Chinese Orphanages: Saving China's Abandoned Girls

As the PRC government provides ambiguous support for Chinas traditionally patriarchal social order and since kinship no longer organizes local society as tightly as it once did the gender bias has been somewhat mitigated since 1949. Yet the living traditions and values of Chinese culture continue to shape and reflect a society which to an extreme degree has been organized by and around agnatic (male) kin groups groups that in a formal sense exclude females or at best define them as marginal members. In a variety of ways government policy in the post-revolutionary era has indirectly reinforced these patterns - for example by restricting the geographical mobility of the rural population and by relying on the rural family patrilineally defined as the first and preferred source of welfare and old age security. Even today in Chinese villages many people when asked about their children (haizi) (How many children do you have? What do they do? etc.) will answer as if only sons count failing even to mention the existence of daughters unless specifically asked. Similarly when relating their family histories in a North China village in the late 1970s and early 1980s informants reported a suspiciously small number of daughters and sisters. These oral family histories told primarily by native village men yielded an extremely skewed sex ratio reflecting the highly patrilineal definition of the family internalized by these informants. As a peasant woman in the documentary film Small Happiness aptly put it nearly forty years after the revolution arrived in her village Daughters are not family they are only relatives. Indeed despite some significant changes in marriage patterns (such as the increasing prevalence of intra-village marriage) dominant norms in the countryside where most of Chinas population still resides continue to dictate that young women marry patrilocally symbolically if not always literally leaving their own natal family and transferring their primary obligations to their husbands family. Therefore unlike sons people still speak of daughters as being lost at marriage or belonging to other people. These attitudes and patterns help explain why orphanages in China have long been disproportionately filled by girls. (excerpt)