101 East

China: All the Single Men

101 East meets the Chinese men seeking to find a bride anyway they can in a country with a severe lack of women.

In China, women are in short supply. Thanks to an ancestral preference for boys, and the implementation of the one-child policy, there are now millions more men than women.

It’s predicted that one in five single men will never find a woman to marry. This striking gender imbalance is causing not just personal devastation but a potential national crisis.

To avoid becoming a “bare branch”, many single men are resorting to extreme methods to find a bride – kidnapping or buying women from overseas; anything to help them fulfil their responsibility to secure the future of their family.

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