Too Many Men! In China & India, Men Outnumber Women by 70 Million – Social Issues of Preference for Sons/Males

In China and India, men outnumber women by 70 million. Both nations are belatedly trying to come to grips with the policies that created this male-heavy generation

By Simon Denyer and Annie Gowen  Illustrations by Jasu Hu – April 18, 2018

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 labor 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 neighbors 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 preference 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.

In the two countries, 50 million excess males are under age 20.

When looking at just the ratio of boys to girls in each country, it may look as if that gap has narrowed …

… but its effects on marriage have yet to peak. The biggest gap between men and women of marriageable age, defined here as 15 to 29, will come in the next few decades, as the babies of the past decade grow up.

And factoring in the large pool of both unmarried older and younger men vying for the same small pool of young women, the gap becomes more of a chasm.

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 away.

In the four sections below are personal tales that show how the imbalance has affected:

Village life and mental health. Among men, loneliness and depression are widespread. Villages are emptying out. Men are learning to cook and perform other chores long relegated to women. Stagnant lives

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. The desperate effort to land 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 neighbors. Importing a bride

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. Taking a stand over harassment

The growing number of eligible men who cannot find brides has
had a profound impact on the age-old rhythms of family life.
Adult sons live with their mothers — in some cases, their
grandmothers. Indian and Chinese women who showed a marked
preference for sons are growing old. They are still burdened with
cooking and cleaning for their adult sons, and the stress affects
their health. “I’ve cried so much I can’t see any more,” says one.

The gender imbalance could prompt a “crisis of masculinity” as traditional
roles are upended and males embrace socially regressive stances to
prove their manhood, said Prem Chowdhry, a researcher and social
scientist in New Delhi. “People devalue their masculinity. If they
remain single, they will be declared not men at all. The basic function
of a man in rural society is to have a family and look after that family.”

“In rural areas, men who didn’t get married are really marginalized; even
socializing in the village is difficult,” said Therese Hesketh, a professor of
global health at University College London. “These guys are depressed.”

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 a 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.”

Om Pati is the mother of seven sons, including from left, Sandeep, Sanjay and Suresh. (Poras Chaudhary/For The Washington Post)

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 neighbors in the village were overjoyed for her each time a new baby arrived. They rang steel plates so everyone in the neighborhood 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 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.”

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.

One recent evening, a family threw a rooftop party to celebrate the birth of a boy. Parties to welcome girl babies are still so rare they are covered by the local newspaper. Before the guests arrived, Kumar huddled in a stairwell nearby, sweating over a cast-iron pot, cracking jokes with friends as he fried sweet pancakes for the guests.

He likes to cook, he says, but the role occasionally unbalances him.

During a harvest festival last year, his mother was delayed in another town. So Kumar was left to prepare the pancakes on his own. As he flipped the cakes in the bubbling oil, he grew teary-eyed, thinking of how there was no wife and kids to eat the treats he was making.

With a wife, he says, “there would be somebody to make tea for me, to tell me when to take a bath. We don’t have much value as unmarried men in this society. Everybody thinks, ‘What problem does this man have? What is lacking in his family? What is lacking in him?’ ”

Evenings are the loneliest times, when the village folds into itself, minders return with their cows from the pond, smoke wafts from evening meals, schoolchildren still in their plaid school uniforms play in the uneven lanes. Kumar shuts himself in his room.

“I watch TV, romantic movies sometimes,” Kumar says. “What can I do? It’s up to me then. What I feel inside stays inside.”

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.”

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