Too many men: Examining the gender imbalances of India and China

Nothing like this has happened in human history. A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.

The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching: Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labour markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations. Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbours and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as well. Barely recognized, the ramifications of too many men are only starting to come into sight.

“In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,” warns Li Shuzhuo, a leading demographer at Xi’an Jiaotong University.

Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex. China’s official one-child policy, in effect from 1979 to 2015, was a huge factor in creating this imbalance, as millions of couples were determined that their child should be a son.

India, a country that has a deeply held preferences for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males, according to its most recent census. The number of newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as the country grows more developed and prosperous. The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution. Officials attribute this to the advent of sex-selective technology in the last 30 years, which is now banned but still in widespread practice.

Both nations are belatedly trying to come to grips with the policies that created this male-heavy generation. And demographers say it will take decades for the ramifications of the bulge to fade.

In the four sections to follow are personal tales that show the fallout from the imbalance. They include:

The desperate effort to land a bride: Housing prices and savings rates. Bachelors are furiously building houses in China to attract wives, and prices are soaring. But otherwise they are not spending, and that in turn fuels China’s huge trade surplus. In India, there is the opposite effect: Because brides are scarce, families are under less pressure to save for expensive dowries.

Importing a bride: Human trafficking. Trafficking of brides is on the rise. Foreign women are being recruited and lured to China, effectively creating similar imbalances in China’s neighbours.

Taking a stand over harassment: Public safety. With the increase in men has come a surge in sexual crime in India and concerns about a rise in other crimes in both countries. Harassment of schoolgirls in India has in some towns sparked an effort to push back — but at a cost of restricting them to more protected lives.

Part 1: Stagnant lives

Li Weibin has never had a girlfriend. Boys outnumbered girls in the isolated mountain village where he grew up, in the factories where he worked as teenager, and on the construction sites where he now earns a modest wage.

Today, 30 years old, he lives in a bare, stuffy dormitory room with five other men in the southern city of Dongguan, bunk beds lining the walls, cigarette butts carpeting the floor.

“I want to find a girlfriend, but I don’t have the money or the opportunity to meet them,” he said. “Girls have very high standards, they want houses and cars. They don’t want to talk to me.”

Li’s problem is not only that he is poor and struggling to save enough money to buy an apartment of his own, it is that in China there are simply too many men. This is a country where marriage confers social status, and where parental pressure to produce grandchildren is intense. Bachelors like Li are dismissively branded as “bare branches” for failing to expand the family tree.

But as any forester knows, bare branches pose a danger, and not just to themselves.

In Dongguan, where the gender ratio is 118 men to 100 women, Li says he has virtually given up hope of finding a girlfriend. He spends his spare time playing games on his phone, or accompanying his co-workers to karaoke or for a foot massage.

“It is just me,” he said. “Life is boring and lonely.”

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When Om Pati, a farmer’s wife in the Indian village of Bass, in the state of Haryana, was having children, she actually prayed a sweet-eyed girl bundle would arrive. But instead she had a son. Then another, and another — seven in all. Her neighbours in the village were overjoyed for her each time a new baby arrived. They rang steel plates so everyone in the neighbourhood would know a boy had been born.

After all, this is a culture where male children are desired above all else — to light the Hindu funeral pyre, inherit property, care for aging parents. As the Sanskrit blessing says, “May you be the mother of a hundred sons.”

Sometimes it felt to Om Pati like she was the mother of 100 sons. She worked from sunrise until night. She consoled herself with the thought that she would one day have daughters-in-law to trade stories and share cooking duties. Grandchildren, too.

But by the time her eldest Sanjay — now 38 and a cook — reached marriageable age, the practice of families in her area sneaking off to larger cities for an illegal sonogram and then an abortion had taken its toll. When she and her husband began seeking matches for arranged marriage, still the norm, there were no suitable brides. The few young women in the village had all married — that is, those who hadn’t left for better opportunities elsewhere.

These days, Om Pati, now 60, spends her days cooking and cleaning for her husband and adult sons, who range from age 22 to 38. They gobble up so many rotis — the flat-round bread loaves that are a household staple, each one shaped in her calloused hands — that she goes through several pounds of flour a day.

