[LINK] "China's New Bachelor Class"

[rfmcdonald]

The Atlantic's Jessica Levine notes that a consequence of sex-selection in China is that rural and poor Chinese men find themselves at a loss for partners. Rural and poor women can marry up and out, owing to the relative scarcity of their gender on the marriage market, but not men.

Cool as glass, a young couple strolls into the Tiffany & Co. attached to Beijing's four-star Peninsula Hotel, elegantly lit with custom crystal chandeliers. She grips his elbow; he's aloof. Epitomizing urban affluence in today's China, this male likely drives a slick car, owns an even slicker high-rise and is more than willing to shell out for a Western-style tuxedo, wedding cake, live music, and, of course, a platinum Tiffany ring.

In other words: he's rich.

By contrast, millions of his fellow rural countrymen will likely never know such splendor or even the joy of matrimony. These young males are known as "bare branches," trees without leaves, involuntary bachelors demographically destined to a life without a wife or child. An estimated 40 to 50 million bare branches are scattered around the nation, and according to Quanbao Jiang and Jesús Sánchez-Barricarte, authors of the article "Bride Price in China: The Obstacle to 'Bare Branches' Seeking Marriage," they tend to be concentrated in rural or poverty-stricken areas.

It's a reversal of hundreds of years of gender discrimination in China. A longstanding preference for boys -- presumed better able to assist in backbreaking farm work -- has played out in sex selection through abortion and infanticide. After the country instituted its One-Child Policy in 1978, it gave most families only one chance at that coveted baby boy.

This only exacerbated the imbalance. Now, an estimated 12 to 15 percent of Chinese men -- a population nearly the size of Texas -- will be unable to find a mate within the next seven years.

This harsh reality has begun to change the country's patriarchal system, yielding the power of choosing a spouse to females. And many are electing for comfort. On the mega-popular dating show "If You Are the One," contestant Ma Nuo perfectly encapsulated China's mood when she famously declared that she would "rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the backseat of a bicycle." Indeed, 70 percent of single women in a 2011 survey said financial considerations ranked above all else when selecting a husband.

The cost of rural females marrying up is leaving the men from their villages waiting and wanting. Hard-pressed to compete with higher-earning males and unable to spring for the car and perhaps the house that some young women see as a matrimonial prerequisite, forlorn bachelors subsequently fall victim to what Jiang and Sánchez-Barricarte deemed the "poor->bare branch->poorer" cycle.

As Deborah Jian Lee and Sushma Subramanian noted in their recent Pulitzer Center report, this cycle is perpetuated by an age stigma. That is, regardless of socioeconomic status, wifeless men over 30 years old are derisively referred to as "leftovers;" the stuff of to-go boxes. Interviews by the Institute of Social and Family Medicine at Zhejiang University found that these societal pressures have led them to feel aimless, angry and alone. Bleaker still, whole villages exist without one unmarried woman. Fueled by sexual frustration, marginalized by neighbors, these islanded bachelors are increasingly likely to drink, fight, gamble, and frequent prostitutes.