30 Million Singles...
I came across an interesting article in the China Daily this weekend about the increasing number of single men in China. With the one child policy a lot of families, especially in the south and in rural areas, prefer to have a male child over a female child. Currently for every 100 female children there are 118.6 males, which may not sound like a lot but spread that over the huge population in China and it becomes greatly magnified. By 2020 it is expected that 30 million males will be unable to find wives (almost the whole population of Canada) due to the imbalance.
That will of course cause a lot of unstability in a country where being married is incredibly important on many levels.
The article goes on to say that China's population should peak in 2033 with a population of 1.5 billion allowing China "to build itself into a well-off society" that "will not be short of manpower". Of course we should ignore the fact that at present up to 60% of university graduates face unemployment and that the north of China is rapidly running out of water which could lead to massive famines. But I'll leave that for another post.
In any case, it'll be an interesting problem for the Chinese government to try to solve.