China largest lonely hearts club

China is set to become the world’s largest lonely hearts club in coming decades, with some 23 million men of marriage age unable to find a female partner, an international population conference heard (see page 5).

The prospect of millions of men forced to go solo threatens major social and political problems for the tightly controlled nation of 1.3 billion people, the most populous on the planet, experts told the conference.

China, like its neighbours Taiwan, Province of China and the Republic of Korea has paid the price for a rapid decline in fertility combined with a preference for male children, according to University of Texas researchers Dudley Poston and Karen Glover.

Since the 1980s, modern medical techniques which can determine the sex of a baby before birth, have led to high rates of abortion for female fetuses, according to the findings.
During China’s baby boom of the 1960s the fertility rate peaked at 7.5 children per woman but plummeted following the introduction of the one-child policy in 1979, to 1.7 children per woman in 2001.

The one-child policy led to massive sex selection in favour of boys from the 1980 and the ratio reached 120 male babies for every 100 female. According to the research, men who do not marry are more prone to crime than if they were married raising fears of social and political instability.

(Source: AFP, 20 July)