Sheriff don't Like It, Poliandry in China

OK, it was "Sheriff don't like It, Rock in Casbah" - I am old, I love The Clash.

Anyhow, here is the thing... by a very unholy combination of centuries old cultural  mores and the not so brilliant "One Son" law, China has placed itself in a double demographic pinch.

Culture may be faster than biological evolution, but it still take decades to adjust to changes in the social environment. The one son law was not,  maybe,  a bad idea in the '70s - when they started discussing it - or 1978 - when they started implementing it - but, by 2000, it had probably outlived its utility... a pity it took another 15 years to stop it and, by that time, young Chinese were not in a procreating mood anyway),

Pushed to having just one child (who will have to pay the pensions of four grandparents -oops?) many Chinese families preferred male children, and discarded female foetuses (4 pensions, remember? the poor sod has to work hard... also, traditionally, it was the male son to help the parents in their ailing age). 

As a result, China has now a nice gender imbalance... 117 men for every 100 women (Usually, it is something like 104:100, to offset the tendency of male kids to die young, usually out of sheer stupidity).


Which means that, even in the best case scenario, China has some 30 million "forced bachelors" (called guanggun  ) in its ranks.

Or, if you prefer, that the Chinese society, as a whole, has willingly erased 30 million of girls , just because they thought that they were not worth the investment.

This is, maybe, the best argument  in history against the use of prenatal tests to decide whether to abort or not; when you use a test to diagnose that a kid will have a terrible genetic illness - like being a girl or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis - you MAY be sparing the kid a lot of trouble, but you SURELY are sparing YOURSELF any hassle.

By the way, that's Stephen Hawking up there, using his last active motor neuron to give you the middle finger.

Of course, it is really "not" a problem... after all, societies ONLY care for their ruling classes concerns.

These 30 million guys will be, mostly, members of the poorer strata of the male population, (the 15% from the bottom, allowing for a 2 % of premature deaths, suggests the logic), those that will not be able to buy a flat and a car (nowadays, the "strict minimum" to consistently attract female interest, in the affluent areas of China) or whatever it will be the "standard" for becoming an husband, when it will be their time to look for a companion.

Those that earn more should have no problem finding a wife (no more than anybody else on the planet, at least) and, as always, the rich and powerful will even be able afford one or two mistresses (or 270 under-age ones... ah, to live enough to see the China's Berlusconi get caught with the cock in his harem).

However, you know that I have an odd concept of hierarchical societies, in which it is not a given that men ought to feel the desire to integrate themselves into, and support, their one.

OK, I think that they are prisons made to keep the average male in check, for the sake of women's stability obsession and at the behest of their bothersome yet useful accomplices, the damned Alpha and wanna-be Alpha  males.    

If I apply my mental model to China, it's 30 million of guys that are not going to have a woman or sons, and that will thus lack the main reasons why the average males feel the need to work "for" society.

Probably, the hierarchy will note their disaffection and, in the chaotic yet merciless way states bureaucracies often act to repress sizeable patches of discontent, I suppose the Chinese police and other repression systems will target the guanggun soon enough.

By the way, it applies to the USA, too... the war on drug was really a war on the disaffected Afro-American male - by the rate of its extinction, I dare to say it was a successful one. Of course, the drug market has hardly reduced in volume and profitability,  but destroying that market was never really the point. 

In some ways, they are already targeted - usually, singles pay more taxes than "families" with a comparable income, aren't eligible for many forms of financial help, and have more issues even just borrowing money from a bank. (As they are more at flight risk than a couple with kids?)

In all, societies always did their darn best to ensure that people do not stay single , pushing them to marry no matter what... even when - specially? -  there is NO ONE to marry.

Modern western societies do this a lot less than the usual because - I suspect - deep down their ruling classes are counting on automation, to replace their pesky underlings some time soon - it would explain most countries disregard for natality indexes falling to 0.something.

I do not expect China to be any different.

The more these "involuntary bachelors" will be felt as a problem, the more they will be pushed to marry - women that simply are not there - and will be hidden from the general social discourse, as the sources of shame that they are.

Of this 30 millions lonely men, the most rich (less poor) may opt for an "out-of-box" solution, getting a woman from another country, to share their not affluent but safe life.

Now you know why China keeps its pet, North Korea, alive... in twenty years, some million Korean women, inured by a couple of decades of famines, could be a manna for China; By the way,  half of Africa would took the plane tomorrow, if given a chance - and pine for home forever after, but that's another matter.


I do not know if China, a culture not particularly open to foreigners - not any more than, say, Japan - would withstand the influx of three of four million strangers.

I suppose that the moment the phenomenon became any evident, the authorities will do their darn best to squelch it, by adding bureaucratic requirement after bureaucratic requirement to the procedures for the naturalization of these peculiar immigrants (they already have a few thousands 'imported wives' per year, and these are already considered with deep suspicion).

So, it is probably not a solution that could be extended to the mass of bachelors (without a wide change in China's society)...

The remaining twenty and some million men will simply be screwed, and left in a situation that many humane human beings would define of existential despair.

I am in the same situation, but I don't care... existence is meaningless anyway; if you have kids, you simply transmit the meaningless to them. 
   
Now, a Chinese economist named Xie Zuoshi has pondered over the issue, and has come out with a solution that is, in reality, already part of the "traditions" of China: poliandry.

Allowing pools of two - or more? - men to "share" a common wife. Or women to marry more than one man, whichever the point of view that satisfy you more..

Of course, the poor idiot has been covered with tar and feathers for this idea, and has done his best to hide it away ever since - too late, Xie, once it's posted on the open, somebody has a copy - the internet wayback machine, for example.

I have sympathy for the guy - like Karl Marx, he is an economist trying to say a sensible thing... he believed that the rest of the world would have considered his proposal rationally, and with an eye open for the amount of human pain that could be avoided

Really, economists make always the same mistake, thinking that humans are the kind of rational economic actors that they use in their calculations, which is a nefarious mistake - humans are not rational, not even that small elite that gets to power by being purportedly more rational than the rest.

And, again, who cares in this case? it will be POOR GUYS! 

Nobody gives a shit about them, or about the poor(er) foreign women that will be illegally imported, to work as cheap whores, to exploit the market that these men will represent.

I think it is safe to say that  Xie's "solution" will not be accepted, because of its "immorality".

It is much more probable that, in twenty years time, the prison system will be a major industry, in a China where real industries does not absorb workers any more (they are already starting to replace workers with robots now).

The prisons will be filled to the brink with guanggun classified as repeated offenders (of using drugs? prostitutes? of not abiding to a law requiring marriage by age 40? They'll find a way to justify it; the powers that are always do) and politicians - may China still be a one party state or a democracy, it doesn't really matter - will base entire careers on how though are on the issue. 

The same shit as usual...





I really hope that time will prove me wrong, but I doubt it.