I’m sorry, I just couldn’t help myself with the title.
The idea for this post came from a story I heard on NPR about the increase in wife kidnapping in China. I started to look into the situation, because I was curious, and what I see has the potential to be terrifying.
Let’s begin at the beginning.
From the South China Morning Post:
Too many men: China and India battle with the consequences of gender imbalance
Nothing like this has happened in human history. A combination of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.
The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching: beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labour markets, drives up savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain property values and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or prostitution in a growing number of locations.
Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into their Asian neighbours and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas. Barely recognised, the ramifications of too many men are only starting to come into sight.
“In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose a very big risk to society,” warns Li Shuzhuo, a leading demographer at Xian Jiaotong University, in Xian, Shaanxi province.
Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males than females – more than the entire population of Malaysia – 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.
Look at that number again, 34 million men who will never find a wife in China.
From The Guardian:
‘My parents say hurry up and find a girl’: China’s millions of lonely ‘leftover men’
Official state media put the male-to-female ratio at 136:100 among unmarried people born since the 1980s. Professor Jin Tiankui, an influential sociologist in China’s policy-making circle, predicts that by 2020 there will be 30 million more men than women in the 24–40 age bracket.
Liu and Jin blame their lack of romantic success on their low social status as migrant workers from rural provinces. The state says there are about 278 million others like them, the backbone of the country’s wildly successful manufacturing, construction and service industries. They embody the nation’s most intractable problems of inequality – loneliness included.
The law of supply and demand is a natural law. It applies to just about everything in life. When there is a surplus of men, the lower quality ones have little value. This means that the most lonely men are going to be poor, working class, and rural.
Keep this part in mind, we are going to get back to it.
From The Economist:
Demand for wives in China endangers women who live on its borders
HUONG was only 15 when she went out to meet a friend in Lao Cai, a city in northern Vietnam on the Chinese border (see map). She thought she would be gone a few hours, but it was three years before she managed to return home.
From the Lilly:
‘I’m too tired to cry’: The Laotian girls who are kidnapped to become child brides
The practice of “bride theft” is widespread among the Hmong population in Southeast Asia. In Vietnam, there have been frequent recent reports of Hmong girls who are kidnapped and trafficked across the border into southern China, and evidence has emerged of similar behaviors within the Hmong diaspora in America too.
From Time:
A Shortage of Women in China Has Led to the Trafficking of ‘Brides’ From Myanmar, Says a Report
Authorities on both sides of the border have failed to stop the trafficking of hundreds of women from Myanmar to China, says a new report released by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Thursday.
The 112-page report, titled Give Us a Baby and We’ll Let You Go: Trafficking of Kachin ‘Brides’ from Myanmar to China, documents anecdotal evidence from 37 victims of the trafficking trade who later escaped, and several families of trafficking victims. The women, originating from Myanmar’s northern Shan and Kachin States, were typically sold for between $3,000 to $13,000 after being lured across the border by the promise of good jobs.
Note the title of the report “Give Us a Baby and We’ll Let You Go.”
China still has a very traditional culture, especially in rural areas. The idea of the bachelor life is anathema to them. For a man to have value he must have a family, a wife, and definitely a child.
In much of China, women are still regarded somewhat as property. Men are still required to pay a bride price. With the shortage of women, it has literally caused inflation in the value of women reflected in the bride price, which is more than many poor rural or working class Chinese men can afford. Kidnaped women from other countries have a market rate lower than the bride price for a Chinese woman, which is what is driving the interest in kidnaped wives.
For a rural man not to have a wife and family destroys any meaning for his life. There is no reason for him to work or put effort into his life, he is just a dead man walking, a life without purpose.
Again, file that away, we’ll get to it in a minute.
The issue with kidnapping Asian girls is similar to relocating raccoons. If they are too close to home, they will eventually return.
This has forced the Chinese to go further and further out from China to kidnap wives, so far away that it is almost impossible for them to run away and return home.
