SANTA
MONICA, California In a trend fraught with troubling political and
social implications, China will soon find itself with a marriage-age
population remarkably out of balance, with about 23 million more young men
than women available for them to marry in this decade and the next - what
demographers term a "marriage squeeze."
This impending surplus of
unattached young men could be a driving force behind increased crime,
explosive epidemics of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and
even international threats to the security of other nations. Yet the
Chinese government has done little to address its demographic destiny.
The coming squeeze is largely
the legacy of the government's one-child policy, along with societal
modernization. As a result, the nation's fertility rate has fallen
dramatically, from around 6 children per woman in the 1960s to around 1.7
currently.
But the society's strong
cultural preference for sons has not changed. In recent decades, ready
access to ultrasound technology has enabled parents to learn the sex of
their unborn children and has led to widespread female-specific abortion.
The demographic consequence is
now apparent. Most societies exhibit biologically natural sex ratios at
birth of around 105 baby boys born for every 100 baby girls, yielding
roughly equal numbers of prospective brides and grooms as generations
reach marriageable age. This normal pattern emerges where human
interventions don't disturb biology.
But China has departed
markedly from this natural pattern since the 1980s. Its sex ratio at birth
has hovered between 115 and 120 baby boys for every 100 baby girls in
recent years, a level that renders roughly one of every eight men in a
generation "surplus." Many Chinese refer to the surplus boys as guang gun
(bare branches).
Past societies with large
numbers of unattached men have on occasion turned to a more authoritarian
political system, perceiving threats of violence. Such societies have also
sought to harness their surplus of men by recruiting excess males into
military occupations, pursuing expansionist policies aimed at developing
unexplored territories or colonizing neighboring ones.
The tensions associated with
so many bachelors in China's big cities might tempt its future leaders to
mobilize this excess manpower and go pick a fight, or invade another
country. China is already co-opting poor unmarried young men into the
People's Liberation Army and the paramilitary People's Armed Police.
No less disquieting are the
social dynamics accompanying a severe marriage squeeze. In all likelihood,
millions of young, poor Chinese bachelors never will marry. Many will
migrate from rural areas to urban destinations, patronizing prostitutes
there. In doing so, these unattached men could turn China's HIV epidemic -
now confined to certain high-risk populations - into a more generalized
one by creating "bridging" populations from high- to low-risk individuals.
Such male bridging populations have fueled HIV epidemics in Cambodia and
sub-Saharan Africa.
China's legal marriage age -
22 years for men, 20 for women - means that more than 23.5 million young
men (by our estimate) will be unable to find Chinese wives during the
period from 2000 to 2021, owing to the inadequate supply of Chinese women
in the marriage market. Neither a spontaneous shift toward a later average
age at first marriage nor lax enforcement on the supply side to allow
teenage brides would substantially lessen this market imbalance.
Although the 23 million-plus
surplus of boys exceeds the entire population of most countries, it
represents but a tiny fraction of all 1.3 billion Chinese. However, these
millions of "bare branches" will be concentrated in a generation born over
a short 20-year period and living mostly in the cities of a largely rural
China.
The surplus of boys and
shortage of girls "made in China" could soon become not just a concern for
China, but for the world.
(Dudley L. Poston is a
professor of sociology at Texas A&M University. Peter A. Morrison is a
demographer with RAND Corp.)