7. Improving Girl Child Survival in Rural China: Research and Community Intervention Projects

As a part of Chinese culture, strong son preference and discrimination against girls have always existed. In contemporary China, especially in the rural areas, it has not disappeared. Son preference results in a disadvantage for female survival, especially for infants and children. The fundamental reason causing excess female child mortality is the combination of son preference and fertility decline, as the result of the government-guided family planning policy. Accordingly, son preference has been intensified with the persistent low fertility after the 1980s, which leads to a continuous increase in the sex ratio at birth (SRB) and excess female child mortality, suggesting the existence of an abnormal intrusion in girl’s survival and development rights, especially in rural China.Since the mid-1990s, with support from the Ford Foundation, the authors have cooperated with the China National Population and Family Planning Commission (NPFPC) to examine excess female child mortality in China and implement intervention practices. They analysed the relationships between regional gender differences of child mortality and women’s social status, son preference, socio-economic and family planning factors in their study, “Gender Differences in Child Survival in Rural China: Policy Implications”.La préférence pour les fils et son corollaire, la discrimination des filles, sont un trait constant de la culture chinoise, qui se perpétue aujourd’hui, en particulier dans les régions rurales. Cette préférence pour les fils dans un contexte de baisse rapide de la fécondité, elle-même suscitée par une politique draconienne de limitation des naissances, résulte dans une surmortalité infantile et juvénile des filles. Ainsi, l’expression de la préférence pour les fils s’est intensifiée avec la baisse continue de la fécondité depuis les années 1980, se traduisant par un déséquilibre croissant du rapport de masculinité des naissances et une mortalité infantile des filles supérieure à la normale.Depuis le milieu des années 1990, avec le soutien de la Fondation Ford, les auteurs ont collaboré avec la Commission nationale de planification des naissances afin de mener une étude sur la surmortalité infantile des filles. Ils ont analysé les relations entre les variations régionales des niveaux de mortalité infantile et des facteurs tels que le statut de la femme, la préférence pour les fils, le contexte socioéconomique et les mesures de limitation des naissances, dans le cadre d’une étude intitulée « Différences dans la survie des enfants en Chine rurale : implications politiques »

Gender discriminations among young children in Asia

Subsequent to the demographic transition, Asian countries have been experiencing deep-rooted changes in family structures. In this context, the question of gender relations within the family, and more generally within society, is crucial, in view of the increase in discriminatory practices toward women, beginning at foetal conception and continuing through all stages of life. Asia is the “black continent” for women. Estimates place the deficit in the number of women in the world at between 60 and 100 million, the vast majority of which is found on this continent. This book focuses on the intensity of female discrimination, from a demographic perspective, in the earliest stages of life, and more specifically around birth, in China, India, Pakistan, the Republic of Korea and Taiwan. These societies share cultural characteristics that are not favourable to women: patriarchal systems, patrilineal families, socialization processes encouraging the submission of wives to their husband's family, etc. In these societies, a son is needed to perpetuate the family line and ensure social and biological reproduction of the family. These are among the reasons why they share a strong son preference, which is in some cases accentuated by economic constraints. A son is generally the only person to support his parents in old age, and as a rule help with work in the fields. Moreover, girls and women still occupy a marginal position in society, whereas a male heir offers countless advantages.La transition démographique suscite, en Asie, de profondes transformations dans les structures familiales. Dans ce contexte, la question des rapports sociaux des sexes au sein de la famille, et plus généralement au sein de la société, est cruciale, dans la mesure où elle entraîne l’augmentation des discriminations à l’égard des femmes dès la conception et à tous les âges de la vie. L’Asie est le “continent noir” pour les femmes. Ce livre traite, par une approche démographique, des discriminations des femmes aux jeunes âges de la vie, et en particulier autour de la naissance, en Chine, en Inde, au Pakistan, en République de Corée et à Taiwan. Ces sociétés d’Asie partagent des caractéristiques culturelles qui ne sont pas favorables aux femmes ; un fils est désiré pour perpétuer la lignée et assurer la reproduction biologique et sociale de la famille. Des contraintes économiques peuvent aussi expliquer la préférence pour les garçons

Science, Modernity, and the Making of China's One-Child Policy

China's one-child-per-couple policy represents an extraordinary attempt to engineer national wealth, power, and global standing by drastically braking population growth. Despite the policy's external notoriety and internal might, its origins remain obscure. In the absence of scholarly research on this question, public discourse in the United States has been shaped by media representations portraying the policy as the product of a repressive communist regime. This article shows that the core ideas underlying the one-child policy came instead from Western science, in particular from the Club of Rome's world-in-crisis work of the early 1970s. Drawing on research in science studies, the article analyzes the two notions lying at the policy's core-that China faced a virtual "population crisis" and that the one-child policy was "the only solution" to it-as human constructs forged by specific groups of scientists working in particular, highly consequential contexts. It documents how the fundamentally political process of constituting population as an object of science and governance was then depoliticized by scientizing rhetorics that presented China's population crisis and its only solution as numerically describable, objective facts. By probing the human and historical character of population research, this article underscores the complexity of demographic knowledge-making and the power of scientific practices in helping constitute demographic reality itself. Copyright 2003 by The Population Council, Inc..