China's bachelor bomb: AIDS, crime, war?

Will China's one-child policy and a strong cultural preference for sons lead to a 'bachelor bomb', ushering in  a marriage squeeze? Sociology professor Dudley L. Poston Jr. and demographer Dr Peter A. Morrison write in the International Herald Tribune about the potential threat:

In a trend fraught with troubling political and social implications, China will soon find itself with a marriage-age population remarkably out of balance, with about 23 million more young men than women available for them to marry in this decade and the next - what demographers term a "marriage squeeze."
 
This impending surplus of unattached young men could be a driving force behind increased crime, explosive epidemics of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and even international threats to the security of other nations. Yet the Chinese government has done little to address its demographic destiny.

This is not the first time such claims have been made. While it is tempting to dismiss them as alarmist, Poston and Morrison know their stuff. One less worrying potential consequence of this 'bachelor bomb' is  that Shanghai could become just as big a gay capital as San Francisco and Sydney are now.

Comments

[Edward Hugh]

This is an important issue, and the consequences are unknown. I'm not very sure that the imbalance will actually affect people's sexual orientation though. More probably it will, as they say, be a factor for instability. My father always used to blame WW1 on an excess of population. This is undoubtedly far too simplistic, but OTOH all that excess testosterone floating around can hardly be a plus for world peace.

And you need to add this to the other structural population elements which are about to impact on Chinese society, like rapid ageing: the labour force will probably start to decline around 2015 and by 2040 China will be *older* than the US.

Some key macro indicators, like the high saving rate, cannot be understood outside this context.

"Yet the Chinese government has done little to address its demographic destiny."

Well I'm not sure what they are suggesting here. Clearly a country as large as China cannot address its demographic problems by means of immigration (although there is a steady flow of brides from N Korea apparently). Since Germany and Japan have also done little or nothing in this regard it seems a bit unfair to criticise China for being a 'laggard' here.

Obviously 'the owl minerva flys only after dusk', but still the sooner we get everyone focused on the importance of all these impending changes the sooner we may get policies which start to address them.

BTW: India has a less publicised but similar female shortfall.

[wang q.]

At the least you can hope is those excess men are going to have high suicidal rate and therefore balancing this problem out.

Its like when their parents' weeding out the female fetus, now they're gonna weed themselves out.

Some questions remain as china is the only country that have more female suicide than male suicide because the available supply of chemical pesticides.