Missing: 20 million women - the WTO column

(Tomorrow in Chinabiz)

Shanghai – Lying with statistics is a special art and the best ones are even able to deceive the users themselves very intelligently. In China the story of the 20 million unmarried men, looking for women has been keeping both demographers and journalist very busy for the past fifteen years, blaming both the one-child policy and the traditional preference for boys as an explanation.
For the arguments’ sake I will now assume that the population statistics in China are correct. I know there can be a lot of discussion about that issue alone, but also for this kind of discussions we need a level playing ground.

China has 20 million more unmarried men than unmarried women and that shortage has been part of many doomsday scenarios for the country. While they are still missing – remember we decided to believe the statistics – I do have to kill the doomsday scenario.

Do join me to a trip I made 15 years ago to the town called Kerkrade in the southern parts of the Netherlands. The 50,000 citizens in this former mining town belong to the poorest in my country and the men were complaining, just like the men at the Chinese country side. All the women left their town to find richer men elsewhere, they told me. They took me to these special places where the lonely hearts, all beer drinking men, were waiting in vain for women to show up, while only a small group of women dealt with their needs on a more professional basis in a corner of that hall.
I checked the local statistics, and indeed, Kerkrade did have 3,000 more unmarried men than women. The official spokesman of the town almost fainted when I confronted him with the statistics. I went home as a happy journalist.
In a move I still regret I also decided back home to call the Dutch National Bureau for Statistics to recheck the figures. After having a good laugh about my story, the expert there checked his figures confirmed Kerkrade was missing 3,000 unmarried women.
I had just finished my story, when he called back. He had bad news for me, he said. The women were not only missing in Kerkrade, but they were missing everywhere in the Netherlands. The difference was caused by the fact that women marry earlier than men. So, for a country with 1.3 billion inhabitants, ‘missing’ 20 million women is not that much of a problem, although some of the men involved might not agree with me. As a percentage, it comes very close to the figures in Kerkrade.
To blame the one-child policy or the traditional preference for boys at the country-side does not help, both demographers and journalists will need to look for a better story, I fear.

I still hate this guy of the Dutch National Bureau of Statistics who called me back and killed my story. Colleagues here in China will hate me for doing the same thing, but I think it is only fair. There are so many real stories to tell, why should we make them up?

Fons Tuinstra