Widening the Gap: China’s Land Reform and Gender Disparities

Sex selection is a global phenomenon that has existed throughout history and is particularly persistent in Asian countries, where son preference is sometimes strong enough to cause substantial levels of excess female child mortality. China, the nation with the world’s largest population and the traditional notion of male household dominance rooted in history, has long been denounced for its controversial sex selection culture and abortion practices.

Despite China’s economic boom since the early 1980s, there remain various social issues that are likely to take a heavy toll on the nation, including the sex ratio imbalance. Sex ratio at birth in the country has increased from 1.06 in 1979 to 1.20 in 2000. In 2010, the sex ratio at birth in China remained at 1.19, or about 500,000 boys born every year in excess of female births. Despite the fact that birth control policies have generally been accused of contributing to persisting gender inequality in the country, Almond et al. conclude in their recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, “Land Reform and Sex Selection in China,” that a stronger driving force behind China’s gender gap expansion in the early 1980s might have been the national land reform known as the Household Responsibility System introduced in 1979.

The authors explain that, in an attempt to motivate agricultural production, farm fields in rural China were contracted to households for individual cultivation for three to five years starting in 1979. The authors use Census data to hypothesize that this post-Mao land reform increased the number of missing girls by more than 1.24 million during the first six years of its implementation. A second child following a daughter was 5.5 percent more likely to be a boy after introducing the Household Responsibility System. Six years after the reform, the sex ratio in families with a first girl increased dramatically, from around 1.15 to the peak of 1.3.

The land reform’s best-documented effects to date are its positive impacts on agricultural outputs and income. The authors suggest that the reform’s main influential mechanism on sex selection is based on the theory that children are a normal good (as explained by Becker, 1960). In cultures with a strong son preference, a daughter is a poor substitute for a son; thus, bearing a son may be expected to be a normal good as well. As a result, sons and sex selection become more affordable as income increases—as income did in China following the land reform.

Almond et al. argue that while people have blamed the One Child Policy (OCP) for the fertility decline and sex ratio increase in the early 1980s, birth rates were already plummeting during the 1970s, with fertility rates cut in half prior to OCP implementation. Furthermore, OCP had not yet been fully carried out in the early 1980s and was allowing for a second child in rural families, home to 86 percent of the Chinese population at that time. Thus, any modest impact of the OCP on sex selection during that period can be eliminated once the land reform is accounted for.

Other channels that could have possibly linked the land reform and sex selection are also ruled out in the paper, given that none of these hypotheses is supported by empirical evidence. Neither gender-specific income nor demand for future male labor appears to be the cause of the sex selection effect. There did not seem to be gender bias in land distribution, and the reform did not privatize land ownership, so intergenerational transfer to sons was impossible. The assumption that gender selection is due to an increase in demand for old age support has also been invalidated—we would initially expect poor families to be more likely to sex select, since the destroying of the financial basis of the “state pension system” by the land contracting system would have caused underprivileged families to demand even more male financial support. However, county level data shows that counties that experienced more output gains had a substantially larger increase in sex ratios after the reform.

Furthermore, initially richer counties also had more boys born after the reform. The data indicates that the education level of parents is positively associated with the sex selection increase. The authors claim that better educated parents captured larger income increases from land reform, which in turn spurred more sex selection for these families. This is especially evident in the educational levels of mothers.

It is generally believed that development will help eliminate gender disparities (for example, see: World Development Report 2012). However, the authors argue that urban development is likely to increase household income and also reduce the cost of sex selection in cultures with a strong son preference. Despite China’s recent policy relaxation on birth control, battling gender disparities in the context of rapid urbanization remains an arduous mission for a rising economic power like China. How to more effectively tackle a series of critical social issues triggered and intensified by gender imbalance, such as increased criminal behaviors and suppressed rights of women, is still an enormous challenge ahead of many Asian countries.

Article Source: Douglas Almond, Hongbin Li, and Shuang Zhang, “Land Reform and Sex Selection in China,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 19153 (June 2013). 

Feature Photo: cc/(Ross Pollack)