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By 2027 one in six young Chinese men won’t be able to find a partner
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“Of course I want to get married,” says Fu, a lorry driver in Yiyang, a far-flung county in Jiangxi province. Once a migrant worker, the 36-year-old returned to the village to live with his ageing parents. They are anxious for him to tie the knot. “But there are few women,” he sighs. The eligible girls around him are all spoken for; others have left to work in cities.
Fu’s plight is not uncommon. Men like him are known as guang gun—bare branches, unable to bear fruit. Their numbers began to increase more than a decade ago. But the scale of the problem is now becoming clear. The Economist has analysed data from the un’s World Population Prospects, a biennial report, and from China’s 2020 census. The data reveal that the sex ratio—the number of men for every 100 women—among men aged 23-37 and women aged 22-36 will hit a peak of 119 by 2027. (Those are the ages between which 80% of each sex gets married—see chart 1.) It is then predicted to remain high for decades. In 2012 the ratio was just 105.
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Chart: The Economist
That means that in 2027 there will be 22.5m more men than women in those cohorts, by far the largest number of “surplus” young males ever recorded anywhere. What is more, the share of unmarried men aged 25-39 shot up from 13% to 30% from 2006 to 2022. This is an issue of huge concern for China’s rulers.
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It was brought about by the arrival in the 1980s of cheap ultrasound machines, which allowed parents across Asia to tell the sex of their unborn child. The widespread preference for sons opened the door to sex-selective abortions. In South Korea the sex ratio at birth hit a brief peak of 117 in 1994, before falling to 106 in 2012, where it has roughly remained. In India it was 109 as late as 2010 (in 2024 it was 107). In developed countries like America and Britain, it was around 105 in 2024.
In China the problem was made worse by demographic engineering. In 1973 the country began trying to reduce its population with the “later, longer and fewer” campaign. This was followed by the draconian one-child policy in 1979. Being given just one chance dramatically lowered couples’ chances of having a boy naturally, and further incentivised sex selection. As a result, China has suffered by far the worst imbalance in its sex ratio at birth (see chart 2).
Chart: The Economist
Now that those boys are grown up, migration is adding to their woes. The 2020 census showed the sex ratio for young adults was 106 in urban areas and 120 in rural ones. Young rural women who move to the city often marry richer urban men. But changing social mores around marriage mean many better-educated urban women do not want to get married at all, let alone to rural men, shrinking the dating pool yet further. Statistics released on February 8th showed that the number of marriages in China in 2024 fell by 20% from the previous year, to 6.1m. That is less than half the number registered in 2013, and the lowest number since the 1980s.
Some guang gun are resigned to their fate. Guo, a 38-year-old musician in Shangrao, near to Fu’s village, has been on a couple of blind dates. On one, he met an overachiever who studied in Germany and worked as a manager for a car company. It was “useless”, he says. On another date, the woman “scrutinised my family background as if it were a business deal”.
As women grow scarcer they also become more valuable. Bride prices (a payment from the groom’s family to the bride’s to seal the marriage) have soared. One survey in Liaoning, a north-eastern province, found that the bride price in rural areas jumped from 68,000 yuan ($9,000) in 2016 to 176,000 yuan in 2020, adjusting for inflation. Another, across 11 provinces, found that costs of marriage (including expenses like housing and matchmaking) for rural males were 7.6 times higher after 2010 than before 2000.
The shortage of women has had other side-effects. Between July and December of 2018 the Chinese government, working with police in Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand, jointly rescued 1,130 foreign women who had been trafficked into China to be married. The Communist Party, obsessed with social stability, also worries a lot about rootless young men with no family prospects.
The ratio in young adults will remain above 115 well into the 2040s. The main hope is that, since peaking in the mid-2000s, the sex ratio at birth has declined. Cultural changes and female economic empowerment have chipped away at couples’ preference for sons. Eventually, the numbers of young men and women could equalise. But that will come as little consolation for today’s rural bachelors. ■
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This article appeared in the China section of the print edition under the headline “Bare branches”
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China
February 22nd 2025
- Behind DeepSeek lies a dazzling Chinese university
- China’s alarming sex imbalance
- Chinese authorities try to stop parents gaming the exam system (again)
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From the February 22nd 2025 edition
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Could there be Chinese troops in Europe?
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China’s leaders now talk of “a window of opportunity for peace”
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Chinese authorities try to stop parents gaming the exam system (again)
They will go to great lengths to try
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Behind DeepSeek lies a dazzling Chinese university
It models itself on Stanford, and is in the tech hotspot of Hangzhou
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Tensions with the West are fuelling China’s anxiety about food supplies
Grain pains are growing
Hail China’s new “ice-and-snow economy”
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Источник: www.economist.com