Gender Distro in China

[kojikun]

I keep seeing this, and I don't know why, but people think that China is overwhelmingly male. Shep just said in was 2/3rd male. This is very very very very very wrong.

Age structure:
0-14 years: 23.1% (male 155,473,656; female 141,737,406)
15-64 years: 69.5% (male 461,223,219; female 433,154,970)
65 years and over: 7.4% (male 44,954,643; female 50,431,574) (2003 est.)

total male population: 661,651,518
total female population: 625,323,950

male to female ratio is 1 male to 0.954 females.

compare to the United States:
Age structure:
0-14 years: 20.9% (male 31,098,473; female 29,675,712)
15-64 years: 66.7% (male 96,628,469; female 97,061,559)
65 years and over: 12.4% (male 14,888,185; female 20,990,156) (2003 est.)

total male population: 142,615,127
total female population: 147727427

male to female ratio is 1 male to 1.036 females

The ratio is almost identical in the two countries. So to everyone out there discussing gender demographics in China:

THE MALE-FEMALE RATIO IS ALMOST 1-TO-1, NOT 2/3 MALE.

source: CIA World Factbook

[Admiral Valdemar]

I never believed that bullshit anyway. It's often used to prove China is fucked in the long term economically, but I've never heard anything but regurgitated stats. off the top of the head with many variations.

[PeZook]

So there's a difference of 28 million people aged 15-64 years between males and females?

How's that a 1-1 ratio? Sure, China isn't 2/3rd male, and it never was, but 28 million people is a very large difference. It's nice to look at absolute numbers rather than ratios, which can be misleading.

It would be cool to see how the feminization looks in the big cities, where most of the GNP is produced.

[Julhelm]

28 million ain't that much considering the total population is well over 1000 million.

[PeZook]

However, the population density is severely higher than in other countries, making the disparity much more visible and problematic. Not to mention that, when compared with other countries, the disparity still remains high, even after accounting for the population difference. Case in point:

With 289 million people, the US only has a disparity of around 5 million. If we keep that ratio, we get 20.7 million surplus of females.

In France, with 60 million people, there's around 800 thousand more males than females. This would bring us up to 20 million in a population the size of China.

In the UK, there is a difference of 700 thousand surplus females. In a 60 million population, giving us somewhere close to 15 million people in a country the size of China.

The total difference for China, on the other hand, is 36 million males with no hope of ever starting a family. That's 16 million more than in France, one of the least feminized countries in Europe. And it's all very concentrated.

[Howedar]

Do you not understand the concept of percentage? Jesus Christ.

[kojikun]

PeZook, you're such a dumbass. You should get a custom title: "Unfamiliar with the Maths of Fractions and Proportions"

[kojikun]

errata: china's ratio should be 0.945 not 0.954.

KEY:
[country]
: male population
: female population
: ratio of males to females
: whole-number ratio of males to females
: difference with a population of 1000 men

some more comparisons demonstrating china's ever so slight deficity:

chinese whole number ratio: 200:189
common population difference: 55 fewer women

uk
29,676,576
30,418,072
ratio: 1:1.025
whole number ratio: 40:41
common population difference: 25 more women

canada
15,926,174
16,280,939
ratio: 1:1.022
whole number ratio: 500:511
common population difference: 22 more women

france
29,352,021
30,828,508
ratio: 1:1.050
whole number ratio: 20:21
common population difference: 50 more women

spain
19,669,404
20,548,009
ratio: 1:1.045
whole number ratio: 200:209
common population difference: 45 more women

germany
40,368,387
42,029,939
ratio: 1:1.041
whole number ratio: 1,000:1,041
common population difference: 41 more women

[Son of the Suns]

Shep just said in was 2/3rd male. This is very very very very very wrong.

If you want to carry on arguments, do so in the thread that it originated in.

[kojikun]

this thread is not an argument. its a restatement of facts. what you quote was a citation of an example of people getting these facts wrong.

[PeZook]

errata: china's ratio should be 0.945 not 0.954.
<snip>

Hmm...it appears you're right.

Conceeded.

[MKSheppard]

How the fuck did this end up in HOS?

[MKSheppard]

This was a serious fucking thread, who the fuck moved it to HOS? HOS is for total utter garbage, not serious debate, even if one side fucked up
their math a little.

