A farmer needs a wife in China and India

--Lauren Johnston 

Alongside high profile allegations of philandering, China's bachelors have been getting bad press. Recently blamed not just for China's property bubble, they have also been ascribed responsibility for the resulting savings rates aggregating to help cause global macroeconomic imbalances. If it turn out that China's most powerless might in fact be rather quite powerful, the topic warrants greater attention, least of all since sex ratio biases have yet to reach their social peak. 
Sex ratio at birth usually ranges from 102-106 live male births per 100 live female births. Modern technologies and restrictions on childbearing help to explain why China's sex ratio has increased significantly over recent decades. Between 1982 and 2005 the  ratio jumped from 107 to 120, and in some provinces to higher than 130. In absolute numbers, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has predicted that by 2020 China will have more than 30-40 million more boys and young men than women under the age of 20.  

In reality the figures translate in poor and male farmers populating women-poor rural villages, hidden from worldview, but whose attempts at social mobility, not to mention basic human satiation, may produce much broader influence. And it is not only China. The world's second-most populous nation, India, similarly faces a crisis with its sex ratios. The last four national census surveys point to rapidly increasing disparities between men and women: The child sex ratio dropped from 962 (girls to 1,000 boys) in 1981 to 945 in 1991, to 927 in 2001, and according to the latest census, in 2011, the ratio decreased further, to 914.6. 

The consequences of "missing women", a phrase coined by Indian Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen in 1990 and a whole new meaning of "gender gap", in China's case have been linked to high savings rates creating a property bubble in the race to secure homes fit for a choosy future bride. Concurrently they have acted to suppress domestic consumption levels. The phenomenon of rising "bride prices" - bride prices in some villages are reported to have exceeded 100,000 yuan (about US$16,000) - and also rising frequency in cases of girl kidnapping. The risk of increased violence against and rape of women is also reported to have increased. 

Beyond China and India's borders, the influence of this emerging heirs race, or "bachelor effect", may be more widespread than realized. It may be that the same race for "heir race" for a bride lends itself to motivate the army of migrant workers increasingly found across the developing world. Could even the incredible pace of infrastructure construction be connected to the drive to return home with maximized savings and a better chance in the heirs race? 

The problem of missing women in any case is very much first and foremost a human one, inducing extreme deprivation as well as direct and latent familial loss. Since the global demographic weight of countries in which the phenomenon is magnified, China and India especially, its scale is exaggerated. Further, the challenge is by definition mathematically exponential. Finding innovative solutions toward alleviating this overall additive contradiction may help to induce important longer-term stabilizing economic and social multiplier effects going forth. 

Conceptually, applying Sen's notion of hunger and famine to sexual famine and competition in heir-creation could help in implicitly shifting attention toward the matter of human deprivation and loss, and the lack of broader adequate social institutions. This contrasts the case of lonely men and property bubbles, as in a recent Sydney Morning Herald article. Sen for example talks of "Starvation is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of there being not enough food to eat." The different relationship traditions of China's minority Mosuo village might radically suggest the same in the case of a broader hunger for a mate. 

Rather more realistic longer-term solutions could include a more deliberate set of policies seeking to raise the status of agricultural regions, and even more so agricultural practice. For example, the establishment of elite and practical agricultural colleges in urban frontiers for farmers may help in the longer-term to raise the broader education levels of China's farming heirs, without needing to challenge the more narrow and pre-defined academic route into Chinese universities. These could produce a series of more certification-based agricultural trades that also help to increase the quality of China's food produce. 

For years, Asian countries have offered scholarships to their elites to study abroad on the condition of returning to work for the state. Similar programs could start in high schools for men of farming families, the future of China's extraordinarily and arguably increasingly important food-producing sector. These could help to form the microeconomic policy partner of broader reforms to increase the development of China's inland provinces. Similarly, a leveling of entry criteria into elite urban universities between provinces - long angering applicants outside of Beijing and Shanghai - may offer the double advantage of reducing rates of "left women" - educated urban elites - while also facilitating social mobility of rural men, though this too could backfire twice over were rural and urban women to ultimately dominate the candidate frontier. It may be a similar story in India. 

A TV show in China follows a match between a middle class urban lady and her migrant worker partner. The bigger story behind it is rather more akin to Australia's TV show A farmer needs a wife. Chinese and Indian TV producers might well replicate the format, in partnership with Australia's next series even, beginning a parallel process of highlighting the positive side of life in the country. This may simultaneously serve to reduce the sense of shame that can deter a woman in the urban elite from marrying a rural sweetheart. China especially has a long recent history of successful experimentation in cities such as Wenzhou and Shenzhen, and more socially in places like Shanxi's Yichang, whose residents have taken part in a "two child policy" experiment since 1985. Immigration authorities may tease out the potential of experiments in gender imbalance easing policies, giving preference for example to foreign women in issuing work visas in rural regions. 

Whatever the program, microeconomic policies that can help engineer an gender steady state in China and India for the short and longer term would (it seems both directly and indirectly) serve the collective future well, as birth controls have indeed sought to do all along. If onward research on bachelor effects finds similar aggregated economic effects, policies inducing institutions that can serve to normalize sex ratios may prospectively even do as much, even more, to pre-emptively stabilize the global economy going forth as traditional economic policy instruments. This particularly given the expected future scale of influence of China and India in the world economy. The human strains of an intensified heirs race could also be treated in the process, while the micro-foundations of macroeconomics may again need to be re-visited. 

Lauren Johnston is a PhD Candidate at Peking University, founder of Sinograduate and a freelancer for the Economist Intelligence Unit. 
(This Article was published in Asia Times) (Copyright 2012 Lauren Johnston)