Deleted member 2012
Magic
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2019
- Posts
- 5,961
- Reputation
- 13,555
Too many men: China and India battle with the consequences
In the world’s most populous nations, men outnumber women by 70 million. Both countries are trying to come to grips with the policies that created this generation of gender imbalance
www.scmp.com
The ricecel:
“Life is boring and lonely”
Construction worker Li Weibin, 30, has never had a girlfriend. Picture: Giulia Marchi
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 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 city of Dongguan, in Guangdong province. Bunk beds line the walls, cigarette butts carpet the floor.
“I want to find a girlfriend, but I don’t have the money or the opportunity to meet them,” he says. “Girls have very high standards, they want houses and cars. They don’t want to talk to me.”
No country for older men: China’s better educated, well-paid women are opting for younger husbands
Li’s problem is not only that he is poor and struggling to save enough money to buy a flat 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 colleagues to karaoke or for a foot massage.
“It is just me,” he says. “Life is boring and lonely.”
The currycel:
“No one knows how sad I feel”
Suresh Kumar says the suffocation he feels as a single 35-year-old is palpable. Picture: Poras Chaudhary
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 says. “I laugh on the outside but the pain that I have in my heart only I know.”
It's over
