The Times, London: “The dance floors are polished to a shine and a 150-metre long “love wall” has been erected down the middle of the venue: everything is set for 48 hours of intensive matchmaking.In a now annual tumult of desire and desperation, more than 20,000 singles will descend on Expo Park in Shanghai today in pursuit of a spouse. A majority will be women: educated, salaried, urbanised and disappointed that city life has yet to yield Mr Right.
The event’s organisers assured The Times that a local steelworks and other Shanghai companies rich in male employees had been “encouraged to dispatch bachelors to the scene”. That urgent call for men is an anomaly in a country where a vast gender imbalance has become endemic and which some demographers believe will create a 50 million-strong surplus of single males by the end of the decade. Chinese families already have an instinctive grasp of the supply and demand crisis that lies ahead for young men. In poorer parts of the country, young men in their 20s are preparing unhappily for a long life unshared.
As well as being held on a greater scale than in the past, today’s event in Shanghai has a fresh innovation: singles will enter free, but parents accompanying them will be charged 50 yuan (£5). The deterrent effect will be minimal. Many thousands of parents are expected to attend, cajoling their offspring towards marriages that modern life is increasingly delaying. Plenty of the parental harassment is an old-fashioned wish for stability and grandchildren. But increasingly, the angst in China is born of raw economic fear. …
China’s male surplus will pose unprecedented challenges to the incoming leadership of the Communist Party. No government anywhere has dealt with an imbalance on this scale. Li Jianmin, the head of the Institute of Population and Development Research at Nankai University, said that the difficulty of men finding wives was an effect of the “big backdrop” of a birth-sex ratio of 118 boys to 100 girls. “The gender imbalance trend started showing in the early 1980s, and now we have just walked over the threshold. In five to ten years, the high-risk period will come,” he said. He added that China’s family planning policy was to a great extent responsible for the imbalance. About 90 per cent of Chinese couples would like a boy and a girl, but when forced to have only one, most opt for a boy.
The problems of male oversupply will be further amplified if, as some now fear, China’s economy sputters. In places of high bachelor concentration, high unemployment, and where all hope of marriage has evaporated, there will probably be crime and unrest, said Andrea Den Boer, a demographer whose Bare Branches book warns of long-term security implications. “It is difficult to be optimistic because while China knows that this problem exists, it does not appear to have any plan,” she said. “There is a strong potential building for future violence and unrest and so far the Chinese authorities have not developed a response to those issues, other than a violent one.””
via City girls go manhunting while the bachelors in rest of country despair | The Times.
A natural if unplanned result of the one-child policy of the CCP.
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