The Observer:
In today’s China, there are now 119 men for every 100 women. In some areas, the imbalance is greater than it was in Huai-pei in 1850. Earlier this year, an official Chinese report projected that by 2020, one in 10 men between 20 and 45 would be unable to find a wife. Professor Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University in the US estimates that by 2020, there will be 28 million surplus Chinese men and 31 million surplus Indian men.
Both governments are becoming more and more worried about the psychological and social consequences, not to mention the sheer criminality of it. As one Indian commentator remarks, the most dangerous period of a woman’s life is her first few months in the womb. China’s President Hu Jintao, remembering the Nian rebellion, has publicly recognised that such a huge population of ‘bare branches’ constitutes one of the biggest potential threats to the communist regime’s survival. Real unemployment in China is more than 20 per cent, inequality is growing rapidly and there is plenty of injustice for rootless, violently inclined, womanless men to protest about.
Here.