NPR - Religion and One Child Policy in China

My beloved National Public Radio has run a couple of excellent stories over the past few weeks. I was only able to catch bits and pieces of them as they happened live on the radio. But I found time today to catch up on the both of the series - New Believers: A Religious Revolution in China and China's One Child Policy.

The first series - New Believers - was in five parts. The following clips ran Monday through Friday on the program, All Things Considered:

In The Land Of Mao, A Rising Tide Of Christianity
China’s Divided Catholics Seek Reconciliation
Female Imams Blaze Trail Amid China's Muslims
Beijing Finds Common Cause With Chinese Buddhists
China's Leaders Harness Folk Religion For Their Aims

All of these contain either audio slide shows or photos, so be sure to check those out along with the audio.

This is a worthwhile series. It covers a lot of the bases that should be covered in a China religion discussion. In particular, I found the story on the female imams of Henan Province informative. I was not aware that China had such a unique sect of Islam. There are no female imams outside of China.

The second series - China's One Child Policy - was also a week-long series. It ran on the program, Marketplace by American Public Media:

How China's one-child policy came to be
One-child workers: A generation of 'little emperors'
China's only children carry family hope
In China: More kids or more stuff?
Chinese labor pool on the decline
Back Story

Also be sure to check out the "Cast of Characters" at the bottom of the page. It profiles some of the 老百姓 - normal Chinese people - covered in the stories.

These programs too were all very good. I want to highlight one section from the third one, "China's only children carry family hope," that particularly resonated with me:

Scott Tong: For sixth grader Fang Jin Xue, the day starts at seven, sharp, with a...

Fang Rong: Baobei kuai dian!

Hurry up! From her mom. The 12 year-old grunts a word of compliance. And then pulls on her clothes: Green hoodie sweatshirt, black cotton pants and pink eyeglasses. The morning hustle feels like my house on a school day -- but this is a Saturday.

Fang Jin Xue explains why: Tutoring class, every weekend.

Fang Jin Xue: First, two classes of English. Then one science, one writing, one Chinese. Then two math classes. It goes late, so we eat dinner at the school.

Mom Fang Rong nukes some sesame porridge. They wolf it down. And scamper down seven flights of stairs -- no elevator here. It's hectic, mom says. Every family is racing to get its one child ahead.

Fang Rong: Competition is fierce, so we all feel we have to do something, right or wrong. If parents don't put kids in tutoring classes, they panic.

Fang Rong, the mom, is a factory quality control worker, making $7,000 a year, about the median income in urban China. Dad works at a factory too. Together, they spend 10 percent of their income on their daughter's schooling. Surveys suggest other families shell out as much as 50 percent.

It makes for a thriving education market, says Tom Doctoroff at the marketing firm J. Walter Thompson.

Tom Doctoroff: Anything that helps a kid become smarter, and able to compete in an increasingly dog-eat-dog landscape is a priority for the parents. Whether it's English lessons or piano lessons, parents are gonna spend money and time in making sure their kids are equipped to rise.

Read/listen to the entire story

I saw this kind of stuff first-hand. In fact, a huge chunk of my time in China was spent working at a private English training school first as a teacher and then later as a manager.

The school I worked for, which was one of many that the American-owned company operated throughout China, was a weekend "training schools" like the one described in this program. Chinese children would attend a two hour session of classes at the "school" every weekend for 24 weeks (two weekends off every six months). The parents would pay about an average of $200 for a semester of classes.

The classes' costs were based upon how much time was spent with the foreign teacher. If a foreign teacher taught the entire two hour block, it cost $200 a semester. If a foreign teacher only taught thirty minutes of the class, then the classes would be about half that price.

I'm not real crazy about the kind of English training schools that I'm describing. I don't want to say these kinds of training schools are completely worthless. They aren't. I saw some incredibly talented students take great advantage of their weekend English classes. But, in general, the teachers were poorly trained, the books terribly-designed, and the students nearly impossible to control. I would probably not recommend the school, or any like it, to a Chinese family wanting the best for their kid.