[MKSheppard]

Hey, I can move threads out of HOS!

[LordShaithis]

The Red Chinese are coming and THEY WANT OUR WOMEN! I volunteer all of my ex-girlfriends.

[Admiral Valdemar]

So long as they don't take our precious fluids...

[MKSheppard]

The Red Chinese are coming and THEY WANT OUR WOMEN! I volunteer all of my ex-girlfriends.

They're actually buying North Korean Women

***************

http://www.parapundit.com/archives/002121.html#002121

Chinese men are buying North Korean women as wives.

But it's easy for Chinese, including smugglers and human traffickers, to cross illegally into North Korea, they say, and this props up a thriving black-market border trade that helps keep the barren North Korean economy afloat.

Dandong natives such as laid-off factory worker Lao Zhou, whose picturesque home town draws tourists eager to spy on North Korea with telescopes, shake their heads when they talk about refugees.

"North Korean women make good wives. They are beautiful and hard-working," he said, echoing an oft-repeated view. "It doesn't cost much to buy a North Korean girl for a wife and just a few thousand kwai (hundreds of dollars) to get them a residency permit."

There is also a slave trade in prostitutes. The demand for prostitutes will likely rise right along with the demand for wives.

Consider the larger context for this report about wife buying and female sex trade. On my FuturePundit blog I've reported on the sex ratio imbalance in China caused by the selective abortion of females.

Li said the normal newborn sex proportion is 100:104-107, and if China's disproportionate figure is allowed to continue unchecked, there would be 30 to 40 million marriage-age men who would be single all their lives by 2020.

"Such serious gender disproportion poses a major threat to the healthy, harmonious and sustainable growth of the nation's population and would trigger such crimes and social problems as mercenary marriage, abduction of women and prostitution," Li said.

Some believe this sex ration imbalance will make China militarily aggressive and they may be right.

In a new book, Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population (MIT Press), Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer warn that the spread of sex selection is giving rise to a generation of restless young men who will not find mates. History, biology, and sociology all suggest that these "surplus males" will generate high levels of crime and social disorder, the authors say. Even worse, they continue, is the possibility that the governments of India and China will build up huge armies in order to provide a safety valve for the young men's aggressive energies.

But consider a different possibility: Chinese men may buy so many North Korean wives that North Korea will either become militarily aggressive or collapse from within. This is not implausible. Those 30 to 40 million single men in China in the year 2020 mean there wil be 3 to 4 times more single men in China than there are women in North Korea. The Chinese will be more affluent than the North Koreans unless radical changes happen to North Korea's economy. North Korea is the place where Chinese men will have the best competitive advantage in angling for wives. The other East Asian countries are not nearly as poor as North Korea and North Korea shares a long 1,416 km land border with China.

China's economy is growing rapidly. Buying power of Chinese men is rising. Even poor Chinese farmers can afford to buy North Korean women.

Lee, the former clerk, said she was fooled into believing she would have a good life in China. "One day, a man from my home town came to see me. He was looking for good-looking women from North Korea to go to China. The prettier the better. I decided on the spot to go.

"Of course, he fooled me. He said he would introduce me to a good man, a university graduate, who was looking for a wife. Then I realized North Korean women were being sold at a cheap price to rural farmers in China."

The fact that even a rural farmer in China can afford to buy a North Korean wife means that there are far more people in China with the buying power to acquire a North Korean wife than there are North Korean women.

Expect the hostility of North Korean men toward China to increase.

Ryu remembers a woman six months pregnant arriving at the camp. The baby's father was Chinese. Four guards grabbed the woman's limbs and threw her toward the ceiling over and over until the woman aborted the fetus. Ryu helped clean up the blood afterwards. "The guards said they hated Chinese babies," says Ryu. "The North Koreans hate the Chinese now, because they are rich and betrayed socialism."

China has been cracking down on North Koreans trying to cross the border into China. But official corruption in China is sufficiently widespread that black market forces will probably prevail over official policy as a consequence of the rising buying power of single men desperate for wives.

Ms Kim was picked up a year after getting married and giving birth to a daughter. Her new family pleaded for her release, arguing that the baby needed her mother because she was still breastfeeding. Ms Kim says they paid a 10,000RMB bribe for her freedom. Three years later she is well established and has a residence permit.

