Travelling recently in southern, rural Chongqing, I was struck by the sense that something in the atmosphere was different from elsewhere in the mainland. Youyang county is a Tu ethnic area, and even though the Tu look different from Han Chinese - they are darker, with longer noses and diamond-shaped eyes - it was not the physical difference.
It was the presence of large numbers of girl children.
As a mother, I often fall into conversation with other mothers when travelling around China and, inevitably, ask if the baby in their arms is a boy or a girl. In Han areas, the question has become almost rhetorical: it is almost always a boy.
The mainland's one-child policy is creating a skewed population. Aided by science in the shape of the ultrasound machine, girl babies are aborted in their millions as families try to ensure a male heir. In symbolic terms, the mainland values the scimitar of the male far above the chalice of the woman - testosterone, not estrogen, will protect your family, the thinking goes. That defies study after study which show that empowering women is the path to development, and that it is women, not men, who do the caring that people require in their old age.
Officially, the mainland's gender imbalance has now reached 117:100 in favour of boys. The natural ratio at birth would be around 105:100. In parts of the countryside, the imbalance is closer to 140:100, according to some sources. While the United Nations uses the government figure, UN officials say unofficially that in some places the ratio is over 130:100.
Sixty million women will be 'missing' from China's population over the next 10 years, warns the UN's resident co-ordinator for China, Khalid Malik. This is becoming a nation of men.