Why China and India face a marriage crisis

By Economist.com

CHINA and India, home to a third of humanity, both face a marriage crisis that will last for generations. As recently as 2010, marriage patterns were normal in the two countries. Now India is revising 500-year-old laws to allow men to marry out of caste, village and state—while in China 50 million men known as guanggun (“bare branches”) look doomed to bachelordom. What has led to this marriage squeeze?

First, millions of women have gone “missing”. A generation ago, a preference for sons and the greater availability of prenatal screening meant first Chinese couples, then Indian ones, started aborting female fetuses and giving birth only to boys. At its extreme, in parts of Asia, more than 120 boys were being born for every 100 girls. The generation with distorted sex ratios at birth is now reaching marriageable age. The result is that men far outnumber women. If China had had a normal sex ratio at birth, its female population in 2010 would have been 720 million. In fact, it was only 655 million, compared with almost 705 million men and boys—50 million surplus husbands.