Fertility and Distorted Sex Ratios in a Rural Chinese County: Culture, State, and Policy

Abstract

This article explores how gender bias in population policies interacts with local culture to reinforce distortions in sex ratios among infants and young children in rural China. It argues that population policies introduce new sources of inequality into local culture while, conversely, gender inequalities embedded in local culture influence formal population policy and practice. Applying an institutional approach to the study of an agricultural county in Jiangxi province, southeast China, the analysis identifies four ways in which an interplay between gender bias in policy and culture produces gendered fertility outcomes: (1) the creation of gendered official categories such as "daughter-only households"; (2) a male bias embedded in local government; (3) the use of local gender norms in state pedagogy; and (4) the reworking or subverting of official norms in ways that reinforce gender inequalities in local reproductive culture. The article concludes that despite indications of contestation of village patriarchy, discrimination against daughters is likely to persist. Copyright 2003 by The Population Council, Inc..

Son Preference and Household Income in Rural China

“…In her study of a single county in Jianxi Province in 2000, Murphy (2003) found the male/female sex ratio among children under five years to be no less than 1.27. She gave three possible reasons for this extremely high ratio, all based on an underlying preference for sons: female infanticide, the abandonment of girl babies, and sexselective induced abortions.…”

Returning to China: The Experience of Adopted Chinese Children and Their Parents

“…Established to combat escalating population growth that occurred during the pronatalist Mao Period (1949 to the 1970s), this regulation was instituted in 1979 and continues in a revised form to the present day. Due to a historical preference for sons to provide labor power and perform ancestral rites of worship, as well as expectations that they will care for their parents in old age (Greenhalgh & Winckler, 2005;Murphy, 2003), stringent Chinese fertility regulations have resulted in abortion, neglect, illegal abandonment, and even infanticide of both girls and children with special needs (Croll, 2000;Chu, 2001;Yong & Lavely, 2003). In the process, thousands of healthy girls-the majority of them second or third daughters in families that seek to bear a son (Johnson, 2004)-have become available for adoption.…”

Explaining son preference in rural India: the independent role of structural versus individual factors

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