The New Republic: “No Country for Young Men”

Mara Hvistendahl writes in The New Republic this week about the possibilities of future unrest and social ills as unintended consequences of China’s One Child Policy.  I wrote a little something about this last year:

There are many factors that can contribute to social instability and political unrest, but having a large population of young, underemployed, and unmarried males is a big one. By way of example, I give you the Old “Wild” West in the United States, rural China in the mid- to late-19th century, and Sanlitun’r on any given Saturday night.

Ms. Hvistendahl concurs:

In the 2020s, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher Zheng Zhenzhen, estimates in a People’s Daily interview that 10 percent of Chinese men will be unable to find wives, which could have a huge impact on Chinese society. Historian David Courtwright suggests in Violent Land that sexually segregated societies in the United States–frontier towns flush with unmarried men, immigrant ghettos in early twentieth-century cities, mining camps–are behind our propensity toward violence. The immigrants and westward migrants who shaped early America, Courtwright says, were largely young single men, who are– today as well as then–disproportionately responsible for drug abuse, looting, vandalism, and violent crime. A long-term

More on Paleoanthropology and Chinese nationalism…

A link from reader Scott Loar relating to a previous post on paleoanthropology, race, and Chinese nationalism: This month’s issue of Scientific American contains an article by Gary Stix on DNA research which bolsters the ‘out of Africa’ theory of human evolution.

Where’s the China connection? Well, as I have blogged about before, the idea that the Chinese may have emerged from someplace else–especially when that someplace else is Africa–and then migrated to China is a hard sell here, even among academic specialists. 

Thanks to Scott for the link.  For those (with JSTOR access) interested in the background to this debate, be sure to check out Barry Sautman’s article “Peking Man and the Politics of Paleoanthropology in China,” from the February, 2001 edition of the Journal of Asian Studies.

20th Asian History Carnival, Part II

We’re back for Part II of the 20th Asian History Carnival. As one correspondent drolly noted after going through yesterday’s links, there is more to Asia than China and more to China than Beijing.  Really? I dunno. I’m one of those annoying pseudo-Beijingers who feel the world pretty much drops off after the Fourth Ring Road. Even Fengtai should be marked on maps with the warning “Here be Monsters.”

Also…I’ve found even more links than I thought I had found. (Yeesh, who knew 10 hours a day translating Qing documents would leave me unable to write in any language other than “Yogi Berra.”) Anyway, what this means is that we’ll be having a Part III of the Asian History Carnival tomorrow.  That’s right, a three-ring AHC…I. Really. Need. To. Go. Outside. More.

On to the links…

The exploration of the Nanhai I, a sunken treasure ship dating from the Southern Song, has finally been raised from its watery grave in the South China Sea. The wreck will be stored in a water tank which recreates the conditions on the ocean floor but still allow visitors to the Yangjiang, Guangdong municipal museum to watch as archaeologists continue to excavate and study

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