Just the other day, it was revealed that more than ten million female births were lost in India in the past two decades due to gender selection and abortion. The same thing happens in China and the consequences are shown below.
Chinese traditions, a tough one-child-per-couple policy and modern medical technology have combined to create a demographic nightmare that threatens China's stability and endangers prospects for greater political freedom in the country with the world's largest population. Over the next two decades, as many as 40 million young Chinese men won't be able to marry, settle down and start families. There won't be enough wives to go around.
Researchers say growing numbers of lonely men in migrant shantytowns and isolated farm villages will pose a threat to social order and could force the Chinese government to tighten its grip on society or even seek military conflicts abroad to keep the restless bachelors occupied.
"Anybody who is expecting China to become a democratic paradise, well, I don't think they're looking at the sex ratios," says Valerie Hudson, a Brigham Young University political scientist who studies the political effects of gender imbalances.
The numbers, skewed by a two-decade-old government policy that limits most Chinese couples to one child, are stark. According to China's latest census, 116.9 Chinese boys were born for every 100 girls in 2000 — up from an already alarming "sex ratio at birth" of 111.3 boys in 1990. Both figures are well above the 105-107 boys for every 100 girls considered normal worldwide. In the USA, there were 104.8 boys born in 2000 for every 100 girls.
As a result, China will have 29 million to 33 million unmarried males ages 15-34 by 2020, according to a report by Hudson and Andrea Den Boer of Britain's University of Kent in a forthcoming issue of the journal International Security. Other estimates put the 2020 figure at 40 million young, unmarried men — known in Chinese as guang guan, "bare branches" or "bare sticks." That's more than the current female populations of Taiwan and South Korea combined.
Most of the millions of men who will go unmarried over the next two decades are China's "losers in societal competition," Hudson and Den Boer report.
Poor young men here complain that modern women are too picky. "Before, it was men choosing women," says Liu Xicheng, 21, a migrant worker who came to Beijing from nearby Hebei Province. "Now it is women choosing men. Some have high quality standards. It is hard to marry them."
The Chinese government is alarmed at the surplus of bachelors. "This is a seriously dangerous ratio," Ren Yuling, a delegate to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Committee, recently told China Youth Daily. "The numbers mean that some people will never have their needs for a spouse met, so they move into dangerous territory."
The Chinese magazine Beijing Luntan predicted as early as 1997 that "such sexual crimes as forced marriages, girls stolen for wives, bigamy, visiting prostitutes, rape, adultery ... homosexuality ... and weird sexual habits appear to be unavoidable." Prostitution already is epidemic in Chinese cities. Bride-trafficking is common in the countryside. Kidnapped brides have fetched $600 apiece in rural Hebei Province, Chinese media have reported, though many of the women manage to run away.
The problem starts with the traditional Chinese preference for boys over girls. The thinking: Sons can carry on the family name and take care of their aging parents; daughters marry into other families and by tradition look after their husbands' parents in old age.
The Chinese government's one-child policy makes matters worse. Worried that runaway population growth would devour China's scarce resources of food and water, the government in 1979 began limiting most families to one child — sometimes forcing women to have abortions and fining couples who had a second child.
The goal was to keep the Chinese population below 1.2 billion through 2000. Although it failed to meet that target — China now has about 1.3 billion people — the policy did cut birth rates significantly.
Ultrasound sorts out girls
Because of the one-child limit, many couples have only one legal chance for a son. Many rely on ultrasound machines to identify the sex of fetuses in the womb so they can abort girls.
The sex ratios started going askew in the late 1980s as portable ultrasound machines reached remote Chinese villages. Here in central Hubei Province, the number of boys born for every 100 girls rose from 107 in 1982 to 109.5 in 1989. In 1995, it reached 130.3 boys for every 100 girls, the highest ratio in China that year.
Pre-natal screening is illegal in China but common anyway. One study found that 36% of the abortions performed in a rural Chinese county were designed to weed out daughters. "Prenatal sex selection was probably the primary cause, if not the sole cause" the county's birth ratio was 126 boys for every 100 girls, Chinese researcher Chu Junhong reported last year in the U.S. journal Population and Development Review. Ultrasound technicians did not say whether the fetus was a girl or boy, Chu found, but they might "smile or frown to indicate the sex of the fetus."
Zhang Yi, a demographer at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, says the official birth ratios, though severe, exaggerate the boy-girl imbalance because some families conceal the birth of daughters to get another chance at a son. Even so, Zhang concedes that the proportion of boys born in China is out of whack.
