SPEEDING THE DEMISE:

Why US speaks softly with China on trade: The new Treasury secretary worries that China's economy is more fragile than it appears (Mark Trumbull, 9/21/06, The Christian Science Monitor)

"If reform stalls, the Chinese economy will stall, and that is in nobody's interest," says Daniel Griswold, an economist at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington. Paulson "understands that our interest is in a thriving, liberalizing China." [...]

Among the challenges: an outdated financial system heavy on bad loans, state-owned businesses in distress, a volatile social rift between prosperous urbanites and the rural poor, and the looming burden of a rising elderly population.

Why would a more affluent and liberalized China be more stable, rather than less?

MORE (via Andries Thijssen):
S. Koreans Search Far and Wide for a Wife: Facing a shortage of prospective rural brides, many men are forced to look abroad. (Barbara Demick, September 21, 2006, LA Times)

Despite the obvious pitfalls, South Korean men increasingly are going abroad to find wives. They have little choice in the matter unless they want to remain bachelors for life.

The marriage market in Asia is becoming rapidly globalized, and just in time for tens of thousands of single-but-looking South Korean men, most of them in the countryside where marriageable women are in scant supply. With little hope of finding wives of their own nationality and producing children to take over the farm, the men are pooling their family's resources to raise up to $20,000 to find a spouse abroad.

The phenomenon has become so widespread that last year 13% of South Korean marriages were to foreigners. More than a third of the rural men who married last year have foreign wives, most of them Vietnamese, Chinese and Philippine. That's a huge change in a country once among the most homogenous in the world.

To some extent, the globalized marriage market is having a trickle-down effect, exacerbating the shortage of marriage-age women elsewhere, particularly China.

"There is a long-standing son preference throughout Asia, but now it is happening in the context of this 21st century marriage market," said Valerie M. Hudson, a political scientist and author of "Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population."

The preference for sons has translated in South Korea into 113 male births for every 100 females. Ultrasound became widely available here in the 1980s, and the first generation screened for gender before birth is now coming of marriageable age.

Think freer trade will solve Asia's birth dearth?

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 21, 2006 12:00 PM