John James Kennedy and Yaojiang Shi. Lost and Found: The 'Missing Girls' in Rural China

摘要

Kennedy and Shi make a compelling intervention in debates about China's masculinised sex ratios and how birth planning policies were implemented in rural regions during the 1980s to early 2000s. They challenge conventional wisdom about the extent of and the reasons for masculinised sex ratios at birth in China's population statistics during the late 1980s and into the 2000s. They join a handful of other scholars (e.g. Yong Cai, William Lavely and Daniel Goodkind) in identifying the underreporting of female births as part of the explanation for 'missing girls' in the official statistics but they give underreporting far more weight than has hitherto been the case.