By Simon Denyer and Annie Gowen, Washington Post, April 18, 2018
Nothing like this has happened in human history. A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.
The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching: Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations.
Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as well. Barely recognized, the ramifications of too many men are only starting to come into sight.
“In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,” warns Li Shuzhuo, a leading demographer at Xi’an Jiaotong University.
Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females--the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex. China’s official one-child policy, in effect from 1979 to 2015, was a huge factor in creating this imbalance, as millions of couples were determined that their child should be a son.
India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males, according to its most recent census. The number of newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as the country grows more developed and prosperous. The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution. Officials attribute this to the advent of sex-selective technology in the last 30 years, which is now banned but still in widespread practice.
In the two countries, 50 million excess males are under age 20.
Both nations are belatedly trying to come to grips with the policies that created this male-heavy generation. And demographers say it will take decades for the ramifications of the bulge to fade away.
In the four sections below are personal tales that show how the imbalance has affected people:
STAGNANT LIVES: Li Weibin has never had a girlfriend. Boys outnumbered girls in the isolated mountain village where he grew up, in the factories where he worked as a teenager, and on the construction sites where he now earns a modest wage.
Today, 30 years old, he lives in a bare, stuffy dormitory room with five other men in the southern city of Dongguan, bunk beds lining the walls, cigarette butts carpeting the floor.
“I want to find a girlfriend, but I don’t have the money or the opportunity to meet them,” he said. “Girls have very high standards, they want houses and cars. They don’t want to talk to me.”
Li’s problem is not only that he is poor and struggling to save enough money to buy an apartment of his own, it is that in China there are simply too many men. This is a country where marriage confers social status, and where parental pressure to produce grandchildren is intense. Bachelors like Li are dismissively branded as “bare branches” for failing to expand the family tree.
But as any forester knows, bare branches pose a danger, and not just to themselves.
In Dongguan, where the gender ratio is 118 men to 100 women, Li says he has virtually given up hope of finding a girlfriend. He spends his spare time playing games on his phone, or accompanying his co-workers to karaoke or for a foot massage.
“It is just me,” he said. “Life is boring and lonely.”
In India, single men are isolated, left out of major family decisions and subject to ridicule, with little in the way of support or mental health services. Worse, in the traditional culture of villages, those who missed out on marriage have no hope of female companionship--dating or having a girlfriend is out of the question.
THE DESPERATE EFFORT TO LAND A BRIDE: It takes a house, savings and a good job to win a bride. Many Chinese men are working harder, taking more dangerous or unpleasant jobs, to get ahead. Parents are also trying to give their sons a leg up financially. “It’s kind of an arms race in the dating and marriage market,” said Shang-Jin Wei, a Columbia University economist.
The high household savings rate, particularly in China, helps explain its huge trade surplus. A man who makes cheap shoes for export does not spend the wages he earns on consumer goods imports. Instead he saves to build a house and attract a bride. Another unintended result--urban housing prices are rising fast.
Male suitors in China pay a “bride price” to earn their future in-laws’ approval for the engagement. Because of the acute imbalance, it has gone from a few hundred dollars a decade or two ago to nearly $30,000 in some parts of China. Families sock that money away instead of spending it.
Having sons was once a hedge against poverty in old age. Now elderly parents are sacrificing to help their sons appear marriageable--and to support sons who fail to find a bride. Daughters-in-law were once expected to look after their husbands’ parents. In millions of families, that’s no longer possible.
Today, young people are fleeing the villages in a desperate search for fortune, and marriage. The best way to find a bachelor in rural China these days: look for someone building a house.
Li Defu is typical. Now 21, he left home seven years ago to find work in the provincial capital Guiyang, but he has pooled the family savings to build a 10-room house overlooking the green hills and valleys of his birthplace, Paifeng.
The reason is simple: It is the only chance he has of finding a wife.
“At the moment there aren’t any girls my age around,” he said, on a recent trip home to supervise the construction. “But I am building this new house in preparation, in case I find someone.”
Li was brought up by his grandmother, a tiny, wizened woman who sat beside him as he chatted. His parents still work in far-off factories; the savings they have collected could be crucial.
