http://www.arabnews.com/?page=7§ion=0&article=128842&d=26&m=11&y=2009&pix=opinion.jpg&category=Opinion
Thursday 26 November 2009 (09 Dhul Hijjah 1430)
Surplus of men; a deficit of peace
Jonathan Power | Arab News
A census released in Beijing reported 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 percent 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 fetus for no more reason than it happens to be
female. However, this practice is also widely practiced in many other Asian
countries. India is not far behind. Adding the two countries together there are
perhaps between 60 and 70 million missing women 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 20
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 center of gravity, opens doors to other interests outside the boys' own
world, smothers him with family life and family responsibilities, and perhaps
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 man-orientated or most
woman-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,
"Behavioral 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 and shortsightedness
of politicians in the case of World War I. 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 postwar 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 (picture)
has wondered whether a democratic country's propensity toward 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 US 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?
