WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

MISSING GIRLS, LAND AND POPULATION CONTROLS IN RURAL CHINA
Moving to the village level, it is hard to identify significant trends
because smaller numbers are involved. In 1988, Huang Tu had a
population of 2416 in 520 households. The households were divided
into eight “teams,” or “small groups.” Each “team” was the equivalent
of a small village in size, but they were all fused together into what, in
this part of Henan is called a village (cun or cunzhuang). The village
itself was under the authority of a township, or “administrative village”
located several kilometres away and including about 15 surrounding
villages comparable to Huang Tu. Two sets of local demographic data,
from 1989 and from 2004, supplement the official data on sex ratios
from higher levels of government and offer a glimpse at local
conditions. In 1989, I conducted a survey of 50 households selected
from each of the 8 teams. My sample of 83 children aged 0 to 14
shows evidence for skewed sex ratios, with a sex ratio of 152 males per
100 females (Table 2). Due to the small numbers in the sample, the sex
ratios fluctuate widely from year to year and are not statistically
significant, but they suggest that the sex bias may have been present
even before the family planning policy began to be strictly enforced in
the early 1980s.
In 2004 I obtained access to more recent household registration
records for one of the eight teams. Counting all living children in this
sample of 130 aged 0 to 19 also yielded a high sex ratio of 113. 5 Given
the small number of births allowed in any village, it is difficult to
identify reliably local trends without referring to larger samples of
births or age-sex distributions from more villages or longer time
periods. But the Huang Tu data are consistent with the high sex ratios
in the township, county and province.
Table 2 Child sex ratios by age (Males per 100 females) for Huang Tu Village,
1989
Year of birth Age Number Sex ratio
1984-1988 0-4 24 200
1974-1983 5-14 49 133
1974-1988 0-14 83 152
Source: author’s interview sample of 50 households 1989.
5 The team had very few births after 2000, but surprisingly reported more girls than
boys. After the 2000 national census revealed the shocking deficit of girls across
China, national attention to the sex selection problem may have given local officials
incentives to report more equal birth sex ratios. With greater government scrutiny
and penalties for sex-selective abortion, local officials may try to conceal the birth of
sons because illegal abortions of females can be inferred from improbably high birth
sex ratios.
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