The published population data of major cities show that the household population of China’s fifteen mega-cities all show a trend of more women than men. Is this because big cities are more suitable for women to live in? Actually, it is not. Some experts point out that the ratio of men to women in a place actually has a lot to do with the level of economic development.
Research shows: the more developed the economy, the more female population
China’s seventh census data has been difficult to produce, but the statistical yearbooks of major cities have recently been released one after another. 2019 data show that the household population of China’s fifteen megacities, including North, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, all show a trend of more women and fewer men. The most imbalanced gender ratio is in Foshan, where men account for 94.71% of the number of women in the household population; the largest number of men is in Shenzhen, at 99.68%. Some analysis points out that the more economically developed a city is, the more likely it is to show more women than men, and women seem to be more likely to stay in big cities.
Yi Fuxian, a China population expert at the University of Wisconsin, tweeted that the more severe the aging, the more women outnumber men, with Hong Kong having the highest percentage of women. Women, who live 6-7 years longer than men, are the biggest victims of childlessness and aging.
In an interview with the station, Xia Ming, a professor of political science at the City University of New York, said that the overflow of female population in big cities is caused by a combination of reasons. He said that the total number of male babies born in China has long been higher than that of female babies due to family planning policies, but women have been able to have breathing space in big cities because the population in big cities is more educated and the patriarchal ideology has faded. At the same time, the high demand for female employees in the developed economies of big cities, especially in the service sector, has attracted a large rural female population to the cities.
“There is still discrimination against women involved in rural China, such as girls not being allowed to eat at the table on New Year’s Day, etc. These deep discriminations can make women feel that there is no hope in the countryside. Women have another advantage in adaptability, including language skills and dependence on the home. Families are now pushing them outward so that the degree of female mobility, especially to the cities, will be high,” Xia Ming said.
Liu Kaiming, head of the Institute of Contemporary Social Observation in Shenzhen, analyzed that the uneven gender distribution of the population is mainly influenced by the traditional concept of marriage, with economically developed big cities being more attractive to women: “Chinese men have been used to marrying women of the same class or lower (class) for thousands of years, so that a man has very many choices, he can choose in big cities, and also He can choose between a big city, a small city, or even a rural area. Women’s choice (is relatively narrow), especially in these decades, women want to marry people who are more capable, better positioned and have higher income levels than themselves, and this has always been the case.”
Xia Ming believes that the long-standing imbalance in the level of economic development between China’s urban and rural areas has led to an uneven distribution of the population by gender, and if comprehensive and integrated efforts are not made to promote comprehensive rural development, the whole society will be further trapped in a vicious circle of polarized economic development and gender imbalance, which will lead to deep-rooted social problems.
Xia Ming said, “The two major phenomena that have been discussed in China in the past two decades are the phenomenon of bachelor and the phenomenon of leftover women. Because there is gender selection under the family planning policy, such as female infanticide, especially in rural areas where even 30 million men cannot find a wife, this pressure has led to human trafficking and smuggling of women in rural China.”
Related tweet by demographer Yi Fuxian (screenshot from Twitter)
Economic Divergence and Population Gender Imbalance Are Caused by Each Other
According to data released by China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the sex ratio of men to women for those born after 1994 exceeds 110:100, while under normal circumstances, the sex ratio of human newborns should converge to 1:1, with a maximum of 107:100. since the implementation of the open second-child policy in 2015, the ratio of men to women for second-child births has often exceeded 130 or 160, reaching 260 in some regions at one point. according to The authorities predict that China will have a male surplus population of more than 15% per year between 2015 and 2045, and by 2050, there will be at least 30 million unmarried men over the age of 50 alone. Gender imbalance will overtake aging as China’s biggest demographic problem.
Only in the less economically developed Jiangxi, the province’s male to female ratio is as high as 120:100, gender imbalance has led Jiangxi to become “marriage squeeze” one of the most serious areas. In recent years, the high marriage bride price in Jiangxi is nationally known, “early marriage of underage women”, “Vietnamese bride” phenomenon is common.
Xia Ming believes that to solve the problem of gender birth and distribution imbalance, we must start by solving the polarization of urban and rural economic development and the household registration system: “The Chinese government keeps proposing to build a new socialist countryside, trying to digest the peasants in place, but it goes against the laws of the economy. The direction of each person’s migration is related to employment opportunities, and more jobs cannot be in county-level cities. After the reform of state-owned enterprises, the industrial system in county-level cities collapsed, (making it impossible to provide more jobs).”
In 2005, the Fifth Plenary Session of the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) adopted the “11th Five-Year Plan Proposal”, which proposed to solidly promote the construction of a new socialist countryside, including the comprehensive development of rural production, the establishment of a long-term mechanism to increase farmers’ income, and the provision of adequate public financial support for rural areas in education, health care and social security, but with little success for more than a decade. According to the “2020 Migrant Worker Monitoring Survey Report” by China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the total number of migrant workers across China will remain high in 2020, reaching more than 280 million, with rural population outflow leading to population explosion in big cities and the aging of China’s rural population continuing to deepen. According to the South China Morning Post, the delay in the release of China’s seven census data, some experts said that not only the birth rate and sex ratio are not optimistic, but the complexity of the work of counting migrant workers may be one of the reasons for the delay in releasing the census data.
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