“There is no other option,” she said. “It’s not in our hands.”

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Suresh Kumar once dreamed of getting married, with a procession through the lanes of Bass, a bride adorned in gold and the kind of ceremony that was once a near-universal rite of passage for Indian men.

But after one potential engagement fell apart, no other suitable brides could be found. He even went back to earn his high school degree in hopes of being a more attractive suitor.

Still no one. Now Kumar is in his mid-30s, long past what is considered marriageable age in India, and is beginning to face a hard truth — that a wife and a family won’t happen for him.

“People say, ‘You don’t have a wife and children at home to care for — why are you working so hard?’ ” Kumar said. “I laugh on the outside but the pain that I have in my heart only I know.”

The men themselves are isolated, left out of major family decisions and subject to ridicule, with little in the way of support or mental health services. Worse, in the traditional culture of villages, those who missed out on marriage have no hope of female companionship — dating or having a girlfriend is out of the question.

It wasn’t supposed to end up this way. When he was in high school he had a brief romance with a classmate, a beautiful 17-year-old, tall and slim, with two braids that reached down her back. Even now he cannot speak of her without singing a few bars of an Urdu love song. “I looked for her on Facebook just yesterday,” he says.

But the tryst was discovered, the parents put a stop to it, and his classmate eventually married someone else. And the family wasn’t able to find any other suitable prospective brides for him.

“We feel it, but this is a problem in every house,” said his mother, Bhima, sitting with her son after the party in the dimly lit courtyard of the modest house where they live.

Sometimes, Kumar says, the suffocation he feels is palpable:

“You know how when there’s no wind and a plant is sitting there and the leaves are not moving? That’s how the man feels: You’re just stationary.”

Part 2: To catch a wife, build a house

Today, young people are fleeing the villages in a desperate search for fortune, and marriage. The best way to find a bachelor in rural China these days: look for someone building a house.

Li Defu is typical. Now 21, he left home seven years ago to find work in the provincial capital Guiyang, but he has pooled the family savings to build a 10-room house overlooking green hills and valleys of his birthplace, Paifeng.

The reason is simple: It is the only chance he has of finding a wife.

“At the moment there aren’t any girls my age around,” he said, on a recent trip home to supervise the construction. “But I am building this new house in preparation, in case I find someone.”

Li was brought up by his grandmother, a tiny, wizened woman who sat beside him as he chatted. His parents still work in far-off factories; the savings they have collected could be crucial.

Around $10,000 (U.S), Li reckons, will have to be paid to his future bride’s family, just to gain their approval for the engagement. A centuries-old tradition, the bride price in China is similar to a dowry elsewhere in the world, but paid from groom’s family to the bride’s parents — rather than the other way around.

A decade or two back, the typical “bride price” was just a few hundred dollars. Today, in some parts of China, the average is nearly $30,000, according to a survey by the People’s Daily newspaper.

That translates into huge pressure for young men like Li and their families. Indeed, helping to build Li’s house was another young man who was already feeling that pressure.

“There are very few girls here, and many girls from outside won’t want to marry into this village because it’s poor,” said 25-year-old Zhou Haijiang, as he laid the tiles in one of the house’s many bathrooms. Only a show of prosperity can attract, and hold, a bride.

“In our village, if you want to find a wife, you have to build a house.”

Part 3: Importing brides

Liu Hua couldn’t find a wife in China. So he decided to buy a foreign one. His sister and mother helped him choose from a selection of Cambodian women who had come to China looking for husbands, eventually picking out a slim girl with a nice smile.

Their main concern — she was a bit taller than him. That, and worrying about what the neighbours would think.

“People in the village said she’d run away, they thought a foreign wife wasn’t as good as a Chinese wife,” said Liu, who lives in Leping in southeastern China’s Jiangxi province. “But now they don’t think so any more. My wife didn’t run away, she is friendly with the neighbours and treats them politely. Everyone says how nice she is.”

