The China Beat · Asia’s Disappearing Daughters

One of the main points I made in my article in Modern China
about the enduring preference for sons in the PRC was a fairly simple
one, which—had I written the article a bit later—I might have linked to a
phrase Bill Clinton would make famous: “It’s the economy, stupid.” What
was left out of the picture in both Western reports (that attributed
the problem to official birth control policy) and Chinese commentaries
(that treated all gender bias as a holdover of pernicious traditional
beliefs) was how having a boy as opposed to a girl was likely to affect
the living standard of a rural family. For all the experiments in social
engineering Mao Zedong introduced from the 1940s through the 1970s,
including some designed to do away with gender bias, the Chinese
government had never focused on uprooting the general pattern of rural
women marrying into their husband’s village.