One Child (16 page)

The world has never seen such a huge national collection of bachelors, men who will not be able to find mates unless China opens its doors to massive immigration, a highly unlikely scenario. There is a name for these men:
guanggun
, or “bare branches,” biological dead ends.

It seemed like New Peace might be a
guanggun
village. It is located in Shaanxi, which is one of the ten provinces in China with the dubious honor of having the most unequal gender ratios.
If you look at a map of China, New Peace would be located somewhere squarely in the middle, geographically centered, culturally on the fringes. The nearest major city is Hanzhong, whose heyday was back in the Han dynasty, when the city was hailed as the birthplace of paper. Since then the city, population 3 million—about the size of Chicago, but small by China’s standards—has bumped along with no national significance. Hanzhong didn’t even merit a direct flight from the capital, Beijing.

I was curious about what a
guanggun
village might be like. I imagined groups of horny, sullen men lurking in village squares and Internet cafés, lust and violence as palpable as the polluted haze of Beijing skies.

To be on the safe side, I decided to travel to New Peace with our office’s lone male researcher. The precaution turned out to be unnecessary. New Peace is like most villages in China, filled with old women and children. All the young people of working age—including the
guanggun
—were off earning money in the cities, as there was nothing but subsistence farming on the village’s tiny rice plots. Since men stood to inherit family land, many retained their rural household registration status. The young women of New Peace, however, having nothing to inherit, hightailed it for bright lights and big factories as soon as they could. Few returned permanently.

In New Peace, Shufen, the mother of one of the duped bridegrooms, welcomed me into the family home. It was a comfortable dwelling, with a traditional sloping roof and big wooden doors, hospitably open to let in light and the occasional neighbor. The only thing out of place was a scarlet motorcyle parked in the living room, red rosettes drooping from the handles. It had been a present for the runaway bride.

While showing me wedding pictures, Shufen related the sad story of her son’s aborted marriage. Zhou Pin, her son, had left New Peace as a teenager to work in southern China’s factories. Long hours and regimented life on the line gave him little opportunity to meet women. Year after year, Zhou dutifully trudged home for Spring Festival, only to meet his parents’ increasingly agitated queries. In New Peace, a single son approaching his mid-twenties is a big source of shame, said Shufen.

A family friend told Shufen that her nephew had married a girl from Sichuan Province. The bride had three Sichuanese friends visiting her who might be interested in marriage, said the friend.

In the old days, marriage with outsiders would be frowned on by New Peace’s insular villagers. Why, Sichuanese people didn’t even speak the same dialect, said Shufen. But New Peace, with fourteen thousand inhabitants, had thirty bachelors on the books and no women of marriageable age. Clearly, they would have to adapt to changing times. Shufen took matters into her own hands and set up a meeting. She summoned her son home.

Zhou’s wooing was swift and businesslike. He met the three women and proposed to the youngest and prettiest after the first meeting. The woman agreed, with a proviso:
caili
of a little over $5,500, which represented about a decade’s worth of farm income for the Zhous.

Three days later, the couple registered their union. They posed for studio pictures, the bride’s cheeks Photoshopped ivory to match
her wedding dress. In another picture, the couple are resplendent in traditional embroidered Chinese outfits of red and gold. The bride pretends to light a string of firecrackers. Zhou mugs a grimace, hands to his ears.

At the wedding banquet a week later, Shufen formally handed over the
caili
—half of it cobbled together from family loans—to a woman she believed to be the bride’s cousin.

Matrimony was catching. Soon, two neighbors sought the new bride out and asked her to introduce suitable friends to their sons. Two marriages happened in swift succession, with
caili
amounts similar to what the Zhous paid.

Within a month, all the brides had vanished.

There was something cinematic about this. I imagined the women sprinting across rice paddies, wedding gowns hiked to their knees, veils rippling in the wind. The truth was somewhat less picturesque. Zhou’s wife escaped by pretending to have a diarrhea attack and climbed out of the outhouse.

