Looking for chinese books about gendercide

[teresa90]

Hi everyone! I'm a graduate student and I'm looking for something to translate for my thesis. It will be about gendercide in China as consequence of the One-Child Policy, so I am desperately in search for some book about this argument, written in Chinese, of course. Can anyone help me? Xiexie nimen!

[gerri]

Can't imagine this being a topic that has been published about in the mainland (and outside of it, I would be wary of the sources)...

[skylee]

Do you also study the gendercide in India?

[hedwards]

I've heard people claiming that it happens in China, but it's unlikely that there are any studies reputable, or otherwise, that would cover the topic as this would make the government look really bad if true. And without the government at least looking the otherway, you wouldn't be able to collect enough data to make for a reliable study.

 

That's not to say that it doesn't happen, but when I was over there I wasn't seeing the sort of sexism that would suggest a preference of such strength. Granted, my Chinese wasn't that good, but who knows.

[Lu]

I don't have any ideas directly, but perhaps check the bibliographies of the books you already found to see if they cite anything in Chinese.

Skylee: what's wrong with studying something taking place in China? Paying attention to Occupy Central doesn't mean we also need to pay attention to Occupy Wall Street. I'm confident India is getting plenty of attention from other people (who in turn might not be looking at China).

[Kobo-Daishi]

Do you also study the gendercide in India?

 

I was reading a recent opinion piece on why India will never catch up with China and one of the reasons the writer came up with is gender inequality.

 

http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/why-china-really-leads-india-114121001134_1.html

 

He said that India ranked 132nd, or 100 places below China "on a gender inequality index put out by the United Nations Development Programme behind even Pakistan and Bangladesh, not to mention Sri Lanka at 75", about how the rich do gender selection to ensure the birth of a male child, how women in China are safe to be out alone even past midnight whereas women in India aren't even safe after 9 P.M.

 

I wonder how prevalent female abortions really were back in the days of the "one-child" policy. The way to determine the sex of a baby is by ultrasound. Was that a routine procedure in China before the economic opening up? If one didn't know the sex of a baby before the birth it would be unlikely that abortions would be targeted specifically against female fetuses.

 

I would gather that most abortions would have been after the birth of the first child and it would apply equally to any pregnancy after, irregardless of gender.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

 

The citations mentioned in this Wikipedia article might have bibliographies for sources for their research.

 

But we'll probably never have a truly accurate accounting.

 

In the 1980s, adoptions accounted for half of the so-called "missing girls".^[45] Through the 1980s, as the one-child policy came into force, parents who desired a son but had a daughter often failed to report or delayed reporting female births to the authorities. Some parents may have offered up their daughters for formal or informal adoption. A majority of children who went through formal adoption in China in the later 1980s were girls, and the proportion who were girls increased over time.^[45]

 

Kobo.

[Shelley]

I heard and I have no proof that this is true: that during the first years of the one child policy women were "encouraged" to have abortions of the second pregnancy right up to the 8th month.

 

Also heard that if the first pregnancy produced a girl this child would "disappear" and a second pregnancy was allowed as the first had "failed."

 

Disappear might be anything from being sent to the country to live with relatives or worse, being abandoned in a ditch.

 

All of this is what I have been told and I have no evidence or proof this is true.

 

I find the idea of someone choosing this for their thesis subject very strange and somewhat depressing.

[skylee]

Skylee: what's wrong with studying something taking place in China?

Did I say something was wrong?

I asked the question because there is a documentary film called "It's a girl" about the gendercide in China and India. It seems to be a good idea to study both countries on this subject.

http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2221404/

[Kobo-Daishi]

I heard and I have no proof that this is true: that during the first years of the one child policy women were "encouraged" to have abortions of the second pregnancy right up to the 8th month.

 

Also heard that if the first pregnancy produced a girl this child would "disappear" and a second pregnancy was allowed as the first had "failed."

 

Disappear might be anything from being sent to the country to live with relatives or worse, being abandoned in a ditch.

 

All of this is what I have been told and I have no evidence or proof this is true.

 

That reminds me of a "straw dog".

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_dog_%28disambiguation%29

 

 

 

A variant of the expression "straw man"

• Most often encountered in business and engineering circles instead of straw man proposal

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

 

 

 

A straw man is a common type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on the misrepresentation of an opponent's argument.^[1] To be successful, a straw man argument requires that the audience be ignorant or uninformed of the original argument.

 

It also reminds me of the "blood libel" that were used to persecute the Jews in Europe in the olden days.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel

 

 

Blood libel (also blood accusation)^[1][2] is an accusation^[3][4][5] that Jews kidnapped and murdered the children of Christians to use their blood as part of their religious rituals during Jewish holidays.^[1][2][6] Historically, these claims—alongside those of well poisoning and host desecration—have been a major theme in European persecution of Jews.^[4]

 

Kobo.

[Silent]

 

I was reading a recent opinion piece on why India will never catch up with China and one of the reasons the writer came up with is gender inequality.

Personally I think gender inequality is a bogus reason. First of all public opinion can change quite fast, even something deep engrained in society like gender inequality may very well change dramatically in just a generation or two.

 

 

That's not to say that it doesn't happen, but when I was over there I wasn't seeing the sort of sexism that would suggest a preference of such strength. Granted, my Chinese wasn't that good, but who knows.

I'ld say the gender ratio's give a fair indication of what's going on, though it is influenced by other factors too. Just not noticing doesn't mean too much assuming you were just an ordinary tourist/didn't stay there extensively. Specially when you don't know the language very well gauging attitudes can be very tricky. First of all, you miss a lot/most of what is said and you will not meet the average chinese, more likely the chinese you meet will have a strongly biased view and attitude compared to the average chinese.

