(College Station)—Breaking up is hard to do, but even getting that first date may be nearly impossible in China where by the year 2021 around 23.5 million Chinese men may be unable to find brides, reveals research by a Texas A&M University sociologist.
Such a gross imbalance of the sexes will result in far more than just an excess of pent-up Chinese men—it could well mean an unprecedented crime wave, an AIDS epidemic or even a potential war, says sociologist Dudley L. Poston Jr., an authority on Chinese demography who researched China's growing population problem with Texas A&M doctoral student Karen S. Glover. They recently presented their research at an international demography conference in Tours, France.
The reasons for the imbalance, Poston explains, can be traced to the Chinese culture's preference for sons. China has a Confucian patriarchal tradition, he says. Sons are preferred for many reasons, such as to carry on the family name, to provide ancestral worship, to provide support when the parents are old and to assist the parents is sustenance-producing activities.
This preference, coupled with the rapid fertility reduction resulting in part from China's strict "one child per family" birth policies, resulted in many families pursuing strategies and interventions that ensure that they conceive a male child, namely prenatal sex identification followed by gender-specific abortion, he notes.
China, Poston says, has experienced a dramatic fertility transition from around six children per woman in the early 1960s to around 1.7 children per woman in 2001. This transition has resulted in gross imbalance of boys and girls born, with more Chinese boys being born in every year, beginning in 1978. Poston and Glover have estimated that already there have been more than 23 million boys born (between 1980 and 2001) in China who will not be able to find Chinese brides.
"In all, between the years 2000 and 2021 a total surplus of more than 23.5 million males of marrying age is estimated in China," he says. "These excess Chinese boys, known as 'guang gun,' meaning "bare branches" will determine the demographic destiny of the country."
The impact of such a male-heavy society? Poston says criminal behavior will likely increase. Research has shown that banditry, violence and revolutions are likely to occur in areas with large numbers of excess males, he notes. "This is the real implication of China's demographic destiny."
History provides some insight into the implications of such an imbalance, he says. During the 19th Century, the Nien Rebellion in northern China's Shandong Province originated in part due to harsh social and environmental conditions, where excess males—some 100,000—organized and turned to criminal activity. It took the ruling Qing dynasty 17 years to overthrow them.
"China could well turn to a more authoritarian form of government," Poston says. "In such a scenario, the country's slow progress toward democracy could be stalled if not halted. If 100,000 excess males in Shandong Province were a thorn in the side of the Qing rulers for 17 years during the 19th Century, imagine the level of rebellion that could be instigated by more than 23 million Chinese bachelors."
China, he says, might do as other governments in the past have done and recruit excess males into dangerous law enforcement and military occupations or into large-scale public works projects in remote regions—all of which are characterized by higher than average death rates.
Governments have also used extra males in the development of unexplored territories and encouraged them to migrate to other countries. To more extreme ends, some governments facing similar dilemmas have ignored in-group violence and even encouraged divisions among excess males, leading to increased violence and self-destruction, he explains.
Even more disturbing, China might be tempted to send its excess manpower to invade another country, possibly Taiwan, Poston says, noting that Portugal sent its extra males off to wars in North Africa. China, he says, is already co-opting young and poor unmarried males into the People's Liberation Army and into the paramilitary People's Armed Police. In the next few decades there will be many millions more such males available for these kinds of activities, he adds.
One of the most likely possibilities, Poston says, is that these Chinese bachelors—the majority of whom will be poor rural workers—will re-settle with one another in bachelor ghettos where commercial sex outlets will be prevalent. With this scenario, there exists a real potential for an HIV/AIDS epidemic of a scale previously unimagined, Poston says.
Poston says that since every year of life males have higher age-specific death rates than females, around 105 males are required at birth for every 100 females for there to be about an equal number of males and females when these groups reach marriageable ages.
For decades, the Unites States has had a balanced sex ratio at birth, but since the 1980s, China's ratio has been significantly above normal levels, and in 2001 there were about 118 males born per every 100 females. Poston says China would have needed a sex ratio at birth of about 103 or lower for the numbers of marriageable-age males and females to be equal about two decades later.
"It is this dramatic decline in the total fertility rate mainly since the mid-1960s and the 1970s that has resulted in excess male births in China every year since the 1980s," he says. "As of 2001, there were still many more boys being born in China than girls, and there is no indication of an end in sight to the abnormal trend.