The Price of Everything (17 page)

Consider the Punjab and Haryana in northwestern India. According to India’s 1981 census, there were about 108 boys aged six or less for every 100 girls, already a lopsided ratio. Then ultrasound technology spread through the country, allowing parents to determine early the gender of their expected baby. Selective abortions surged. By 2001, the census reported that for each batch of 100 young girls there were 124 young boys.

Dowries no doubt are an important reason why women are such a burden to their families. But they are not the only reason families in South and East Asia try to unburden themselves of their daughters. In South Korea, marrying off a son is often much more expensive than marrying a daughter. Still, in South Korea, the 2000 census reported a ratio of 110 boys for every 100 girls four years old and younger, a ratio that suggests systematic culling of females—either just before birth or quickly afterward. According to one study, there were 61 to 94 girls “missing” in China for every 1,000 born in 1989- 90, and 70 missing girls in South Korea in 1992.

It might all be about supply and demand. In polygamous cultures—for example, among Kenya’s Kipsigis—available women are scarce commodities because rich men hoard them, making them valuable. In India, they do not have the benefit of scarcity.

Monica Das Gupta, a demographer at the World Bank, believes bride prices were common in northwestern India at the turn of the twentieth century. Dowries emerged as declining child mortality boosted population growth and tipped the mating balance in favor of men—who marry older. Today, she told me, the trend is reversing as declining population growth and prenatal culling of female fetuses have reduced the number of young girls for older men to marry. Parents in the Punjab these days scour other Indian regions offering money for brides to marry their sons.

Demand for women is also lower in patriarchal cultures in which male descendants are meant to carry the family line. The killing of girls in South and East Asia has increased not only because of advanced ultrasound technology but also because falling fertility has reduced the size of families and families still want at least one son.

Researchers argue that girls are cheap in the patriarchal systems of South and East Asia because they are excised from their birth families, transplanted forever to those of their husbands. They are useless to pass the lineage down and provide no economic support to their parents. Women are not part of the clan. Men make up the social order; women are brought in to help men reproduce. They must bear a son. Otherwise they have no point.

Some of these biases were codified in law. South Korea’s Family Law of 1958 said inheritance should go down the male line, men must marry outside their lineage, and wives must be transferred to their husband’s family register. The kids, of course, belonged to the father’s line. Only in 2005 did the Supreme Court mandate that women could remain on the register of their parents after marriage. In 2008 parents were allowed to register the children under the mother’s family name.

These practices survive even outside their social and economic context. A study of the 2000 census in the United States found similar lopsided sex ratios in the children of Chinese, Indian, and South Korean parents. Among third children, sons outnumbered daughters by 50 percent if the family already had two girls.

But even in South and East Asia, there is hope that demographic and economic changes could raise the value of women. Industrial development in South Korea has reduced the importance of the family at the center of social and economic life. Living in cities and earning pensions, parents have become less dependent on their sons, who have been able to pursue more independent lives. Having a son has become less urgent. Daughters, meanwhile, have acquired value outside of marriage, gaining an education and joining the labor force.

Unlike India, where sex ratios of children have become steadily more imbalanced over the past half century or more, in Korea, between 1995 and 2000 the number of young boys recorded in the census for each 100 girls fell from 115 to 110.

Jiang Jin, a thirty-one-year-old mother of three, has decided to live an undercover life in Beijing—babysitting her sister’s children for a thousand yuan per month—rather than return to her hometown in Jiangxi and face the penalties for having had three children in violation of China’s one-child law. Enforcement of the law is looser in China’s countryside. Families are often allowed two children. Still, authorities in Jiangxi would fine her perhaps up to five thousand yuan, she says, to register her illicit kids and send them to school. “If you don’t pay the fine,” she said, “they take your house; they sterilize you.”

Jiang Jin’s predicament is not unusual. Like many other Chinese, she wanted a boy, and kept having children until one came. Other Chinese have resorted to more radical solutions. When Deng Xiaoping instituted China’s one-child policy in 1979, his intention was to limit the size of the population so that it would peak at 1.2 billion before shrinking to 700 million by the middle of this century. But he didn’t foresee one of its most notorious consequences. The systematic killing of girls, as families who had a baby girl got rid of her to make space for the boy they needed to take the bloodline to the next generation. While families in some rural areas were allowed to have two children, it still forced parents with one girl to ponder abortion if they happened to expect another. In 2010, China’s Academy of Social Sciences reported that 119 boys were born for every 100 girls.

