Interesting article on the subject, these single men are largely marginalized by their society, labor markets and the economy has changed as a result. Some of the personal stories are really sad as well, imagine being a laborer in your 30’s making maybe enough money to scrape by, but possibly never having been even kissed or having a relationship with a woman.
What possible long term consequences do you think this will have down the road? You would think some of these men would attempt to find work elsewhere, possibly even leaving their countries of origin if financially possible to do so. It seems like their could be unfortunate social consequences as well, probably nothing worse than a bunch of single, horny young men that have scant possibility of finding companionship. I know the world is probably already way overpopulated but this is obviously an unnatural occurrence that changes a lot of the social dynamics with consequences which may go on for quite some time. I expect there would be a lot of resentment towards older generations as well because of it.
It’s been a huge boost to feminism in China, as women now command immense power in terms of marriage/dating - not sure about India;
It’s led many men in China to try to import women from abroad, especially Southeast Asia - legally or illegally;
It’s led to China relaxing the One Child Policy (but that’s statistically not enough; they’d need to put in some sort of special incentive for couple to have more daughters)
It *might *lead to some sort of violent-incel movement in those nations; who knows.
John Oliver just did an episode on this wrt China. I wish he’d do more about China, but even though this is old news to most folks who follow China it’s still good that he’s touching on it at least. Maybe next he’ll take on forced organ harvesting, Falun Gong, environmental collapse, Great Firewall of China and Social Credit scores…you know, the small stuff.
Dire. Watch John’s video…he’s actually fairly spot on wrt the consequences and reaction in China, even though he glosses over some stuff. One thing the Chinese are doing is basically taking women from other neighboring countries and forcing them to marry Chinese men. John doesn’t get into the homosexuality angle, but ironically the Chinese have both set up the situation and then blocked off that possible solution (i.e. the Chinese, especially the CCP aren’t very keen on homosexuality).
And they haven’t learned their lesson either. They basically went from the disastrous 1 child policy to a useless 2 child policy, as if they can just pull a lever and get a better result after, literally, decades of draconian measures to try and enforce their stupid initial policy. Now that they have managed to so screw things up, I guess they figured, why not just fix it by fiat again? :rolleyes:
Ironically, to ‘fix’ this issue they don’t have to do that much. In the short term they are fucked of course. What they REALLY need is immigration, especially female immigration, but they have such screwy policies that folks are leaving, not wanting to come in en mass (well, voluntarily). But their own upward standard of living is already doing stuff to curb their population. But the CCP just can’t do nothing…they have to fuck with things, despite the fact that every time they have (since 1949) they have fucked up by the numbers. Every. Time.
There’s also the consequences of the Little Emperor syndrome. You have millions of young men who were brought up in a family environment where they were treated as the center of the world. But once they get out in the real world they find that not only are they not the center of it but they are surrounded by all these other men who are equally self-centered.
Also I’ve read a lot of stuff over the years about rape and sexual assaults in India even a lot of stuff happening in public or involving large groups of men in incidents, I imagine this would only exacerbate the problem.
Female immigration will bring its own long term problems. Chinese society has depended on ethnic homogeneity in defining itself. But in a generation you’re going to have a large number of Chinese people who have a Han father and a mother from some other country. That’s going to force a major re-adjustment in the popular view of what it means to be Chinese.
Female immigration is functionally equivalent to male emigration - either of those would work to fix the gender balance. But it’s a pipe dream anyway because 30 million is way too many young women for all the countries who aren’t China to lose, and way too many young men for all the countries who aren’t China to absorb.
One thing that might help somewhat is that Russia, which neighbors China, has a surplus of women. There are significantly fewer men in Russia than women. Problem is, most of those Russian women are in western Russia, far from China. And even if they interacted with Chinese men, there would be a formidable two-way language barrier betwixt the two of them, and that’s not taking into account whether they would want to intermarry to begin with.
Otherwise, in theory, millions of Russian single women could marry millions of single Chinese men. It would only suffice to solve a tiny fraction of the problem, but it’s worth a shot.
It’s a pipe dream because it’s actually very difficult to formally immigrate to China and become a Chinese citizen. Hell, there are millions of folks who were born in China, and are Han Chinese, who are’t Chinese citizens…in many of those cases because they were born to families who already had a child and who’s parents hid them so they wouldn’t have to have a forced abortion or have their kid taken away or pay a huge fine (depending on where you are in the CCP pecking order of course).
The thing I notice about the gender ratio from that original article is that, even knowing their sons are going to have a shit-ton of trouble finding women to marry them does not appear to have fixed the Indian and Chinese preferences for having sons. Those are nice projections there showing the gender-birth-gap closing but they’re just projections - it hasn’t actually happened yet. Dowry is still a thing in India, sexism is still prevalent in both countries … there’s a deep aversion to responding to a lack of women by giving women an actual better deal in life, or prioritising women higher than men.
I imagine that many parents aren’t thrilled with the thought of, “Our nation has a desperate shortage of women, and lots of men are sex-starved, so it’s up to us to provide the daughters who will help satisfy the sex/relationship needs of the next generation of boys.”
It’s probably a self-limiting problem. I think most people would prefer the live in the society they grew up in. And the gender ratio in China might pull female immigrants towards China but there’s no equivalent gender ratio in most countries pushing them out. Most women will have an opportunity to marry a man in their own native country so they won’t seek marriage opportunities in China.
It’s already happening, and parents aren’t always given a choice…nor are the girls. This is happening in multiple countries that are neighbors with China. It’s but one of the issues that’s happening due to the CCP’s stupid decision to try and impose population control by fiat.
John Oliver calls them ‘rocket scientists’, but really, they were (and frankly are) idiots.
What I find interesting is about 20 years ago we were seeing a flood of Chinese girls being adopted here in the US because they were dumped off due to the 1 child policy. I think about 10 years ago China stopped this but now I bet they wished they would have held onto those girls.
I believe the problem is primarily a rural problem versus an urban problem. In rural areas, there are more farmers, more crushing poverty, and are generally less sophisticated which creates the desire for sons. I also feel there is an indifference to this issue by urban dwellers because they look down at the rural people.
But you can’t selectively provide children of one sex except by selective abortion of the other sex after the sex of the fetus is known, or by post-natal selective murder. Since I doubt ultrasound was available for a lot of pregnancies in rural areas until recently, the statistics imply that millions of female babies were probably murdered.
Long term? Sweet fuck all. Gender ratios tend to get fixed pretty quickly once the underlying cause of the imbalance is lifted, usually in a generation or two. Which is of little comfort to the people now true.
