April 26, 2009
BEIJING (AFP) — Hundreds of students at a Tibetan school in China's northwest held a daring protest, demonstrating over education conditions, locals and an overseas Tibetan group said Saturday.
The protest took place Friday morning among Tibetan students at the Xiahe middle school in Gansu province, the proprietor of a local hotel told AFP by telephone.
"The students protested on Friday. There were no protests today," he said without giving his name.
"There were a few police, but no violence. Everything is quiet."
Xiahe, is home to the Labrang Monastery, a famous Tibetan Buddhist temple, where monks protested in March 2008 when anti-Chinese unrest spread throughout ethnic Tibetan regions of China.
During the unrest, the remote town and monastery were besieged with armed police, the proprietor said.
According to Phayul.com, an exiled Tibetan news website, several hundred Tibetan students were expressing their disappointment over the rise in the number of Chinese students in college-level institutes.
The students said college seats that are normally given to Tibetans were being given instead to Chinese students, it said.
Phones at the Xiahe public security office and the Xiahe Middle School were not being answered Saturday.
Unrest in ethnic Tibetan regions in China spread last year after riots erupted in Lhasa during March.
China has said "rioters" were responsible for 21 deaths, while saying that its security forces killed only one "insurgent."
However, the exiled Tibetan government headed by the Dalai Lama has said more than 200 Tibetans were killed in China's subsequent crackdown.
A Tibet court issued a suspended death sentence for one man and stiff jail terms for two others for setting deadly fires in the Lhasa riots last year, Chinese state media said Tuesday.
The two fires killed six people, Xinhua news agency said, quoting the Tibet Daily newspaper.
2009-04-27
2009-04-15
Chinese Chinese Bias for Baby Boys Creates a Gap of 32 Million
Sharon Lavaliere
The New York Times
April 11, 2009
BEIJING — A bias in favor of male offspring has left China with 32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls, creating “an imminent generation of excess men,” a study released Friday said.
For the next 20 years, China will have increasingly more men than women of reproductive age, according to the paper, which was published online by the British Medical Journal. “Nothing can be done now to prevent this,” the researchers said.
Chinese government planners have long known that the urge of couples to have sons was skewing the gender balance of the population. But the study, by two Chinese university professors and a London researcher, provides some of the first hard data on the extent of the disparity and the factors contributing to it.
In 2005 , they found, births of boys in China exceeded births of girls by more than 1.1 million. There were 120 boys born for every 100 girls.
This disparity seems to surpass that of any other country, they said — a finding, they wrote, that was perhaps unsurprising in light of China’s one-child policy.
They attributed the imbalance almost entirely to couples’ decisions to abort female fetuses.
The trend toward more male than female children intensified steadily after 1986, they said, as ultrasound tests and abortion became more available. “Sex-selective abortion accounts for almost all the excess males,” the paper said.
The researchers, who analyzed data from a 2005 census, said the disparity was widest among children ages 1 to 4, a sign that the greatest imbalances among the adult population lie ahead. They also found more distortion in provinces that allow rural couples a second child if the first is a girl, or in cases of hardship.
Those couples were determined to ensure they had at least one son, the researchers noted. Among children born second, there were 143 boys for 100 girls, the data showed.
The Chinese government is openly concerned “about the consequences of large numbers of excess men for social stability and security,” the researchers said.
But “although some imaginative and extreme solutions have been suggested,” they wrote, China will have too many men for a generation to come.
They said enforcing the ban against sex-selective abortions could normalize the sex ratio in the future.
The study was conducted by Wei Xingzhu, a Zhejiang Normal University professor; Li Lu, a Zhejiang University professor; and Therese Hesketh, a University College London lecturer.
The New York Times
April 11, 2009
BEIJING — A bias in favor of male offspring has left China with 32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls, creating “an imminent generation of excess men,” a study released Friday said.
For the next 20 years, China will have increasingly more men than women of reproductive age, according to the paper, which was published online by the British Medical Journal. “Nothing can be done now to prevent this,” the researchers said.
Chinese government planners have long known that the urge of couples to have sons was skewing the gender balance of the population. But the study, by two Chinese university professors and a London researcher, provides some of the first hard data on the extent of the disparity and the factors contributing to it.
In 2005 , they found, births of boys in China exceeded births of girls by more than 1.1 million. There were 120 boys born for every 100 girls.
This disparity seems to surpass that of any other country, they said — a finding, they wrote, that was perhaps unsurprising in light of China’s one-child policy.
They attributed the imbalance almost entirely to couples’ decisions to abort female fetuses.
The trend toward more male than female children intensified steadily after 1986, they said, as ultrasound tests and abortion became more available. “Sex-selective abortion accounts for almost all the excess males,” the paper said.
The researchers, who analyzed data from a 2005 census, said the disparity was widest among children ages 1 to 4, a sign that the greatest imbalances among the adult population lie ahead. They also found more distortion in provinces that allow rural couples a second child if the first is a girl, or in cases of hardship.
Those couples were determined to ensure they had at least one son, the researchers noted. Among children born second, there were 143 boys for 100 girls, the data showed.
The Chinese government is openly concerned “about the consequences of large numbers of excess men for social stability and security,” the researchers said.
But “although some imaginative and extreme solutions have been suggested,” they wrote, China will have too many men for a generation to come.
They said enforcing the ban against sex-selective abortions could normalize the sex ratio in the future.
The study was conducted by Wei Xingzhu, a Zhejiang Normal University professor; Li Lu, a Zhejiang University professor; and Therese Hesketh, a University College London lecturer.
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