Oh, I wish I would’ve been the one to come up with that title. Unfortunately, I can’t take credit.
In the early 1990s, I remember reading about how portable ultrasound units were enabling Chinese villagers to find out if pregnant women were carrying male or female babies. Then, typically, they’d abort the female babies. According to the article I was reading, it was reaching a point where some regions had a birth-rate of 32 boys to every 1 girl.
There’s a new book on the subject, and it predicts that China will engage in a massive, bloody conflict by 2020, presumably because of the pent-up frustrations of all those grown boys. The book is Bare Branches: Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population, by Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. den Boer, and the Chronicle of Higher Education just ran a neat article on it.