In general, if a whole group of people see what a particular cultural institution holds for them and opt out, it's a condemnation of the institution, not the people. No one's tricking millions of...
In general, if a whole group of people see what a particular cultural institution holds for them and opt out, it's a condemnation of the institution, not the people. No one's tricking millions of women into deciding that marriage or even dating is not for them.
But for the powers that be, it's easier to blame the people who want to opt out than it is to engage in self reflection and change. Change is scary, and may mean giving up power. Better to just condemn women for being clear that marriage doesn't benefit them in the modern era than to try to change it to be more equitable.
All that aside, I really don't see what path China has with regards to their gender disparity. An extra 30+ million men who will never have a family is a hard thing for a society to work with. Where are the social safety nets that will take care of these men if they never have children to look after them? How do you fulfill their need for companionship and community outside of the families they'll never have? Family was the answer to many social challenges, but it's not anymore. How do you deal with that?
Is it? It's all about scale. For one, it's not like people are protons and electrons, it's very normal for people to date someone, break up, date someone else, break up, and so on. Like with rent,...
An extra 30+ million men who will never have a family is a hard thing for a society to work with.
Is it? It's all about scale. For one, it's not like people are protons and electrons, it's very normal for people to date someone, break up, date someone else, break up, and so on. Like with rent, or occupancy, there's a normal float of people who are not a couple - which is OK, it doesn't mean they're all forever alone or anything. Some people never settle down with anyone - they have FWB relationships for sexual relief and manage with other types of relationships.
30 million sounds like a lot, but it's 2% of a population of 1.4 billion.
I think MimicSquid is talking about the gender imbalance. If there are more men than women, those extra men will have to live without a woman. Even with a perfectly authoritarian government that...
I think MimicSquid is talking about the gender imbalance. If there are more men than women, those extra men will have to live without a woman. Even with a perfectly authoritarian government that mandates some kind of rotational system, some men will go through significant parts of their lives feeling lonely.
And saying it's only 2% is pretty cynical. We are talking about millions individuals who will never have a family and kids, one of the most important things for most people.
That's also what I was talking about? The whole point I was making is that that's the wrong way to think about it. This is not how humans work, especially at the scale of an entire nation. This is...
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I think MimicSquid is talking about the gender imbalance.
That's also what I was talking about?
If there are more men than women, those extra men will have to live without a woman.
The whole point I was making is that that's the wrong way to think about it. This is not how humans work, especially at the scale of an entire nation. This is fundamentally a stochastic process.
If you are a guy in China, your dating prospects are more difficult, because of the gender imbalance, at a percentage level that is imperceptible. That's not to say people don't struggle, but it's not because of the gender imbalance. Smartphones, xiaohongshu, dating apps, algorithms on dating apps, the lack of in-person meeting - the usual, contribute far more than there being 2% more men than women.
It's not a game of musical chairs. If you're a guy, there's plenty of single women, and there will continue to be. Because people are not mechanical pieces - it's very likely everyone will date many, many people, and break up with many, many people, because for whatever reason you're just not compatible.
Take the US statistics, for instance. The US has, for the most part, a even 50/50 split. The way people in this thread are talking about it, you'd think there'd be a 100% marriage rate of adults, and therefore whenever there's any more men than women or vice versa y'know out of luck, missed the musical chairs. But no, 47% of adults are married. A majority aren't. So there's always going to be a large percentage of single people. When there is a gender imbalance, that percentage of single people goes down for the majority gender, but it's not 0 or anything.
There will never be a scenario where ALL of the women in a reasonable age range from you are either "taken" or not looking for a SO.
There is no government mandated sex rotation needed, nor sending men to die in a war. Like jesus christ people.
While I don't entirely disagree with you, the statistics from the US are more complicated than that. Marriages have gone down, but long-term monogamous cohabitation has gone up, compensating for...
While I don't entirely disagree with you, the statistics from the US are more complicated than that. Marriages have gone down, but long-term monogamous cohabitation has gone up, compensating for the change at least in part, and fully in some cohorts (typically people with a university education). In addition, people are getting married later, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't get married eventually. This means that if you look at the percentage of people who are currently married, that number may have gone down, but if you look at the percentage of people who will eventually get married at some point, that number may not have changed as much.
First of all, I'm not sure why you calculated percentage points from the whole population when we are talking about men, so it should be a percentage of men. Second, you can't just take the whole...
First of all, I'm not sure why you calculated percentage points from the whole population when we are talking about men, so it should be a percentage of men.
Second, you can't just take the whole population. It is absurd to suggest that a 20 year old guy will "float" an 80 year old woman. A population pyramid practically everywhere will have more elderly women because women have the privilege of living longer. China is no exception - in every age bracket at 65 and below there are more men than women. So it skews even worse than what your 2% suggests.
Third, even if we assume that "float" means that people hooking up and FWBing and dating around is uniformly spread across everyone (you should know that it isn't the case at all), the end point is to form a family. That's millions of people who just won't be able to, ever, skewing very much to young people. If a 20 year old has no hopes of ever having kids, what do you think that does to them?
Do you think that it’s normal for a nation to have a 100% marriage rate among adults? Of course not. In the US it’s at 47%, 53% of adults are not married. If you go on tinder and set the age range...
Do you think that it’s normal for a nation to have a 100% marriage rate among adults? Of course not. In the US it’s at 47%, 53% of adults are not married.
If you go on tinder and set the age range to 40+ it does not just 404.
There is ALWAYS a large number of single people at every age rank. Having a gender imbalance affects this, buts it’s ultimately a drop in the bucket.
If a 20 year old has no hopes of ever having kids, what do you think that does to them?
There are exactly 0 people for which this applies. Dating is not a game of musical chairs. Do you think there’s literally anywhere in China where you can go on a dating app as a 20 year old and the results are blank because everyone is taken? I’m using “dating app” as a proxy here just to highlight how ridiculous this notion is.
If you take any particular person, and follow that person, there will never be any point in time where the number of eligible bachelors for them to court is 0.
Of course, there will be some people that are single at every age range. That’s perfectly normal. Again, the US has a very normal gender split and there are many tens of millions of people who are single at every age group.
It’s like some weird application of the pidgeonhole principle. Yeah, if there’s 30 million extra men and we assume that gay people are negligible by the pidgeonhole principle there must be 30 million single men. But it doesn’t actually matter because in practice between 1/3rd and 1/2 of any given generation is single. So there must be 30 million single men but even in a steady state there is already 250 million single men, so the fact that the floor is 30 million just doesn’t matter that much.
The one child policy was also a long time ago. Its peak generations has already come and gone. You can see that on the splits by age range.
I can guarantee you the effect of douyin and xiaohongshu is several orders of magnitude greater on the pressures of the dating market than the gender imbalance of a policy that didn’t make it out of the 90s.
I didn't say dating. I said "having kids". Besides you putting a lot of ridiculous positions in my mouth, this largely still answers you: Anyways, from the article: I'd say that's a better way of...
There are exactly 0 people for which this applies. Dating is not a game of musical chairs.
I didn't say dating. I said "having kids". Besides you putting a lot of ridiculous positions in my mouth, this largely still answers you:
Third, even if we assume that "float" means that people hooking up and FWBing and dating around is uniformly spread across everyone (you should know that it isn't the case at all), the end point is to form a family. That's millions of people who just won't be able to, ever, skewing very much to young people. If a 20 year old has no hopes of ever having kids, what do you think that does to them?