Around $10,000, Li reckons, will have to be paid to his future bride’s family, just to gain their approval for the engagement. A centuries-old tradition, the “bride price” in China is similar to a dowry elsewhere in the world, but paid from groom’s family to the bride’s parents--rather than the other way around.
A decade or two back, the typical bride price was just a few hundred dollars. Today, in some parts of China, the average is nearly $30,000, according to a survey by the People’s Daily newspaper.
That translates into huge pressure for young men like Li and their families. Indeed, helping to build Li’s house was another young man who was already feeling that pressure.
“There are very few girls here, and many girls from outside won’t want to marry into this village because it’s poor,” said 25-year-old Zhou Haijiang, as he laid the tiles in one of the house’s many bathrooms. Only a show of prosperity can attract, and hold, a bride.
Zhou said he would like to stay in Paifeng all his life, but the pay isn’t good, and he will soon reluctantly join the tide of migrant workers heading for China’s booming megacities, in search of riches--and brides.
IMPORTING BRIDES: Tens of thousands of foreign women are flocking to China for marriage, pushed by poverty at home and sucked in by China’s shortage of women. Chinese men surf websites that offer foreign brides, and may wind up paying upwards of $8,000 for marriage tours to find a wife. For the brides, it’s a huge gamble: They are lured with promises of work, and some are effectively trapped and trafficked into marriage. In their new families, daughters-in-law often occupy the lowest status.
In any given age group, a proportion of men will fail to find brides, but they will stay in the marriage market, competing with younger men to marry younger women. The disproportion keeps growing. By 2050, French demographer Christophe Guilmoto estimated, there could be between 150 to 190 men for every 100 women in China’s marriage market.
The shortage of women in rural China is amplified because women there often “marry up,” seeking husbands with slightly higher educational, financial or social status. That takes women away from villages to the cities in search of those types of men--making it even harder for the men who stay behind.
Liu Hua couldn’t find a wife in China. So he decided to buy a foreign one. His sister and mother helped him choose from a selection of Cambodian women who had come to China looking for husbands, eventually picking out a slim girl with a nice smile.
Their main concern--she was a bit taller than him. That, and worrying about what the neighbors would think.
“People in the village said she’d run away, they thought a foreign wife wasn’t as good as a Chinese wife,” said Liu, who lives in Leping in southeastern China’s Jiangxi province. “But now they don’t think so any more. My wife didn’t run away, she is friendly with the neighbors and treats them politely. Everyone says how nice she is.”
His wife, Lili, is among tens of thousands of foreign women who are flocking here for marriage, pushed by poverty at home and sucked in by China’s dramatic shortage of women.
Leping has become a center for the trade in Cambodian women: in village after village, they are easy to spot, looking after young children and picking them up from school, or just hanging out watching their husbands play mah-jongg.
In Huangling, a village two hours’ drive to the north of Leping, Liu and Lili’s was the first of several transnational marriages.
“Our village has 50 or 60 bachelors and only one or two single women,” said Liu. “For men who are 40 or even older, Cambodian women are like a second chance.”
But for the women involved, it is a huge gamble, being catapulted into families where daughters-in-law often occupy the lowest status of all, especially foreign ones who have just been “bought.”
Not surprising, then, that Lili’s mother didn’t want her to come. You don’t speak the language, you don’t know anyone, it’s dangerous, she warned.
But in Cambodia, daughters are expected to help support the family financially. Lili’s father had died, and there were three young brothers to bring up and get through school. Her village, in central Cambodia’s Kampong Cham province, offered no real employment opportunities.
Lili, who was born Sreynich Yorn in Cambodia, was paid the equivalent of $450, plus travel expenses, and promised a relatively well-paid job in a Chinese factory when she arrived, provided she agreed to get married.
Liu said he paid deposits ranging from $5,000 to $40,000 to three local families, just for the right to date their daughters, and got only some of the money back when the matches didn’t work out.
Fed up with demanding Chinese families, he eventually decided to pay a broker nearly $15,000 for Lili, who took a Chinese name after moving there.