His wife, Lili, is among tens of thousands of foreign women who are flocking here for marriage, pushed by poverty at home and sucked in by China’s dramatic shortage of women.

Leping has become a center for the trade in Cambodian women: in village after village, they are easy to spot, looking after young children and picking them up from school, or just hanging out watching their husbands play mah-jongg.

In Huangling, a village two hours’ drive to the north of Leping, Liu and Lili’s was the first of several transnational marriages.

“Our village has 50 or 60 bachelors and only one or two single women,” said Liu. “For men who are 40 or even older, Cambodian women are like a second chance.”

But for the women involved, it is a huge gamble, being catapulted into families where daughters-in-law often occupy the lowest status of all, especially foreign ones who have just been “bought.”

Lili, who was born Sreynich Yorn in Cambodia, was paid the equivalent of $450, plus travel expenses, and promised a relatively well-paid job in a Chinese factory when she arrived, provided she agreed to get married.

“I wanted the money, for my mother,” she said.

Liu said he paid deposits ranging from $5,000 to $40,000 to three local families, just for the right to date their daughters, and got only some of the money back when the matches didn’t work out.

Fed up with demanding Chinese families, he eventually decided to pay a broker nearly $15,000 for Lili, who took a Chinese name after moving there.

The two profess to be content, living in a house filled with photos of their wedding and their two young children, a 4-year-old boy, Siyiuan, and his 1-year-old sister Sisi.

Both insist theirs is a genuine marriage, not a transaction. Happily, Liu’s mother approves.

But Lili still feels cheated, especially after she found out how much her husband had paid. The job she was promised never materialized, and she is furious with the marriage broker for pocketing almost all the fee.

“She lied to me for money,” she said.

Still, she is one of the lucky ones.

“My husband is a good man and he treats me well,” she said. “I don’t want to go back. I have children now.”

One 32-year-old woman, interviewed in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, said she had been enticed to come to China with the promise of a factory job. But when she landed, she was forced to marry a man she didn’t like.

“My husband said to me: ‘You are my slave, I bought you. If I want, I can do anything to you.’”

Her new family locked her in the house to prevent her from fleeing, she said. Her husband demanded sex four times a day. If she refused, she was beaten.

Finally, she had a baby girl. Seven days after birth, her husband demanded sex again, and when she refused, beat her, she said. Two years later, she recalled, she had a miscarriage, was denied medical treatment by her husband’s family and almost died.

For three years, the woman had not called her family back home in Cambodia “because I didn’t want my mother to worry,” and because she felt ashamed she hadn’t been able to send any money.

Eventually, though, she called her brother. Together they convinced the Chinese family to let her visit her sick mother in Cambodia — but they let her go only on the condition she leave her daughter behind.

Now she lives in a cruel limbo. Scared of being stigmatized in her village, she rarely goes home, working instead for low pay in a garment factory on the outskirts of Phnom Penh.

She has been separated from her 3-year-old daughter for more than a year.

Thinking of her, a fleeting smile passes over her face.

“I cry every day,” she said.

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With men outnumbering women in China by 34 million, the demand for foreign wives risks simply shifting the problem onto China’s smaller neighbours.

Russian women, some of whom used to look to the West for husbands, are increasingly seeking marriage in China, says Elena Barabantseva at Britain’s University of Manchester, who has been leading an international project on marriage migration into China.

In China, they are the most sought-after brides, prized for their fair skin and European features. They are seen as educated but accessible, less emancipated than Western women. These women are more likely to end up in bigger cities, with richer men.

Commercial marriage tours to Russia as well as Ukraine offer Chinese men the chance to meet 10 or 20 women over the space of a few days for around $5,000, rising to $8,000 if they find a bride.

But a much larger number of women come from Vietnam. Marriage migration across the porous border in southern China began two decades ago and is flourishing, said Caroline Grillot, who has been researching the phenomenon for a decade, most recently with Barabantseva in Manchester.

Vietnamese women are seen as less “demanding” than some Chinese women and more focused on traditional family values. They are also sought after for their fair skin, their big eyes and slim waists, Grillot says. They in turn often prefer Chinese husbands to their own compatriots, not just for their wallets, but because they are seen as hard-working and family-focused.

