No actually, it's a myth rooted in the racist belief that Chinese people care about their children less than other people, and therefore are willing to kill or abandon their children on a large scale rather than pay a fine, to a greater degree than other people - you actually indicate you believe the broader version of this racist myth with your "Han ethnicity" comment, indicating you believe that there is some relation between the Han ethnicity specifically and female infanticide. There's a reason the Wikipedia entry for it is full of [citation needed] on every claim that actually amounts to female infanticide, because there is no solid evidentiary basis for the claim. It's not backed up by demographic data, it doesn't account for the impacts of sex-selective abortion, it completely ignores the role of "white lie" corruption where Party officials would not count female children for the purposes of the One Child policy in the small rural villages where this behaviour supposedly occurred en masse, and it supposes a frankly absurd level of inhumanity by parents. The One Child policy was a stupid, bad policy instituted by a corrupt government, but the idea that the response of the Chinese population to this policy was mass female infanticide rather than sex selective abortion, minor corruption on the part of village officials in ignoring violations, or paying a fine is just racism without evidence.
I think you underestimate what people will do when desperate, or the extent of gender bias among the Hans. I was born in Taiwan and raised in America, and I still caught whiffs of it.
I am not sure where you are getting the idea that people in the Imperial eras were capable of determining the sex of fetuses, and proceeding with abortion. As far as I know, that is a modern thing enabled by modern technology. If you are suggesting that people heard of this modern practice and projected it falsely into the past … I had thought so to, until I read through a history of Chinese martial arts.
China’s history is very complex. There were imbalances in sex ratios, with large numbers of unmarried, unemployed men skilled in violence destabilizing the society, throughout centuries. By the Ming dynasty, every village trained militias because they had to, and it was a thin line into banditry. Villages, convoys — those were raided. Women kidnapped, and raped. It was a big enough problem that the Ming literates and intelligentsia talked about it, and it grew worse during the Qing.
Corruption among local officials wasn’t minor. It was rampant. Land ownerships had locked people out of economic opportunities, and abusive landowners were the norm. Sects, secret societies were formed for a variety of reason, including mutual protection. Those were the seeds for the near constant uprisings and rebellions during the Qing dynasty, culminating to the Taiping Civil War (14 years of fighting, 20-30 million dead, 600 cities razed). That sex ratio imbalanced was a factor leading to all of this.
China also has the world’s most complex watershed in the world, when taking agriculture into consideration. The only other comparable watershed in terms of complexity is that of the Sacramento River basin, and it does not compare to the scale of the Yellow River basin. The flooding of the Yellow River is frequent. Feast and famine is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture (“have you eaten?” is the equivalent of “how have you been?”). We are talking mass displacement of refugees and widespread hunger during the bad time. Even if it were not wars, rebellions, or bandits, this alone sets the circumstances for desperate times.
You can call female infanticide “racism” if you like, but I think doing so denies the misery and cruelty buried in history.
As for me, this — both the good and bad — are a part of my heritage. Female infanticide is one thread out of many that had happened. It’s in owning the whole thing that reform is possible.
