China's Army of Single Men: An Increasingly Aggressive Country?

The Chinese Communist Party’s one-child policy has led tens of millions of couples to abandon or abort baby girls and created a huge and growing surplus of men. What does this all this excess testosterone mean for China and, more importantly, for China’s neighbors?

I was living in China when the one-child policy began in 1980, and saw firsthand how it drove couples desperate for a son to eliminate unwanted daughters. In the early days this was often done by drowning, although it was also common to simply abandon baby girls in some out-of-the-way place to die of exposure. In more recent years, increased prosperity and new medical technologies have enabled couples to act on their longstanding preference for male children during pregnancy by undergoing prenatal sex determination and sex-selective abortion.

The result of this continued carnage of girl children is that China now has one of the highest sex ratios at birth ever recorded. Instead of 106 boys for every 100 girls–the usual ratio of boys to girls–China reports a ratio of 117 boys for every 100 girls. The ratios in some provinces are even more skewed, with 130 boys reported for every 100 girls. The shortage of girls and young women is obvious to anyone who visits China, as I have recently. In some high school classrooms, boys often outnumber girls two to one. The oldest cohort of only children are now in their twenties, and they are predominantly male. Demographers predict that there will be 30 million more Chinese men than women of marriageable age by 2020.[i]

Problems at home … and potential problems abroad

In economics, price reflects scarcity. The scarcer a good, the higher the value that is placed upon it. By extension, one might think that creating an “artificial” shortage of women by selectively eliminating them would raise their value. In a narrow economic sense this may be true. What anthropologists call “brideprices”–a payment by the groom’s family to the parents of the bride–are on the rise. At the same time, the overall “worth” of women, in terms of their societal standing, seems to be on the decline.

To put it another way, women are being treated more and more as a commodity. This has led to early and coerced marriages of young girls, increased violence against women in general, and more exploitation of women and girls through the country’s already flourishing sex slave trade. How this works is as follows: Women are kidnapped from their native villages and taken to a distant province. There they are sold to the highest bidder, who in China may be a farmer interested in acquiring a wife or a brothel owner seeking to expand his line of prostitutes.[ii]

Modern-day sex trafficking also crosses national borders. Young women from Vietnam and Burma are lured into China on the promise of factory jobs, only to find themselves working in a brothel. Young girls from North Korea–one of the poorest countries on earth–are sometimes sold by their parents to Chinese traders who promise to find them a husband among China’s tens of millions of bachelors.[iii]

This is not to suggest that skewing the sex ratio in favor of males in any way benefits males. Prostitution and homosexuality are on the rise in China, as is the crime of rape, as single men seek sexual outlets outside of marriage. Others are driven to emigrate to neighboring countries, pulled in part by the desired to find a wife abroad.

Men may be frustrated in other ways as well, especially by their inability to form families after the normal fashion, that is to say, with a wife and subsequent natural or adopted children. This may drive them to seek surrogate families–by joining gangs, secret societies, and the PLA. A gang, as has been remarked, is a kind of surrogate family, with the gang leader in the role of father figure, and the gang members serving as siblings. The military offers the brotherhood of the barracks, with the commanding officer in the role of pater familias. So, too, does the secret society, common in China, offer the prospect of faux family ties.

None of this bodes well for China’s neighbors. Chinese triads, which already dominate the drug trade in Southeast Asia, are spreading their influence in places far from China, such as Vancouver and Toronto, which have large Chinese minorities. The new Chinese Diaspora is also creating new communities of recent emigrants around China’s periphery, whose loyalties still reside with the mother country, and whose presence may create a pretext for intervention.

China has always been a patrilocal society, to be sure, but how much of China’s aggressiveness vis-à-vis the South China Sea is a result of the increasingly male tilt of the population as a whole? And how well would the PLA fight to recover Taiwan if its members were promised brides from the island if they were successful?

Sociologists have long speculated that societies with large surplus populations of men have a tendency towards violence. China’s one-child policy has led to a war on women. But it may ultimately lead to a war by men.

[ii] Cheryl Weinstein, “With 1-child policy, China ‘missing’ girls, Washington Times, January 27, 2010.

[iii] Radio Free Asia, “North Korean women sold in China,” 29 April 2009, available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/docid/49fb1073c.html [accessed 27 April 2010]