This tragic case is all the more disturbing because it is part of a wave of suicide that seems to be washing over the countryside. Estimates of suicides in China range from 13 per 100,000 all the way up to 30 per 100,000. In the Western world, by contrast, suicide rates hover around 10 per 100,000. In China, the large majority of suicides are young rural women. Traditionally, suicide was often a socially acceptable, even honorable, choice for a woman facing humiliation. Today, it may be that it is more often a form of resistance to the crushing weight of old patriarchal norms that young women simply cannot accept. However, for the vast majority of married women resistance takes other forms, including divorce.

Many young women migrate to towns or cities to work, and find husbands there them. Young, single female workers in Shenzhen in South China are so plentiful that they outnumber the men by 2.5 to one. The government has set up roller-skating rinks, stadiums, amusement parks, and so on to keep these women busy “so they won’t think about men.” For single men a spot like this ought t:ybe a great hunting ground, but women who have lived in a place like Shenzhen, a stone’s throw from Hong Kong and one of the richest and most developed areas of China, are likely to be very choosy. It is hard to imagine that any would be willing to “marry down” by moving somewhere into the dirt-poor countryside. In those rural areas that remain mired in poverty, men can offer almost nothing. For example, in the village of Dachuan in the poor northwestern province of Gansu, in the early 1990s nearly 40% of the households were living below the local official poverty line, which was a per capita income of $50 to $65 per year.19 This kind of abject poverty and the shortage of women has led some rural men to desperate measures.

Understandably, marriageable women have definitely become a hot commodity. This has given them the power, if they choose to use it, to decide whom they will marry and under what conditions. Thus, discrimination against females, manifested in the low rate of female births, has had the paradoxical result of increasing the influence and desirability of women.

Women are taking advantage of the demand for bride by migrating to wealthier regions, where eager, potential husbands wait, offering a life better than the one back home. According to census figures, between 1985 and 1990 0ver 4 million women migrated in order to get married, compared to only about 400,000 men who migrated for the same reason. How do these potential brides and grooms find each other? Lonely heart ads in newspapers and magazines have become popular. The ads, placed mostly by men, read much the same: there is information about the man’s age; his housing situation; whether he has been married before, and if so whether he has children and his height. Matches are also arranged by relatives or friends who are living and working away from home, and by impatient singles themselves.

And sometimes infants, especially girls, died of parental neglect. Even more horrifying, some parents killed their infants, especially the girls. But in China today-a country free of widespread hunger, hopelessness, and utter destitution-the crime of infanticide must be extremely rare, certainly so rare that it cannot play any significant role in the nation’s sexual imbalance.

Undoubtedly, an infinitely more prominent role is played by the under registration of female births. When talking to people, frequently someone will admit to knowing of a family that gave birth to a daughter but, in contravention of the regulations, did not register her with the government. People who get away with this are able to avoid the heavy penalties (a fine of several thousand dollars m some places) of having “too many” children. But the real problem comes later, when the child is ready to start school. As a nonperson, the child would normally be denied all social services.

The obvious result of a shortage of women is that some men are unable to find wives. In the countryside in the 1990s in the age group 20-24 (the prime “getting married- age): for every 100 unmarried women there were no less than 162 unmarried men.

Normally in the human species, slightly more boys are born than girls. This is nature’s way of keeping things in balance because boy infants have a lower rate of survival. Thus, without any sort of outside intervention, by the time men and women reach reproductive age, their numbers should be about equal. But in China since 1949, and also probably before then, men have outnumbered women. Today the imbalance is a phenomenal 107 males for every 100 females. How it is that China has defied nature, and what does it matter?

The foremost cause of the imbalance has to do with the continuing preference for sons, combined with the one-child policy. If couples may have only one child, and if they strongly prefer to have a son, what can they do? Thanks to modern technology, quite a bit. Ultrasound machines, including inexpensive Chinese-produced models, have been widespread for a number of years. Since a scan often identifies the sex of the fetus, couples can use that information in deciding on an abortion. While there is no way of knowing how many couples choose to abort female fetuses identified by this means, it seems safe to assume that many do. To thwart this, the state has forbidden doctors to divulge the sex of the fetus, but anxious couples often find ways of getting around this. Ultrasound scans are not entirely reliable, and undoubtedly some male fetuses-because they are incorrectly identified as female-are also aborted. This “problem” should fade away as amniocentesis, which identifies sex almost without error, becomes increasingly popular.

The second factor is that women are less well educated than men, and therefore fewer are qualified for higher-paying, skilled jobs. In a nationwide survey conducted in 1990, in the age group 16 t0 65 years, women on average had completed only 4.75 years of schooling, while men had completed 6.63 years. About 27% of women had never been to school, compared to less than 10% of men. About 51% of men had graduated from middle school, but only 34.6% of women. And about 3% of men had received a college education compared to 1.7% of women. The education discrepancy between men and women is largest among those born before 1949. After 1949 educational attainment for both males and females skyrocketed, at least until the late 1970s, so that younger people tend to be much better educated than their elders. Yet, the male-female education gap still exists, and in recent years may even be getting wider, especially in the countryside. Equally disturbing is the gap between rural women and their urban sisters. In 1990, one in 10 rural 16-year-old girls had not completed primary school; in the cities, less than two in 100 girls of the same age had failed to English primary school.

Surveys have also found that most women work because they want to. In the mid-1990s, 88% of married women interviewed said that they would work even if their husband’s income were sufficient to support the family. About 35% of them considered work as an opportunity to express them. Only 8.5% said they worked in order to gain financial independence. Employment figures for women would probably be still higher were it not for the fact that women tend to retire, sometimes against their wishes, earlier than men. For physically demanding work, such as stevedoring, the official retirement age is 55 for men and 50 for women. For other types of work, women generally are retired at age 55, while men can continue to work until age 60 or beyond. Thus, in the age group 50 to 55 years, about 30% of women are retired compared to only about 8% of men. This discrepancy may have less to do with discrimination against women per se than with several other factors related to the employment of women.