Gender Imbalance In Imperial China

Gender Imbalance In early imperial China, the way of life was very different than it is in China today. Men were known to have taken care of the fields. Women were to stay at home and to their woman’s work. Their work consisted of sewing, weaving, spinning, and embroidery. This is the Confucian way of how to be a good woman. Although, it was not necessary for these jobs to be done year- round; many women also had the job of tea picking. In that time, people believed that women who picked tea would turn out to be good woman and caused them to be better respected through their hard work (Lu). The Great Leap Forward took place in 1958-1961. Mao Zedong called for the farms to become government ruled. The Great Leap Forward lead shortages of grain yields as well as the starvation of many (Han). The Cultural Revolution took place after as another result of the Great Leap Forward. The Cultural Revolution helped China recover from the results of the Great Leap Forward. One problem still remained from the Cultural Revolution: a growing population (Howden et al.). There was a rapid population growth from
The normal ratio of men to women is 105 to 100. In China, the ratio is 118 to 100. The change in this ratio causes there to be 40 million men unable to find a wife (Howden et al.). The one-child policy also caused a lot of girls to be aborted. Men have always carried the family name in China, but the need for the names to be carried on seemed to become more necessary due to the one-child policy. Young women no longer see the need to be married as soon as they can; with so many eligible men, there’s no rush for them. Divorce rates have also gone up recently; unhappy women have no reason to stay with their husbands anymore. There has also been an increase in sex-trafficking and prostitution. Businesses have even been formed selling refugee women from North Korea to poorer Chinese men