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In China and India, men outnumber women by 70 million. Both nations are belatedly trying to come to grips with the policies that created this male-heavy generation

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 labor 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 neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as well. Barely recognized, 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 Xi’an Jiaotong University.

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. The imbalance creates a surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and, possibly, prostitution. Officials attribute this to the advent of sex-selective technology in the last 30 years, which is now banned but still in widespread practice.

In the two countries, 50 million excess males are under age 20.

Girls ages 0-4 Girls and boys ages 0-4 Difference between girls and boys ages 0-4 Number of boys for every 100 girls ages 0-4 Number of men for every 100 women ages 15-29 Number of men ages 15–49 for every 100 women ages 15-29 Source: United Nations World Population Prospects These lines represent the number of girls, from newborns to age four, in China and India since 1970, with projections out to 2100. The darker lines show the number of male babies during that same period. The shaded area is the difference between these boys and girls. The number of young boys in India and China has outpaced the number of young girls by millions for at least 20 years. When looking at just the ratio of boys to girls in each country, it may look as if that gap has narrowed ... ... but its effects on marriage have yet to peak. The biggest gap between men and women of marriageable age, defined here as 15 to 29, will come in the next few decades, as the babies of the past decade grow up. And factoring in the large pool of both unmarried older and younger men vying for the same small pool of young women, the gap becomes more of a chasm.

Both nations are belatedly trying to come to grips with the policies that created this male-heavy generation. And demographers say it will take decades for the ramifications of the bulge to fade away.

In the four sections below are personal tales that show how the imbalance has affected:

Village life and mental health. Among men, loneliness and depression are widespread. Villages are emptying out. Men are learning to cook and perform other chores long relegated to women. Stagnant lives

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. The desperate effort to land a bride

Human trafficking. Trafficking of brides is on the rise. Foreign women are being recruited and lured to China, effectively creating similar imbalances in China’s neighbors. Importing a bride

Public safety. With the increase in men has come a surge in sexual crime in India and concerns about a rise in other crimes in both countries. Harassment of schoolgirls in India has in some towns sparked an effort to push back — but at a cost of restricting them to more protected lives. Taking a stand over harassment

Chapter One Stagnant lives Outnumbered and struggling The growing number of eligible men who cannot find brides has had a profound impact on the age-old rhythms of family life. 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. “I’ve cried so much I can’t see any more,” says one. The gender imbalance could prompt a “crisis of masculinity” as traditional roles are upended and males embrace socially regressive stances to prove their manhood, said Prem Chowdhry, a researcher and social scientist in New Delhi. “People devalue their masculinity. If they remain single, they will be declared not men at all. The basic function of a man in rural society is to have a family and look after that family.” “In rural areas, men who didn’t get married are really marginalized; even socializing in the village is difficult,” said Therese Hesketh, a professor of global health at University College London. “These guys are depressed.”

‘Life is boring and lonely’

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 a 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 southern city of Dongguan, bunk beds lining the walls, cigarette butts carpeting the floor.

“I want to find a girlfriend, but I don’t have the money or the opportunity to meet them,” he said. “Girls have very high standards; they want houses and cars. They don’t want to talk to me.”

Construction worker Li Weibin, 30, has never had a girlfriend. (Giulia Marchi/For The Washington Post)

Li’s problem is not only that he is poor and struggling to save enough money to buy an apartment 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 co-workers to karaoke or for a foot massage.

“It is just me,” he said. “Life is boring and lonely.”

Om Pati is the mother of seven sons, including from left, Sandeep, Sanjay and Suresh. (Poras Chaudhary/For The Washington Post)

‘May you be the mother of a hundred sons’

When Om Pati, a farmer’s wife in the Indian village of Bass, in the state of Haryana, was having children, she actually prayed a sweet-eyed girl bundle would arrive. But instead she had a son. Then another, and another — seven in all. Her neighbors in the village were overjoyed for her each time a new baby arrived. They rang steel plates so everyone in the neighborhood would know a boy had been born.

After all, this is a culture where male children are desired above all else — to light the Hindu funeral pyre, inherit property, care for aging parents. As the Sanskrit blessing says, “May you be the mother of a hundred sons.”

Sometimes it felt to Om Pati like she was the mother of 100 sons. She worked from sunrise until night. She consoled herself with the thought that she would one day have daughters-in-law to trade stories and share cooking duties. Grandchildren, too.

