Chinese Workers in Africa
Who Marry Locals Face Puzzled Reception at Home. In response to a growing gender
imbalance in their home country, Chinese men look elsewhere to find partners.
This isn't my normal focus, but I found this dispatch from the good people at
ChinaSmack amusing. The post is replete with photos and ruminates on the
growing phenomenon of Chinese men marrying African women, as Chinese presence
in Africa continues to expand. A taste of the
photos and associated captions:
"This
is a photo of a young Fujian guy with his
African wife in Congo.
They run a restaurant there to make a living, I've eaten there once, it wasn't
bad. The young couple are able to communicate in Chinese."
"A
Shandong migrant worker who married a wife in Africa and gave birth to a daughter. His African wife
passing away from illness when the daughter was two-years-old and he raises his
daughter alone planting vegetables in the suburbs of Nairobi being bother father and mother to
her. Not easy! What a great Shandong
man! A great Chinese man!"
"This
is a Chinese man and African woman's child. I've always wondered, is this child
i considered Chinese or not? Very confusing!!!"
"The
son of a wealthy Sichuan Chinese businessman who married last year's Miss Kenya!!!"
Here is what it had to say:
One
of the many accomplishments of Hvistendahl's book is to show that there have
been additional "contradictions" at work in the pan-Asian
"missing women" phenomenon. For simplicity's sake, we can boil these
down to contradictions linked to visions of what it means to be
"modern" and contradictions tied to technology.
A
central element in the first sort of contradiction pre-dates the implementation
of the one-child family policy. It goes back to Western writings in the 1950s
and 1960s that harped on the apocalyptical implications of high birth-rates in
the developing world.
Here,
in a much stripped down form, is my paraphrasing of the way Hvistendahl lays
out the situation, in sections that owe and acknowledge a considerable debt to Columbia University historian Matthew Connelly's
important book, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population
(Harvard University Press, 2008):
If
only, some proponents of "population bomb" thinking argued, methods
could be found to ensure that couples outside of the West embraced more
"modern" small family ideals. Given the strong bias toward sons in
many places, one thing needed was to make sure that couples who kept having
daughters would not just keep trying and trying to have a male offspring. To solve
the problem of overpopulation, the key would be to convince couples that having
more than two children was no longer feasible (the planet could not take having
people procreate at more than just this replacement level)--and allow them to
be confident that one of those children would be a son (e.g., if their first
child was a girl, give them much better than a 105 to 100 chance that the
second would be a boy).
But something was left out of the equation here: if a
magical means could suddenly appear to guarantee that hundreds of millions of
couples wanting to stop at two children, who had a girl first, had a boy next,
the result would be a dangerously off kilter demographic picture. There would
soon be an incredibly large number of men who would be expected to marry (and
for the most part would want to marry), but would grossly outnumber eligible
women.
Turning
to technology, recent decades have seen moves toward--or full realization
of--various sex selection methods that can alter the odds dramatically in favor
of having a son or daughter, depending on a couple's wishes. These range from
the relatively low-tech (sonogram machines that reveal the sex of a fetus) to
methods so high-tech they border on science fiction (fiddling with genes to
produce babies with sought-after traits).
The contradiction here is that, while
reports of skewed gender ratios in China in the 1980s sometimes focused on the
re-emergence of a very old method of diminishing the number of girls in an area
(infanticide by drowning), the single biggest factor in the current tilt toward
boys in many parts of Asia has been sex-selective abortion by couples who have
learned, after amniocentesis or more often a sonogram, that a pregnancy (in
many cases, a second or third one in a son-less family) would lead to a
daughter's birth.
What
we have here is a messy combination of factors that take us far beyond a clash
between "traditional" values and state policies. We find instead
situations in which old preferences are reinforced by new practices (e.g., the
economic reforms in the Chinese countryside) and can be acted upon by using new
machines.
There is no "typical" Asian couple responsible for
contributing to the large number of "excess men" (males growing up in
areas with too few female age mates), but Hvistendahl shows that, when
imagining one, we might do well to conjure up a couple striving to embrace a
modern ideal (only having two children) and making use of modern technologies,
rather than let our minds think only of a "traditional" and "backward"
pair who need to be educated by the state to have their ideas brought up to
date.
The
demographic implications for economic growth, not just in China but
globally, could well force some interesting and unexpected policy choices over
the next decade.
Damien Ma is a China analyst at Eurasia Group. He writes on
Chinese energy policies and climate change, politics, innovation, U.S.-China
relations, social policies, and Internet policies, among other topics. He has
written for Slate, The New
Republic, and Forbes.
REUTERS/Bobby
Yip
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