Skewed birth ratios aren't the only thing young Chinese men have going against them, Zhang says. Social trends also make it harder for them to marry.
Since China began to open up its socialist economy in the early 1980s, tens of millions of Chinese have left impoverished farm towns to find work elsewhere. The trouble is that men and women are moving in opposite directions: the women to factory jobs on the booming eastern coast, the men to public works projects in the nation's interior.
The migration patterns have created strange situations in a country with too many unmarried men. Zhang found one factory town in southeastern China's Guangdong Province with 200,000 migrant women and just 4,000 local men. Not surprisingly, he says, "The local women are very hostile toward the migrant women."
Moreover, Chinese women are getting pickier. Traditional arranged marriages are fading, especially in the cities. And in a country with a growing gap between the rich and poor, many young women are determined to marry a have, and leave the have-nots back on the farm.
"Girls are becoming more practical," says Li Shaowa, 20, a Wuhan department store clerk. "Money is important," agrees her co-worker, Yang Wen, 20. "He needs a stable job and to be well-educated." Both say they intend to take their time looking for a husband.
All of which leaves China's poorest, least-educated men in a bind. Among unmarried rural men, for example, 97% never finished high school and 40% are illiterate.
Already, many bachelors are living without women in migrant work camps. A construction site here in the industrial city of Wuhan is definitely a man's world. Yang Yudong, 22, a worker, admits that his marriage prospects are bleak. "If you want to get married, you need to have money," he says. "The money I make now ($70 a month) is not enough."
Off a side street in the capital, Beijing, migrant men live in shacks behind a massage parlor, where they work as waiters and janitors. The men, mostly from the countryside, sleep two or three to a mattress; the only furniture is a wooden cupboard holding some teacups. But they're happy to earn $60 a month.
They don't get out much. They are afraid the police will hassle them for the ID cards that permit them to live in Beijing, which many don't have. And they can't afford to do much. So when they aren't working, they stay in the shacks, sleeping and smoking.
Blamed for rising crime
Sometimes violence erupts among migrants. Last month, a migrant from Jiangsu Province in eastern China pummeled his manager, knocking out his teeth and sending him to the hospital. Researchers say aggressive behavior is common among young men grouped together, away from women, far from home.
Migrants are being blamed for rising crime in cities. As their numbers grow, they could pose a greater threat to social order. "When the sparks begin to fly," Hudson and Den Boer write, "those bare branches provide kindling sufficient to turn the sparks into a fire larger and more dangerous than otherwise."
The two researchers note that large numbers of unmarried men have shaken Chinese society before. During the mid-1800s, for example, the Nien Rebellion broke out in eastern China's Shandong Province, where there were 129 men for every 100 women. At that time, 25% of Chinese men never married because many baby girls were victims of infanticide. Unable to find wives, some of Shandong's bachelors turned first to banditry and then to outright rebellion against the ruling Qing dynasty. At their height, 100,000 Nien rebels controlled territory containing 6 million people. It took the government 17 years to crush them for good.
Historically, governments have dealt with troublesome, unmarried men by:
Imposing authoritarian rule.
For that reason, Hudson and Den Boer conclude: "The prognosis for developing a full democracy in China is poor."
Sending them off to war.
Hudson and Den Boer found that Portugal, stuck with landless, unmarried men, sent them off to invade North Africa during the Middle Ages. The researchers predict that India and Pakistan, both of which have large surpluses of unmarried men, may have little incentive to end their hostilities over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. An increasingly assertive China might start spoiling for a fight with its neighbors. [ ]
Dispatching them to public works projects far from the cities.
China has embarked on huge construction programs such as a natural gas pipeline from western China to Shanghai and a high-altitude railway to Tibet.
Co-opting them with jobs in security forces.
Already, China is bringing poor young men into the paramilitary People's Armed Police, assigned to crush riots and other social disturbances.
In the past, Chinese bachelors worked as bodyguards, pawnshop heavies, bouncers and protection racketeers, says James Watson, a Harvard University anthropologist who has studied southern China's bachelor subculture. "I would expect such opportunities to expand tremendously."
The State Family Planning Commission, which oversees China's one-child policy, is taking steps to ease and better understand the problem. It has banned the use of pre-natal screening and is trying to account for the daughters whose existence has been hidden. And it is hoping to build a social safety net that will ease fears that parents won't be cared for in old age, something that has shown promise in limited experiments so far.
Beijing Luntan concludes that many poor young men will have no choice but to get used to the single life. They must learn to "handle the punishment they have received as a result of ... the mistakes of the previous generation."
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