[hedwards]

@Silent, I was there an entire year and mostly in areas where foreigners don't visit. The town wasn't even one that most Chinese knew about and it doesn't show up on maps unless you've got one that shows all the towns out there. The schools I was dealing with mostly had women running them and a lot of the businesses as well. It's certainly possible that it was there and I wasn't noticing it, but outwardly, I wasn't seeing anything that suggested that women were at the sort of disadvantage they are in some other parts of the world.

 

I did see things that I would consider to be backwards while I was there, but the Chinese I was dealing with were mostly ones that weren't used to dealing with foreigners, during my time in 石门 there was pretty much just me and two other foreign teachers. Most of the Chinese I was meeting had never met a foreigner before.

 

But, who knows, it's definitely possible that the sexism was there, I just have a hard time buying a country where women are running businesses and getting to be executives is also a country where parents are going out of their way to learn the sex of their baby so that they can selectively abort it. It just doesn't seem consistent with the general attitude I saw towards women.

[imron]

I don't think the government makes any firm move to discourage discussion on this topic. In fact there are laws preventing disclosing the sex of the child before birth for precisely this reason, so if anything, they clearly acknowledge this is a potential problem.

I'm not sure where you'd go looking to find original material to translate though.

[陳德聰]

I think that female infanticide is probably something easier to look up than supposed gender-based abortions. Bypasses the nonsense Kobo is posting about logical fallacies.

[Kobo-Daishi]

Bypasses the nonsense Kobo is posting about logical fallacies.

 

Did you read what was quoted from Shelly?

 

I heard and I have no proof that this is true: that during the first years of the one child policy women were "encouraged" to have abortions of the second pregnancy right up to the 8th month.

 

Also heard that if the first pregnancy produced a girl this child would "disappear" and a second pregnancy was allowed as the first had "failed."

 

Disappear might be anything from being sent to the country to live with relatives or worse, being abandoned in a ditch.

 

All of this is what I have been told and I have no evidence or proof this is true.

 

Heard but no proof is true. What I've been told and no evidence.

 

How else would you address such hearsay as other than "logical fallacies"?

 

Like saying heard black guy raped a white woman in the American west.

 

Kobo.

[li3wei1]

Kobo, Shelley clearly labelled his stuff as unsubstantiated rumor. Nothing wrong with that. Quoting from Wikipedia is one step up from that.

[Kobo-Daishi]

@Li3wei1,

 

Yes, Shelley did label his stuff as unsubstantiated rumor.

 

But, Wikipedia is merely just one step up from that? Even for a definition of a term? 

 

Kobo.

[Lu]

Hedwards, I have no way of knowing the specific situation where you were, and perhaps things were actually very equal there. But there is a good chance that, for example, the leaders of the village were mostly men; the people with the most money were mostly men; and there were more boys than girls. Even if these things were not true in your village, they are true for China.

In addition, women are still (or again) seen as the weaker sex, they are often disadvantaged in the housing market, they are discriminated against if they don't marry in time ('in time' meaning 'preferably right out of university, but definitely before turning 30'). There is a lot of domestic violence against women, most of the leadership is male (and Han, but that's a different discussion), most rich people and CEO's and such are male... Need I go on? There is a lot of sexism in China. It doesn't bother most Chinese, so they might not tell you about it. As a foreigner you won't be on the receiving end of it, so you probably won't experience it either. But if you look a little closer, you can't miss it.

[Silent]

 

 

@Silent, I was there an entire year and mostly in areas where foreigners don't visit. The town wasn't even one that most Chinese knew about and it doesn't show up on maps unless you've got one that shows all the towns out there. The schools I was dealing with mostly had women running them and a lot of the businesses as well. It's certainly possible that it was there and I wasn't noticing it, but outwardly, I wasn't seeing anything that suggested that women were at the sort of disadvantage they are in some other parts of the world.

You may very well have a correct impression, but I'm not convinced based on my experiences and the figures I (perhaps incorrectly) remember. Even in Somaliland I've seen quite a few businesses run by women and fairly liberal behaviour from girls in the marriagable age. In conversations nothing was said that pointed toward gender inequality, but the subject was never explicitely discussed. Still I'm convinced it exists.

 

If I remember correctly the genderratio at birth is significantly off and the imbalance has increased over the last decennia at least up till the start of this century. Of course there are more factors in play that may effect the genderratio at birth (e.g. pollution), but for the sizable discrepancy in China I've a hard time to come up with a different explanation that does not contain selective arbortion/infanticide. But of course these are just my two cents without basis is scientific research.

[hedwards]

@Lu, you could say the same thing about the US. It doesn't mean that there's any sexism going on, despite complaints by women's rights activists. Most politicians are men for the simple reason that men are far more likely to choose to run for office. Men are over-represented as executives as well, but men are also similarly over-represented in the military, and various dangerous jobs as well. Women just make choices that tend to put them more towards the middle of the pack and then have a tendency to divorce much more easily than men do, so you wind up with a lot of American women in poverty compared with men.

 

I can't say exactly what causes men to be over-represented in political appointments, but I doubt very much that the Chinese government looks to promote unqualified women just to maintain a balance. I'd also point out that those positions represent probably less than a hundredth of a percent of the total population and using that as any sort of evidence is just not going to work. Being a government official at the higher levels is a rare event and as such, you can't make any valid assertions based upon the presence or absence of a group in that very tiny sampling of people.

[li3wei1]

Women  . . . have a tendency to divorce much more easily than men do

 

I guess this would be all the women getting divorced from each other, then, while all-male marriages are much more stable?