Religious Geography and County‐Level Sex Ratios in China

Abstract

The sex ratio at birth in China is highly imbalanced in favor of boys. Past research on sex ratios in China emphasizes economic factors for their weakening effect on the Confucian tradition of son preference. Research in the sociology of religion suggests that religious geography may affect sex ratios through the spill‐over of religious teachings to those living in areas dominated by a religious tradition. To assess this linkage, we investigate the relationship between religious geography and county‐level child sex ratios using the 2000 China Population Census and the 2004 China Economic Census, the most complete and recent data available on religious presence in China. Applying spatial analyses of 2,685 counties (over 90% of all counties), we find that counties with a greater presence of Daoist temples have more imbalanced (male‐biased) sex ratios, whereas a greater presence of Buddhist temples and Islamic mosques is associated with less imbalanced sex ratios.

How Can Digital Maps of Religions Inform Us about Fractionalization and Polarization in Post-Communist Romania?

“…Park 2002C. Park , 2005, connecting it to (ethnic) cultural proximity (Berceanu et al 2023;Creţan et al 2014) and elections (Barsanuc et al 2021;Doiciar and Creţan 2021), as well as to specific concepts of space, place and identity that frame new landscapes and spatial patterns and often relate to new paradigms for various problematizing dialogues on religious backgrounds and religion from a geographic perspective (Stump 2008;Knott 2008;Tong et al 2021;Yorgason and della Dora 2009;Berceanu et al 2023;Yang and McPhail 2023). As regards religion geographies, Romania remains an interesting European spatial sample, with certain dynamic religious patterns framed both during past layers of time and in recent post-socialist decades with interesting, real diversity, which will briefly be investigated in the next section.…”