Comin' around again

Today "The Week" arrived - a digest of Britain's best journalism and a lifeline to home. One of the few things I miss about the UK is the quality and variety of the press, something that Asia is sadly lacking (the South China Morning Post and its kind are like Jane Austen with the racy bits taken out).

Anyway, an article in this week's Week got me thinking. It's about the lot of women in the UK who grew up post the great war. So many men were killed in the trenches that the entire social fabric of the UK changed, causing, amongst other things, the pernicious UK class system to weaken (no titled men to marry), millions of women to enter the work force (no men to work) and a complete change in the expectations of young women of their lot (er, no ordinary guys to marry either). According to the article, of young women in 1917 only 1 in 10 could expect to marry and have children - and this in a society where gender roles were tightly proscribed. Devastating, I imagine.

Fast forward 90 years and I'm writing this on mainland China's doorstep (HK ain't part of China really - no one here truly thinks so anyway, least of all the HK Chinese). Here the situation is startlingly reversed. There is a dearth of women in China and India due to cultural preferences for boys over girls. At the most sophisticated end of the scale this means selective abortions early in pregnancy. At its most brutal it's infanticide and the abandonment of unwanted girls. The social costs of this are huge. For starters, many men will grow up with no realistic prospect of marriage and children. This might not seem too significant.....but for the fact that marriage tends to have a stabilising effect (especially on men) and large numbers of young men lacking meaningful work and/or relationships is a recipe for trouble.

Anyone fancy a gaze into the crystal ball 90 years hence to see where this trend takes us??