If Ted Koeppel’s China special is to be believed Homosexuality is kind of don’t ask don’t tell. As long as you keep it under wraps it’s fine.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090410/ap_on_re_as/as_china_gender_imbalance
Apparently it has led to a rise in crime.
If anything will lead to an expansionist China it will be this, because they have an incentive to use their useless males as cannon fodder in imperial adventures.
I do not think this is as big a deal as others are making it out to be. First of all, porn is readily available thanks to the Internet and many people do just fine with a monastic or onanistic lifestyle.
- The way those two countries are getting it on, Mongolia’s never going to get any sleep.
The problem is that there aren’t enough women in China so it doesn’t really matter how well they do there.
I don’t think you’re going to find 14% of all the men in China interested in join monastaries.
kenner116’s answer strikes me as most realistic.
My guess is that we will see China become an exporter of labor. Sailor on cargo ships, construction in Dubai, manual work in Japan. The educated and moneyed will have the wives in China. The uneducated and poor will go elsewhere, looking for someplace to start a family, or somewhere to earn the money to start one at home.
Unfortunately, I could see lower class girls essentially going to the highest bidder. If not literally, then along the lines of “boy 1 has money, boy 2 doesn’t. Boy 1 will be able to support us in our old age.”
Remember, in a 1 child/household system, the parents of both kids are going to be depending on them for support, as the parents get older.
Yeah, China could take advantage of the aging populations elsewhere to export its idle young men to be day laborers, though there isn’t much of a shortage of unskilled day labor worldwide in the industrialized demographically necrotic nations.
I think whoever said “expand into Africa” is the winner. China has an ever-growing presence in Africa and it’s going to start to seem like an attractive prospect for rootless young men.
In my experience, Chinese men are reluctant to marry foreigners. It would upset their parents and is just not the right way to continue the family line. And Western women are particularly unattractive- we might as well be men. That said, there is a thriving human trafficking trend bringing in “wives” from Burma for forced marriages. There is also plenty of kidnapping for forced marriages in general. Even when things are chosen, money has always been at least as important as love when it comes to choosing a mate. We are only a generation or two away from arranged marriages, and marriage still has a “business contract” feel to it.
It is impossible to overstate how important getting married and having kids is in Chinese culture. Young people are coddled and pampered, but in exchange they are instilled with a huge sense of debt- and the only way to repay that debt is to get married, have kids, and support their parents. For most people, this is their main purpose in life.
Homosexuality is quietly tolerated. My gay friends have never had any problems finding boyfriends. You meet plenty of openly flaming people and now and then you meet someone who will openly discuss his sex life, etc. It’s not quite as open as America and people aren’t really comfortable with it, but it’s definitely there and not too huge of a deal.
Women have a looooooooong way to go before they reach any sort of cultural equality, and I don’t think that is going to change any time soon, even with the imbalance.
Finally, the one-child policy is overstated. Most young people I know have sisters and brothers. Mostly it affects the urban elites with good jobs. It has very little effect in the countryside or among the poor.
To be pretty blunt, most young guys out to get married are not in it for the progeny but the fucking. They wouldnt care which of them got the wife knocked up as long as they got to screw.
I understand in China that it’s different, but even so young men become older men after a while.
Something similar to India and Korea could happen:
India has a huge gender imbalance in some regions. Some guys go out of their own state to marry women from poorer regions of India.
South Korean farmers find it hard to get a woman too; apparently many modern educated women do not want to live in a village. The men often import women from SE Asian countries.
He has a wife and several husbands to share his life with and a kid to help raise. Problem solved.
You do realize that the whole point of this thread is that there aren’t enough women to go around in China, right? They most certainly do not do “all right.”
Also, I said nothing about the USA. I simply said that Chinese men are not in great demand, with no reference to any specific nation. So why accuse me of thinking that the USA is the only country in the world?
While the urges can generally be satisfied in countless ways, it won’t fulfill the hunger in wanting a relationship with the possibility of having children some day. But hey, those chumps can just rub a rock and be on there way.
Another criminal act committed against the Chinese people, by their people.
Do you consider this to be a serious post?
Yes, the expression I’ve heard is “Heaven is high, but the Emperor is in Beijing”. Though I’m not sure weather this is due to trouble exerting such control over rural areas, or if it’s just an issue of “What can we possibly do to those on the bottom economic rung of society?”
I get that traditional Chinese families depend on the youngsters for support in their later years, for this reason alone a male child is preferred because they have more earning potential, but it seems obvious to me that having a girl instead of a boy increases the chances that your child will find a mate that can support the family later.
Why is this still not the case?
Gender imbalance is only PART of China’s demographic nightmares.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=agZ75QikqjWs&refer=home
China is now following Japan and Korea into a major population decline. Hence:
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There are going to be fewer and fewer young people in China.
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A vastly disproportionate number of those young people are going to be male.
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China will soon have more senior citizens than the USA has citizens.
Now, though it often SEEMS to Americans as if “all the manufacturing jobs are in China,” manufacturing jobs have been steadily declining in China, too.
So, what does China face? They’ll have to tell tens of millions of young men, “Sorry guys, but you’ll probably NEVER find women, you’ll probably NEVER find a decent paying job, and if you do, well, we’ll have to take most of your paycheck away to support your grandparents. You don’t have a problem with that, do you?”
In our own culture, one might see a similar phenomenon among the geek/gamer/con/Slashdot/Monty Python-quoter crowd. Lots of socially inept men (as seen by the outside world), with far fewer women. What are the dating and mating dynamics of that crowd?
I always assumed it was because the male child was worried about supporting his parents, not the parents of his wife. Is it common to have both sets of parents living in the same house as their married children in China?