Lost and Found ― The "Missing Girls" in Rural China

\In 1979, the Chinese government famously introduced The Single Child Policy to control population growth. Nearly 40 years later, the result is an estimated 20 million "missing girls" in the population from 1980-2010. In Local Leaders, Families, and the "Missing Girls" in Rural China, John James Kennedy and Yaojiang Shi focus on village-level implementation of the one-child policy and the level of mutual-noncompliance between officials and rural families. Through in-depth interviews with rural parents and local leaders, they reveal that many had strong incentives not to comply with the birth control policy because larger families meant increased labor and income. In this sober exploration of China's Single Child Policy throughout the reform period, the authors more broadly show how governance by grassroots cadres with greater local autonomy has affected China in the past and the challenges for resolving center-versus-locality contradictions in governance that lie ahead.

John James Kennedy is Professor of Political Science and Director of Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Kansas. He has consistently returned to China to conduct research on rural politics since 1994, and he is also co-founder of the Northwest Socioeconomic Development Research Center (NSDRC) at Shaanxi Normal University, Xian, China. His research is on local governance and social development in China; topics include local elections, tax reform, family planning, health care and the cadre management system. He has in a published in a variety of peer reviewed journals including The China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China, Asian Survey, The Journal of Peasant Studies and Political Studies.

Yaojiang Shi is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for Experimental Economics in Education (CEEE) at Shaanxi Normal University, as well as Director of the Northwest Socioeconomic Development Research Center (NSDRC). He has been conducting regional survey research and village case studies in rural China since 2002. His research focuses on rural public service provision, quality of rural health care and rural education. He has published in a variety of peer reviewed journals including The China Quarterly, Journal of Comparative Economics, Health Policy and Planning, British Medical Journal, and Asia Pacific Education Review.