Gender Imbalance In China

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Despite the Chinese proverb “Women hold up half the sky”, Chinese society prefers sons to daughters. Gender imbalance is a serious problem in China with a 3.8% gender gap in 2011 as seen above, translating into 52 million more men than women. The disparity has persisted and has been above the global average of 107:100, for nearly 30 years (Zhang, 2011). A clear consequence of son preference is the increase in trafficking of women (Conaway, 2008). Gender imbalance has largely been a result of the combination of the implementation of one child policy in 1979, the increased availability of technology to detect gender from 1980 onwards (Ebenstein, Li and Meng, 2010), and the long-standing cultural preference for male heirs. This paper posits…show more content…
(14) Evaluation on impact of Government Policy on Gender Imbalance The OCP (simplified Chinese: 计划生育政策; Hanyu Pinyin: ji hua sheng yu zheng ce; literally “policy of birth planning”), (福建省年度計劃生育,1997), is the population control policy of the PRC . The OCP is mainly targeted at urban areas and studies have shown that it prevented more than 250 million births. It limits the urban ethnic Han to a single child. Critics argue that the policy has led to female infanticides due to traditional preference for boys. Families are able to have a second child if their first child is a female after a span of several years in rural areas (BBC, 2000). There are other considerations commonly applied to allow couples to have more than one child (Goitom, 2011).…show more content…
The official policy also grants local officials the flexibility to make exceptions to allow for a second child, which therefore diminishes the importance of governmental policy. Another visible example would be the 2008 Sichuan Province earthquake and Chengdu earthquake, wherein new regulations that were announced for parents from the province who have lost their children in the earthquakes. These parents were given legal permission to conceive a second child (The Associated Press, 2008). Exceptions made to the OCP under special circumstances show that the policy is not as rigid and stringent after

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