Anyways, from the article:
The number of surplus men, known as guanggun, or bare branches, is huge. By 2027 there will be 22.5m more marriage-age men than women. That translates into 119 men of marriage age for every 100 women of that age; in 2012 the ratio was 105 to 100.
I'd say that's a better way of representing it than "2% of the population". By the way, you said "there being 2% more men than women" in another post. Which, again, is an incorrect way of looking at it.
Poorer men like Mr Zhao face immense economic pressure. Online, they use the term baojinbi, or “exploding gold coins”, to describe women wringing them dry by demanding expensive dates, gifts and bride prices. Research by Minhee Chae of Nankai University and Zhang Dandan of Peking University found that more than 30% of young male migrants who intend to marry think they only have a 50% or lower chance of doing so by the age of 30. They estimate that a young migrant worker would have to save every penny for six years to afford the average bride price of 127,300 yuan ($18,780).
Why is there a $18,780 price tag if the ratio is ultimately a drop in the bucket?
The keyword is “migrant worker”. This is a matter of class. The reality is that, if you’re a migrant worker, you are structurally disadvantaged. This is because you have the wrong hukou for the...
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Why is there a $18,780 price tag if the ratio is ultimately a drop in the bucket?
The keyword is “migrant worker”. This is a matter of class. The reality is that, if you’re a migrant worker, you are structurally disadvantaged. This is because you have the wrong hukou for the area - as a result, you are unable to use most of the government resources in the area.
If you are a migrant worker from a poorer area in Shanghai, although you may provide tax revenue for the city, you can’t use the city’s benefits. And that’s forever - you can’t change your hukou. So if you’re trying to get married in the area, you will need to make up for your structural disadvantage.
The situation with migrant workers is a completely different social issue.
For sure, the hukou system is something that makes marriage a lot more complicated, that folks living in the west take for granted Eg, if a woman with a mid-size city urban hukou marries a rural...
For sure, the hukou system is something that makes marriage a lot more complicated, that folks living in the west take for granted
Eg, if a woman with a mid-size city urban hukou marries a rural hukou man, but they both currently live and work in Shanghai (mega city), their child won't have a mega city urban hukou for education and need to either inherit the dad's rural kuhou and be sent back home to live with grandparents at the farm, OR inherit mom's mid size city hukou and the entire family now needs to find new work in her hukou city.
Because a hukou is inheritable from either parent, it would make sense that nearly all women who wish to have kids would be aiming for men with mega city hukous only. So the situation is actually a lot worse off than just the single child policy would suggest.
The individual seems to be able to move it's just that there's a push pull about losing land in the country vs taking up resources in the city. So if you create your own family you have to move to...
The individual seems to be able to move it's just that there's a push pull about losing land in the country vs taking up resources in the city. So if you create your own family you have to move to where your hukou is even if you were living and working somewhere else before that. Some folks want to update their hukou, but some don't want to lose family land if they were "upgraded" even if they would want to keep working or raising their family elsewhere.
It's definitely more control over a populations movement but not quite as restrictive as serfdom (at least as currently implemented)
Exactly what DNAF said. It's not a perfect system, but it does do some good things like making sure the city resources can support its population, and that the country is still making enough food,...
Exactly what DNAF said. It's not a perfect system, but it does do some good things like making sure the city resources can support its population, and that the country is still making enough food, and that education/ health care/civic resources funding can be more predictable.
They do have a much higher degree of mobility than ye olde serfdom: through education and employment and marriage, one can move about on a temporary basis or even apply for permanent hukou change.
Other strategies like rural tourism or traditional trade revival make it a bit better to stay behind in rural areas. You can think of it as mega-commute most in America already do: we can't afford to live downtown but we can buy a house with a yard and dog if we accept an hour long commute every day.
I asked why does the payment even exist, not why migrants have it worse (that was relatively obvious). Why is an average bride worth almost $20k? What about an average groom?
I asked why does the payment even exist, not why migrants have it worse (that was relatively obvious). Why is an average bride worth almost $20k? What about an average groom?
Culturally bride prices and dowries exist in different cultures for different reasons. Typically to my knowledge it's rarer to have both, but this is not an area of my expertise. A bride price is...
Culturally bride prices and dowries exist in different cultures for different reasons. Typically to my knowledge it's rarer to have both, but this is not an area of my expertise.
A bride price is meant to compensate the bride's family for the cost of raising her and the loss of her labor, because the bride becomes part of the husband's family and leaves her parents household. Since the husband does not leave his family there's no reciprocal payment for him. And since the cultural perspective is not "two people striking out on their own" it's got this angle of the "transference" of women from one man to another. There is also a sense of the husband being in debt to his inlaws for their daughter (and never affording it.) This is more common where the daughter's labor supports the family (or historically has). Bride prices are more common when women are scarcer. Sometimes these are just token amounts
A dowry is money that is designed to go to the new couple and often remain as the woman's to control in the case of widowhood or divorce. It's a security net for women in cultures where they couldn't earn their own income. This was more common where there's an independent household and where women don't/can't work. It offsets the cost of the husband feeding her and is sort of an advance on her inheritance from her father (or the only one she'd get). But women may have been pressured or expected to spend it at their husbands' demands.
So there's no husband price, just a difference in who the money is from and for. Because historically and culturally men have been allowed to work (outside the home) and have been the accepted heads of the household (or their father/grandfather), while women have had different societal restrictions/expectations. As culture has changed, all traditions have not. Not everyone follows them, and I can't speak to China specifically so perhaps someone else can, but they don't account for a more egalitarian society (though I wouldn't call the current state of affairs truly egalitarian.)
That is a classical answer, but it's helpful only in the abstract. Who would China engage in a land war with, that would kill off millions of soldiers? Their geographically contiguous neighbors...
That is a classical answer, but it's helpful only in the abstract. Who would China engage in a land war with, that would kill off millions of soldiers? Their geographically contiguous neighbors where you could just march troops in by the millions and have them die are rare. North Korea is a dependent. Russia is a junior partner, and is having trouble just with Ukraine. Mongolia's total population is 3.5M, or just over a tenth of the number of single men in China. Kazakhstan, Ubekistan, and Kyrgyzstan are similarly lightly populated. Along with them, Pakistan shares a land border with China, but not one conducive to land invasion. Tibet is already controlled, Nepal & Bhutan are small and across the Himalayas. India could be a choice if you really needed to lose a lot of troops, but their land border isn't really one to fight over. Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam are perhaps the most optimal place to lose a lot of troops? The terrain is more conducive to marching in, and also losing troops continuously to guerilla warfare. Losing 30M people is a stretch though. The Vietnam war went on for 14 yeas and military deaths only added up to 250k. That's peanuts. You'd have to have full on WWII scale disasters to lose that many troops. Total military casualties for all nations in WWII were only 21-25 million. China only lost 4 million.
Sorry, I got on a little bit of a kick looking up statistics. But basically: losing them all in a war somewhere is a nonstarter.
Give the "manosphere" another year or so and they'll say that using anything after swords on the warfare tech tree is womanly. We can help that along by highlighting that women have better aim...
Give the "manosphere" another year or so and they'll say that using anything after swords on the warfare tech tree is womanly. We can help that along by highlighting that women have better aim than men on drones or something. It really doesn't matter what, just that you stoke that a bit. They'll bite. Also accepting modern medicine, and not dying of gangrene.... Gay, bro.
