Two Asian Giants, Too Many Men: Cultural Difference and the Consequences of the Sex Ratio Imbalance in China and India

Abstract

China and India are the two most populous countries on the planet. The traditional cultural preference for male children in the two countries is so deeply rooted that, despite the criminalization of prenatal sex discernment, sex-selective abortions, infanticide, and the relaxation of the one-child policy in China, each country is now home to about 35 million more men than women. While these factors that have created the sex ratio imbalance in both countries certainly merit further research, the literature on the consequences of the sex ratio imbalance is not nearly as well developed, despite the fact that these consequences have the potential to exert significant influence on economic behavior, public safety, mental health outcomes, and the incidence of human trafficking in countries whose combined population represents a third of the world’s inhabitants. Therefore, this thesis compares the effects that a hypermasculine sex ratio has on rates of savings, crime rates, mental health outcomes in rural areas, and human trafficking in the two countries and shows how differing cultural traditions in the two countries influence the effects of the sex ratio imbalance. In the first chapter, I examine how differences in the cultural norms of traditional marriage markets in India and China have resulted in sex ratio imbalances of similar size and direction having opposite effects on household savings rates in the two countries.The second chapter focuses on the sex ratio imbalance’s relationship to rises in rates of criminal behavior and violence, particularly against women and girls. The third chapter details single men’s declining mental health outcomes in the most rural parts of India and China. In the last chapter, I examine the relationship between the sex ratio imbalance and the incidence of domestic and international human trafficking in the two countries. This analysis shows how the different cultural norms that organize traditional marriage markets in China and India have increasingly put bachelors at an economic disadvantage―in China, they are under immense pressure to save up for the skyrocketing costs of the bride price that scarce women demand, while in India, men have had to settle for much smaller dowries than they would receive if brides were easier to come by. These economic pressures, and the reality that heterosexual men in rural areas will rarely have the opportunity to have sex, let alone find a life partner, have decimated the mental health of these single men; depression, loneliness, and suicide increasingly affect men in rural communities in both countries. The proliferation of psychological issues among bachelors with slim chances of having consensual sex with women has led to an uptick in violence and criminal offending among men living in areas with excessively masculine sex ratios. Here, women and girls are often victimized at the highest rates. The rampant incidence of violence against women and girls in these hypermasculine areas has emboldened human traffickers, who stand to reap enormous profits from disadvantaged men desperate to purchase a cheap foreign bride. For all the cultural and governmental differences between the two most populous countries on the planet, India and China are both currently positioned at the precipice of a crisis of societal instability brought on by the sex ratio imbalance. This study analyzes four of the sex ratio imbalance’s most significant effects in China and India and it is my hope that, in so doing, it may help attract the attention of more social science researchers to this urgent social problem.