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PREFERENCE FOR BOYS IN CHINA
PREFERENCE FOR BOYS IN CHINA
China has one of the greatest gender disparities among newborns of any country in
the world, and this is all the more alarming because China is such a populous nation. In
2005, 118 boys were born for every 100 girls, up from 110 boys per 100 girls in 2000
and 112 in 1990. One Chinese expert told the Times of London the rate seem to have
peaked to 120.4 at the end of 2006. The sex ratio is expected to remain skewed at
around 119 boys for every 100 girls through the 2030s. Worldwide, 103 to 107 boys
are born for every 100 girls.
In some rural areas there are only 67 girls for every 100 boys. Kindergarten classes in
places where the problem is particularly bad have twenty-some boys and maybe three
or four girls. Some primary school has enough boys to fill five classes but only enough
girls for two.
A study by the British Medical journal Lancet said that selective abortions had left
China with 32 million more boys than girls. A UNICEF study counted 29 million "missing
females" in China. The number of “missing girls” generated in one year increased from
around 500,000 in 1990 to 900,000 in 2000. So many baby girls are “missing” that
Chinese authorities have delayed the release of census data because it showed the
situation getting worse rather than better.
In the old days wealthy men with wives who gave birth only to daughters often took
concubines to have sons. If one of the concubines produced a son the man often
dumped the concubine and give the son to his wife to raise.
Good Websites and Sources: Wikipedia article Wikipedia ; Family Planning in
Chinachina.org.cn ; New England Journal of Medicine article nejm.org ; One Child policy
articlesharker.org Too Many Boys and Military Aggression opinionjournal.com ; Christian
Science Monitor csmonitor.com ; Links in this Website: POPULATION IN
CHINAFactsanddetails.com/China ; ONE-CHILD POLICY IN
CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; BIRTH CONTROL IN
CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; THE BRIDE SHORTAGE IN
CHINAFactsanddetails.com/China
Places in China with High Ratios of Boys to Girls
In some places, particularly in the southeastern and central Chinese provinces the boy
to girl ratios are much higher than the national average. In some places in rural
Guangxi province, where boys are prized on farms, the numbers approach 144 boys for
100 girls. In some villages more than 75 percent of all children born are boys. In the
city of Lianyungang in Jiangsu Province, 163.5 boys are born for every 100 girls. In
some rural counties in Shaanxi Province newborn boys outnumber girls 2 to 1. Qishan
Country recorded a ratio of 2.53 to 1. Some villages here had not had a baby girl born
as a second child for more than three years.
Hainan Island has the highest newborn-born-to-girl ratio of any Chinese province with
135.7 boys to 100 girls. About 70 percent if the island‟s residents live in rural areas.

2. Many belong to the Li and Miao minority. A 29-year-old farmer who has a son and a
daughter told the Strait Times, “If you fail to bear a son, people will laugh at you at
you. People will say things like, „You „ll end up in an old folks‟ home in your old age, as
you have no son to take care of you.” A 45-year-old Li woman who gave birth to three
daughters said, “I was so sad when my third daughter was born. I was worried no one
would take care of my wife and me when we grew old.”
Families on Hainan with girls play hide and seek with authorities to keep their children
secret so they can have more. One woman with a daughter, who was told that she
could not have any more children if her second child was a girl, said “I will try again
until I get a son.” Already the island has it share of bachelor villages. In Hainan by
some estimated 9 out 10 aborted foetus are girls. In the old days the expression “a
daughter had given to seas” was a euphemism for female infanticide, a customs that is
now rare.
Reasons for Preference for Boys in China
Boys are regarded as important because they look after property; inherit land; have
more opportunities to get ahead in life than daughters; care for parents when they get
old; and perform important ceremonial duties when the parents die. They care for
parents spirits in the afterlife so their spirits do not wander the earth as hungry ghosts.
Having boys is regarded as kind of pension system. In recent years pressures to have
sons have gotten stronger rather weaker as the Chinese “iron rice bowl” welfare and
pension system has been dismantled and replaced with survival of the fittest capitalism.
In much of China, there is no universal, government-sponsored social security
anymore. Many rural Chinese have no pensions. One peasant farmer in southeast China
told the New York Times, “People around here depend on their sons to provide for them
in old age because you can‟t rely on anyone else.”
The preference for boys is tied up in the Confucian belief that male heirs are
necessary to carry on the family name and take care of the family spirits. A Chinese
family worries that if there is no son no one will look after them and keep them
company in the afterlife. Confucius once said, "there are three ways of being disloyal to
your ancestors. Not carrying on the family name is the worse."
Celebrations are held for the birth of a son. One peasant woman told AP, her husband
celebrating by getting drunk and buying her candy. “That was like New Year‟s Eve,” she
said.
Girls and the Reasons for Preference for Boys
Girls, on the other hand, have to give away any property they possess to their
husband and are not supposed to take care of their parents in old age. A daughter‟s
responsibility to her family ends when she gets married. She moves in with her
husband, often in another village or town, and become part of her husband's family and
helps care for them. In China there is an expression, "Daughters are like water that
splashes out of the family and cannot be gotten back after marriage."
The Communists raised the status of women in China, making it no longer such a bad
thing to have daughters. But since the one-child policy and economic reforms were

