Alone Among the Billion
The Chinese people get plenty of the world’s attention these days. There are, after all, nearly 1.4 billion of them. And yet many of them are so very lonely.
No brothers. No sisters. And for many, no wives.
This is the onechild generation, born under the just- ended policy that limited family size. By many measures they are privileged: doted on, well educated, well provided for. Many have grown up with everything a child could want, except a playmate.
The Chinese media call it “the loneliest generation.”
“In 5,000 years of Chinese history, we will have been the only generation made up of almost all only children,” Wang Yunpeng, a 35-year- old engineer in Xi’an, told The Times.
Now many of those only children are of childbearing age themselves, ready to make a different choice than their parents could: two children.
“I wanted a sibling so much when I was a kid,” said Shi Jiandong, 22, a student at Fudan University in Shanghai. “I don’t want our kids to experience the loneliness that we felt.”
But first there must be mates, and because of the one- child policy, wives are in short supply. The limit on children and a cultural preference for boys often led to sex-selective abortion. For every 100 girls born, there were 117 boys. So now there are bachelors — an estimated 30 million of them by 2020. And after their lonely childhoods, they are facing loneliness as adults.
That prospect is unacceptable to Xie Zuoshi, a professor at Zhejing University of Finance and Economics, who promoted an alternative: having men share wives. The Times summed up his argument as one of economic supply and demand: Rich men can afford wives, poor men cannot.
“But that doesn’t mean the market can’t be adjusted,” he wrote on one of his blogs. Having several men take a wife together is “not just my weird idea. In some remote, poor places, brothers already marry the same woman, and they have a full and happy life.”
Much of the online response to his thinking was outrage.
“Men are publicly debating how to allocate women, as though women were commodities like houses or cars, ” wrote Zheng Churan, a women’s rights activist. “Behind the imbalanced sex ratio of 30 million bachelors lie 30 million baby girls who died due to sex discrimination. But somehow everyone’s still crying that some men can’t find wives.”
Evidence suggests that China should listen to such voices as it tries to reverse demographic trends. Studies show that prodding by the government has less influence on healthy birthrates than factors like gender equality.
“A basic element of fertility rebound is a society with increasing gender equality,” Francesco Billari, a professor of sociology and demography at Oxford, told The Times. “When women are in the labor market and social policy helps them and men do more child care in the household, fertility bounces up.”
In Italy, he said, gender equality is greater in the richer north, and women there have more job opportunities and are having more children than before. But women are having fewer children in the south, where the division of labor is more traditional.
“It’s more like China,” he said.