The calamity of Asia's lost womenMore here. So, if I were going to write that novel, it would be about one guy, and his friends, in such a society. I might even put a gloss on whether it was China, India or some fictional place that mixed aspects of each. The novel would have certain comic aspects in the first half and become more and more bleak as it went along, ending with the protagonist deciding to join a terrorist group out of sheer desperation; he is quickly killed.
The killing of baby girls has led to a surplus of disaffected men who are a threat to stability
Will Hutton
Sunday March 18, 2007
The Observer
In the middle of the 19th century, an area the size of Germany located between Beijing and Shanghai in central China was run for more than 15 years by the Nian rebels, a 50,000-strong network of bandit groups who lived by pillage and rape. The inability of the Imperial armies to quell the rebellion for so long was a sign of the system's vulnerability that would eventually lead to its collapse.
Importantly, the Nian bandits were men without women, long understood in China as the principal stimulus to their rebellion and cause of their violence. They originated in a district in northern China -- Huai-pei -- where the killing of infant girls to conserve food for more economically valuable boys in response to famine had been particularly terrible.
By 1850, the official records show that there were 129 men to every 100 women, an astonishing imbalance in the ratio between the sexes. Lower-class Huai-pei peasants could not find wives; hungry, economically displaced and, in Chinese terms, 'bare branches' -- not proper men because they could not marry and father children -- they turned to banditry as providing meaning and sustenance alike.
Those womanless bandits cast a long shadow over not just today's China, but the whole of Asia. Asia is estimated to suffer from up to 100 million missing women -- aborted as fetuses or murdered in infancy because of their sex. Pakistan, erupting in protests last week against President Musharraf's anti-democratic high-handedness in suspending a senior judge, is a volatile tinderbox where the capacity for such insurrection to spread is everpresent.
Fanning the flames of injustice and Islamic fundamentalism is the country's sex imbalance. Dispossessed, displaced men with no prospect of ever finding a partner more readily take to the streets like Nian rebels; violence demonstrates masculine meaning.
In today's China, there are now 119 men for every 100 women. In some areas, the imbalance is greater than it was in Huai-pei in 1850. Earlier this year, an official Chinese report projected that by 2020, one in 10 men between 20 and 45 would be unable to find a wife. Professor Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University in the US estimates that by 2020, there will be 28 million surplus Chinese men and 31 million surplus Indian men.
Free idea. Take it and run.
technorati: China, surplus men, unintended consequences, India
1 comment:
I BEGAN writing my novel Home Products in the summer of 2003, a few weeks before my wife gave birth to our first child.
But even before I began work on the book I bought a black hardcover sketchbook. In its pages, I started writing down whatever I liked in what I happened to be reading. Among the earliest journal entries is the opening line of a review that had appeared, in the New York Times, of the film "The Hours". This was also the opening line of a novel by Virginia Woolf. I cut it out and pasted it in my journal. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."
There are no notes around that neatly cut out quote but I can imagine why it had appealed to a first-time novelist. You read Woolf's line and are suddenly aware of the brisk entry into a fully-formed world. No fussing around with irrelevant detail and back-story. And I began to write various opening lines.
Read more How to write a Novel
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