WUHAN, China – China is increasingly being forced to confront a demographic nightmare that threatens to destabilize society and undermine meager steps toward freedom in the totalitarian
country.
“Over the next two decades, as many as 40 million young Chinese men won't be able to marry, settle down and start families. There won't be enough wives to go around,” says a feature in USA Today. Historically, governments have dealt with troublesome, unmarried men by tightening the reins of government, sending men off to war, banishing them to far-away public works projects, and conscripting them into security forces such as the paramilitary People's Armed Police, assigned to crush riots and disturbances.
According to China's latest census, the two-decade-old government policy that limits most Chinese couples to one child has contributed to a ratio of 116.9 Chinese boys born for every 100 girls in 2000, up from an already alarming 111.3 boys a decade ago. Both figures are well above the 106 boys for every 100 girls that are normal worldwide.
“This is a seriously dangerous ratio,” Ren Yuling, a delegate to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Committee, told China Youth Daily. The Chinese magazine Beijing Luntan predicted in 1997 that epidemic prostitution, “forced marriages, girls stolen for wives, bigamy, visiting prostitutes, rape, adultery… homosexuality… and weird sexual habits appear to be unavoidable.”
Because of the one-child limit, many couples, particularly in urban areas, have only one legal chance for a son. Many rely on ultrasound machines to identify the sex of fetuses in the womb in order to abort girls. Pre-natal screening was recently banned but remains widespread.
To read the feature in USA Today.
To read a Population Research Institute mail-out on China’s one child policy, click here.
To read LifeSite coverage of Canada’s funding of the one-child policy, click here.
(This update courtesy of LifeSite News.)