The school, started by Americans in the late 1990s, is a huge success financially though. That's just it, the school cares more about making money than the kids learning anything. Because of their $uccess (and the $uccess that other competing schools are finding), these sorts of cash cows schools are going deeper and deeper into the heart of China and millions upon millions more children are going to have the opportunity to attend them. They aren't going away any time soon.

My disillusionment for these kinds of schools surely results from me having worked in one for a while. But it also has to do with the fact that Chinese children have no lives outside of studying. I really wish Chinese kids were given the opportunity to act like kids.

So many of the children I saw on the weekends at my school were worn down. They were being forced by their parents to attend English class, math class, Chinese class, piano, etc. etc. On top of that, they were drowning from homework from their Monday through Friday school, which they usually attended in the morning from 7AMish until noon, in the afternoon from 2:30 to 5:30, and then in the evening from 7:30 until 9:00 five days a week (and sometimes either on Saturday morning or Sunday evening).

I would sometimes tell older Chinese kids about the way I grew up in America. I went to school from 8:30AM until 3:10PM. I played on soccer, basketball, and baseball teams outside of school. I did stuff outside - went swimming, made snowballs, etc. I aimlessly rode my bike. I watched too much TV. I was basically an average, generation-Y, suburban kid. That sounds like heaven to the Chinese children of today.

There are a lot of reasons why Chinese kids face such pressure. More than I can quantify. But there are two things that I feel contribute.

I'm convinced a large part of what I and the NPR story are describing has to do with China's civil society, or lack thereof. China is just barren in so many ways in this area. I'm sure that as China improves, its civil society will improve. But at the moment, during this time of massive change for every person in China, things like community groups, organizations, or even, gulp, religious infrastructure just haven't fully developed. Contemporary China, in many ways, is just too Darwinian and every-man-an-island. This will change. But it will take time.

I'm also confident that the one child policy has a lot to do with the heavy burdens placed on Chinese children. Nearly every young child in China is the hope, joy, and treasure for its parents. It's all or nothing.

Given where China is today, one can understand why Chinese children face the pressures they do and Chinese parents smother their children.

China's Missing Girls

The lecture I saw at the University of Kansas' Confucius Institute - "Out of the Shadows: Family Planning and Identifying the 'Missing Girls' in Rural China" - was very good. The presenter, Dr. John Kennedy from KU, has done most of his work in rural Shaanxi Province (Xi'an's Province). So that made the talk even more interesting for me.

I'll highlight some of the main points he had last night.

- The 2000 census published in the People's Daily said that there are 116.86 males born for every 100 females. The number is much higher in rural parts of the country though. He had a rate of 123 boys for every 100 girls in Shaanxi Province.

- The ideal number of children for a Chinese farmer is two boys and one girl. This number will allow the family name (姓) to live on and also give the family plenty of resources for a successful family farm.

- Young men are needed to take care of elderly parents. There is no retirement in China's countryside. Old people basically work until they die. If a family doesn't have a son, the daughters will be married off and nobody will be there to take of the parents in their final years.

- Kennedy talked about visiting "bare sticks" villages. "Bare sticks" (光棍儿) are men who cannot find a wife. There are a lot of factors that go into a man being a "bare stick" - ie. being too poor to be an attractive candidate for a woman - but one of the main reasons there are so many is that there simply aren't that many women in villages. He described "bare sticks villages" as being 100% male villages where men work day after day at a factory or on farms with no wife or family. And, of course, no hope for things to get better.

- The farmers and villagers, particularly women, from the countryside who sell fruit and vegetables in cities were discussed. I liked this section because I vividly remember the women on the streets near my apartment selling fruits and vegetables. Dr. Kennedy explained that those women usually travel into the city three or four days at a time, sell their produce to city folk, head back to their family's farm with money, and then do the whole thing again a couple days later.

- Dr. Kennedy, in his time in northern Shaanxi, came across a family with five children. After getting to know the father and having some baijiu with him, the father told him that of his five kids, only two are "registered." The other three 不存在 - don't exist.

