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Comment by josu | Hacker News Reader

The article makes it sound as if this is a modern phenomenon and as if it is exclusive to China. This pressure for women to get married has always existed everywhere. The burden has somewhat alleviated recently in Europe (maybe in other developed countries too), but it is certainly there for all the developing countries.

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Yes. And while the cultural aspects are worth understanding, neither they nor the women are the real story in China. As you note, there have always been and will always be people of both sexes who are single through choice or temperament. But in China, the real story is leftover men. When you have such an enormous sex imbalance at birth for as long as China has, no amount of natural excess male mortality is ever going to even that out. So when you take the Chinese population, segregate it by broad age groups, subtract out those who are single by choice and pair off the rest, you're left with tens of millions of young and middle-aged single men.

History's solution for this, almost invariably, is both simple and guaranteed effective. The leftover men are called an army, and they either die in combat or conquer foreign lands, where they can take -- by force, usually -- the stock of available women after killing the menfolk in battle. In either case, the imbalance is corrected.

That's the real "leftover" story in China: if those men aren't to be an army, then what are they to be?

There's a clear trend where Chinese men are marrying Russian women.

http://www.chinawhisper.com/6-pictures-of-chinese-farmers-an...

http://rbth.asia/society/2013/05/25/the_key_to_a_happy_russo...

> The leftover men are called an army, and they either die in combat or conquer foreign lands

Or they conquer their own land, i.e. a revolution.

> Or they conquer their own land, i.e. a revolution.

Maybe, but that doesn't solve the problem. They're still single and would rather not be. Something else still has to give. A very long civil war might do it, if that's what you're suggesting.

It's been estimated that up to 10% of men are homosexual, so that makes up most, if not all of the difference...

Plus migration and things too...

The homosexual men are more or less cancelled out by lesbian women...

Except most studies show that more men are exclusively homosexual, whilst more women consider themselves bi-sexual.

Sources would be nice.

What makes it a story is the imbalance between the sexes. These women aren't married despite having a pretty unbalanced sex ratio to their advantage.

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