Where are our Daughters, Mothers, Sisters, and Wives?: A Typological Analysis of Missing Women and Girls in Greater China, 1900–2000s

Abstract

Advancing a typology for missing women and young girls in Greater China (China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan) has been a task seldom engaged in by feminist criminologists, specialists in East Asian history, or sociologists specializing in women’s studies in the last decades. Partially because of this situation, people tend to believe that missing women and young girls in Greater China are abandoned or abducted persons, and that it is not difficult to categorize this group. The author of this paper argues that missing women and young girls in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are not merely abandoned or abducted persons. On the contrary, the socioeconomic, political, and/or cultural factors that separate some Chinese/Hong Kongese/Taiwanese females from their families are highly heterogeneous. With this in mind, the theme of this paper is to develop a classification system for missing females in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Three variables are used to construct this classification system: personal choice, slavery, and sociological locus. Each of these factors is divided into two levels: forced/voluntary (F/V) migration for personal choice; involvement/non-involvement (I/N) of economically exploited labor for slavery; and unlikelihood/likelihood (U/L) of family reunification for sociological locus. Based on combinations of these stated variables, missing women/young girls in Greater China are conceptually categorized as FIU, FNU, FIL, FNL, VIU, VNU, VIL, and VNL types.