Dr. Kennedy's main point was this: There are a lot more unregistered girls living in rural China than the official numbers of the media says there are. He gave three reasons for the out-of-whack sex ratio:

1. Abortion
2. Infanticide
3. Unregistered girls

Whereas the western media and even a lot of academics think one and two are the main culprits, he thinks that the unregistered girls situation is not well-understood and, thus, under-reported.

There are, in fact, lots of reasons for families to keep girls. No family wants to kill babies. Women can be of use around the farm and aren't simply "another mouth to feed." And ultrasounds (which are illegal) and abortions are often too costly for farmers to have.

There are also reasons for local cadres (party officials) to turn their blind eye to unregistered girls. The main things that cadres are responsible for are as follows:

1. Social stability
2. Economic development
3. Birth rate kept down

As long as the local villagers are happy and the cadre can keep his numbers down, then harmony should be achieved (and promotions for the cadre should be had).

There are a lot of questions/issues that go hand-in-hand with the issue of unregistered girls: What do they do when they're adults? How can they become legitimate? Education? He believes that until the phenomenon of unregistered girls is better addressed, these issues will continue to be a problem.

It's important to try to understand the issues that exist in China's country side. As great as it was talking with people like Zachary Karabell and Robert Compton, they, admittedly, don't know a whole lot about rural China. Their experience in China is in the cities like Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen where economic growth is taking place. Seeing that China is such an agrarian country and that more than half of its population is still farmers, learning more about China's countryside is necessary for having a deeper understanding of China.

One-Child Policy Shmolicy

As China's economy develops and allows its people greater flexibility of movement, its arcane one-child policy is becoming more and more difficult to enforce. Particularly amongst the ultra-rich.

From The Telegraph:

Image from CBS News

In China's cities, the fines for having a second child can run up to 200,000 yuan (£20,000). The payment is intended to cover the schooling and healthcare costs of additional children.

However, wealthy parents are now either paying the fines outright, finding a way around them, or travelling to Hong Kong where no permit is needed, according to the government.

Between 2001 and 2008, nearly 78,000 babies were born in Hong Kong to parents registered as living on the mainland.

...

"Due to the rising mobility of Chinese citizens and the social transformation from the country's reform and opening up from the late 1970s, it has become tougher to regulate the policy," he said.

...

In addition, the government has gone on the offensive against public figures with multiple children, in order to set an example. "The fine is a piece of cake for the rich, the government had to hit them harder where it really hurt, at their fame, reputation and standing in society," said Zhai Zhenwu, a sociology professor with Renmin University of China.

Celebrities have been barred from public shows or television programmes and businessmen have been blocked from receiving government contracts.

Read On

It makes sense to me that the most well off in a society are the ones who crave freedom the most. Wealthy Chinese families have big apartments, cars, and everything else they want. I'm not surprised to hear that they also want to have as many kids as they like.

As China's economy yields more and more rich people and a larger middle-class, some of the questionable policies and rules being enforced in the country are going to face greater scrutiny. The internet (assuming it's not completely blocked out at some point) and cultural influences from outside the country will also help show Chinese people what else is out there in the world.

The one-child policy has already wreaked an amazing amount of havoc on millions and millions of people. And its going to create a plethora of unfathomable problems in the future as well.

It'll be interesting to see when the country decides to cut its losses on the policy and let its people have as many children as they want. I understand that there are 1.3 billion people in the country, etc. etc. But I don't buy that society would fall apart if the policy were lifted. There will hopefully be a point in the future when it's decided that the whole thing is more trouble than its worth.

The Male Pill

The Chinese are making great strides in contraception equality.

From The Independent:

Scientists believe they are one step closer to developing an effective male contraceptive jab after successfully carrying out the largest feasibility study to date.

Researchers at the National Research for Family Planning in Beijing injected 1,000 healthy, fertile male patients with a testosterone-based jab over a two-year period and found only 1 per cent went on to father a child. The men were all aged between 20 and 45 and had fathered at least one child in the two years before the testing began. They were also all involved with healthy female partners between the ages of 18 and 38 who had no reproductive problems of their own.