Ok if that doesn't work, civil wars are great for killing lots of your own people.
Yes they would want to avoid that. But if they feel the choice is between themselves being unseated or civil war, they will choose civil war every time.
Yes they would want to avoid that. But if they feel the choice is between themselves being unseated or civil war, they will choose civil war every time.
Sure sure, I'm just saying it's more important to get the tech out of it so we can do an old school land war in Asia. Civil war is more a last resort thing. Surely they can find someone to throw...
Sure sure, I'm just saying it's more important to get the tech out of it so we can do an old school land war in Asia.
Civil war is more a last resort thing.
Surely they can find someone to throw bodies against
Uhh Taiwan. It’s a fortress. If they attempt it it’s going to be ugly. If not them then Japan. Otherwise longer term money is on resource acquisition in either Africa or eventually antartica
Who would China engage in a land war with, that would kill off millions of soldiers
Uhh Taiwan. It’s a fortress. If they attempt it it’s going to be ugly.
If not them then Japan.
Otherwise longer term money is on resource acquisition in either Africa or eventually antartica
Remember, the theoretical goal here is to lose 30 million men in a war without otherwise destabilizing the status quo. The problem with all of those options is the transportation. If they're doing...
Remember, the theoretical goal here is to lose 30 million men in a war without otherwise destabilizing the status quo. The problem with all of those options is the transportation. If they're doing well enough to ship the troops there by the literal tens of millions so that they could be killed, the troops won't be dying by the tens of millions. If they're losing, they'll lose the naval capacity to ship them.
Your suggestions are options China might actually take and be successful at, but that would be a failure in this regard.
Why would a country intentionally want to lose 30 million people? There are a lot of uncaring leaders out there, but I can think of any in all of history that intentionally started a war solely to...
Why would a country intentionally want to lose 30 million people? There are a lot of uncaring leaders out there, but I can think of any in all of history that intentionally started a war solely to reduce their own native population. It sucks that China's own policies and cultural biases led to too many men, but it's not actually a serious problem for them, much less that starting a war solely for them to die in it would ever make sense as a strategy.
That's a pretty bold simplification. There's a lot of middle ground in which these things drag out for years and cost millions of lives. Taiwan has turned itself into a pile of artillery and...
If they're doing well enough to ship the troops there by the literal tens of millions so that they could be killed, the troops won't be dying by the tens of millions. If they're losing, they'll lose the naval capacity to ship them.
That's a pretty bold simplification. There's a lot of middle ground in which these things drag out for years and cost millions of lives. Taiwan has turned itself into a pile of artillery and there's plenty of scenarios where China adopts a more Russia meat grinder doctrine to brute force it. There's plenty where they don't and only lose 100k troops or something like that, but it's just not that black and white.
Sure, but 30 million? How do you get there? In attacking Ukraine Russia has seen about 1 million casualties (that is, dead and wounded) in 4 years. I agree that there would be a terrible loss of...
Sure, but 30 million? How do you get there? In attacking Ukraine Russia has seen about 1 million casualties (that is, dead and wounded) in 4 years. I agree that there would be a terrible loss of life, but I don't see how your suggestions actually clear the bar.
You don't, but the societal shock of losing even 100k people, let alone 1million, is tremendous. Russia has 144 million people, and yet 1 million casualties is resonating throughout their country,...
You don't, but the societal shock of losing even 100k people, let alone 1million, is tremendous. Russia has 144 million people, and yet 1 million casualties is resonating throughout their country, and will for the foreseeable future.
Russia seems like the most logical direction as it collapses. China has lost plenty of territory to Russia in tha last 200 years. Although I'm not sure if China would lose much in such a conflict....
Russia seems like the most logical direction as it collapses. China has lost plenty of territory to Russia in tha last 200 years.
Although I'm not sure if China would lose much in such a conflict. And of course they're probably getting much more stuff from Russia by just being a sort of an overlord.
In contrast to the idea of war being the answer, I think a large part of the answer is just movement. Women going to China, or Chinese men going elsewhere. Unfortunately I also believe there will...
In contrast to the idea of war being the answer, I think a large part of the answer is just movement. Women going to China, or Chinese men going elsewhere. Unfortunately I also believe there will be a lot of human trafficking women to China, since there will be such demand.
I remember awhile ago seeing an article about an increasing number of Chinese men marry African women in the regionsi that China has their belt and roads initiatives at work.
I remember awhile ago seeing an article about an increasing number of Chinese men marry African women in the regionsi that China has their belt and roads initiatives at work.
That's what third places were for. I can't speak for how Asian cultures developed in this regard, but the idea was that you make it easy for community to meet, group up, and support each other in...
Family was the answer to many social challenges, but it's not anymore. How do you deal with that?
That's what third places were for. I can't speak for how Asian cultures developed in this regard, but the idea was that you make it easy for community to meet, group up, and support each other in order to get some of that social value. It doesn't replace the "ideal" of raising a family, but it's an important part of any person's social circle.
A fairly simple solution is that they could immigrate to countries with a shortage of men. Older parents are also more likely to have daughters, so in a strange way we might have the inverse...
A fairly simple solution is that they could immigrate to countries with a shortage of men. Older parents are also more likely to have daughters, so in a strange way we might have the inverse problem globally within a couple generations.
I really hate this topic. It’s toxic on just about every side it seems. The Chinese Manosphere people are disgusting of course. The fact that there is a gender imbalance of 119:100 is really not...
I really hate this topic. It’s toxic on just about every side it seems.
The Chinese Manosphere people are disgusting of course. The fact that there is a gender imbalance of 119:100 is really not an excuse for behaving that way. That’s, what, a 9% difference? Even if it were a 90% difference, that doesn’t mean that men have some divine right to a woman’s body. It is fine that they feel lonely and they should be approached with compassion but the misogyny needs to be handled sternly because it’s unacceptable.
But worse than that is how many people here are openly toying with the idea that we should send these men out to die in a war. That’s just disgusting and I am deeply disappointed. These people may be childish and even dangerous to society, but they are still human beings and their lives have value. Saying “women suck” should not equate to a death sentence.
I have limited understanding of Chinese culture, having never even been there, but I can say without a shadow of a doubt that their society will survive this “ordeal”. Their families will not fall apart. And even if they did, they might just remember that they are theoretically communists and come up with a government mandated support system.
I hope the war thing isn't what people believe should happen to "bare branches" men or even men in general, but a sort of knee jerk "china bad" cynicism that, folks might imagine, a bad government...
I hope the war thing isn't what people believe should happen to "bare branches" men or even men in general, but a sort of knee jerk "china bad" cynicism that, folks might imagine, a bad government wouldn't find it problematic to enforce.
For what it's worth, I think you are right that their society will survive this ordeal: China would never in a million years send their bare branches to die for no reason. (Crazy Cynical) It'd be faster and more efficient to absorb a lot of women from every some corners of the planet and leave that gender imbalance as a problem to solve for other nations. They do seem very desperate for "high quality" progeny. (Less crazy) They will keep encouraging births and families and keep punishing anti-family values, the way we see American Republicans doing and South Korea double downing on: that is, reward the men, rewards holding "traditional" gender hierarchy, enact policies that over a long time span resolve the problem in a secure way.
It's a cynical response to how governments used to deal with a surplus of unmarried men: enlist them and ship them off for imperialism. And how you'd have to revert warfare to a pre-tech day. It...
