Chinese men without marriage prospects are called "bare branches." They're bare because of the millions of missing women.
Beijing's bachelor bulge: the unprecedented surplus of boys.
“I'm really eager to have a wife, but it is very hard to find one here,” Mr. Liu says. “I am too old and too poor. I'm just counting the days without desires.”
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In the past, "bachelor hordes" gave rise to political uprisings that lead to wars.
Scholars have pointed to the Nien Rebellion in northern China in the 1850s. After a series of failed harvests, the local inhabitants adopted a policy of infanticide, and eventually 25 per cent of the men were unable to marry because of a shortage of women. About 100,000 unmarried men formed bandit gangs, which merged into armies that tried to overthrow the Qing Dynasty in a war that lasted for years.
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Many experts predict that the growing surplus of unmarried men will cause an increase in violence, rape, prostitution, crime and the illegal trafficking of women. “The large number of unmarried men will disrupt the normal continuity of human reproduction,” said Zhan Changzhi, a sociologist at Hainan University, in an interview with a Chinese newspaper.
“The population will decrease,” he said. “Huge numbers of single men will suffer from sexual starvation. Many mental disorders will be caused because they cannot enjoy a normal family life and sexual life. Many of them will become criminals. And the trend will damage the economy, since the single men will have no strong desire to improve their economic condition. They'll stay at home and do nothing, and their human resource will be wasted. This is a very severe problem.”
Yet, activists who protest the brutality of forced abortion are kidnapped.