China may fail to curb its worrying gender imbalance before 2015 as planned, the country's top family planning body said.
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The Sixth National Population Census showed that every year, there were about 1.2 million more "leftover men" — men who are above 30 years of age and unmarried.
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By 2020, China will have at least 30 million more unmarried men than women between the ages of 20 and 45.
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"It is a grave social problem as many men will face old age without the economic and emotional support of a family," said Zhai Zhenwu, head of the School of Social and Population Studies at Renmin University of China.
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To curb the skewed birth sex ratio, the National Health and Family Planning Commission launched a five-year plan to drop the ratio to 115 male newborns for every 100 females by 2015. The current ratio is 117.6 to 100.
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The international average, which was believed to be the least harmless for the development of society, is roughly 103-107 to 100.
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Lu Huajie, a professor of sociology at Peking University, expressed pessimism.
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"According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the sex ratio at birth of past four years has been around 117 or 118 to 100.
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It has already been an impossible mission to even reach the '115 to 100' goal," he said.
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Li said illegal gender testing and subsequent abortions are mainly responsible for the current situation.
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Zhai said the root cause lies in a slow-changing preference for boys in rural areas.
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Lisa Eklund, a sociologist from Lund University in Sweden, found that a preference for boys remains steady in rural China, while at the same time adult sons in cities have been given a more important role in providing for the social and financial security of the elderly.Â