yoke of the tough restrictive population policy. On the other hand, fertility trends among the less sinicized groups (Tibetans, Uigurs, Kazakhs and Kirgiz), have been largely at odds with the mainstream Han group. Their fertility remained high at the very moments when it was sharply reduced among Hans and decreased when Han fertility was remaining almost stable. This reflcts the fact that the Chinese authorities have conceded substantial privileges to their minorities, especially in the frontiers by relaxing the family planning policy. Religion as such does not emerge as a key explanatory variable explaining fertility differences. Hence, fertility among Moslem minorities has diverged to a great extent among the more integrated Hui minority, on the one hand, and the Turkic ones (Uigurs, Kazakhs and Kirgiz), on the other. Whereas the patterns of the Hui fertility were always in line with those of the Hans, the Xinjiang populations have displayed a higher than expected fertility, which might be a demographic response to the ambitions of the central government, whose aim was to strenghten its buffer-zone in the Turkic regions by drowning them under the masses of Han immigrants. The proportion of ethnic Chinese in Xinjiang has thus increased from a mere 7% in 1953 to some 40% today. However, this proportion is unstable and likely to decrease in the near future under the impact of the higher natural growth of the Turkic populations.

China’s Demography in a Changing Society: Old Problems and New Challenges

After four decades of strict birth control, the rapid growth of China’s population has been substantially curbed. According to official figures, the total fertility rate dropped below the replacement level in the early 1990s, and has continued to decline since then to a level of 1.8 children per woman in the 2000s. But the 2010 population census revealed a much lower figure of 1.2. The authors of this chapter argue that the official figure is an overestimate, and that the 2010 census reflects actual fertility. The chapter first looks at the reasons behind this overestimation. It then examines in more depth recent fertility trends and patterns as they appear from available sources. This is followed by a discussion on the reliability of the 2010 census data, and in particular on the plausibility of widespread underreporting of births, an assumption still largely supported by Chinese officials.

Women, Feminism and Femininity

Women’s emancipation became a political concern in the mid-nineteenth century. Early Chinese-style feminism began to emerge under the Taiping and their leader Hong Xiuquan who founded a kingdom in southern China called Taiping Tian Guo (literally “heavenly kingdom of great peace”). This egalitarian and revolutionary movement condemned bigamy, female prostitution, adultery and the practice of foot binding (Elisseeff 1988). It demanded equality between the sexes in work as in war, and distributed land equally among women and men. However, the Taiping governed only a portion of the country, and their rule lasted for just 15 years. After their fall, the troubled period that followed undermined those early demands for gender equality (Kristeva 2001).

Life-Long Inequality

The masculinization of China’s population is largely a “bottom-up” process in the sense that first it affects births (through increasing use of prenatal sex selection) and then children (as a consequence of excess female infant and child mortality) and then continues into adulthood as cohorts grow older (Chu 2001; Mo 2005). However, the sex distribution in adulthood can be also influenced by other factors. When there is no sex-differentiated migration, the sex ratio can be rebalanced by improvements in women’s survival, particularly at reproductive ages; by gains in female life expectancy at birth; or by worsening living conditions for men, in particular at working ages, owing to high-risk occupational and social behaviours which expose them to excess mortality. Conversely, the masculinization process can accelerate in adulthood due to insufficient gains or worsening living standards for women, leading to relative excess mortality.

Discrimination Against Girls in Early Childhood

The male surplus in China is highest in the young population, and this has been the case for at least the past half-century. The 1953 census revealed a deficit of girls among children aged under 15, with a sex ratio of 111.4 boys for every 100 girls. Not long after that date, however, there was a gradual gender rebalancing among children, as living standards and the status of women began to improve in the 1950s, at a time when there were no restrictions on family size. Although the proportion of boys remained higher than the levels usually observed, the sex ratio of the child population decreased considerably by the 1960s, falling to 107.6 boys per 100 girls in 1964 and to 106.4 in the 1982 census (NBS 1988). China’s child population entered a new phase of masculinization in the next inter-census period (1982–1990), by the end of which the sex ratio of children under 15 had risen to 108.5. It increased even further in the recent period, to 113.6 boys per 100 girls in 2000 (PCO 2002) and 118.3 in 2010 (PCO 2012).

A Phenomenon Not Unique to China

The global female deficit was estimated to total 100 million in the 1990s, and by far the largest share of this deficit was in Asia (Sen 1990; Klasen and Wink 2002), currently the only continent with a majority of men (Table 6.1). China is not the only country responsible for this Asian particularity, however. A male surplus also exists in several neighbouring countries, including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Together with China, these countries, which are home to around 3 billion of the world’s population of 7 billion, reported an estimated female deficit of 89.3 million in the early 2000s: 40.9 million in China, 39.1 million in India, 4.9 million in Pakistan and 3.7 million in Bangladesh (Klasen and Wink 2002). As in China, the female deficit in those Asian countries results from discriminatory practices (the elimination of girls by sex-selective abortion and/or excess female mortality in childhood and adulthood), which can be interpreted as a manifestation of patriarchal societies in a period of economic modernization.

Discriminatory Practices and Factors in Masculinization

Most research published in the 1990s concurred that under-reporting of births was the main reason for the shortage of girls (Coale and Banister 1994; Hull 1990; Johansson and Nygren 1991; Zeng et al. 1993). We were able to demonstrate that under-reporting was widespread in the statistics of the National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC) and in vital statistics (32.1 and 26.6 %, respectively, in 1989), when compared with the total number of births recorded in 1990. But uncertainties remained as to the extent of under-reporting in the 1990 census itself (Attane and Sun 1999) (Inset 10.1).

A Geography of Discrimination

It is highly relevant in the case of China to distinguish between urban and rural areas in the analysis of pre- and post-natal discrimination against girls, because of the profound socioeconomic disparities that exist between the two places of residence. Since the almost simultaneous introduction of economic reform and the one-child policy in the late 1970s, urban and rural areas have experienced divergent economic, social and demographic trends, accentuating already considerable differences in way of life and standard of living. Moreover, since the 1970s family planning regulations have differentiated between urban and rural areas and between provinces (see Inset 2.1 above), and couples vary their reproductive strategies according to the number and sex of their offspring. The preference for sons is not as obvious and does not have the same impact on the sex ratio at birth or on female infant mortality across the country.