Rural-China specialist on preference for boys

Oxford professor said government’s ‘Care for Girls’ program has had some success in stamping out selective abortions, Andrew Moody reports.

The preference for couples to have sons in rural China still remains very strong, Rachel Murphy said.

The associate professor of sociology at the University of Oxford said having a boy in a society where there is not much provision for social welfare is the only way to ensure future financial security.

“I remember talking to a woman who said her life was not going well because she had given birth to another daughter,” she said.

“I told her not to be too despondent because (US) President (Barack) Obama has two daughters. She just said, ‘Yes, but he is not a Chinese farmer’.” Murphy, a 44-year-old Australian, was speaking in the new Dickson Poon China Centre at the University of Oxford.

She has spent much of her career studying rural people in China, particularly in Jiangxi and Anhui provinces.

One of her specialties is China’s sex-ratio imbalances. After the family planning policy was introduced in 1979, the number of boys born for every 100 girls soared to 120 in 2000 (more than 130 in some rural areas), boosted partly when ultrasound technology made abortion of female fetuses possible. The government aims to bring the ratio to 112 next year. The natural birth rate where there is no family planning policy is 105 boys to girls across all societies.

“This imbalance was there historically and all through the Mao period as well. Chinese parents have always wanted to have at least one son and just carried on having children until they had a son.”

Murphy believes the Chinese government has had some success in righting the imbalance with its “Care for Girls”, first piloted in 2003 and aimed at stamping out selective abortion. She believes there might be special cultural factors in China that make it difficult to eradicate preference for sons altogether.

“There was a view that China would become like South Korea. It, too, had this sex-ratio imbalance but as the country urbanized this was largely eradicated.

“In China, both rich and poor areas have sex-ratio imbalances, however. This is particularly the case among wealthy entrepreneurs who want to pass on their property to their sons.”

Murphy, who was brought up in Perth, Western Australia, started to learn Chinese at school only because it clashed with the timetable for sports — something she dreaded. “In Australia, it is fairly miserable to be a child who is no good at sport but I did enjoy Chinese very much and studied it from the age of 12.”

When she was 17, she was one of eight Australians selected for the Australian Young Scholars Study Year in China program, through which she attended both Beijing Second Foreign Languages Institute and East China Normal University in Shanghai.

“It was the first time any of us had spent any time living away from home and it was a great adventure. I remember seeing so many rural people at Beijing railway station with their mesh sacks wondering where they had come from and what they were doing.”

She went on to get a double major degree in Asian and cultural studies at Murdoch University in Perth before moving to the UK to do a PhD in sociology at Cambridge University.

Murphy then pursued an academic career, taking in academic posts at Cambridge and Bristol universities before moving to Oxford in 2007.

She has since headed the Asian Studies Centre and from the beginning of this year was made head of the School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies. She is widely regarded as one of Europe’s leading experts on the sociology of China.

Her first book, How Migrant Labor is Changing Rural China, published in both English and Chinese, sold 5,000 copies, which is considered high for an academic work. Until having a family of her own, Murphy had spent three or four months every other year doing field work. This involved staying in county or township government state houses and interviewing children and families.

“It is what I call deep hanging out. When I was doing my PhD, I had officials accompanying me at the beginning. I was asking family after family the same questions and they soon got bored,” she said, laughing.

“They said: ‘You have asked every representative rural family why their son had gone away and they have told you it was to earn money. Why do you think they have gone out for?’”

She is currently writing her second book on the phenomenon of so-called left behind children in rural areas who are often raised by their grandparents while their parents go to the cities to work.

“Sometimes people overlook the pressure placed on grandparents. I had a daughter at the age of 40, I have a husband who helps with the housework, a washing machine, running hot water, a pretty good income and the ability to pay for a child minder who is really good,” she said.

“Imagine if I were 60 or 70 and as well as looking after three children also had to look after a farm, collect fern for fuel, husk the grain and wash the soil from the vegetables to cook. There are no ready meals from the fridge to microwave. It is just a substantial burden.”

She said new boarding schools that in many rural areas have replaced village schools, which no longer had enough numbers to support them, have taken some of the pressure away.

“Policymakers have identified these schools as the solution to the care deficit of left behind children and in some cases they have become their second home. Parents like them because they are worried about grandparents spoiling the children and they think they will be safer and receive a better education in the strict environment of a school. Education is very important to them and it is one of the reasons they are working away.”

Murphy said most Chinese rural people see moving to the city as a route to a better life. One of the main aims of the current government is the reform of hukou, or the household registration system. Without hukou, people do not have access to a range of benefits, including free education for their children.

“Hukou is not the only story and there is often too much emphasis on this because there are many factors that prove obstacles to rural people establishing a proper foothold in a city, including long working hours, low pay and the difficulty in securing housing. These are barriers in other countries too, particularly Latin America.

“The scheme is, however, an important institutional tool in keeping the costs down of raising the next generation, enabling families to live together instead of being separate.”

Murphy believes the study of China is continuing to rapidly evolve.

“When I started to study China it was seen as a fairly marginal topic; now everybody wants to know about it. There are also much more opportunities to do collaborative research projects in China that might have once been perceived too sensitive,” she said.

Murphy is unsure, however, whether the awareness in the West of what life in China is really like is accurate with many assuming it is about Shanghai skyscrapers and buying Gucci handbags.

“It depends on whom you are talking to. People who go on a two-week holiday come back and tell you how fabulous it is. I still don’t think people have much sense of the variety and diversity of China because customs and dialects can be incredibly different.”