But by the time her eldest Sanjay — now 38 and a cook — reached marriageable age, the practice of families in her area sneaking off to larger cities for an illegal sonogram and then an abortion had taken its toll. When she and her husband began seeking matches for arranged marriage, still the norm, there were no suitable brides. The few young women had all married — that is, those who hadn’t left for better opportunities elsewhere.

These days, Om Pati, now 60, spends her days cooking and cleaning for her husband and adult sons, who range from age 22 to 38. They gobble up so many rotis — the flat-round bread loaves that are a household staple, each one shaped in her calloused hands — that she goes through several pounds of flour a day.

“There is no other option,” she said. “It’s not in our hands.”

Suresh Kumar says the suffocation he feels as a single 35-year-old is palpable. (Poras Chaudhary/For The Washington Post)

‘No one knows how sad I feel’

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 said. “I laugh on the outside but the pain that I have in my heart only I know.”

The men themselves are isolated, left out of major family decisions and subject to ridicule, with little in the way of support or mental health services. Worse, in the traditional culture of villages, those who missed out on marriage have no hope of female companionship — dating or having a girlfriend is out of the question.

One recent evening, a family threw a rooftop party to celebrate the birth of a boy. Parties to welcome girl babies are still so rare they are covered by the local newspaper. Before the guests arrived, Kumar huddled in a stairwell nearby, sweating over a cast-iron pot, cracking jokes with friends as he fried sweet pancakes for the guests.

He likes to cook, he says, but the role occasionally unbalances him.

During a harvest festival last year, his mother was delayed in another town. So Kumar was left to prepare the pancakes on his own. As he flipped the cakes in the bubbling oil, he grew teary-eyed, thinking of how there was no wife and kids to eat the treats he was making.

Shaofeng’s problem — one faced by millions of his countrymen — is a product of cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology. In China, there are simply too many men. (Lu Liu/for The Washington Post)

With a wife, he says, “there would be somebody to make tea for me, to tell me when to take a bath. We don’t have much value as unmarried men in this society. Everybody thinks, ‘What problem does this man have? What is lacking in his family? What is lacking in him?’ ”

Evenings are the loneliest times, when the village folds into itself, minders return with their cows from the pond, smoke wafts from evening meals, schoolchildren still in their plaid school uniforms play in the uneven lanes. Kumar shuts himself in his room.

“I watch TV, romantic movies sometimes,” Kumar says. “What can I do? It’s up to me then. What I feel inside stays inside.”

It wasn’t supposed to end up this way. When he was in high school he had a brief romance with a classmate, a beautiful 17-year-old, tall and slim, with two braids that reached down her back. Even now he cannot speak of her without singing a few bars of an Urdu love song. “I looked for her on Facebook just yesterday,” he says.

But the tryst was discovered, the parents put a stop to it, and his classmate eventually married someone else. And the family wasn’t able to find any other suitable prospective brides for him.

“We feel it, but this is a problem in every house,” said his mother, Bhima, sitting with her son after the party in the dimly lit courtyard of the modest house where they live.

Sometimes, Kumar says, the suffocation he feels is palpable:

“You know how when there’s no wind and a plant is sitting there and the leaves are not moving? That’s how the man feels: You’re just stationary.”

