WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

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LI S.–WEI Y.- JIANG Q. - M. W. FELDMAN
ing females” phenomenon must be considered to be mainly a reflection
of reduced female child survival.
Jiang et al. (2005) systematically studied the number and percentage
of missing females in the 20 th century in China, and estimated the
total number of missing females in the 20 th century from birth cohorts
between 1900 and 2000 to be 35.59 million, about 5 percent of the
total investigated cohort. Figure 9 graphs the historical variation in the
percentage of missing females.
Figure 9 Percentages of missing females during 1900–2000
%
16
14
12
10
8
6
4
2
0
-2
1990
1985
1980
1975
1970
1965
1960
1955
1950
1945
1940
1935
1930
1925
1920
1915
1910
1905
1900
Source: Jiang et al. (2005).
Proportions of missing females (%)
Smoothed proportions of missing females
by five-year intervals
Year
2000
1995
The percentage of missing females differs greatly in different historical
periods. Before 1949, the overall percentage of missing females
was relatively high. Since 1900, the percentage first remained stable,
and around 1910, at the end of Qing dynasty, it reached a local peak,
after which it declined again. Since 1920, the percentage of missing
females has generally tended to rise. In the middle and late 1930s, at
the beginning of the war against Japan, it reached a peak again, and
then began to decline. After 1949, although the percentage of missing
females fluctuated, it remained generally low until the mid-1970s. In
this period, there were two local peaks: one during the great famine of
the late 1950s and early 1960s following the Great Leap Forward, and
the other during the Cultural Revolution. Since the mid-1970s, the
percentage of missing females has been continuously increasing, although
the current value is still lower than the peak for the 20 th century.