A new Zogby poll indi­cates Amer­i­cans are wisely begin­ning to ques­tion the man­ner in which we have financed the war against ter­ror­ism. Mean­while China engages in female infanticide.

More than twice as many U.S. adults (58%) say that debt owed to China is a more seri­ous threat to the long-term secu­rity and well-being of the U.S than is ter­ror­ism from rad­i­cal Islamic ter­ror­ists (27%).

Inter­est­ingly there was lit­tle vari­a­tion by party iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with a major­ity of Democ­rats, Repub­li­cans and inde­pen­dents all agree­ing that the debt owed by the United States to China poses the greater threat.

Mean­while, in a painful snap­shot of the social val­ues of Amer­i­cas largest cred­i­tor ‘gen­der­cide’, dis­card­ing infant girls at birth, is still prac­ticed in China to bad effect.

XINRAN XUE, a Chi­nese writer, describes vis­it­ing a peas­ant fam­ily in the Yimeng area of Shan­dong province. The wife was giv­ing birth. “We had scarcely sat down in the kitchen”, she writes (see arti­cle), “when we heard a moan of pain from the bed­room next door…The cries from the inner room grew louder—and abruptly stopped. There was a low sob, and then a man’s gruff voice said accus­ingly: ‘Use­less thing!’

“Sud­denly, I thought I heard a slight move­ment in the slops pail behind me,” Miss Xin­ran remem­bers. “To my absolute hor­ror, I saw a tiny foot pok­ing out of the pail. The mid­wife must have dropped that tiny baby alive into the slops pail! I nearly threw myself at it, but the two police­men [who had accom­pa­nied me] held my shoul­ders in a firm grip. ‘Don’t move, you can’t save it, it’s too late.’

The result of the male female imbal­ance is that unpart­nered young adult males turn to crime and violence.

Through­out human his­tory, young men have been respon­si­ble for the vast pre­pon­der­ance of crime and violence—especially sin­gle men in coun­tries where sta­tus and social accep­tance depend on being mar­ried and hav­ing chil­dren, as it does in China and India. A ris­ing pop­u­la­tion of frus­trated sin­gle men spells trouble.

The crime rate has almost dou­bled in China dur­ing the past 20 years of ris­ing sex ratios, with sto­ries abound­ing of bride abduc­tion, the traf­fick­ing of women, rape and pros­ti­tu­tion. A study into whether these things were con­nected† con­cluded that they were, and that higher sex ratios accounted for about one-seventh of the rise in crime. In India, too, there is a cor­re­la­tion between provin­cial crime rates and sex ratios. In “Bare Branches”††, Valerie Hud­son and Andrea den Boer gave warn­ing that the social prob­lems of biased sex ratios would lead to more author­i­tar­ian polic­ing. Gov­ern­ments, they say, “must decrease the threat to soci­ety posed by these young men. Increased author­i­tar­i­an­ism in an effort to crack down on crime, gangs, smug­gling and so forth can be one result.”

Gen­der dis­crep­ancy is hap­pen­ing all over the world with a cor­re­spond­ing rise in vio­lence… boys need girls and we girls need boys in equal num­bers or all hell breaks out.

Also, while on the sub­ject of China, South Africa is now accept­ing major invest­ments in energy and rare earth min­ing and refin­ing from China. Like Amer­ica, they hope to develop jobs and improve the South African econ­omy. Rely­ing heav­ily on China hasn’t worked out so well here.