Chinese men will pressure the Chinese government to allow North Korean women to pass into China. The Chinese government will see these women as a source of women to reduce the frustrations of single men who can not find Chinese wives. Chinese leaders are going to have to weigh the foreign policy and domestic policy consequences of their border policy with North Korea. If they continue to clamp down this may just encourage more corruption.

Chinese money is also going to flow to North Korean border guards and officials and corrupt them as well. This is already happening. So the North Korean guards are not all immune to the enticements of cash in exchange for looking the other way. As living standards rise in China and the female shortage worsens the amount of money available for smuggling women out of North Korea will rise.

The shortage of women in China may end up posing an existential threat to the Pyongyang regime more powerful than anything US policy makers are likely to do. North Korean leaders might react to this threat by engaging in market liberalization reforms aimed at raising North Korean living standards enough to reduce the level of desperation of North Korean women.

The regime in North Korea faces a more general economic threat from China because of rising wages in China. The higher the wages go the greater the incentive for Northeast China factory managers and other businesses to turn to the black market to supply cheap North Korean labor. This will pull both men and women out of North Korea. Will that destabilize the regime more or less than the selective removal of women from North Korea?

[Mayabird]

The Red Chinese are coming and THEY WANT OUR WOMEN! I volunteer all of my ex-girlfriends.

They're actually buying North Korean Women

<snip article>

It's interesting that they talked about the rural farmers buying women. The article didn't say this, but the gender disparity is much greater in the country than in the cities. In some rural areas of China, 80% of the children are male. It's so bad there that some girls are being married to their cousins and brothers so that the boys don't have to go unmarried (the number of birth defects has gone up tremendously in those same areas). 30-40 million may not sound like a lot in a population of 1.3 billion, but if an area however small suddenly ends up 80% male, there will be problems.

[Stormbringer]

The ratio is almost identical in the two countries. So to everyone out there discussing gender demographics in China:

THE MALE-FEMALE RATIO IS ALMOST 1-TO-1, NOT 2/3 MALE.

While Shep's the only one that made that particular statement, the simple male to female ratio is not the whole story of it. It has as much to do with the attendant social issues of that disparity and their effect on the social fabric.

[kojikun]

While Shep's the only one that made that particular statement, the simple male to female ratio is not the whole story of it. It has as much to do with the attendant social issues of that disparity and their effect on the social fabric.

Oh I never said that the male-female ratio was the only thing of importance, but the gender distribution is mistaken for being higher than it is WAY too frequently.

[Stormbringer]

While Shep's the only one that made that particular statement, the simple male to female ratio is not the whole story of it. It has as much to do with the attendant social issues of that disparity and their effect on the social fabric.

Oh I never said that the male-female ratio was the only thing of importance, but the gender distribution is mistaken for being higher than it is WAY too frequently.

I don't think that's the case (with the exception of Shep). A lot of sites tend to just give the 28 or so million statistic with out putting it in context of entire population. And often times the report is from an area that does have a particularly uneven distribution with out mentioning that. It's far more a simple lack of meaningful context than distortion of the actual ratio.

[kojikun]

Maybe I've just seen to much of Shep's Chinese Doomsaying?

[Stormbringer]

Maybe I've just seen to much of Shep's Chinese Doomsaying?

Perhaps. Or perhaps you're simply making a few too many assumptions.


Oh, and the social problems sure as hell do have the potential to be pretty nasty. The fact that the difference is quite probably artificial and if it is, is likely to get worse is a big problem.

[Tsyroc]

Shouldn't it be more important to look at the male to female ratio of people at or below child bearing/marriage age?

Including people who aren't likely to have any more children or get married again tends to skew things away from what is supposed to be the potential problem.

I also don't get the 15-64 age bracket. Are they just counting those people as adults because it seems to me it would make more sense to cut things off at about 40, which is pretty close to where women stop being able to have children without extra medical help.

Obviously the numbers show that the male to female ratio of even the younger generation isn't as bad as the 2/3rds male suggested but it might be a good time for China to invest in some hand lube factories.

I also wonder, will the shortage of women help increase the value of women in Chinese society or will it push them towards being more of a commodity (ie buying wives from Korea etc...)?

[Tsyroc]

Okay, it clicked.

The 15-64 age bracket is probably for people most likely to be in the workforce.