It's a cynical response to how governments used to deal with a surplus of unmarried men: enlist them and ship them off for imperialism. And how you'd have to revert warfare to a pre-tech day. It was never intended to be taken seriously. (And anyone who decides not to get modern healthcare because it's "gay" is making their own adult choices that I'll let public health professionals try to solve.) No they shouldn't send people to die in a war, a thing I'm broadly opposed to anyway. No they do not deserve any death sentence.
I'd say the same thing about any country, it's not about China specifically fwiw. I'm sorry if the whole thing triggered the feelings that this was a "China bad" thing.
For me the frustration I have is with the broad societal acceptance of an entitlement to women's bodies, time, attention, labor, etc. and I think it's interesting that this thread has had a lot less of that than other threads about Westerners/Americans with similar beliefs.
:P I'm usually the most guilty of automatic "China bad" responses, myself. The different thing here is that Sons are uniquely valued in Chinese society to a degree those of us living in the west...
:P I'm usually the most guilty of automatic "China bad" responses, myself.
The different thing here is that Sons are uniquely valued in Chinese society to a degree those of us living in the west find largely unimaginable. The uproar that losing a son in a war would cause is probably the only thing holding Xi Jinping back from full on war with Taiwan. There are by now many families whose bloodline comes down to a single male heir born to another single male heir of a third gen of single male heir. That these sons represent the entirety of the future for many generations is held as a stronger belief than any religion or basic human moral ethics that I've come across. They would sooner propose all girls and all women be forcibly gifted to men in triple shift rotations than lose thousands of these sons in a war, let alone millions of them.
Oh for sure this issue is systemically driven, from the original one child policy to the value of sons vs daughters, etc. and it was predictable enough that I feel like the conversation about "not...
Oh for sure this issue is systemically driven, from the original one child policy to the value of sons vs daughters, etc. and it was predictable enough that I feel like the conversation about "not enough women" has been happening my entire adult life.
But I was not intending genuine political analysis, more a speculative fiction dystopian type answer. On said topic, though it hasn't aged great* The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri Tepper deals with gender dynamics and using war as population control.
*The society has "cured" homosexuality for one. It's very second wave feminism but it's an interesting story.
It's less a serious plan people desire, and more a historical trend. Wars are optimal distractions for government with disrest that is too large to suppress. It also knocks 3 birds with one stone...
many people here are openly toying with the idea that we should send these men out to die in a war.
It's less a serious plan people desire, and more a historical trend. Wars are optimal distractions for government with disrest that is too large to suppress. It also knocks 3 birds with one stone by embracing nationalism and achieving whatever conqeust goals the leader at the time has.
Regardless of how entitled the men are here, I don't think it's a problem China (or hell, any other country) will solve in a mentally healthy way. And it will get worse before it gets better.
Easy and quick wars of conquest deal with unrest. 30 million KIA is not easy and quick and will for sure create more unrest. Then again, if you open a wiki page about civil wars and read any entry...
Easy and quick wars of conquest deal with unrest. 30 million KIA is not easy and quick and will for sure create more unrest.
Then again, if you open a wiki page about civil wars and read any entry about China it always looks like someone added a bunch of 0s.
we're also transitioning to "forever wars" as a format. Putin said his "special operation" would last 3 days, and even if that was a gross exaggeration I do genuinely think that he never predicted...
we're also transitioning to "forever wars" as a format. Putin said his "special operation" would last 3 days, and even if that was a gross exaggeration I do genuinely think that he never predicted this assault to last longer than 3-4 months, let alone almost 4 years.
War is changing. It doesn't work the way it did before. But Putin and Jinping are both 73 years old. They won't ever fully come around to this reality before they meet their end.
It's more that for the last 100 years or more there have been promises of quick, bloodless wars that will be over by Christmas. Wars generally take a lot longer than people think unless they're...
It's more that for the last 100 years or more there have been promises of quick, bloodless wars that will be over by Christmas. Wars generally take a lot longer than people think unless they're planned and scoped very carefully and the enemy plays along.
I think it's worthwhile to think whether societies work in harmful, possibly preventable cycles. That thinking requires "toying with ideas" so to speak.
But worse than that is how many people here are openly toying with the idea that we should send these men out to die in a war.
I think it's worthwhile to think whether societies work in harmful, possibly preventable cycles. That thinking requires "toying with ideas" so to speak.
The concept that a nation should go murder people in another country, murdering many innocent noncombatants in the process of getting rid of their socially undesirable people, really isn’t an idea...
The concept that a nation should go murder people in another country, murdering many innocent noncombatants in the process of getting rid of their socially undesirable people, really isn’t an idea that deserves any thought whatsoever. It’s a morally abhorrent idea that should not be considered and I shame anyone who thinks it’s an appropriate response to anything.
I understand that people may have brought up the concept as a jaded look back to historical issues, but the fact that we are having this discussion proves my point on why it’s bad that that topic was inappropriate; it may have been brought up in jest, but it lead to people being absolutely serious about it. This is just like the alt-right using memes to smuggle in fascist ideas among the populace. It’s a joke until it isn’t.
Who is being absolutely serious about it? Like genuinely. You can't use "the fact we're having this conversation means I'm right" if you're the one who brings up the conversation. Alt-right...
Who is being absolutely serious about it?
Like genuinely. You can't use "the fact we're having this conversation means I'm right" if you're the one who brings up the conversation.
Alt-right "jokes" aren't actually jokes that's the whole thing. Do you actually think I, or anyone else here, want millions of men to die in a pointless war for no reason other than population control and I'm "joking" about it to slyly gain social acceptance of it?
Because that's the fundamental difference of "it's just a joke, bro" vs. "I thought it was super clear no one means this and we're all just really burnt out about the world and have zero hope this will be handled well IRL" dark humor/whistling in the dark.
But to erase any concern, I really thought it was very obvious no one expects nor wants that outcome, not with a veneer of "just joking so you can't be mad at me" but a genuine "legitimately there was never anything serious about it and we're just cynical as fuck." But if the irony didn't land for you, it didn't land. I just want to assure you it was there.
You can still be mad obviously, that's not up to anyone else, but I do not think the brush you're painting everyone with is a reasonable one. And I wish for half the passion toward how our military is actually recruited, used, and abused in the real world. Or towards the men claiming women are brainwashed by feminism and owe them sex. But if you really think we're the equivalent of the alt-right, at least say it to the people you're mad at.
You have very seriously misconstrued what I was saying. I used the alt right as an example of how jokes can be taken seriously, and that’s why I said we shouldn’t be joking about this. Jokes are...
You have very seriously misconstrued what I was saying. I used the alt right as an example of how jokes can be taken seriously, and that’s why I said we shouldn’t be joking about this. Jokes are jokes until the moment they aren’t.
Did you not see the person I was responding to said we should be considering these ideas? If you were looking for a line in the sand, that was a pretty clear example. I was responding exactly to who I was upset with in that example.
The person you were replying to made a comment that to me sounded like critiquing how societies have worked in harmful cycles and that to try to prevent those cycles people have to think about...
The person you were replying to made a comment that to me sounded like critiquing how societies have worked in harmful cycles and that to try to prevent those cycles people have to think about them aka "toy with ideas". I think you misunderstood their comment, but that's just my take.
And the "jokes" that the alt right make were never actually jokes. They were always things they agreed with and advocated for being couched as jokes.
