How do rich Asians adapt to unbalanced sex ratios?

In a recent issue of Le Monde Diplomatique, Isabelle Attané describes in her article "L'Asie manque de femmes", the boy-biased ratio of boys to girls at birth in many of the largest countries of Asia: 117 in China, 111 in India, 110 in Taiwan, 108 in South Korea, 106 in Indonesia. This excess is a relatively recent phenomenon, beginning only in the 1980s when the demographic transition accelerated in these countries and parents, unwilling to incur cultural and economic disadvantages of bearing daughters to full term, began to produce only sons. Attané concludes her article with an apocalyptic floush, invoking the images of social collapse produced by such a global excess of Lebanese Amin Maalouf's 1992 novel The First Century After Beatrice (Le premier siècle après Béatrice).

"If tomorrow men and women could, by a simple way, decide the sex of these children, certain peoples would only choose boys. They would stop reproducing and, soon, disappear. Today a social flaw, the culture of the male will become a group suicide," that what will happen will be an "autogenocide of misogynistic populations." Before that, in Maalouf's vision, will come decades of civil and international war as resentful single men fight it out among themselves.

Poor regions suffering from serious sex imbalances will face serious problems indeed, perhaps even the something like the depopulation-related strife that Maalouf described. Richer regions, though, can import their women from poorer regions. This is already happening on a large scale in China, where not only women from poorer parts of China but ambitious emigrants from Vietnam are entering the marriage market in richer areas. In Taiwan and South Korea, two wealthy countries with pronounced sex ratios in favour of men, the immigration of women from poorer countries--Vietnam, the Philippines, China--has taken on remarkably large dimensions, as Attané notes in the case of Taiwan.

These marriage migrations are also growing strongly towards Taiwan, where nearly 8% of the marriages celebrated in 2000 involved a Taiwanese man and a Vietnamese woman. Since the mid-1990s, Vietnam has provided spouses to several hundred thousand Taiwanese men, wanting a women who respects their shared traditional values and who is less likely to demand their independence than a Taiwanese woman.

In South Korea, despite growing concerns about the fate of these female emigrants and considerable prejudice against children born in mixed-nationality marriages, this immigration is transforming the country's population.

About 800,000 foreigners make up Korea`s population of 48 million. The number of foreigners is expected to reach 1.5 million in the next five years, according to government data.

Moreover, there are rising numbers of mixed marriages in Korea. The number is increasing due to rural women moving into cities, leaving young farmers and fishermen to find brides from other Asian nations, particularly in Southeast Asia.

International marriages now make up 13 percent of all marriages in Korea. More than 30 percent of international marriages are unions between rural men and foreign brides.

According to Pearl S. Buck International, there are about 35,000 mixed-race children in Korea. About 15 percent of all newborns in Korea are from mixed marriages. That figure will likely double by 2020, the foundation said.

As Attané notes in her article, even though in South Korea at least the sex ratio is slowly returning to normal, the effects of the shortage of women will create a generation of men who will need to import women immigrants as spouses. This marriage immigration might be enough to handle the unbalanced sex ratios in the richer parts of Asia, though the prospects facing the poorer regions of China now and Southeast Asia and North Korea in the future aren't pleasant. It will also make these richer countries, where a double-digit percentages of children are born to marriages involving at least one foreign-born parent, rather spectacularly multicultural in the very near future. One only hopes that these receiving countries will do a better job of handling this population shift than some of their other counterparts.