Interestingly enough, I was discussing this issue with my ninth graders just this week as part of our unit on China.

A bias in favor of male offspring has left China with 32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls, creating “an imminent generation of excess men,” a study released Friday said.

For the next 20 years, China will have increasingly more men than women of reproductive age, according to the paper, which was published online by the British Medical Journal. “Nothing can be done now to prevent this,” the researchers said.

Chinese government planners have long known that the urge of couples to have sons was skewing the gender balance of the population. But the study, by two Chinese university professors and a London researcher, provides some of the first hard data on the extent of the disparity and the factors contributing to it.

In 2005 , they found, births of boys in China exceeded births of girls by more than 1.1 million. There were 120 boys born for every 100 girls.

I tried to get my students to consider the demographic implications of this development. Being fifteen, their immediate question was "does that mean a bunch of guys are going to have to turn gay?" But after giving the matter some more serious consideration, they actually drew some of the same conclusions that are noted in the study that prompted this article -- that the nation's one child policy and the traditional Chinese preference for boys were the cause. They also raised the issue of possible increases in crime and the availability of "excess young men" for military service as possible ramifications of the trend. Smart kids -- but scary numbers.

Posted by: Greg at 01:22 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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