You say you replied to the only person you were upset with but you referenced things I said and spoke in the aggregate, painting everyone with the same brush. As I said, I think that's quite overbroad. I understand why you're upset, I don't agree with the conclusions you're drawing over it. And that's fine, I cannot control what you think of me.
and I shame anyone who thinks it’s an appropriate response to anything.
But if you wish to "shame" anyone who posted like this, I personally think you're missing the mark.
The surviving unaborted daughters, they mean. Many were also abandoned in favour of a second wife with finally a son. Some families decide these daughters are not worth anything and would rather...
This younger generation of women benefited from the one-child policy, as resources were funnelled towards only daughters.
The surviving unaborted daughters, they mean. Many were also abandoned in favour of a second wife with finally a son. Some families decide these daughters are not worth anything and would rather spend the resources to support a same-family-name male cousin. Many families decide since they only have one daughter, the parents must look after themselves in retirement so they skimp as much as they could on the daughter to fatten themselves up. There are few women winners here.
The safest outlet is attacking the opposite sex, especially since doing so aligns with what the government itself is saying.
Bullies and abusers know which targets are safe. You don't see these men being angry about lack of economic opportunities or the government policies that led them to this point. They know that if they bang on long enough they will see more instances of police/courts turning blind eyes to domestic abuse or forcibly confined women slaves or buying trafficked women, stalking, sexual assaults, harrassment etc
Last year, a legal ruling in favour of a male Wuhan University student accused by a female student of masturbating in front of her became a lightning rod for men’s concerns about feminist overreach and women’s concerns about a lack of clarity in defining sexual harassment.
According to the verdict， the court said Xiao＇s actions could not be determined as masturbating and it was highly likely that he was scratching． The two people had no interaction for two hours in the library， during which they had both left and returned to their seats， the court said．
This, despite the videos that look like masturbating, despite the fact that when confronted, he wrote her an apology letter. And after the verdict, her graduation thesis was called into question.
I mean, yeah? When their parents were making decisions on whether or not to abort their children, they were unborn, probably not even a fetus. You can hardly blame people for things or attitudes...
I mean, yeah? When their parents were making decisions on whether or not to abort their children, they were unborn, probably not even a fetus. You can hardly blame people for things or attitudes their parents held before they existed.
The male children born under the regime are innocent. To some extent I don't even blame the women parents too much for rejecting their girls: that they don't want baby girls born into that mess...
The male children born under the regime are innocent.
To some extent I don't even blame the women parents too much for rejecting their girls: that they don't want baby girls born into that mess seems at least understandable, if not fully reasonable to me. (The fathers hold more responsibility because they could have been the deciding vote to say, no, our baby girl will be precious and even if our extended family treats them as inferior she still has us. That extended family will come around once they realize the last male heir refuses to take a mistress and have another child).
I thought you were going to go in the direction that maybe men forced women to abort the girl baby (plausible? possible?) or that a patriarchal society brainwashed women into thinking they needed...
I thought you were going to go in the direction that maybe men forced women to abort the girl baby (plausible? possible?) or that a patriarchal society brainwashed women into thinking they needed the son. I think it's a little weird to envision a scenario where both the man and woman have the same stance ("we should have a son because a son is more precious") but that the man should get the blame because the man didn't ultimately choose to override the woman.
Oh I get that the men themselves are not to blame, merely their parents who were shortsighted enough to not see the potential problems of rejecting female babies. Or to put another way: Don't...
Oh I get that the men themselves are not to blame, merely their parents who were shortsighted enough to not see the potential problems of rejecting female babies.
Or to put another way: Don't blame the women (as manosphere bros tend to do) for the patriarchal tendencies of your parents.
| Mr Peng has 50,000 followers [on zhizhu] This seemed awfully small to me Zhihu’s average monthly active users (MAU) stood at approximately 83 million in 2024 It is still a lot of people, as is...
| Mr Peng has 50,000 followers [on zhizhu]
This seemed awfully small to me Zhihu’s average monthly active users (MAU) stood at approximately 83 million in 2024
It is still a lot of people, as is the 4 million mentioned on billibilli (~330m users). That's all I can really see because its paywalled, but it is unimpressive to me. Also I question whether China would just willingly send men to die. That seems like completely out of left field. A cursory glance into Chinese elderly care reveals it is a policy priority and are pumping funding into it.
Obviously none of this address the very real problem of misogyny which I certainly don't doubt still occurs in China, in the same vein I don't doubt China is suffering from their own version of the manosphere. I do think they are better suited to handle it than we in the states are.
I find that most everything from The Economist has to be taken with a heavy grain of salt these days.
To be clear, while I was humoring Gazook89's premise, I don't think China is going to engage in a major land war to kill off their extra men. Some combination of directed hatred of the other, a...
To be clear, while I was humoring Gazook89's premise, I don't think China is going to engage in a major land war to kill off their extra men. Some combination of directed hatred of the other, a social safety net sufficient to make them feel that the alternatives would be worse, and regular, isolating entertainment is plenty to keep most people from engaging in the sort of actions that threaten the status quo.
Maybe it could be some kind of CDN issue or something? Not entirely sure, but last few times I've tried, sometimes it loads, sometimes it doesn't, and the fact that it worked when you used a VPN...
Maybe it could be some kind of CDN issue or something? Not entirely sure, but last few times I've tried, sometimes it loads, sometimes it doesn't, and the fact that it worked when you used a VPN maybe was just a coincidence of timing, or would possibly indicate that when you tried to reach it from a different region (assuming the VPN didn't originate along the exact same network path as your normal internet connection) that there may be some CDN where traffic from some regions reaches fine and then in the region your normal internet connection is, the CDN may not be stable.
I'm surprised we didn't see influencers with similar views to Andrew Tate blow up on Chinese social media sooner. China has a serious demographic problem thanks to their one-child policy...
I'm surprised we didn't see influencers with similar views to Andrew Tate blow up on Chinese social media sooner.
China has a serious demographic problem thanks to their one-child policy encouraging parents to abort or abandon girls after birth out of wanting a male heir, and a phenomenon known as elite overproduction.
So imagine you're a Chinese guy in his late-twenties. You've been pushed through cram schools and forced to study for much of your childhood and adolescence, manage to get into a prestigious university like Tsinghua or Peking, graduate with a top Bachelors degree, only to then be unable to find a graduate job. You then take on postgraduate study yet despite coming out of it with a Masters or PhD, your only prospects for work after are to register for Meituan (China's equivalent of Doordash) and earn a pittance delivering fast food orders in the gig economy. You can't find a girlfriend or a spouse because China's aforementioned one-child policy has made boys outnumber girls by a ludicrous amount, and because you're not in stable employment, you are basically disqualified from being a suitor for marriage.
There is an African proverb that best describes why the manosphere has been growing so hard in the past few decades. "The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth." China represents a rather extreme example of what is currently going on in the West (mass youth unemployment) which have left men particularly disenfranchised.
That's because they never went through a phase where that kind of figure fell out of popularity and then came back like Tate. Take Jackie Chan, famous shit husband, serial womanizer, abandoner of...
I'm surprised we didn't see influencers with similar views to Andrew Tate blow up on Chinese social media sooner.
That's because they never went through a phase where that kind of figure fell out of popularity and then came back like Tate. Take Jackie Chan, famous shit husband, serial womanizer, abandoner of his daughter and utterly rejects her being a lesbian. Famous and respected and the pride of their nation.
