Chinese grifters posing as brides work the countryside

[samvara]

The bit that freaks me out about this - does "The Wall Street Journal reports on the overabundance of Chinese men of marriageable age (currently 32 million more men than women, roughly the population of Canada)" mean there are 16 ETA 32 million dead baby Chinese girls?

Comments

[sqbr]

Afaict there's also the fact that people whose first child is a girl might risk it and try for another, while those whose first is a boy don't.

[cricketk.livejournal.com]

Pretty much. It's a direct result of the traditional emphasis on boys interacting with the One Child policy.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

Worse than that, I think it's around 32 million :-(

If roughly as many girls as boys are conceived, every missing girl has been aborted or killed.

[black-samvara.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming - very rough maths I know - that half of those parents had a boy first time, and half chose to 'try again'.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

Yes, but half those who 'tried again' would have conceived a second girl, and a quarter of those who 'tried a third time' would conceive a third girl, and so on. The later attempts add up to another 16 million.

Regardless of the strategy you use for deciding how often to conceive, and how often to abort/kill, you still end up with equal numbers of boys and girls conceived. Every excess male corresponds to a missing female. The numbers really are twice as bad as you thought.

If you want to get very depressed, try repeatedly tossing a coin, and every time it comes up tails add a tally to a 'boy' count, and every time it comes up heads add one to either 'girls' or 'aborted or killed,' using whatever criteria you wish. Repeat until the boy count is 30 higher than the girl count, then see what the death rate's up to. Group them into families if it helps.

[black-samvara.livejournal.com]

Ah, I get you now - thanks for the explanation.

[mynxii.livejournal.com]

*is horrified*

[creativemeans.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it means that :(

[wolflullaby.livejournal.com]

That's horrible. :(

[wolflullaby.livejournal.com]

I read this article, and then read another similar one. I am especially horrified by this sentence... "Thanks to its 30-year-old population-planning policy and customary preference for boys, China has one of the largest male-to-female ratios in the world."

It is a blandly worded front for covering something much darker and nastier.

[black-samvara.livejournal.com]

Technically if it works it will be brilliant. After all, males can't have more babies.

It's the thought of all those babies being aborted or killed shortly after birth just because they are female that breaks my heart.

[bannie.livejournal.com]

Ditto :(