Water fun in Wuhan

Post lock-down socialising in Wuhan: at least that is the implication in the accompanying article in the FT, even if it does not actually say so. The caption being the rather blander: 'Wuhan’s recovery has been trumpeted by Beijing, with the pandemic largely under control by the spring. Packed parties and events were held while other countries endured lockdown © AFP via Getty Images'.

I don't think I would ever have been tempted by an event of the sort shown. Plus I thought that there were a lot more young men than young women, perhaps reflecting the shortage of these last. Although the story from reference 1 seems to be that the number of young men to the 100 young women is now around 105, having been more like 107 fifty years ago. So things are getting better for them. Sadly, the Statista people at reference 1 were rather aggressive about getting permissions to do stuff, so I closed the window before reading about sex ratios properly.

Something else turned up by Bing talked of the sex ratios of births, rather than the sex ratios of populations, which are rather different, with the former fluctuating rather a lot and with underreporting of female births being a big issue. Not clear to me why this should be. All this appearing to be a short report of a talk given at a conference in 1992. See reference 2.

While the Financial Times is rather careful about subscribers stealing their intellectual property, intercepting the Microsoft copy and paste of the caption with a long message which thins down to: 'Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach ... Subscribers may ... More information can be found at...'. Hopefully they won't get too excited about the present theft, albeit not the first.

PS 1: I also wonder about the birth rate in the this country. First thought, birth during lockdown not a good thing. Second thought, has lockdown resulted, will lockdown result in a lot more births, nine months later? A quick peek at ONS failed to turn anything up, beyond a press release saying that births during 2020 appeared to have been a bit lower than average.

PS 2: BH made the point over porridge that if child limiting policies were in place, families may have not registered a female birth because they wanted be free to go for another birth, hoping to get the desired & superior male. We then moved onto what would happen if one did not register a birth in this country, more or less running into the sand at this point.

Reference 1: https://www.statista.com/.

Reference 2: Sex ratio of China's population deserves attention - Y Zeng, P Tu, B Gu, Y Xu, B Li, Y Li - 1992.