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01/14/2006:

"A bias towards boys is unbalancing Asia"

Counting up the numbers of boys and girls in a country has never been so troublesome. On Monday the medical journal the Lancet published a report estimating that prenatal selection and selective abortion in India was likely to be causing half a million girls to be culled every year. Within 24 hours, the Indian medical association weighed in to dispute the Lancet's figures as out-of-date and exaggerated. The Indian government has made no formal statement, but is said to be incandescent with rage.

There are good reasons for all this sensitivity. The abnormally unbalanced gender ratios of some Asian countries - either due to abortion, sex-selective technologies such as ultrasound or old-fashioned infanticide - have been the subject of academic controversy since the late 1980s. Just recently, however, they come to be cloaked in a more sinister hue. One of the latest growth areas in the academy is in "security demographics", where scholars are invited to predict the potentially dire implications of demographic change, and one of the most gloomy prognostications is rooted in what could happen when sex ratios spin out of kilter.

"Bare branches" is the Chinese term for the poor young men who are left with no prospect of finding a partner or starting a family. In their influential 2004 book of the same name, the American political scientists Valerie M Hudson and Andrea M den Boer argued that these men were an accident waiting to happen. The pair found evidence of a huge number of "missing females" in eight different Asian countries, but the vast majority were from India and China, where two-fifths of the world's population now live. In 1999, they noted, the Chinese academy of social sciences admitted that the birth-sex ratio in that country had reached 120 boys for every 100 girls, and that the number of surplus Chinese males was now 111 million.
guardian.co.uk