Today, websites such as ZhongYueLove.com (China-Viet-Love) offer a selection of Vietnamese women. Some services offer a money-back guarantee that the brides will be virgins, and a free replacement for any who run away within a year. Others arrive from Burma and Laos, crossing into China’s relatively poor southwestern Yunnan province.

In effect they are replacing local women who have themselves migrated, to find husbands in more prosperous parts of “inner China,” said Shen Hanmei, a professor at Yunnan University in Kunming.

Significant numbers have poured in from North Korea, too, especially after famine struck there in the mid-1990s. Many have suffered horrendous treatment from abusive husbands or were trafficked into prostitution in China, and ended up in labor camps if they tried to return to their home country.

Part 4: Taking a stand on harassment

First the girls refused to go to class. Then they launched a sit-in in the center of town. Then they stopped eating.

A group of 11-graders in the Indian village of Gothra Tappa Dahina sparked a public revolt because they were tired of being harassed by men as they walked to school in a neighbouring town. Nearly every day on the road, they said, they would be circled by young men buzzing them on motorbikes, grabbing their scarves, their bodies, and calling them sexually provocative names.

Street harassment — called “eve teasing” here — has long been a problem in Indian society, which remains deeply patriarchal despite years of economic growth and superficial signs of change. Now, the widening imbalance between numbers of men and women in the country is exacerbating the problem, public safety officials believe.

This conservative part of northern India has 7,000 villages with as many as 150 to 200 surplus single men each, one study said. In a country all too familiar with crimes against women, packs of men, fueled by cheap local liquor, often take to the street to chase and pressure young women.

Ultimately the girls decided to take matters into their own hands.

“There’s too many men,” said Nikita Chauhan, 14, the willowy daughter of the village seamstress who became a protest leader. “They keep us locked in their fist.”

Last May, amid blackened, burned-over farmers’ fields and in the scorching heat, the girls gathered under a printed cotton tent in the center of the village and began their strike.

The temperatures soared to 107 degrees. Some fainted and had to be taken to the hospital. Some passed out and lay as they were, fanned by fellow students, who spooned water laced with electrolyte powder into their mouths, like baby birds. They were joined by the mayor, their mothers, then women from other villages. A month earlier, the girls had graduated from the village school to high school and began experiencing what their older sisters had long warned them about — that the 2.5-kilometre stretch of road between their village and the high school was not safe, because of the young men on motorcycles — with helmets obscuring their faces — who harassed themas they walked.

“I decided whatever I had experienced during those days wasn’t worth tolerating,” said Sujata Chauhan, 14, sitting near the protest site. (The girls are not related — Chauhan is a common last name among the local caste.)

Gothra Tappa Dahina village is a small community of nearly 3,000, mostly farming families who grow corn, wheat and millet. It is part of a district that has one of the worst boy-girl ratios in Haryana, an economically strong but socially backward state which itself has the worst gender ratio of newborns to age 6 in the country, according to census data. Crimes against women have risen in the state by 127 per cent in the last decade.

The imbalance of men to women in the village tells the story — there are 133 men to every 100 women, according to community health statistics.

College student Shakti Singh, 20, said he would like a girlfriend but has no clue how to get one.

With little help from their conservative parents but with easy access to the Internet, he and his friends model their behavior on the swains in Bollywood romance movies. The genre — often with a hero who breaks down a woman’s reluctance — has been criticized for glorifying stalking and rape.

In Gothra village, the girls’ sit-in finally notched a small victory.

After eight days, school officials — worn down by seeing the wilting girls on cable news as the protest garnered attention — announced that the girls’ demands would be met. They would open 11th and 12th grades in the existing school so the girls would not have to walk.

It was a victory that did little to discipline the harassing young men, and one that will liberate the girls by keeping them closer to home — but a victory, nonetheless.

“Until we were at the hunger strike, we did not realize how progressive our village had become. How supportive they were. How they think now! Now, we are not restricted at all,” Sujata Chauhan said.

“People have come to realize that we have equal rights and they are willing to give them to us.”