When I arrived in New Peace four months later, most of the duped bridegrooms had left to seek jobs elsewhere. Only Zhou remained.

It turned out the marriage, formed so quickly and in such a pragmatic fashion, had touched his heart. Very early on he had suspected his bride was not the innocent country girl she’d claimed to be, he said. She’d understood some of his references to his factory work and asked a few questions that made him suspect she had worked in a city. Even so, Zhou hoped she would adjust to New Peace’s quiet rhythms. She had seemed gentle and grateful for small attentions. He had planned to seek work closer to home and return often for feast days. He’d bought her the motorbike so she could blunt the dullness of village life with trips to Hanzhong. They made plans to see the terra-cotta warriors in Xian, a five-hour bus ride away.

I could see little to attract young women to New Peace and hold
them there. It had a small shop, a one-stop outlet that sold things like washing powder and pesticide.
(The latter is so commonly used in rural suicides,
New York Times
reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal called it “the Chinese equivalent of Valium in every bathroom cabinet.”) Farming was still hard work. The fields were too small for machinery, and so a lot of field work was done the way it had been a hundred years before. Lots of houses didn’t have running water. And while the young married women of New Peace worked extraordinarily hard in the fields and the home tending to children and in-laws, their husbands were free to roam outside for months on end. In this kind of situation, it’s not difficult to see why, until the mid-2000s, China was the only country in the world where more women killed themselves than men, with the suicide rate highest among young rural women.
This is changing now as villages empty of women; it’s rural men who are increasingly the ones killing themselves.

Zhou’s family feared he would take his own life in despair, and his parents forbade him to leave the village. In truth, Shufen said, all of them were in despair, worried about how to repay the heavy loans they had undertaken for the
caili.
Other New Peace families were worse off. One of the duped bridegrooms had a younger brother, also single, and the family didn’t know how they could raise his bride price.
His father moaned, “I wish I had daughters.”

I had initially been drawn to the story of New Peace’s runaway brides because of its tragicomic elements. I liked how this small band of women had somehow managed to strike a blow against China’s patriarchal system. As a woman and despised daughter myself, I felt the problems of New Peace and other countless little hamlets seemed like poetic justice, payback for hundreds of years of systemic discrimination against women.

But Zhou’s gallantry touched my heart. Even though his disastrous marriage had left him in debt and legal limbo, he refused to blame his wife. He didn’t hate her for leaving, he said. “She must
have her own troubles.” He actually spoke to her a few times after she ran away—he said she’d called. “She said she was sorry, she had no choice.”

Not all of China’s bachelors would be as generous under similar circumstances, but they all face a bleak future that is not their doing.

II

There is no shortage of theories about how this male youth imbalance will shape China, and by extent the world. Undeniably, large groups of young males create situations ripe for social dissent and violence and are linked to developments such as the Arab Spring and the rise in rape in India. How, then, will it be for China, where the gender gap is by far the largest in the world?

In 2004, academics Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer’s book
Bare Branches
argued that China’s large population of single men could create a more warlike nation. The many periods in China’s history that have seen a male surplus include two Qing-era rebellions in areas with extremely large numbers of single males. One, a rebellion of bandits in northeast China, called the Nien Rebellion, occurred in 1851 when famine and female infanticide had resulted in a ratio of roughly 129 men to every 100 women.
One in four men was unable to marry at all, noted Hudson and den Boer.
(Today, some provinces in China have between 26 and 38 percent more males than females, according to Yi Zhang, population researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.) As Hudson and den Boer point out, a large population of single men is not, on its own, necessarily a recipe for violence. “The mere presence of dry bare branches cannot cause a fire, but when the sparks begin to fly, those branches can act as kindling, turning sparks into flames.”