The trial was the largest effectiveness study of a testosterone-based male contraceptive ever undertaken. At the end of the two-year period only one in 100 men had fathered a child. No contraception is 100 per cent effective – 1 to 2 per cent of women still become pregnant while they are on the Pill – but the jab's success rate puts it on a par with the effectiveness of the female Pill or injections.

Dr Yi-Qun Gu, one of the researchers involved in the testing, said: "For couples who cannot or prefer not to use only female-oriented contraception, options have been limited to vasectomy, condom and withdrawal. Our study shows a male hormonal contraceptive regimen may be a potential, novel and workable alternative."

Read On

It's easy to understand why China would be interested in this new area of research: the one child policy. Although there are controversy and drawbacks to the program, the Chinese are committed to it.

I have to imagine that making the "pill" available to men, whether in the form of a pill or an injection, would make the whole endeavor of birth prevention more effective. There can be problems surrounding womens' health and taking the pill. If some women are unwilling or unable to take it, that presents problems in preventing babies. Having the pill only available to half the population certainly limits its overall effectiveness.

And in a way, I suppose a male pill helps balance out the equality in this whole realm. Women are the ones who have the children, so having men be able to bite the bullet on the contraceptive aspect seems reasonable to me.

I'm not sure how long this pill is going to take before it is safe to take. But I'm sure the Chinese will rush it along so that they can begin forcing their men take it.

Sichuan Baby Boom

China is coming up on a painful anniversary in a few days. With that day comes a wave of newly-born babies.

From The Los Angeles Times:

May 3, 2009 Reporting from Mianzhu, China -- Ten months and 25 days after he buried his only child, Luo Gang became a father again at a makeshift hospital cobbled out of aluminum trailers.

For weeks after his 11-year-old daughter was killed in last May's massive earthquake here in Sichuan province, his wife cried so uncontrollably that her family feared she might be having a breakdown.

"If you don't have another baby, my sister will be grieving her whole life," Luo said his brother-in-law advised him.

Luo said he was shocked by the tactlessness of the suggestion.

"We were in a bad way after the earthquake. My wife couldn't stop crying," recalled Luo, a 35-year-old welder, his eyes sunken deep with fatigue after a long night waiting for his wife to give birth to their son. He spoke outside the hospital room where his perfect little baby, born a few hours before, lay wrapped in bunting in a metal bassinet next to his mother, both sleeping contentedly.

"Now, we are better. A new life has been created to take the place of the one that was taken away."

Read On

This article highlights a couple aspects why this tragedy is particularly hard for the Sichuanese:

Sichuan has long been a battleground over the policy, with the government strictly enforcing the one-child limit. (In many other parts of China, farmers can have a second child if the first is a girl, but not in Sichuan.)

Among Sichuan's predominantly rural population, most people have no retirement plans other than the long-ingrained Chinese tradition that children care for their elders.

"The earthquake very much highlights the vulnerability of the one-child policy," said Gu Baochang, a professor of demographics at People's University in Beijing.

"These people are not covered by any social security program. They rely completely on their children for elderly support. And it's not just money. Once they are old, without children they have no place in society."

The parents who now have the opportunity to remake their lives with new children must have such conflicting emotions.

How sad the affected areas of Sichuan must be.

There are so many circumstances about China and Sichuan Province that made last year's earthquake more devastating than it would've been elsewhere. It really is hard to see how many of the people whose lives were destroyed last year will be able to pick up the pieces and move forward.

I'll surely be highlighting and talking about more articles relating to last year's earthquake as May 12th approaches.

Getting Old

Men grow old, pearls grow yellow, there is no cure for it.
- Chinese proverb

From The Associated Press:

Photo from Daylife.com

BEIJING (AP) — China's rapidly aging population threatens the country's social and economic stability and could affect the prospects of other countries around the world, a U.S. study says.