The two profess to be content, living in a house filled with photos of their wedding and their two young children, a 4-year-old boy, Siyiuan, and his 1-year-old sister Sisi. In one, they sit on a park bench, he in his best gray suit and red tie, she in a white wedding dress carrying a bunch of red and white roses, together making the shape of a heart with their arms.
Both insist theirs is a genuine marriage, not a transaction. Happily, Liu’s mother approves.
But Lili still feels cheated, especially after she found out how much her husband had paid. The job she was promised never materialized, and she is furious with the marriage broker for pocketing almost all the fee.
“She lied to me for money,” she said.
Lili spends her days looking after her two young children. Her husband, a painter and decorator, is often away for work, but her mother-in-law seems sympathetic, even proud of the young woman who brought her two grandchildren.
Her own mother even visited here last year, and went home with a wad of money, around $1,500, that will help the rest of the family.
She is one of the lucky ones.
“My husband is a good man and he treats me well,” she said.
One 32-year-old woman, interviewed in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, said she had been enticed to come to China with the promise of a factory job. But when she landed, she was forced to marry a man she didn’t like.
“My husband said to me: ‘You are my slave, I bought you. If I want, I can do anything to you.’”
Her new family locked her in the house to prevent her from fleeing, she said. Her husband demanded sex four times a day. If she refused, she was beaten.
Finally, she had a baby girl. Seven days after birth, her husband demanded sex again, and when she refused, beat her, she said. Two years later, she recalled, she had a miscarriage, was denied medical treatment by her husband’s family and almost died.
For three years, the woman had not called her family back home in Cambodia “because I didn’t want my mother to worry,” and because she felt ashamed she hadn’t been able to send any money home.
Eventually, though, she called her brother. Together they convinced the Chinese family to let her visit her sick mother in Cambodia--but they let her go only on the condition she leave her daughter behind.
Now she lives in a cruel limbo. Scared of being stigmatized in her village, she rarely goes home, working instead for low pay in a garment factory on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.
She has been separated from her 3-year-old daughter for more than a year.
Thinking of her, a fleeting smile passes over her face.
“I cry every day,” she said.
TAKING A STAND OVER HARASSMENT: In Haryana state in northern India, crimes against women have risen 127 percent in the last decade. Young men in Haryana say that they have no good job opportunities and little entertainment--save for a nightly game of cricket, soccer or kabaddi, the Indian contact sport. Out of boredom and frustration, many take to harassing young women. Egged on by Bollywood films in which a hero breaks down a woman’s reluctance, the men chase the girls.
A group of 11-graders in the Indian village of Gothra Tappa Dahina sparked a public revolt because they were tired of being harassed by men as they walked to school in a neighboring town. Nearly every day on the road, they said, they would be circled by young men buzzing them on motorbikes, grabbing their scarves, their bodies, and calling them sexually provocative names.
Street harassment--called “eve teasing” here--has long been a problem in Indian society, which remains deeply patriarchal despite years of economic growth and superficial signs of change. Now, the widening imbalance between numbers of men and women in the country is exacerbating the problem, public safety officials believe.
This conservative part of northern India has 7,000 villages with as many as 150 to 200 surplus single men each, one study said. In a country all too familiar with crimes against women, packs of men, fueled by cheap local liquor, often take to the street to chase and pressure young women.
Those who admit to “eve-teasing” say that it is harmless. Sometimes the girls flirt back or encourage it, they say.
College student Shakti Singh, 20, said he would like a girlfriend but has no clue how to get one.
With little help from their conservative parents but with easy access to the Internet, he and his friends model their behavior on the swains in Bollywood romance movies. The genre--often with a hero who breaks down a woman’s reluctance--has been criticized for glorifying stalking and rape.
“There is a lot of effect from movies,” Singh said. “Even though the girl says no he continues chasing her, and she still says no. But in the end he gets the girl.”
Now multiply that impression by the several million unattached young men watching these movies nationwide. The state recently launched a program to curtail these misguided “Romeos,” with special police squads to patrol shopping malls, college campuses and bus stands where chronic harassers gather.
“I won’t tease in the village. I will get beaten up. But outside I do,” boasted Lal Singh, a field worker, 31.