China’s Trafficked Brides: Thanks to the one child policy, Chinese men are turning to Ukrainian brides and sex trafficking to find wives.
The saying might be “love don’t cost a thing,” but in China, hopeful Shanghainese grooms are expected to pay as much as $147,000 to their future bride’s family. This growing cost, driven by a shortage of Chinese women, is why some bachelors are heading abroad in search of wives.
In a surprising twist, many are looking to Eastern Europe, urged on by viral social media posts about Chinese men who have married young, local women. State-run newspapers have even joined the chorus extolling the benefits of going overseas.
These women start dating men, who take them back to China, then find themselves unable to return home.
Bride market trafficks Pakistani Christian women to China
Hundreds young women from Pakistan’s small Christian minority have been trafficked to China as brides in recent months as their impoverished community is targeted in an aggressive new marriage market, activists and officials say.
Brokers offer desperately poor parents thousands of dollars to give girls in marriage to Chinese men, even cruising outside churches for potential brides. They are helped by Christian pastors paid to preach to their congregations with promises of wealth in exchange for their daughters.
Once in China, the girls — most often married against their will — can find themselves isolated in rural regions, vulnerable to abuse, unable to communicate and reliant on a translation app even for a glass of water. Touted as wealthy Christian converts, the grooms often turn out to be neither, according to accounts from brides, their parents, an activist, pastors and government officials, speaking to The Associated Press.
So Chinese men and smugglers are kidnapping women to be wives in China from all over Asia and as far away as Eastern Europe.
There is a famous quote by the great French economist Frederic Bastiat:
“When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will”
Now that all the evidence is laid out, let’s add it all up and see where it goes.
In the past, poor and working class young men, especially those from rural areas, enlisted in the military to elevate their social status.
This was true of the British and French imperial armies. A young man with no prospects could enlist and earn some level of honor and prestige as a non-commissioned officer that he did not have by the circumstances of his birth.
Generally, wars have been fought for two reasons, ideology and resources. The later, resources have traditionally been land related, either farmland, access to ports, or some natural resource extracted from the land such as precious metals or oil.
The Nazis put a word to this: lebensraum.
Soon to be in China is tens of millions of young, military age men, from poor families and poor areas, who have no prospect of marriage because of a lack of women, and this leaves them with virtually no purpose or meaning in their lives.
In China, there is no resource as precious to the population of surplus men as women. Wife kidnapping is evidence of this, but many men are just too poor to afford to buy a black market bride.
As more and more of these young men get angry and resentful that they not just will never have wives, but may forever be virgins, as a result of the government’s one child policy, the government of China is going to have to deal with this social unrest.
One way to death with this surplus population is the way the British did, through colonialism and conquest.
It is not a far fetched idea that the Chinese government may draft its surplus male population into the world’s largest imperial army for the purposes of conquering other nations in Asia for their women.
A young, poor, Chinese man with few prospects might very well choose to join the military and fight and risk death for a wife than live alone as a virgin, shunned by Chinese society.
Kidnapping women from one nation and transporting them to another only redistributes the problem of surplus men, the only fix is to eliminate the surplus. War is perhaps the most effective way to solve this surplus of men, as it will be men from both the conquering and defending armies that will die.
As shown above, the number of male casualties in this war will have to exceed 35 million for China and some 70 Million for all of Aisa. All in all, it may be 100 million or more to decompress this growing crisis.
In not many years, we may see World War Three begin, not because of Religion or Oil, but sex.
If and when this comes, my suggestion is to remind the Chinese just how beautiful Persian women are and that the population of Iran is about 70 Million and half female, enough to satiate their needs. Also, Muslim women are raised to be subordinate to men so would make subservient wives.
You might as well let one problem solve another.
Who knows, one day we may have the chance to travel to China to see the National Monument to the Heroes of the Battle of Poontang.
(Again, I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist one more joke.)
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