This, paradoxically, means that girls in China will eventually become very expensive. Today, China is “missing” tens of millions of women. This poses a different demographic challenge: what to do with millions of Chinese men who will fail to marry—what the Chinese call
guang gun,
or “bare branches.” Economists at Harvard estimated that by 2020 there will be 135 men of marriage age—twenty-two to thirty-two—for every 100 potential brides, aged twenty to thirty. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences estimated that by 2020 there would be 24 million men of marriage age without a spouse. The chance that a man over age forty in the countryside would find a spouse would be virtually zero.

This bodes ill for China’s development. The lopsided sex ratios are likely to result in higher crime rates, increasing the number of frustrated and unmoored young men prowling the streets. It will increase the incidence of prostitution, and thus probably of HIV, and increase economic uncertainty for millions of men who will likely reach old age without heirs to care for them. The imbalance will also deepen regional disparities as women from the poorer regions in inland China are drawn to the wealthier coast to find both jobs and better pickings in the marriage market.

Researchers have even suggested the sex imbalance pushed Chinese households into a race to save more, so their sons would have money to compete in the increasingly tight marriage market. This enormous savings rate has contributed to China’s accumulation of some $2.5 trillion in foreign exchange reserves at the end of 2009. If one can believe Alan Greenspan, the former Fed chairman, China’s gender imbalance helped inflate the global housing bubble, as the mass of Chinese savings sloshing through the world’s financial system kept interest rates low and fueled the boom in housing prices all over the world.

Beyond marriage imbalances, China’s disregard for women is squandering a valuable resource. Women accounted for more than half of China’s internal migrants aged between fifteen and twenty-nine, according to the 2000 census. Most of the migrant workers fueling China’s economic boom were young women, who trekked from rural China to the vast assembly lines along the coast.

Studies across the developing world have found that women make more productive decisions than men about the allocation of household resources. In particular, they invest considerably more in their children’s welfare. One study among female tea pickers in rural China found that the survival rates of baby girls increased when tea prices rose. The educational attainment of girls and boys improved noticeably too. This was because rising tea prices boosted women’s wages, ensuring more investment in their children’s health and education.

When Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist Army fled to Taiwan in 1949 after being defeated by Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army, sex ratios in Taiwan tilted abruptly in girls’ favor, as the island was suddenly flooded with young single men. This enhanced women’s bargaining power in the mating market. As a result, the survival rates of baby girls increased, fertility fell, and investments in children’s education grew.

Realizing its predicament, the Chinese government has now set about formulating policies to increase the value of women in their parents’ eyes through programs like the “Care for Girls” initiative, which offered free public education for females and other incentives. And it has even begun to selectively loosen the one-child policy. Three decades after its inception, Shanghai authorities are even offering financial incentives to families who want to have a second child.

If nothing else, the gender imbalance has opened some new business opportunities for women in the marriage market. Payments to the bride’s family, a common institution in rural China known as
cai li,
have surged since the early 2000s, reaching tens of thousands of yuan as rural families become increasingly desperate about finding wives for their sons at any price. The
Wall Street Journal
reported that in Hanzhong, in Shaanxi, central China, eleven newly minted brides had fled from their husbands in a matter of two months—and taken their bride price with them.

THE INTERNATIONAL LABOUR ORGANIZATION
estimates that, excluding sex workers, 8.1 million people around the world are coerced into doing their jobs. That’s not very many, if one considers the popularity of coerced labor through human history.

Slavery and forced labor were prevalent from the Aztec and the Islamic empires to Rome and ancient Greece, from feudal Europe to the antebellum American South. By some standards one might think today’s labor markets are well suited to coercion: it would help employers save real money. These days workers draw almost 65 percent of the nation’s income in wages and benefits—about ten percentage points more than they did eighty years ago, when the government started measuring the statistic consistently. That kind of money seems like a fairly potent incentive for their employers to enslave them. So why don’t they?

Perhaps we’ve learned to be repulsed by slavery. But the historical record suggests that societies’ choice of working conditions has less to do with values and morality, and more with the profitability of how labor is organized. From sixteenth-century Russia to the European colonies in the New World, the decision of whether to employ indentured or free workers has hinged on whether it is cheaper to pay a wage or to feed, clothe, and house slaves while paying for security to keep them enslaved.