The real estate bubble is helping out:
Internet chat groups have sprang up where women exchange advice on how to conceive girls.
Rising property prices are driving the change, which is expected to be confirmed by China’s once-a-decade census that started on Monday, because Chinese families must traditionally buy a flat for a son before he can marry.
“My husband and I don’t earn much and I can’t imagine how we can buy a flat for a son,” says Zhang Aiqin of Pujiang in Zhejiang province.
“And it is not only a flat,” says Zhang Yun, a Shanxi province native who lives in Shanghai, alluding to the cost of educating and marrying off a boy. “Sons bring economic pressure†‰…†‰[but] ‘a daughter is a warm jacket for a mother’ when she is old,” she says, quoting an ancient Chinese idiom to illustrate the fact that many urbanised Chinese think daughters are better caregivers.
Ancient idioms are great, because you can usually find ones that argue each side of an argument.
I would be interested to see how wide-spread this is, as about 10 years ago, there was significant reporting on how many baby girls were discarded to orphanages as "maggots in the rice." The issue being that as adults they would live near and support their in-laws rather than their parents.
Hunch from a limited set of anecdotes : sex selective abortion in India seems to be based on purely utilitarian grounds – the cost of daughter's marriage (popularity of dowry, a recent entrant to much of India, went up last century; plus marriages have become way more expensive, with more guests etc.), the fact that only the son was expected to work traditionally, and of course that the girl's income and services would go to in-laws.
But many Chinese I know seem to consider daughters as more useful to their parents, because women allegedly take family and hence their parents more seriously (though BCN411's comment above suggests a different picture on "usefulness to parents" – don't know which one applies more significantly). The reason for sex selective abortion in China seems not quite utilitarian, but that people perceive only male progeny as perpetuating "their lineage".
Once again the above are based on limited discussion and extrapolation, not sure about their correctness.
I heard similar things in Burma. I think traditional ways are changing
and it is much more likely that Daughters will spend time helping their families.
It is probably the sames in western countries?
"many urbanised Chinese think daughters are better caregivers"
So what? So do most urbanised Americans in my experience.
But in India, daughters bring pressure.Sometimes,parents have to constructnumber of houses equivalent to the number of daughters.Therefore, parents having govt jobs forced accept bribes from the public.Marriage expenditure of a huge one in terms of dowry, property, gold, textiles, consumer durables, vehicles,feast, auditorium fees(that too costly and prestigious in the town) etc.There is pre and post marriage expenditures.bandwagon, Veblen and Snob effects do their roles.
When the girl/ spouse shortage is enough that boys are buying brides, and even agreeing to live with the bride's family (rather than husband), then the balance will be more addressed.
The ability of 40+ guys to buy(woo), and then copulate and reproduce with teen girls, means that it won't be so terribly hard for the successful Chinese guys to find mates, and for some kind of tolerable balance to be created.
At least, I hope this rather than a 30 mil. unmarried angry mob of women-less guys looking for glory.
I expected the gender imbalance in China to self-correct. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan all have had a preference for boys at some point in their past that later shifted towards girls. The same thing is now happening in China.
The big question is India.
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