3. launched in the 1970s, Confucian values have returned, making it once again
fashionable not to have girls.
One farmer told the New York Times, “If you have a son he can go out and make
money, then the whole family will be secure. If your daughter gets rich that‟s a
different thing altogether, because the money goes to her husband‟s family.”
While parents openly celebrate when they have boys they often look disappointed
when they have girls. Newborn girls are sometimes given names like Pandi ("expecting
a boy"), Yanan ("second to a boy") in hopes the next child will be a boy. Some six
million women bear the names Lai-di ("call for a brother") and Ziao-di ("bring a
brother").
This contrasts with sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia, where sons
and daughters both care for aging parents—and sex ratios are fairly normal. In South
Korea, the ratio of boys to girls peaked in 1990 at 119 to 100 and declined to 110 to
100 in 2000. Demographers attribute the change to a weakening of the patriarchal
family as people have become more urbanized, Westernized and independent. These
changes haven't occurred in China, which remains largely agrarian.
The trend is changing in Chinese urban areas, where there is now a slight preference
for girls, under the belief they are more likely to care for their aging parents.
Family planning poster that says abandoning girls is a crime
Girls, Preference for Boys and the One Child Policy
Demographers have found that the boy-to-girl ratio increases the more strictly the
one-child policy is enforced. One study of three villages in Shaanxi found that 114 boys
to 100 girls were born in 1979 to 1983 when the "one child" policy was introduced;
then dropped to 98 to 100 during a lenient period from 1984 to 1987; and soared to
145 to 100 in 1988 to 1993 when the policy was strictly enforced.
Couples that have a son the first time around count themselves fortunate. If they
have a daughter, they often want to try again for a son. It is not unusual for woman to
make three or four attempts to have a boy, keeping the first girl, giving the second girl
away and having the third aborted after discovering she is female with an ultrasound
test.
Some women feel overwhelmed by the pressure to have boys. A mother of a daughter
who gave birth to a second daughter told the New York Times, “I felt I couldn‟t hold my
head walking in the village.” Undesired baby girls, who are born, often end up in
orphanages, or being put up for adoption.” Some in the same circumstances
contemplate suicide.
A booming economy has resulted in more not less sex selections as families have
more money to spend on things like ultrasound tests to improve their chances of having
a boy.
Poor Treatment of Girls in China

4. The low number of girls is attributed to poor nutrition, inadequate medical care,
desertion and infanticide. One Chinese woman told the New York Times, "My parents
were disappointed in my gender. They wished I were a boy. I had to work very hard to
compete with my brothers." Girls are sometimes not counted by census takers because
they are hidden by their families.
Mortality rates are considerably higher for girls than for boys. Girls are 12 percent
more likely to die before the age of five than boys. In the countryside the mortality rate
for infant girls one year or younger is 27 percent higher for girls than for boys. A
Chinese demographer told the Washington Post, "If the son is sick, families in the
countryside will get a doctor. If the girl is sick, they won‟t.”
Many girls go hungry while food is directed to their brothers. A women with a younger
brother told the Los Angeles Times, “My sister and I knew that all the good food went
to him—when he was done, then we could eat.”
Abandoned Children
In the 1990s it was relatively common for parents with unwanted children to abandon
them. Orphanages were often overwhelmed by requests and didn‟t have enough staff
and formula to take care of all the children that were sent their way.
Because it was illegal to abandon children even at orphanages, babies were often left
in cardboard boxes or bamboo baskets near orphanages and firecrackers was set off to
let staff members at orphanages know where the babies were. One woman who worked
at an orphanage at that time told the Los Angeles Times, “We‟d find them all over.
They‟d be wrapped in rags, filthy...Sometimes they‟d have ant all over their face
because babies have a sweet smell and ants like them.”
Infanticide and Girls in China
In rural China, it reportedly is not that unusual to see a dead baby left in a garbage
heap or abandoned by the side of the road or in a train station. Some couples regard
the punishments for having a child to be so severe that they feel it makes more sense
to abandon unwanted children than raise them.
Some demographers say that hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of infanticides
have occurred in China in the last two decades. Many of the victims are baby girls. The
simple fact that second child born in a Chinese family is often a boy is proof enough
that female infanticide is at least a possibility. Some women go into hiding when they
are pregnant so that if they give birth to a daughter they can get away with murdering
it without anybody knowing about it.
There are many stories about parents paying old ladies to murder their baby
daughters: drowning them in toilets, smothering them with pillows or strangling them,
and then burying them in their backyard. Many baby girls are simply neglected and die
from causes related to poor nutrition or being poorly taken care of when sick.
The Chinese government has admitted that the practice of female infanticide is a
concern and the People's Daily has even labeled it a "grave problem." The paper has
reported that the ratio of males to females under the age of five in one rural area of

