Dr. John J. Kennedy, associate professor of political science and director of the Center for Global and International Studies at the University of Kansas, first observed the phenomenon of the “missing girls” in China during the 1990s. In his lecture “Out of the Shadows: Family Planning and Identifying the ‘Missing Girls’ in Rural China,” he stressed the importance of the topic to Chinese society and the world at large.
Kennedy gave his lecture at Elizabethtown College on Tuesday, March 31 in Gibble Auditorium. He first went to China as part of a study abroad trip in 1994 and has returned several times since then, twice on Fulbright grants. He now returns to China at least twice per year to visit friends and continue working on his research on the ‘missing girls.’ Kennedy has been working with many of the same people he met when he first studied there. “We identified with the same passion for study and working with refugees in China,” he said. He and his friends started the Northwest Socio-Economic Development Center in 2004 and work with local people to conduct their research on the phenomenon.
Kennedy’s lecture explained that the “missing girls” are those girls whose births are not registered with the Chinese government by their parents. The girls go unregistered because of China’s family planning policies. These policies were discussed in the 1950s and 1970s, but were implemented during the 1980s. Family planning in China was meant to reduce the population size and boost economic growth. Culturally, these policies changed the idea of the perfect Chinese family. Traditionally, the ideal family consisted of a daughter as the eldest child and one or two younger sons. The daughter was expected to help raise her brothers, who were expected to carry on the family name and care for their parents later in life.
The original family planning policy, the Only Child Policy, stressed the importance of families having only one child. This policy was fairly successful, encouraging a lower population, reducing poverty and relieving stress on food production and land use. In the early years of the Only Child Policy, it was considered fine to have one girl and no other children. Eventually, this policy morphed into the desire for families to have male children.
“What I want to argue today is that tradition can change, culture can change,” Kennedy said. Practicality forced changes to the Only Child Policy. The Two Child Policy debuted in 1988 in order to alleviate pressure on elder care, marriage and the college exam system. It was also implemented to prevent “Little Emperor’s Syndrome,” or only child syndrome, the perceived spoiling of an only child by their caregivers’ showering them with attention. Under the Two Child Policy, if a female child was born first, families were usually allowed to try to have another, male, child. If a second daughter was born, parents would often leave their birth unregistered and try again for a boy. This tendency results in a combination of skewed sex ratios and cultural norms.
A number of explanations exist for the phenomenon of the “missing girls.” The most common three are assumptions that parents are having sex-selective abortions, infanticide and late registration. The ultrasound required to perform a sex-selective abortion is illegal in China, but Kennedy said that does not mean people are not having them performed. He said infanticide is a huge issue in China, but the assumption that millions of parents are performing it is unlikely to be true. Kennedy said he believes late registration to be the most likely cause for the “missing girls,” but that it is difficult to determine, as late registrations are hard to identify. There is evidence for all three explanations, he said, but “the key here isn’t which one, but which one has the most influence on the sex ratio,” he said.
“So how do we count the missing?” Kennedy asked. “That’s the big question.” He said his team is interested in the late registration of girls in the population. “We are interested in what’s missing,” he said, “The large amounts of girls alive but unregistered.” Late registration means the girls’ parents have not gone to the government to report their births. If they are alive, that means they are only missing from the statistical evidence, but if they are dead, they are gone for good.
Kennedy said that late registration does not leave parents off the hook. Late registration means these girls are not citizens, which prevents them from receiving a full education or full protection under the law. Identifying and registering these “missing girls” has serious implications for the future, he said.
The lecture was sponsored by the Center for Global Understanding and Peacemaking.
