A
Surplus of Men,
a Deficit of Peace
By
Jonathan
Power
July 16, 2002
LONDON - Statistics of the 2000 census recently
released in Beijing report that there is now an
extraordinary imbalance in the birth-rate - 117 boys are
being born for every 100 girls. In southern Hainan
province the gap widens to an astonishing 135/100 ratio.
In China today about 97% of all unmarried persons aged
between 28 and 49 are male.
China is probably the world leader in using cheap
scans to enable parents to know the sex of their child in
the womb and, despite breaking the law, to find a doctor
who will abort a foetus for no more reason than it
happens to be female. However, this practice is also
widely practised in many other Asian countries. India is
not far behind. Adding the two countries together,
according to Valerie Hudson and Andrea Den Boer, writing
in the spring issue of Harvard University's quarterly,
International Security, there are now "between 62 and 68
million missing females in Asia". The historical record
suggests that societies that breed surplus males end up
with more crime and with a higher propensity for going to
war. Within twenty years both China and India will end up
with around 30 million young surplus males. They have no
brides, no families, and thus will tend to be roamers,
migrants and putative warriors. Those who think that by a
quick fix they can boost the family fortunes by getting
rid of apparently useless girls will find all too quickly
that having sons grow up that lose out in the highly
competitive stakes for gaining a wife quickly trade away
their society's natural charm and stability. The
equilibrium of everyday life will be gradually but surely
undermined by the horrors of surplus testosterone.
Whatever else the female does for the male she calms
him down and gives him a centre of gravity, opens doors
to other interests outside the boys' own world, smothers
him with family life and family responsibilities, and
perhaps (as in my case) gives him both a reason to be and
the chance of daily success that endures, although the
world outside may be undermining him, thwarting him, and
perhaps on occasion besting him. Even in the most male
orientated or most female liberated of cultures these
essential truths seem to hold.
According to one study "The Moral Animal" by Robert
Wright "an unmarried man between 24 and 35 years of age
is about three times as likely to murder another male as
a married man the same age". Another study by Allan Mazur
and Alan Both published in the June 1998 issue of the
academic magazine, "Behavioural and Brain Science",
argues that testosterone levels in men who court women
and then marry drop relative to men who do not.
"Testosterone levels may explain the low criminality
found among married men".
Hudson and Den Boer have done some intriguing research
on the effect of male dominated populations. One study
was of the Nien rebellion in China of 1851-63, finally
quelled in 1868. This occurred in the poor area of
Huai-pei in northern China. After a particular bad period
of failed harvests the people began a policy of female
infanticide, and between one fifth and one quarter of all
females were killed as children in the hope that the
remaining boys would be more adept at bringing in an
income for parents who knew they would age prematurely.
In reality, bereft of brides, many young men took to
banditry. They began as salt smugglers but ended up
attempting to overthrow the Qing dynasty. At the peak of
their rebellion there were some 100,000 of these "bare
sticks" as they were called. The imperial government was
compelled to import foreign arms and modernize its army
along Western lines. Only then was the rebellion
crushed.
There is much more of this kind of research in the
article and doubters should look up the original. Common
sense suggests there is something in it, even though we
know the pogroms in Rwanda took place in a society that
had an almost perfect sex ratio. Of course, the
sex-imbalance theorists cannot explain everything and
violence and war come about for a wide number of reasons,
from environmental stress in the case of Rwanda to the
vanity of politicians in the case of the First World War.
Yet this theorizing perhaps explains why, when Britain
lost so many of its young men in the trenches of World
War 1, a female dominated post war society helped propel
Britain for a while into serious disarmament and a near
pacifist foreign policy.
In his important article in Foreign Affairs Francis
Fukuyama has wondered whether a democratic country's
propensity towards a peaceful foreign policy is better
explained by the status of women in democracies than by
the simple existence of democratic institutions
themselves. It could explain in part why the U.S. and
Britain are more warlike than the Scandinavian countries.
And Asian leaders should start to ask themselves if war
between India and China or India and Pakistan (another
sex imbalanced country) is rather more likely in the
coming years because what is going on today in village
hospitals and doctors' surgeries all over Asia. A surplus
of men, a deficit of peace, perhaps?
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2002 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
Tell a friend about this article
Send to:
From:
Message and your name
 
|