Women as state-builders in Qinghai province: Evidence from the 2000 census

During the Qing dynasty, the expansion of the Chinese empire was led by male-dominated institutions. This pattern continued into the first decades of the People's Republic of China. Qinghai province was on the receiving end of largely male population transfers beginning in the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s, in-migration continued at lower levels but the gender balance of in- and out-migration shifted. Official population figures show that the population of Han women grew faster than Han men in the 1960s and 1970s despite ongoing male resettlement and sex ratios at birth that favoured males. The faster rate of growth for Han women is therefore most likely to be the result of population transfers to Qinghai, rather than births or deaths. One can also see evidence of population transfers of women in the 1960s and 1970s in two middle-aged cohorts of Qinghai's urban population in 2000 that are dominated by females. It is likely that this bulge in the numbers of middle-aged women in Qinghai's municipalities has been produced by population transfers and that it reflects a state policy to adjust the imbalanced gender ratios it had created in the 1950s.