In the middle of the 19th century, an area the size of Germany located between Beijing and Shanghai in central China was run for more than 15 years by the Nian rebels, a 50,000-strong network of bandit groups who lived by pillage and rape. The Nian bandits were men without women, long understood in China as the principal stimulus to their rebellion and cause of their violence. They originated in a district in northern China — Huai-pei — where the killing of infant girls to conserve food for economically valuable boys in response to famine had been particularly terrible.

Lower-class Huai-pei peasants could not find wives; hungry, economically displaced and, in Chinese terms, ‘bare branches’ — not proper men because they could not marry and father children — they turned to banditry as providing meaning and sustenance alike. Those womanless bandits cast a long shadow over not just today’s China, but the whole of Asia.

Asia is estimated to suffer from up to 100 million missing women — aborted as foetuses or murdered in infancy. Pakistan, erupting in protests last week against President Musharraf’s anti-democratic high-handedness in suspending a senior judge, is a volatile tinderbox where the capacity for such insurrection to spread is everpresent.

Fanning the flames of injustice and Islamic fundamentalism is the country’s sex imbalance. Dispossessed, displaced men with no prospect of ever finding a partner more readily take to the streets like Nian rebels; violence demonstrates masculine meaning. In today’s China, there are now 119 men for every 100 women. In some areas, the imbalance is greater than it was in Huai-pei in 1850. Earlier this year, an official Chinese report projected that by 2020, one in 20 men between 20 and 45 would be unable to find a wife. Prof. Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University in the US estimates that by 2020, there will be 28 million surplus Chinese men and 31 million surplus Indian men.

For its part, the Indian government is increasingly alarmed by the explosion of woman trafficking and prostitution, and the threat to the rule of law implied by such mass infanticide and abortion of babies because of their sex. In the last few weeks, it has stepped up its campaign to make the battery of laws against such practices stick.

In both China and India, there is a near complete correlation between the growth of violent crime and those cities and provinces where the sex ratio is worst. It is Indian provinces such as Uttar Pradesh and parts of the Punjab that have both the worst sex imbalance and highest levels of recorded crime. Chinese cities such as Shanghai or Guangzhou report 90 per cent of crime from unmarried migrant men. Most Chinese regimes in history, as the communists know, have been toppled from below. Western commentators like to project China and India as economic giants effortlessly on the move. But societies that are dysfunctional rarely sustain rapid growth or stable government. There will be change. The questions are how and when. — The Guardian