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Bride-trafficking grows as the number of single men soars
By David Eimer in Beijing (independent.co.uk)
Updated: 2005-08-01 11:25 China's last census revealed that 117 boys are born for every 100 girls. In
some parts of Guangdong and Hainan provinces in southern China, the ratio is as
high as 135 boys to 100 girls. The introduction of the "one-child" policy in
1979, designed to curb the growth of China's vast population, has only
exacerbated the problem. Pregnant women in rural China took advantage of new,
portable ultrasound scanning machines to ascertain the sex of their baby in
advance: in return for money, nurses and doctors smile if the foetus is a boy,
or frown if it's a girl. Selective abortions remain common, despite being
outlawed in 1995.
For single men in the countryside, the lack of women is devastating. Poorly
educated (97 per cent of men in rural areas fail to finish school and some 40
per cent are illiterate), they can either stay in villages where single women
are scarce, or join the millions of migrant workers who flock to the cities to
work on construction sites in the hope of making enough money to make them
attractive marriage prospects.
Chinese women, though, are becoming more choosy about who they marry. Many
women from the country have found work in the factories of boom towns such as
Shenzhen, and are reluctant to return to a hand-to-mouth existence on a small
farm in the middle of nowhere. In the big cities, a new generation of
well-educated, independent women has emerged.
"Jane", an engineer with a master's degree, is one of them, and is in no rush
to get married. "I don't think I am very picky, but my parents think I am," she
laughs. "I think I require very basic things: a man with a good personality who
treats his parents well and who is well educated with a good job. If he doesn't
have a good job, then it's not going to work. I would like to get married, but
if I can't find the right man, I won't. I'll just treat myself very well."
For China's growing army of bachelors, that's an option most of them won't
have.
'Looking for China Girl', is on Tuesday at 9pm on BBC2
When 16-year-old Qing Yang was kidnapped in Sichuan province last year and
sold for ￡360 to a desperate bachelor, it took her family and a private
detective six months to track her down in Jiangsu province, hundreds of miles
away. By then, she had been raped and forced to live as the wife of the man who
bought her.
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