Girls Vs Boys in China
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China had solved one of their population problems, but had unknowingly created another problem from it. Back in 1976, China faced an overpopulation problem. The growth of Chinas population brought a lot of problems to the country and to its people. Some of the problems were from overcrowding and not enough resources like food and jobs to go around for everyone. This was why the government of China enacted the One-Child Policy act in order to prevent over population. The One-Child Policy was a law that allowed a family to only have one child with the incentive of economic and educational advantages to the family that obeyed this law, in many cases disobeying the law would result in a fine.
This leads to my main article, in the Guardian Newspaper, that talks about todays effects on China from the One-Child Policy. The One-Child Policy had been successful in Chinas goal to prevent overpopulation but one of its effects was the unbalanced ratio of boy to girl genders. This plan had worked and for a while and the population was controlled and by 1987, “the countrys boy-girl ratio was similar to the global average. But because of the One-Child Policy, todays families have been unintentionally giving birth to more males than females as a result, “approximately 117 boys to every 100 girls.(1)” The government had not foreseen this problem and in response to this problem, they are now offering the parents cash incentives to produce more girls. In some areas the cash incentives for families living in rural areas are higher because they are likelier to have two children instead of one, and in this case, having two daughters. There are a lot of societal issues in relation to the One-Child Policy. Some cases include kidnapping of women and children and even the abortion of unborn female fetuses. But without these measures being taken, researchers say that by 2020, the consequences would be a shortage of 30 million women. Therefore, the Chinese government officials insist that these measures are necessary to the country.
I felt that the author presented a pretty fair and factual article but I still felt a little bias on the authors intentions throughout his writing. The author did present his reasons why China enacted the One-Child Policy and why the Government was rewarding the families that gave birth to females, but his points on the negatives of Chinas policy outweighed the pro side of the One-ChildPolicy. An example would be the cases where women would have abortions simply because the fetus that she is carrying found to be of female gender.