If you want peace, prepare for social instability in China and India. That is the message from a 2004 study on Asia’s “bare branches” – permanent involuntary bachelors who do not have families. The authors warn that the scale on which sex ratios in India and China are “being artificially altered is unprecedented in human history”. Their detailed historical research concludes that once the male-female ratio exceeds 120 to 100, then a society becomes inherently unstable. They warn that India’s democratic system may weaken and that any hope of a “full democracy” in China should probably be abandoned.
According to the study, China had already announced in 1999 a birth ratio of 120 males to 100 females. In the 2000 census, the birth ratio in two provinces (Hainan and Guangdong) was higher than 130:100. In some provinces, because of large migrant worker communities, the ration of adult males to adult females even now can be around 130:100.
Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer’s book, Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population [MIT Press] fell off my desk this morning as I was contemplating the small number of women speakers and participants in my institute’s annual Worldwide Security Conference this week, which aims to bridge Asia to the West. We aim each year to redress the exaggerated gender balance we find in our speaker lists. Each year, we fail.
The social influences on security may be more profound than most specialists and political leaders imagine. In 1943, the United States Army published an internal study on the Japanese Imperial Army. My notes have long since disappeared. As I recall, the study attributed the brutality of the Imperial Army not so much to the officer corps’ bushido tradition, but to the overwhelming domination of the other ranks by uneducated peasants whose behavior reflected social values in the countryside.
Accurate or not, the results of that study have remained with me and were borne out to some degree by a study on the success of Mao’s insurgency in China, by Alexander Atkinson, (Social Order and the General Theory of Strategy, 1981). The author concluded that Mao was militarily successful because he matched his strategy closely to the peasant social culture (not any putative “class interest”).
The main conclusion of the Bare Branches study is worth a closer look. The authors do not posit gender equity as the main characteristic of more stable societies. The main attribute they focus on is the “status of women”. Are women valued in adult life as economic contributors or social protectors?
Thus the disposition of a community for violence arising from gender imbalance appears to be conditional not on how many women are in power but on how they are treated and regarded in the society. Put another way, we can help preserve international order from the dangerous effects of gender imbalance to the extent that women as a group are empowered to exercise authority and deliver economic resources.
On this measure, China at first glance looks better placed than India. Gender equality is widely promoted in China and women’s access to power is for the most part guaranteed. But that is on the superficial level. What has happened in China is that the preference for male children is simply deeply entrenched and where only one child is allowed, this has produced the severely distorted – and dangerous – birth ratio.
Thus, we arrive at a very different view of how organizations like the EastWest Institute might look at how it promotes the role of women in its work. Is it important to strive for higher numbers of women in particular events in order to approach a 50-50 balance between men and women participants? Or is it more important to promote a concept of human and social security that is premised on empowering women to exercise authority and deliver resources? The situation in India and China sketched out by Hudson and den Boer suggests the latter should be not only a higher priority but an urgent one, since international security (a “safer and better world”) is our goal.