They just passed go and did not collect 200. The same rhetoric isn't new fringe favorite because it never left the spotlight.
Their hit drama from 2025 Love Again (cn) is about this old widower being pursued by four beautiful younger women. This is still mainstream normal stuff for them: it didn't blow up because it's been big the whole time.
These men aren't rejected by the village, no, they're rejected by the rejected surviving women. It seems to me like the village is highly motivated to burn anything else to keep these men warm
In general, if a whole group of people see what a particular cultural institution holds for them and opt out, it's a condemnation of the institution, not the people. No one's tricking millions of women into deciding that marriage or even dating is not for them.
But for the powers that be, it's easier to blame the people who want to opt out than it is to engage in self reflection and change. Change is scary, and may mean giving up power. Better to just condemn women for being clear that marriage doesn't benefit them in the modern era than to try to change it to be more equitable.
All that aside, I really don't see what path China has with regards to their gender disparity. An extra 30+ million men who will never have a family is a hard thing for a society to work with. Where are the social safety nets that will take care of these men if they never have children to look after them? How do you fulfill their need for companionship and community outside of the families they'll never have? Family was the answer to many social challenges, but it's not anymore. How do you deal with that?
Is it? It's all about scale. For one, it's not like people are protons and electrons, it's very normal for people to date someone, break up, date someone else, break up, and so on. Like with rent, or occupancy, there's a normal float of people who are not a couple - which is OK, it doesn't mean they're all forever alone or anything. Some people never settle down with anyone - they have FWB relationships for sexual relief and manage with other types of relationships.
30 million sounds like a lot, but it's 2% of a population of 1.4 billion.
I think MimicSquid is talking about the gender imbalance. If there are more men than women, those extra men will have to live without a woman. Even with a perfectly authoritarian government that mandates some kind of rotational system, some men will go through significant parts of their lives feeling lonely.
And saying it's only 2% is pretty cynical. We are talking about millions individuals who will never have a family and kids, one of the most important things for most people.
That's also what I was talking about?
The whole point I was making is that that's the wrong way to think about it. This is not how humans work, especially at the scale of an entire nation. This is fundamentally a stochastic process.
If you are a guy in China, your dating prospects are more difficult, because of the gender imbalance, at a percentage level that is imperceptible. That's not to say people don't struggle, but it's not because of the gender imbalance. Smartphones, xiaohongshu, dating apps, algorithms on dating apps, the lack of in-person meeting - the usual, contribute far more than there being 2% more men than women.
It's not a game of musical chairs. If you're a guy, there's plenty of single women, and there will continue to be. Because people are not mechanical pieces - it's very likely everyone will date many, many people, and break up with many, many people, because for whatever reason you're just not compatible.
Take the US statistics, for instance. The US has, for the most part, a even 50/50 split. The way people in this thread are talking about it, you'd think there'd be a 100% marriage rate of adults, and therefore whenever there's any more men than women or vice versa y'know out of luck, missed the musical chairs. But no, 47% of adults are married. A majority aren't. So there's always going to be a large percentage of single people. When there is a gender imbalance, that percentage of single people goes down for the majority gender, but it's not 0 or anything.
There will never be a scenario where ALL of the women in a reasonable age range from you are either "taken" or not looking for a SO.
There is no government mandated sex rotation needed, nor sending men to die in a war. Like jesus christ people.
While I don't entirely disagree with you, the statistics from the US are more complicated than that. Marriages have gone down, but long-term monogamous cohabitation has gone up, compensating for the change at least in part, and fully in some cohorts (typically people with a university education). In addition, people are getting married later, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't get married eventually. This means that if you look at the percentage of people who are currently married, that number may have gone down, but if you look at the percentage of people who will eventually get married at some point, that number may not have changed as much.
First of all, I'm not sure why you calculated percentage points from the whole population when we are talking about men, so it should be a percentage of men.
Second, you can't just take the whole population. It is absurd to suggest that a 20 year old guy will "float" an 80 year old woman. A population pyramid practically everywhere will have more elderly women because women have the privilege of living longer. China is no exception - in every age bracket at 65 and below there are more men than women. So it skews even worse than what your 2% suggests.
Third, even if we assume that "float" means that people hooking up and FWBing and dating around is uniformly spread across everyone (you should know that it isn't the case at all), the end point is to form a family. That's millions of people who just won't be able to, ever, skewing very much to young people. If a 20 year old has no hopes of ever having kids, what do you think that does to them?
Do you think that it’s normal for a nation to have a 100% marriage rate among adults? Of course not. In the US it’s at 47%, 53% of adults are not married.
If you go on tinder and set the age range to 40+ it does not just 404.
There is ALWAYS a large number of single people at every age rank. Having a gender imbalance affects this, buts it’s ultimately a drop in the bucket.
There are exactly 0 people for which this applies. Dating is not a game of musical chairs. Do you think there’s literally anywhere in China where you can go on a dating app as a 20 year old and the results are blank because everyone is taken? I’m using “dating app” as a proxy here just to highlight how ridiculous this notion is.
If you take any particular person, and follow that person, there will never be any point in time where the number of eligible bachelors for them to court is 0.
Of course, there will be some people that are single at every age range. That’s perfectly normal. Again, the US has a very normal gender split and there are many tens of millions of people who are single at every age group.
It’s like some weird application of the pidgeonhole principle. Yeah, if there’s 30 million extra men and we assume that gay people are negligible by the pidgeonhole principle there must be 30 million single men. But it doesn’t actually matter because in practice between 1/3rd and 1/2 of any given generation is single. So there must be 30 million single men but even in a steady state there is already 250 million single men, so the fact that the floor is 30 million just doesn’t matter that much.
The one child policy was also a long time ago. Its peak generations has already come and gone. You can see that on the splits by age range.
I can guarantee you the effect of douyin and xiaohongshu is several orders of magnitude greater on the pressures of the dating market than the gender imbalance of a policy that didn’t make it out of the 90s.
I didn't say dating. I said "having kids". Besides you putting a lot of ridiculous positions in my mouth, this largely still answers you:
Anyways, from the article:
I'd say that's a better way of representing it than "2% of the population". By the way, you said "there being 2% more men than women" in another post. Which, again, is an incorrect way of looking at it.
Why is there a $18,780 price tag if the ratio is ultimately a drop in the bucket?
The keyword is “migrant worker”. This is a matter of class. The reality is that, if you’re a migrant worker, you are structurally disadvantaged. This is because you have the wrong hukou for the area - as a result, you are unable to use most of the government resources in the area.
If you are a migrant worker from a poorer area in Shanghai, although you may provide tax revenue for the city, you can’t use the city’s benefits. And that’s forever - you can’t change your hukou. So if you’re trying to get married in the area, you will need to make up for your structural disadvantage.
The situation with migrant workers is a completely different social issue.
For sure, the hukou system is something that makes marriage a lot more complicated, that folks living in the west take for granted
Eg, if a woman with a mid-size city urban hukou marries a rural hukou man, but they both currently live and work in Shanghai (mega city), their child won't have a mega city urban hukou for education and need to either inherit the dad's rural kuhou and be sent back home to live with grandparents at the farm, OR inherit mom's mid size city hukou and the entire family now needs to find new work in her hukou city.