The current ratio of 16 elderly people per 100 workers is set to double by 2025, then double again to 61 by 2050, according to the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

By 2050, there will be 438 million Chinese aged 60 and over, said the study, jointly produced with the Prudential Foundation. Of those, 103 million Chinese will be 80 or older.

China, however, remains a relatively poor country and only about one out of three urban workers has any sort of pension coverage, the report said. The burden of supporting the growing number of elderly would pass to a proportionately shrinking working population.

By the 2020s, demographic trends may be "weakening the two principal pillars of the government's political legitimacy — rapidly rising living standards and social stability," the report said.

Read On

The report that this article refers to from CSIS can be downloaded here. There are lots of interesting things to note in the lengthy report. This paragraph, in particular, really struck me:

China may be the world's oldest living civilization, but for most of its history it has been a demographically young society. As recently as the mid-1960s when Mao Zedong called on the nation's youth to launch the Cultural Revolution, China's median age was 20, meaning that half of the population were children or teenagers. The elderly made up just 7 percent of the population, about what they had since time immemorial.

This graph, from the report, is a useful way of looking at China's aging problem:



This problem of China getting too old can, more-or-less, be boiled down to the following two things: improved quality-of-life standards that now let Chinese people reach their elderly years and China's one-child policy.

One of the many benefits of China's modernization is that its citizenry can now enjoy a longer and more healthy life. This is mildly surprising given China's pollution problems. But, in fact, modern advancements in medicine and living standards are outweighing any problems associated with pollution. As the report states, the age-expectancy of a Beijing resident is 80 and a Shanghai resident 81, older expectancies than people in most other developed nations enjoy.

Then there is the one-child policy. On China's male/female ratio crisis, I was hesitant to say that the one-child policy is 100% to blame for the problem. I conceded that there are a lot of cultural things in play as well. But on this issue of aging though, I believe that the one-child policy is directly leading to crisis.

It's pretty simple; if children do not replace elderly people, the population will age and ultimately contract. The CSIS report talks about how the people who decided to implement the one-child policy knew that it would eventually cause problems. But the out-of-control population at the time was seen as a bigger threat than too many old people in a generation or two. So the policy was put in place with little thought about the future consequences. (This kind of reminds me of the "don't give up eating for fear of choking" situation I discussed the other day.)

The consequences of those decisions in the late 1970s and early 1980s are now crystallizing.

China is going to have a massive problem when all of the millions of single children out there, the ones who will be responsible for making China a superpower, are going to have to take care of two elderly parents.

I wonder how long China will be able to avoid putting their elderly into nursing homes, a practice that is widely thought to be degrading and undignified in Chinese society. I don't see how China will be able to avoid going in that direction.

The social consequences of a society that is so elderly are going to be massive. Add China's aging crisis in a generation or two to the long list of problems that the country, and the world, are going to have to deal with.

China's Looming Male/Female Ratio Disaster

I've talked about the ticking time bomb that is China's male/female a number of times on my blog before. There is some fresh data today that highlights just how big of a problem it is.

From AFP:

PARIS (AFP) — Selective abortion in favor of males has left China with 32 million more boys than girls, creating an imbalance that will endure for decades, an investigation released on Friday warned.

The probe provides ammunition for those experts who predict China's obsession with a male heir will sow a bitter fruit as men facing a life of bachelorhood fight for a bride.

"Although some imaginative and extreme solutions have been suggested, nothing can be done now to prevent this imminent generation of excess men," says the paper, published online by the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

In most countries, males slightly outnumber females -- between 103 and 107 male births for every 100 female births.

But in China and other Asian countries, the sex ratio has widened sharply as the traditional preference for boys is reinforced by the availability of cheap ultrasound diagnostics and abortion.

This has enabled Chinese couples to use pregnancy termination to prevent a female birth, a practice that is officially condemned as well as illegal.

In China, an additional factor has been the "one-child" policy.

Read On

32,000,000 too many boys. Think about that number for a minute.

It's the population of the Netherlands and Chile, combined.

It's unfathomable to consider just how big of a problem this male/female ratio in China is.

