"Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex. China’s official one-child policy, in effect from 1979 to 2015, was a huge factor in creating this imbalance, as millions of couples were determined that their child should be a son.
India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an excess of 37 million males, according to its most recent census. The number of newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as the country grows more developed and prosperous...
Housing prices and savings rates. Bachelors are furiously building houses in China to attract wives, and prices are soaring. But otherwise they are not spending, and that in turn fuels China’s huge trade surplus. In India, there is the opposite effect: Because brides are scarce, families are under less pressure to save for expensive dowries...
Adult sons live with their mothers — in some cases, their grandmothers. Indian and Chinese women who showed a marked preference for sons are growing old. They are still burdened with cooking and cleaning for their adult sons, and the stress affects their health...
Tens of thousands of foreign women are flocking to China for marriage, pushed by poverty at home and sucked in by China’s shortage of women. Chinese men surf websites that offer foreign brides, and may wind up paying upwards of $8,000 for marriage tours to find a wife. For the brides, it’s a huge gamble: They are lured with promises of work, and some are effectively trapped and trafficked into marriage. In their new families, daughters-in-law often occupy the lowest status...
Russian women, some of whom used to look to the West for husbands, are increasingly seeking marriage in China, says Elena Barabantseva at Britain’s University of Manchester, who has been leading an international project on marriage migration into China."
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