Spinward Flow
SOC-14 5K
It's even worse than that.The policies of the Chinese Government have created an imbalance [M:F and age] that has resulted in a population that has ALREADY peaked and is expected to decline
In chinese culture, what makes a person "chinese" is NOT RACIAL ... it's family names.
What race you are "doesn't matter" (per se), but what does matter is your family name.
And ... spoiler alert ... family names are patriarchal, meaning that you get your family name from your father.
What this means in practice is that ONLY BOYS grow up to become men who can carry on the family name, because only males can pass on their family name to their children and descendants. In other words, girls/women/females are substantially "irrelevant" when it comes to passing on the family name (which makes people "chinese") into the next generation.
Oh but it gets worse.
There's the 4:2:1 problem going on in chinese society right now.
What's the 4:2:1 problem, I hear you ask?
The 4:2:1 problem is:
- 4 grandparents
- 2 parents
- 1 child
Which means that the current generation of boys becoming men have grown up being treated like "little emperors" because they are the culmination of 3 families (2 pairs of grandparents and 1 pair of parents) so they have been doted on their entire lives. Now throw them into a life threatening occupation (such as the army, for example) where they could die without passing on their family names to another generation.
So there's been this tremendous bias towards "we want to have boys" among families, because boys carry the family name into the next generation, along with a zero sum game of "we don't want any girls" among families, because "having a girl" should be Somebody Else's Problem™. Therefore, out of parochial self-interest, there's a tremendous gender imbalance in the M/F ratio going into the next generation beyond the current one.
There's a reason why the One Child Policy is causing tremendous strain on chinese civic culture right now, enough so that the PLA needs to be very careful about battlefield casualties, because a LOT of their current manpower (emphasis on "man") is reliant on those 4:2:1 children coming of age and if they get slaughtered (needlessly) then there are going to be a LOT of exceptionally unhappy families moving towards unrest that could spark a revolt against central authority.
Military analysis is currently speculating that by the end of the 2020s decade, the opportunity for mainland China to invade Taiwan will have passed ... simply because of the demographic crunch on the home front, such that the military simply can't "afford" to expend the casualties necessary for an invasion operation AND survive the backlash at home, in addition to the manpower shortages they're going to be facing as demographic destiny starts to arrive. They just simply won't have the reserves needed for such an operation.
My point being that the M/F ratio is PART of the problem causing the population to decline, but it's actually the result of the One Child Policy that was intended to shrink the population (which it did and has). The M/F ratio imbalance is actually a "side effect" of the One Child Policy in combination with the way that "chinese-ness" is passed on through family names.
You can't "become" chinese (via naturalization) ... you can only be born chinese ... and for that, you have to have a father with a chinese family name ... and only fathers can pass on their family names to the next generation.
4:2:1 ... for the the 1, girls don't count when it comes to passing on the family name.
Now start thinking in terms of 8:4:2:1 and the kind of pressure it puts on the youngest generation to carry on the family name and traditions ... in a culture where ancestors are respected and deserving of veneration ... and those ancestors are going to "have ideas" (and expectations) about how their descendants should carry on the family name and traditions.
Let's just say that the "evolutionary pressure" starts getting rather intense at that point, with respect to who "wins" and who "loses" at the game of musical chairs as the population shrinks. Gets even worse when there "aren't enough wives to go around" because of the M/F imbalance, making the pressure cooker of competition to pass on family names to the next generation get even more intense.