The article goes on to say that the western autonomous regions (which are mostly ethnic minorities who are not strictly held to the old-child policy) are the only parts of China that have normalized male/female ratios. This seems to point to the one-child policy as the main cause of this problem.

China is heading more in the direction of relaxing its one-child policy.

Jackie told me recently that if she was to marry a Chinese boy who is an only child, then she'd be able to have two children. The reason is because Jackie is also an only child. Young Chinese adults, who were on the first generation to be affected by the one-child policy (which went into effect in 1979), can have more than one child if their parents observed the law.

Modifying some rules of the one child policy does not mean that there is going to be a large-scale reform of the law though. In the spring of 2008, there was some speculation about that possibly happening.

From The Associated Press on March 2, 2008:

BEIJING (AP) — China may consider changing its one-child policy because it has succeeded in helping to slow population growth in the past three decades, a Chinese official said Sunday.

The policy, launched in the 1970s, has produced "very good results," said Wu Jianmin spokesman for the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, an advisory body to parliament.

There would be an estimated 400 million more people in China without it, Wu said.

"The one-child policy was the only choice we had given the conditions when we initiated the policy," Wu told reporters at a news conference the day before the CPPCC convened for its annual session. However, he added, "when designing a policy we need to take into consideration the reality."

"So as things develop, there might be some changes to the policy and relevant departments are considering this," Wu said without giving a timeline or details on which departments would be involved.

Read On

Seeing international headlines that was China reconsidering its one-child policy appears to have spooked the Chinese policy makers. I say this because any thought about doing away with the policy was completely refuted in the press just a couple days later.

From The New York Times a week later on March 11, 2008:

BEIJING -- China's top population official has ruled out changing the country's one-child family planning policy for at least another decade, refuting speculation that officials were contemplating adjustments to compensate for mounting demographic pressures.

The official, Zhang Weiqing, minister of the State Population and Family Planning Commission, said China would not make any major changes to the overall family planning policy until an anticipated surge in births is expected to end roughly a decade from now.

"The current family planning policy, formed as a result of gradual changes in the past two decades, has proved compatible with national conditions," Zhang said in a front-page interview published Monday in China Daily, the country's official English-language newspaper.

"So it has to be kept unchanged at this time to ensure stable and balanced population growth."

Read On

It's pretty obvious that there isn't going to be any drastic change in the one-child policy, which one would seem justified in saying has helped cause this male/female crisis.

This lack of willingness to change official policy seems to support what I've suggested before - that a cultural shift in attitudes is going to have to be the solution here. As I wrote earlier this week, it appears as though things are getting better in terms of Chinese parents being accepting of having young girls, but the country still has a long ways to go in this regard.

No matter what happens now though, young children in China are facing an unbelievable demographic problem. The skewed male/female ratios go back more than a decade. So when the primary school-aged in China right now enter adulthood in about a decade, they're going to be in for tremendous cultural challenges.

Obviously, the tens of millions of men who can't find a wife are going to be affected greatly. But to think that it will only affect them is foolish, I think. All aspects of China's society are going to suffer at that time. I have to imagine that things like crime and violence will go up when there are millions upon millions of sexually frustrated Chinese men stuck in a rut.

I'll feel bad for all Chinese people when these problems start to arise. But at the same time, the country as a whole will be reaping what its sowed. The one child policy is a draconian measure.

In the coming decade, disastrous planning mixed with a, widespread, awful attitude towards having girls as children are going to lead to an unprecedentedly large cultural crisis with no solution or treatment for China and its people.

Baby Boy Kidnappings

The following is a terrible story on the kidnapping of babies and the subsequent human black markets found in southern China.

From The New York Times:

SHENZHEN, China — The thieves often strike at dusk, when children are playing outside and their parents are distracted by exhaustion.

Deng Huidong lost her 9-month-old son in the blink of an eye as a man yanked him from the grip of his 7-year-old sister near the doorway of their home. The car did not even stop as a pair of arms reached out the window and grabbed the boy.

