It is a "widow's country" that exports men; This is a "daughter country" with more women than men.
The overlapping geographical environment, the high-pressure rule of strongman politics, and the geopolitical needs of the game of great powers have cut off the connection between this place and the world; But the great changes in the outside are always rolling up the wind here and even plundering the men of this country.
This country is Tajikistan.
The past 30 years have been a place of turmoil and chaos.
The hollowing out of power caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union, the economic chaos caused by the shock economy in Russia, the outbreak of a full-scale civil war between power groups... Tear the country to shreds.
The "alpine peach blossom source" of the past is now the "widow's country of Central Asia".
In this country of only 9.75 million, there are nearly 800,000 widows!
Who unleashed the "widow curse"?
How did such a paradoxical anthropological phenomenon come about?
What is the plight of Tajikistan, which lacks men?
In order to present as much as possible the deeper causes of the "widow's state", I consulted a large number of Russian-language literature and interviewed Tajik workers in Russia.
Then the next content will provide you with a new perspective of anthropological observation.
First, turmoil - economic death row under geopolitical upheavals
In the face of the collapse of the Soviet Union, Tajiks have ambivalent feelings.
Without the collapse of the Soviet Union, there would have been no independent Tajik state, but without this geopolitical catastrophe, Tajiks would not have had to endure war, chaos and poverty.
During the Soviet Union, the national economy of Tajikistan was supported by financial subsidies from Moscow and economic assistance from the "brothers in Central Asia"; But all this came to an end in 1991.
The hollowing out of power and the Great Recession turned into war in 1992.
The civil war, which pushed Tajikistan into an "economic death row" - an exodus, a collapse of order, moral disorder.
In 1997, the civil war ended, and President Emomali Rahmon tightened his grip on authority and re-established order. But this did not free Tajikistan from the "economic death row".
Inflation, the burden of foreign debt, bureaucracy, three mountains, crushed the national economy.
The side effects of the war also reverberated, and the "widow curse" gripped Tajikistan.
The five-year civil war consumed a large number of men, who died in battle or fled overseas. The war broke families apart and created the first widows.
But this is only the beginning of the widow's spell.
When the war died down and people were looking forward to a new life, no one could have imagined that more women would become widows in the next 20 years.
Second, tearing - the "widow's curse" of the poor countries of Central Asia
Rahmon, who emerged from the power struggle in the Soviet Union, was an out-and-out pragmatist.
He clearly knew that Tajikistan, with a population of nearly 10 million, could not feed at all.
93% of the land is mountains and lakes, and 50% of the mountains are above 10,000 feet, with fragile agriculture, weak industry, and weak trade.
Rahmon, the hero of Central Asia, in the end, the sword went sideways. He chose a treacherous road to drag Tajikistan out of economic difficulties, but also opened the Pandora's box of the "widow's curse".
Rahmon's "solution" is to bind Russia economically - on this side, sparsely populated Russia lacks labor; On that side, Tajikistan, which has many people and few land, has a surplus of labor.
As a result, a vigorous tide of labor export that lasted for more than 20 years kicked off.
Since 97, Tajikistan has rapidly transformed into a labor exporter, and official data shows that in 2013, Tajikistan's foreign labor export reached 790,000 people, which is nearly 10% of the population!
Labor exports have also become the absolute pillar of the country's economy, accounting for 45% of the country's GDP, in the vernacular: this country lives by working for Russia.
But sugar cane has never been sweet at both ends, and the export of labor feeds the country, but it hurts the women of the country.
Data show that 87.4% of Tajiks who go to Russia to work are men. These men have families in their home countries, but often never return after going to Russia to work.
Many young women, the last message they receive from their husbands, is "divorce text messages", and the Tajik government has even enacted special legislation to prohibit divorce by text messages for migrant workers in Russia.
Although the divorce rate is high and briefly controlled by the data, everyone knows that this is only a formal cover-up.
Today, there are nearly 800,000 women in Tajikistan waiting for husbands who have never been heard from and may never return.
They are isolated from global trade, but they are the most direct victims of it.
However, then again, a piece of land that carries a population far beyond its carrying capacity, is there a third way out, either towards the consumption of internal wars, or, towards the export of foreign population? What do you think?
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