CHINA'S MISSING WOMEN.

• Author: Smith, Patricia

For decades, China's government enforced a policy that led to a huge gender imbalance. Now it's dealing with the frightening consequences.

Sixteen-year-old Phyu* grew up in a tiny ramshackle village in the nation of Myanmar, where her prospects were few. But in the summer of 2018 came an offer of a waitressing job, if she was willing to travel for it. Eager for a better life, she got into a van that made its way across the border to China.

After 10 days of traveling, however, Phyu realized she wasn't going to a job in a restaurant. She tried to run away but didn't know where to go. The traffickers caught her and locked her in a room. Her phone had no signal. Men who spoke Chinese were brought to see her.

"I had a sense I was being sold, but I could not escape," says Phyu, now 17. She started to cry, but the trafficker told her to stop because she needed to look pretty for her potential husband.

Phyu was one of many thousands of women and girls from Myanmar who've been forced into marriages with Chinese men in recent years. And it's not just Myanmar: Young women and girls from impoverished parts of Laos, North Korea, Vietnam,

Pakistan, and Cambodia have also been effectively sold to men in China who are desperate for wives.

One-Child Policy

They're desperate because there are 37 million fewer women than men in China--a gap roughly equivalent to the entire population of Poland. That gender imbalance is the result of China's longtime policy of allowing families to have only one child and the traditional cultural preference for boys. Over the course of the 35 years the one-child policy was in place--it ended in 2016--China was robbed of millions of baby girls as many families used gender-based abortions and other methods to ensure that their one child was a boy. The impact of this imbalance has rippled across Chinese society, and the surge in "bride buying" from other countries is only one of the effects. Others include rising crime rates in areas with high percentages of unmarried men and a shrinking workforce.

"It's a huge problem," says Valerie Hudson, a professor at Texas A&M University and co-author of a book on the issue of gender imbalance. "In a deeply patriarchal society like China, a young man not getting married means he's no one. He has no respect. You are going to have a population with some serious grievances."

How did China get into this demographic mess? The roots of the problem go back to 1979, when China introduced the one-child policy as a way to limit the growth of the country's huge population, which is now 1.4 billion, the world's largest. The thinking was that having fewer people to feed, educate, and find jobs for would enable China's economy to develop faster.

Then in the 1980s, ultrasound Scanners--which are intended for checking the health of developing fetuses but can also show their sex--became widely available across China. Suddenly, pregnant women could easily find out if they were having a boy or a girl. That technology, combined with China's one-child policy, made many women decide not to have the baby if it was a girl. In China's Confucian culture, it's the duty of a son to support and care for his aging parents, and this helps drive the traditional preference for sons.

Social Upheaval

The problem peaked in 2004, when 121 boys were born in China for every 100 girls, according to Chinese statistics. Now...