Sun Zuo, a gregarious 3 1/2-year-old, was lured off by someone with a slice of mango and a toy car, an abduction that was captured by police surveillance cameras.

Peng Gaofeng was busy with customers when a man snatched his 4-year-old son from the plaza in front of his shop as throngs of factory workers enjoyed a spring evening. “I turned away for a minute, and when I called out for him he was gone,” Mr. Peng said.

These and thousands of other children stolen from the teeming industrial hubs of China’s Pearl River Delta have never been recovered by their parents or by the police. But anecdotal evidence suggests the children do not travel far. Although some are sold to buyers in Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, most of the boys are purchased domestically by families desperate for a male heir, parents of abducted children and some law enforcement officials who have investigated the matter say.

The demand is especially strong in rural areas of south China, where a tradition of favoring boys over girls and the country’s strict family planning policies have turned the sale of stolen children into a thriving business.

Read On

This is a really messed up story. There isn't much more evil than stealing babies. The epedemic that is going on in Shenzhen and other southern Chinese cities is unbelievable.

The easy target of blame for this kidnapping problem is the one-child policy. While I'm sure that China's family planning policy has something to do with these babies getting snatched, I think that traditional Chinese culture and attitudes towards children and family are more of a culprit.

Some of the quotes in this article from rural peasants are awful:

“It doesn’t matter how much money you have. If you don’t have a son, you are not as good as other people who have one.”

...

“If you have only girls, you don’t feel right inside,” said Ms. Zhen, who has one child, an 11-year-old son. “You feel your status is lower than everyone else.”

...

After some quick bargaining, the price was dropped to $3,500 from $4,100, and a few hours later, after borrowing money from friends and family members, they took the boy home. They named him Jiabao, which means “guarantor of the family.”

This antiquated Chinese tradition of a boy being a status symbol needs to change. It seems to be based on the same kind of ideas that said it was OK for women to have their feet bound or for them to be, more or less, servants to their husbands. (If you want to read more about Chinese women and their struggles in the past, pick up Wild Swans.)

It's understandable that farmers want sons to work in the fields. But China's history and culture suggest that there is much more to the equation than just that aspect of having a baby boy.

I've asked numerous people in Xi'an about whether they want to have a boy or a girl. Knowing what I know about traditional Chinese culture and Chinese peasants and their attitudes towards children, I've been curious to hear what conteporary city-dwellers' thoughts on having girls is.

Nearly everyone I've talked with has said that they don't care whether its a boy or a girl. The few who did have a preference said they'd like to have a girl. The reasons ranged from being better behaved, to China not having enough girls, to the burden that is on a Chinese boy before marriage.

The last point is a particularly interesting one.

In Chinese cities before marriage, the boy must pay the girls' family a lump sum of money, pay for the wedding, and provide an apartment where the couple can live. (Trust me, I'm familiar with these things having a Chinese fiancee. Seeing that I'm a 老外 - foreigner - and our plans are not the same as a typical Chinese couple's, these things don't all exactly apply to Jackie and me. But I'm at least very familiar with the steps that occur before Chinese couples get married.)

The lump sum paid to the woman's family often is 9,999RMB (about $1,500) because the number 9 and the character 久, which means "a long time," sound exactly the same.

Unlike in America, the man pays for the wedding in China (although he usually breaks even or makes money on the event because, in China, couples receive little red envelopes filled with money rather than blenders or other useless household items for wedding gifts).

The apartment situation is a tricky one. A Chinese boy isn't considered ready to marry until he has a purchased apartment (ie. is not renting). For twenty-something year-old boys who often don't have the tens of thousands of RMB that is required to pay a down-payment on an apartment, this often requires a substantial loan or gift from the boy's parents.

So it's fairly easy to see why, in cities, having baby girls is no problem at all. In fact, having boys is a bit of a headache.

Hopefully this acceptance of having girls in Chinese cities can make its way to the Chinese countryside sooner rather than later. While I sometimes lament China's culture that is constantly being lost to the modernizing and westernizing of the country, rural attitudes towards women are not something that should be missed.