Because a hukou is inheritable from either parent, it would make sense that nearly all women who wish to have kids would be aiming for men with mega city hukous only. So the situation is actually a lot worse off than just the single child policy would suggest.
Edit: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF10344/IF10344.4.pdf -- decent overview of the system
Maybe I'm missing something but this feels like serfdom by another name?
The individual seems to be able to move it's just that there's a push pull about losing land in the country vs taking up resources in the city. So if you create your own family you have to move to where your hukou is even if you were living and working somewhere else before that. Some folks want to update their hukou, but some don't want to lose family land if they were "upgraded" even if they would want to keep working or raising their family elsewhere.
It's definitely more control over a populations movement but not quite as restrictive as serfdom (at least as currently implemented)
Exactly what DNAF said. It's not a perfect system, but it does do some good things like making sure the city resources can support its population, and that the country is still making enough food, and that education/ health care/civic resources funding can be more predictable.
They do have a much higher degree of mobility than ye olde serfdom: through education and employment and marriage, one can move about on a temporary basis or even apply for permanent hukou change.
Other strategies like rural tourism or traditional trade revival make it a bit better to stay behind in rural areas. You can think of it as mega-commute most in America already do: we can't afford to live downtown but we can buy a house with a yard and dog if we accept an hour long commute every day.
I asked why does the payment even exist, not why migrants have it worse (that was relatively obvious). Why is an average bride worth almost $20k? What about an average groom?
Culturally bride prices and dowries exist in different cultures for different reasons. Typically to my knowledge it's rarer to have both, but this is not an area of my expertise.
A bride price is meant to compensate the bride's family for the cost of raising her and the loss of her labor, because the bride becomes part of the husband's family and leaves her parents household. Since the husband does not leave his family there's no reciprocal payment for him. And since the cultural perspective is not "two people striking out on their own" it's got this angle of the "transference" of women from one man to another. There is also a sense of the husband being in debt to his inlaws for their daughter (and never affording it.) This is more common where the daughter's labor supports the family (or historically has). Bride prices are more common when women are scarcer. Sometimes these are just token amounts
A dowry is money that is designed to go to the new couple and often remain as the woman's to control in the case of widowhood or divorce. It's a security net for women in cultures where they couldn't earn their own income. This was more common where there's an independent household and where women don't/can't work. It offsets the cost of the husband feeding her and is sort of an advance on her inheritance from her father (or the only one she'd get). But women may have been pressured or expected to spend it at their husbands' demands.
So there's no husband price, just a difference in who the money is from and for. Because historically and culturally men have been allowed to work (outside the home) and have been the accepted heads of the household (or their father/grandfather), while women have had different societal restrictions/expectations. As culture has changed, all traditions have not. Not everyone follows them, and I can't speak to China specifically so perhaps someone else can, but they don't account for a more egalitarian society (though I wouldn't call the current state of affairs truly egalitarian.)
I suspect you throw them into a war somewhere.
That is a classical answer, but it's helpful only in the abstract. Who would China engage in a land war with, that would kill off millions of soldiers? Their geographically contiguous neighbors where you could just march troops in by the millions and have them die are rare. North Korea is a dependent. Russia is a junior partner, and is having trouble just with Ukraine. Mongolia's total population is 3.5M, or just over a tenth of the number of single men in China. Kazakhstan, Ubekistan, and Kyrgyzstan are similarly lightly populated. Along with them, Pakistan shares a land border with China, but not one conducive to land invasion. Tibet is already controlled, Nepal & Bhutan are small and across the Himalayas. India could be a choice if you really needed to lose a lot of troops, but their land border isn't really one to fight over. Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam are perhaps the most optimal place to lose a lot of troops? The terrain is more conducive to marching in, and also losing troops continuously to guerilla warfare. Losing 30M people is a stretch though. The Vietnam war went on for 14 yeas and military deaths only added up to 250k. That's peanuts. You'd have to have full on WWII scale disasters to lose that many troops. Total military casualties for all nations in WWII were only 21-25 million. China only lost 4 million.
Sorry, I got on a little bit of a kick looking up statistics. But basically: losing them all in a war somewhere is a nonstarter.
Give the "manosphere" another year or so and they'll say that using anything after swords on the warfare tech tree is womanly. We can help that along by highlighting that women have better aim than men on drones or something. It really doesn't matter what, just that you stoke that a bit. They'll bite. Also accepting modern medicine, and not dying of gangrene.... Gay, bro.
Ok if that doesn't work, civil wars are great for killing lots of your own people.
Civil wars kill a lot of people, but I daresay the people in charge would like to avoid that option.
Yes they would want to avoid that. But if they feel the choice is between themselves being unseated or civil war, they will choose civil war every time.
Sure sure, I'm just saying it's more important to get the tech out of it so we can do an old school land war in Asia.
Civil war is more a last resort thing.
Surely they can find someone to throw bodies against
Remember, the theoretical goal here is to lose 30 million men in a war without otherwise destabilizing the status quo. The problem with all of those options is the transportation. If they're doing well enough to ship the troops there by the literal tens of millions so that they could be killed, the troops won't be dying by the tens of millions. If they're losing, they'll lose the naval capacity to ship them.
Your suggestions are options China might actually take and be successful at, but that would be a failure in this regard.
Ship 'em offworld and send 'em to fight the bugs.
Why would a country intentionally want to lose 30 million people? There are a lot of uncaring leaders out there, but I can think of any in all of history that intentionally started a war solely to reduce their own native population. It sucks that China's own policies and cultural biases led to too many men, but it's not actually a serious problem for them, much less that starting a war solely for them to die in it would ever make sense as a strategy.
I don't think anyone has been serious here.
I have no idea. You should ask Gazook89. He's the one who proposed it.
That's a pretty bold simplification. There's a lot of middle ground in which these things drag out for years and cost millions of lives. Taiwan has turned itself into a pile of artillery and there's plenty of scenarios where China adopts a more Russia meat grinder doctrine to brute force it. There's plenty where they don't and only lose 100k troops or something like that, but it's just not that black and white.
Sure, but 30 million? How do you get there? In attacking Ukraine Russia has seen about 1 million casualties (that is, dead and wounded) in 4 years. I agree that there would be a terrible loss of life, but I don't see how your suggestions actually clear the bar.
You don't, but the societal shock of losing even 100k people, let alone 1million, is tremendous. Russia has 144 million people, and yet 1 million casualties is resonating throughout their country, and will for the foreseeable future.
Russia seems like the most logical direction as it collapses. China has lost plenty of territory to Russia in tha last 200 years.
Although I'm not sure if China would lose much in such a conflict. And of course they're probably getting much more stuff from Russia by just being a sort of an overlord.
In contrast to the idea of war being the answer, I think a large part of the answer is just movement. Women going to China, or Chinese men going elsewhere. Unfortunately I also believe there will be a lot of human trafficking women to China, since there will be such demand.
I remember awhile ago seeing an article about an increasing number of Chinese men marry African women in the regionsi that China has their belt and roads initiatives at work.
That's what third places were for. I can't speak for how Asian cultures developed in this regard, but the idea was that you make it easy for community to meet, group up, and support each other in order to get some of that social value. It doesn't replace the "ideal" of raising a family, but it's an important part of any person's social circle.
A fairly simple solution is that they could immigrate to countries with a shortage of men. Older parents are also more likely to have daughters, so in a strange way we might have the inverse problem globally within a couple generations.
