China Law Blog

The bulk of China may be many years behind South Korea, but urbanites show a fairly strong bias for daughters. Girls tend to be better behaved as children, have more opportunities to advance even if they don't do well on the all-important national exams and are a better bet as parental caregivers. Families with daughters also don't bear the onerous wedding costs.

Even outside of major metropolitan areas, girls have more job opportunities, are more likely marry up and advance socially. Their parents also don't have to worry about finding a daughter-in-law from a badly skewed marriage pool.

The dynamic for India is totally different. Indian daughters are much more costly to their parents and there's less social mobility for the girls.

True, in India, you have to pay someone to take your daughter (big liability). In China, the one child policy is the first problem, with religious, ethnic and economic incentives being the final problems.

Wow... that's an interesting result. In the past when I had discussed the existence of glass ceilings/double standards/what have you in China with some of my students, often times they would say at least women in China are better off than in Korea or Japan. But it appears times are a-changin'.

NH: If my daughter had ideas like yours, I'd probably also have to pay someone to take her.

Q: Mr. Platek, what, specifically, do you find wrong with Lamb Kebab? I have a similar distaste for his ideas, but I can't seem to finger how his ideas are inconsistent, wrong, or morally dubious.

support for the Beijing olympics is morally dubious:

http://www.veoh.com/videos/v1357069DKZqmaty

I don't think it's fair to compare the metropolitan Korea with mostly rural China in general. There are vast regional difference in China and there are areas in China with more advance view on girls then the others. One of the best quote on gender equality in Shanghai is from an interview in That's Shanghai with a 24 years old Shanghainess girl: "I think gender is more equal in my generation. Unlike my mom, I sometime help my boyfriend with the dishes."

Inst: A consistently negative take on every matter possible under discussion is my specific objection. His moniker "bad bad China" is specifically unjustified.

Todd:

Are going to engage in petty insult tossing? I thought you were Mr. Moral Highground. Of course, doing business with a totalitarian, mass murdering regime and traitorous corporations kinda erodes your stance.

Rene,

The gender situation in urban China is very different from rural China, and there's strong regional cultural differences as well. In southern cities, daughters are quite desireable. In the countryside, there's a still a very very strong culturally and possibly economically motivated biases for boy children, though the economic equation there is also moving in favor of girls.

Astrid,
What is the basis of your opinion? It doesn't seem to match the facts (e.g. the M:F ratio is pretty skewed in areas like Guangzhou, which aren't exactly countryside).

NH: I am Mr. Let's Keep An Open Mind, and,yes, am liable (not guilty) to represent all sorts of clients. The companies from US and elsewhere doing business in China are doing many positive things for China and Chinese people in terms of improving life. If you can identify gas chambers being built and/or operated there, with or without foreign assistance, kindly so report so that we may all become enlightened. I only ask you to perform fair and balanced investigation and reporting, from time to time. Is it that you only see the negative wherever you look, or that it is the negative on which you prefer to expound?