5. Hebei province was five to one and has run stories about of men asking for divorces
from wives who only gave birth to females.
Infanticide has a long history in China. It was practiced often in the past, resulting in
high male-to-female ratios and was not stamped out until the Communists came to
power in 1949. In the mid-19th century after a large wave of infanticide so many men
across China were unable to find wives they organized into armed bands. The ensuing
Nien Rebellion took the imperial government in Beijing more than a decade to put down
and played a role in weakening the Qing dynasty and ultimately toppling it.
Some villagers didn‟t like accusation that they abandoned their girls. One villager in
Guizhou Province told the Los Angeles Times, “People around here don‟t dump their
kids...Boy or girl, they‟re our flesh and blood .”
Infanticide is not practiced only in China. It is common in India and occurs from time
among American teenagers with unwanted children. During of period of social unrest
and food shortages in the 1930s, anthropologists found that every mother in an Ayoreo
Indian village committed infanticide at least once.
Ultrasound and Missing Girls in China
Portable Chinese
ultrasound scanner Millions of Chinese women have had abortions after ultrasound
tests showed they were carrying females. By some estimates sex-selective abortions
performed after ultrasound test account for a third and maybe half of the “missing
girls.” By one count 97 percent of all aborted babies are girls.
In villages with easy access to ultrasound machines it is not unusual to find that 75
percent of the children born there are boys. In one village in Guangxi 19 of the 24
children born one year after ultrasound was introduced were boys. Before ultrasound
the ratios of boys to girls was near 1 to 1. A study in a county in Guangdong province
found that couples with a girl already elected to get an abortion 92 percent of the time
if they found the wife was carrying another girl.
One villager told the New York Times, “If you‟re rich and you want a big family, you
can keep having babies until you get a boy. But if you can‟t pay the fine, or don‟t want
all the burdens of a large family, then you get the test.”
Couples pay as little $4 for an ultrasound test. Illegal abortions are readily available
for those who do not want a girl, often the same day an ultrasound test is taken for
between $15 and $120 depending on the complexity of the procedure and the “gift”
demanded by health care workers.
Ultrasound was introduced in the mid-1980s. China now mass produces its own
ultrasound machines, which sell for $2,000 a piece. Abortions after ultrasound tests
occur in the second or even third trimester of pregnancy. This is because sex
determination by ultrasound is usually possible in the forth, fifth and sixth months of
pregnancy.
Test used to determine gender are banned but widely carried out, mostly at
underground clinics in rural areas. According to report by the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences in 2009, “Sex-specific abortions remained extremely common

6. place,especially in rural areas...The problem is more serious in rural areas due to the
lack of a social security system. Ageing farmers have to rely on their offspring.”
Effort to Increase the Number of Girls in China
The Chinese government has vowed to fix the gender imbalance. It outlawed sex-
selective abortions and the use of ultrasound to screen the sex of unborn children in
1997. In January 2005, the laws restricting sex-selective abortion were tightened; the
practice was officially banned and made part of the criminal code. Thus far the
campaign has not been very successful. Significantly more boys continue to be born.
Many doctors, undeterred by the threat of long prison sentence, perform the tests to
supplement their monthly income which is often as low as $50 a month. In August
2007, the Chinese government proposed making the laws tougher on sex-selective
abortion that would dish out harsher punishments to doctors who performed them.
In some places, the Chinese government gives special pensions to couples with two
daughters and fruit trees to couples with one daughter (the fruit is supposed to provide
a source of income in old age). The aim of the policy is to reduce incentives for having
boys as a social security measure. The government also allows girls with no brothers to
go to school for free while parents with sons have to pay $7.50 a semester. In other
places parents with daughters and no sons are given access to the best jobs and
officials with jurisdiction over areas with significantly more boys than girls are passed
over for promotions.
These days it is becoming increasingly more desirable to have girls. In many cases it
is easier for young women to get jobs than young men and daughters are considered
more loyal and likely to take care of their parents in old age than sons. One commercial
on television shows a mother complaining she was neglected by her three sons while
her dutiful daughter took good care of her. In the countryside villages are filled with
slogans like “A girl is worth as much as a boy,” “Having a daughter is as good as having
a son,” and “Firmly uphold equal rights for girls and boys.”
Image Sources: 1) Shanghai List; 2) Landberger com; 3) University of Washington; 4)
Priceline website
Text Sources: New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Times of London,
National Geographic, The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, Reuters, AP, Lonely Planet
Guides, Compton‟s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.
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© 2008 Jeffrey Hays
Last updated April 2010
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