Chinese men to find it tougher to get wives

BEIJING - Young Chinese men of marriageable age will soon find it tougher to look for a wife because there will be 24 million more young men than women of marriage age by 2020.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), a government think tank, has said in a report that the gender imbalance in the country is widening, the People’s Daily reported.

The gender ratio in China has been higher than the world average. Census data in 2005 showed that the sex ratio of newborn babies was 120 boys born for every 100 girls. The international average is 103 male births for every 100 female births, Li Bin, director of the National Population and Family Planning Commission, was quoted as saying.

The gender imbalance had already made it difficult for a Chinese bachelor to find a wife. Some single young men in big cities are now seeking marriage partners in rural areas, which has put single men in villages at even more of a disadvantage, because urban bachelors have higher incomes and more stable jobs, the report said.

“I have neither a high income nor a spacious apartment in Beijing; so none of my female colleagues wanted to marry me,” Kong, 29, from Chaoyang district of Beijing, told the Global Times.

Meanwhile, Guan Qingbin, 25, a migrant worker in Fengtai district of Beijing, said he did not think he could find a wife in Beijing.

“In order to earn more money, I had to take two jobs, one during the day as a car repair technician and the other one at night as a driver for a private entrepreneur,” Guang said.

“Even though I work this hard, I can only earn 3,000 yuan ($443) each month, which is inadequate to support the life of a family in Beijing.”

“China’s highly imbalanced sex ratio at birth has lasted for more than 20 years and the cumulative effects have already emerged,” said Yuan Xin, a professor at the Institute of Population and Development in Nankai University.

The balanced sex ratio is the law of natural evolution, but the imbalanced sex ratio in China has already become a major “obstinate disease” of society, he said.