Dave at The Mutant Palm has posted a critique of the “guang’gun goin’ to hell” narrative that pops up every so often. The short form of that story is that sex-selection in family planning, exacerbated by the One Child Policy, is creating a bachelor bomb (a generation of guang’gun 光棍 or ‘bare sticks’) that will mean years of social unrest in the PRC.
Dave and I disagree slightly on the guang’gun issue, I’m more pessimistic than he is, but I agree with him that this has been overblown by the mainstream media and the historical parallels with the demographic pressures in the turbulent decades of the 19th century, while instructive, are hardly exact.
I wrote a seminar paper on this subject in 2006, and if I can dig it up out of my archive I’ll post it online. In the meantime, check out Dave’s very thoughtful post. (Mainland link here.)——————Kudos also to Dave for his ongoing series exploring the recently opened NYT archives for snippets of historical China analysis. Fascinating stuff from the “The More Things Change…” desk.