Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
What Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune once said of health care in
Depression-era North America is true of China today: “There is a rich
man's tuberculosis and a poor man's tuberculosis. The rich man recov-
ers and the poor man dies. This succinctly expresses the close embrace
of economics and pathology.” (Spence 1969, 217)
Sex Ratio Imbalance
China's growing sex ratio disparity could endanger internal social
stability in the country and even damage its relations with neighbor-
ing countries. An important recent study of excess male populations
in Asian countries has speculated that in some regions of China and
India, “bare branches” (single men with no prospects for marriage)
are causing rising crime rates and social instability (Hudson and den
Boer 2005, 230-41). Perhaps the Qing dynasty's legislative preoccupa-
tion with specifying harsh punishments for rootless, vagrant, sexually
aggressive males (Sommer 2000, 96-101) had something to do with sex
ratio disparity. Much more recently, there have been indications that
human smuggling along the China-North Korea border involves
almost exclusively North Korean women who have been bought by
Chinese men desperate to find wives (Kim 2008, 81-101). According
to the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, tens of thousands of
women are bought and sold in China each year, especially in the prov-
inces of Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou, and China is also a popular
destination for trafficked women from Russia and Ukraine. Organized
crime gangs in China have recently begun discovering how lucrative
human trafficking can be when individuals and families are willing
to pay the equivalent of thousands of U.S. dollars to traffickers for
baby boys or for girls at or near marriageable age. Wife-selling, kid-
nappings of girls, and prostitution, along with all of the attendant
social ills associated with these crimes, will be the natural consequen-
ces of China's grossly unnatural gender imbalance problem.
Energy Dependency
China does not have enough natural resources, in particular energy
resources, to sustain its burgeoning economic development. Thus
China, like most industrialized countries, must look to outside sources
to meet its energy needs. China understands its utter dependency on
oil from the Middle East and is presently beefing up its military capabil-
ities, particularly its navy, to guarantee the unimpeded flow of Middle
Eastern oil into Chinese ports. China's military does anticipate, or at