The desperate effort toland a bride

To catch a wife, build a house

Chapter Two THE DESPERATE EFFORT TO LAND A BRIDE To catch a wife, build a house It takes a house, savings and a good job to win a bride. Many Chinese men are working harder, taking more dangerous or unpleasant jobs, to get ahead. Parents are also trying to give their sons a leg up financially. “It’s kind of an arms race in the dating and marriage market,” said Shang-Jin Wei, a Columbia University economist. The high household savings rate, particularly in China, helps explain its huge trade surplus. A man who makes cheap shoes for export does not spend the wages he earns on consumer goods imports. Instead he saves to build a house and attract a bride. Another unintended result — urban housing prices are rising fast. Gross national savings rate in China 50 45 The savings rate skyrocketed during the 2000s, when the sex ratio between girls and boys also climbed. 40 35 1982 1990 2000 2010 2016 Source: World Bank Gross national savings rate in China 50 45 The savings rate skyrocketed during the 2000s, when the sex ratio between girls and boys also climbed. 40 35 1982 1990 2000 2010 2016 Source: World Bank 50 45 Gross national savings rate in China The savings rate skyrocketed during the 2000s, when the sex ratio between girls and boys also climbed. 40 35 1982 1990 2000 2010 2016 Source: World Bank Male suitors in China pay a “bride price” to earn their future in-laws’ approval for the engagement. Because of the acute imbalance, it has gone from a few hundred dollars a decade or two ago to nearly $30,000 in some parts of China. Families sock that money away instead of spending it. Bride prices in nine Chinese provinces skyrocketed between 1994 and 2013 Liaoning +550% Price (renminbi) Jiangsu +643% ¥200,000 ¥100,000 Sichuan +272% ¥0 1994 2013 Source: Professor Wei Yan, Xi’an University of Finance and Economics Bride prices in nine Chinese provinces skyrocketed between 1994 and 2013 Liaoning +550% Price (renminbi) Jiangsu +643% ¥200,000 ¥100,000 Sichuan +272% ¥0 1994 2013 Source: Professor Wei Yan, Xi’an University of Finance and Economics Liaoning +550% Bride prices in nine Chinese provinces skyrocketed between 1994 and 2013 Jiangsu +643% ¥200,000 ¥100,000 Sichuan +272% ¥0 Source: Professor Wei Yan, Xi’an University of Finance and Economics Having sons was once a hedge against poverty in old age. Now elderly parents are sacrificing to help their sons appear marriageable — and to support sons who fail to find a bride. Daughters-in-law were once expected to look after their husbands’ parents. In millions of families, that’s no longer possible.

‘If you want to find a wife, you have to build a house’

Today, young people are fleeing the villages in a desperate search for fortune, and marriage. The best way to find a bachelor in rural China these days: look for someone building a house.

Li Defu is typical. Now 21, he left home seven years ago to find work in the provincial capital Guiyang, but he has pooled the family savings to build a 10-room house overlooking the green hills and valleys of his birthplace, Paifeng.

The reason is simple: It is the only chance he has of finding a wife.

“At the moment there aren’t any girls my age around,” he said, on a recent trip home to supervise the construction. “But I am building this new house in preparation, in case I find someone.”

Li was brought up by his grandmother, a tiny, wizened woman who sat beside him as he chatted. His parents still work in far-off factories; the savings they have collected could be crucial.

Around $10,000, Li reckons, will have to be paid to his future bride’s family, just to gain their approval for the engagement. A centuries-old tradition, the “bride price” in China is similar to a dowry elsewhere in the world, but paid from groom’s family to the bride’s parents — rather than the other way around.

A 24-year-old who gave only his family name, Wang, came to Guangdong province to work when he was 14. He has saved enough to build a house back home but struggles to find a wife. (Giulia Marchi/For The Washington Post)

A decade or two back, the typical bride price was just a few hundred dollars. Today, in some parts of China, the average is nearly $30,000, according to a survey by the People’s Daily newspaper.

That translates into huge pressure for young men like Li and their families. Indeed, helping to build Li’s house was another young man who was already feeling that pressure.

“There are very few girls here, and many girls from outside won’t want to marry into this village because it’s poor,” said 25-year-old Zhou Haijiang, as he laid the tiles in one of the house’s many bathrooms. Only a show of prosperity can attract, and hold, a bride.

“In our village, if you want to find a wife, you have to build a house.”

Zhou said he would like to stay in Paifeng all his life, but the pay isn’t good, and he will soon reluctantly join the tide of migrant workers heading for China’s booming megacities, in search of riches — and brides.

Many unmarried Chinese men have made their way to cities like Dongguan in southern China’s Pearl River Delta, a vast urban agglomeration nicknamed the “factory of the world.”

Their work ethic, their determination to succeed, is remarkable.

In a noodle shop close to a series of shoe factories, a 24-year-old who gave only his family name, Wang, was enjoying dinner with some friends. In between mouthfuls, he said he left his home in rural western China a decade ago and now works 11 or 12 hours a day, with just two days off a month.

He has already saved enough to build a house back in his home village, but is still struggling to find a wife.

“If you are picky, it’s hard,” he said. “There are also more boys here, and it is not necessarily easy to meet girls.”

Importing brides

‘You are my slave’