While intriguing, Hudson and den Boer’s theories were considered by many social scientists as speculative and not necessarily pre
dictive. Ten years later, their thesis gained slightly more credence, as China grew increasingly assertive in territorial spats with neighbors.
In 2012, China’s squabble with Japan over some barren uninhabited islands, called Senkaku by the Japanese and Diaoyu by the Chinese, heated up to such an extent that the
Economist
’s cover story raised the question “Could Asia Really Go to War over These?”

In 2014, ten years after the publication of
Bare Branches
, Hudson and den Boer argued in a
Washington Post
article that a “virile form of nationalism” has begun to creep into China’s foreign policy rhetoric, which they believe has been deliberately stoked to keep the allegiance of “young adult bare branches.”

Domestically, at least, it makes sense that more men equals more strife. In 2008, economists showed that a 1 percent increase in China’s gender ratios increased violent and property crime rates between 5 and 6 percent.
Researchers estimated that the “increasing maleness” of China’s young adult population could account for as much as a third of the overall rise in crime.
A 2013 study by Zhejiang University found that China’s bachelors had lower self-esteem compared to married men, and much higher rates of depression and aggression.

While women in China do not experience the levels of public assault and molestation they face in places like the Middle East or India, they do experience a great deal of violence at home. One in four women in China confronts domestic violence, according to the All-China Women’s Federation, and they have few legal protections. In 2011, Kim Lee, the American-born wife of a famous Chinese entrepreneur, tried fruitlessly to file a police report against her husband for battering her. When the police refused to recognize her beating as a crime, she went on Weibo and posted pictures of her bruises, sparking a media frenzy. Later she was awarded a divorce on the grounds of domestic violence—a landmark ruling—and emerged as a vocal advocate for women’s rights. The Chinese government only drafted a national law against domestic violence in 2014.

Economically, the impact of China’s gender imbalance appears mixed.
Economists Wei Shang-Jin and Zhang Xiaobo argue the gender imbalance may stimulate economic growth by inducing more entrepreneurship. They found that regions with a higher gender imbalance have higher GDP growth and more vigorous growth of private companies.
On the other hand, Wei and Zhang also think the imbalance has led to excessive saving, as parents with sons stockpile funds to increase their eligibility on the marriage market, and the researchers calculate that half the increase in China’s savings in the past twenty-five years can be attributed to the increase in the gender ratio.

If this is the case, China’s
guanggun
problem will make it harder for Beijing to transition from an export-led economy by stimulating domestic consumption. Wei and Zhang’s theories are not mainstream—economists have many explanations for why China saves—but they do add to the growing body of evidence that the one-child policy, in many respects, created a demographic structure that will dampen future growth.

A 2014 Australian study also found that China’s gender imbalance contributed to excessive savings and rising crime rates.
Unfortunately, policies that seek to rebalance the gender imbalance will take decades and slow real per-capita income growth, though the study’s writers concluded this slowed economic growth would be offset by gains made from reduced crime.

No one knows for sure yet if China’s male surplus will decisively crimp China’s economic growth or make it a more warlike nation. But it seems safe to say that it has hugely intensified marriage anxiety in a society where parents—particularly parents of only children—are extremely invested in their offspring’s romantic choices.

Back in 2009, high
caili
prices were still an unfamiliar concept to many Chinese city folk. While prevalent in the countryside,
caili
was still “rare in urban Chinese environments,” wrote Canadian scholar Siwan Anderson.
Barely six years later, the real estate company Vanke
had published a map showing
caili
rates across China.
According to company data, cities with the most expensive
caili
were Shanghai and Tianjin at $16,000 and $9,600, respectively. These prices were just the tip of the iceberg, since desirable bridegrooms were also expected to own real estate.

Vanke’s methodology was widely criticized. Some said it underestimated bride prices—why was
caili
in Beijing, second-largest city in China, only $1,600 and two bottles of fiery Maotai, and zero in booming Chongqing? Still, almost no one disagreed with the disagreeable notion that
caili
, once a quaint custom of the countryside, was now a nationwide practice. More than ever since the 1949 launch of the People’s Republic, marriage had become a matter of money, valuation, and investment.