I really hate this topic. It’s toxic on just about every side it seems.
The Chinese Manosphere people are disgusting of course. The fact that there is a gender imbalance of 119:100 is really not an excuse for behaving that way. That’s, what, a 9% difference? Even if it were a 90% difference, that doesn’t mean that men have some divine right to a woman’s body. It is fine that they feel lonely and they should be approached with compassion but the misogyny needs to be handled sternly because it’s unacceptable.
But worse than that is how many people here are openly toying with the idea that we should send these men out to die in a war. That’s just disgusting and I am deeply disappointed. These people may be childish and even dangerous to society, but they are still human beings and their lives have value. Saying “women suck” should not equate to a death sentence.
I have limited understanding of Chinese culture, having never even been there, but I can say without a shadow of a doubt that their society will survive this “ordeal”. Their families will not fall apart. And even if they did, they might just remember that they are theoretically communists and come up with a government mandated support system.
I hope the war thing isn't what people believe should happen to "bare branches" men or even men in general, but a sort of knee jerk "china bad" cynicism that, folks might imagine, a bad government wouldn't find it problematic to enforce.
For what it's worth, I think you are right that their society will survive this ordeal: China would never in a million years send their bare branches to die for no reason. (Crazy Cynical) It'd be faster and more efficient to absorb a lot of women from
everysome corners of the planet and leave that gender imbalance as a problem to solve for other nations. They do seem very desperate for "high quality" progeny. (Less crazy) They will keep encouraging births and families and keep punishing anti-family values, the way we see American Republicans doing and South Korea double downing on: that is, reward the men, rewards holding "traditional" gender hierarchy, enact policies that over a long time span resolve the problem in a secure way.It's a cynical response to how governments used to deal with a surplus of unmarried men: enlist them and ship them off for imperialism. And how you'd have to revert warfare to a pre-tech day. It was never intended to be taken seriously. (And anyone who decides not to get modern healthcare because it's "gay" is making their own adult choices that I'll let public health professionals try to solve.) No they shouldn't send people to die in a war, a thing I'm broadly opposed to anyway. No they do not deserve any death sentence.
I'd say the same thing about any country, it's not about China specifically fwiw. I'm sorry if the whole thing triggered the feelings that this was a "China bad" thing.
For me the frustration I have is with the broad societal acceptance of an entitlement to women's bodies, time, attention, labor, etc. and I think it's interesting that this thread has had a lot less of that than other threads about Westerners/Americans with similar beliefs.
(Also @Akir)
:P I'm usually the most guilty of automatic "China bad" responses, myself.
The different thing here is that Sons are uniquely valued in Chinese society to a degree those of us living in the west find largely unimaginable. The uproar that losing a son in a war would cause is probably the only thing holding Xi Jinping back from full on war with Taiwan. There are by now many families whose bloodline comes down to a single male heir born to another single male heir of a third gen of single male heir. That these sons represent the entirety of the future for many generations is held as a stronger belief than any religion or basic human moral ethics that I've come across. They would sooner propose all girls and all women be forcibly gifted to men in triple shift rotations than lose thousands of these sons in a war, let alone millions of them.
Oh for sure this issue is systemically driven, from the original one child policy to the value of sons vs daughters, etc. and it was predictable enough that I feel like the conversation about "not enough women" has been happening my entire adult life.
But I was not intending genuine political analysis, more a speculative fiction dystopian type answer. On said topic, though it hasn't aged great* The Gate to Women's Country by Sheri Tepper deals with gender dynamics and using war as population control.
*The society has "cured" homosexuality for one. It's very second wave feminism but it's an interesting story.
It's less a serious plan people desire, and more a historical trend. Wars are optimal distractions for government with disrest that is too large to suppress. It also knocks 3 birds with one stone by embracing nationalism and achieving whatever conqeust goals the leader at the time has.
Regardless of how entitled the men are here, I don't think it's a problem China (or hell, any other country) will solve in a mentally healthy way. And it will get worse before it gets better.
Easy and quick wars of conquest deal with unrest. 30 million KIA is not easy and quick and will for sure create more unrest.
Then again, if you open a wiki page about civil wars and read any entry about China it always looks like someone added a bunch of 0s.
we're also transitioning to "forever wars" as a format. Putin said his "special operation" would last 3 days, and even if that was a gross exaggeration I do genuinely think that he never predicted this assault to last longer than 3-4 months, let alone almost 4 years.
War is changing. It doesn't work the way it did before. But Putin and Jinping are both 73 years old. They won't ever fully come around to this reality before they meet their end.
It's more that for the last 100 years or more there have been promises of quick, bloodless wars that will be over by Christmas. Wars generally take a lot longer than people think unless they're planned and scoped very carefully and the enemy plays along.
I think it's worthwhile to think whether societies work in harmful, possibly preventable cycles. That thinking requires "toying with ideas" so to speak.
The concept that a nation should go murder people in another country, murdering many innocent noncombatants in the process of getting rid of their socially undesirable people, really isn’t an idea that deserves any thought whatsoever. It’s a morally abhorrent idea that should not be considered and I shame anyone who thinks it’s an appropriate response to anything.
I understand that people may have brought up the concept as a jaded look back to historical issues, but the fact that we are having this discussion proves my point on why it’s bad that that topic was inappropriate; it may have been brought up in jest, but it lead to people being absolutely serious about it. This is just like the alt-right using memes to smuggle in fascist ideas among the populace. It’s a joke until it isn’t.
Who is being absolutely serious about it?
Like genuinely. You can't use "the fact we're having this conversation means I'm right" if you're the one who brings up the conversation.
Alt-right "jokes" aren't actually jokes that's the whole thing. Do you actually think I, or anyone else here, want millions of men to die in a pointless war for no reason other than population control and I'm "joking" about it to slyly gain social acceptance of it?
Because that's the fundamental difference of "it's just a joke, bro" vs. "I thought it was super clear no one means this and we're all just really burnt out about the world and have zero hope this will be handled well IRL" dark humor/whistling in the dark.
But to erase any concern, I really thought it was very obvious no one expects nor wants that outcome, not with a veneer of "just joking so you can't be mad at me" but a genuine "legitimately there was never anything serious about it and we're just cynical as fuck." But if the irony didn't land for you, it didn't land. I just want to assure you it was there.
You can still be mad obviously, that's not up to anyone else, but I do not think the brush you're painting everyone with is a reasonable one. And I wish for half the passion toward how our military is actually recruited, used, and abused in the real world. Or towards the men claiming women are brainwashed by feminism and owe them sex. But if you really think we're the equivalent of the alt-right, at least say it to the people you're mad at.
You have very seriously misconstrued what I was saying. I used the alt right as an example of how jokes can be taken seriously, and that’s why I said we shouldn’t be joking about this. Jokes are jokes until the moment they aren’t.
Did you not see the person I was responding to said we should be considering these ideas? If you were looking for a line in the sand, that was a pretty clear example. I was responding exactly to who I was upset with in that example.
The person you were replying to made a comment that to me sounded like critiquing how societies have worked in harmful cycles and that to try to prevent those cycles people have to think about them aka "toy with ideas". I think you misunderstood their comment, but that's just my take.
And the "jokes" that the alt right make were never actually jokes. They were always things they agreed with and advocated for being couched as jokes.
You say you replied to the only person you were upset with but you referenced things I said and spoke in the aggregate, painting everyone with the same brush. As I said, I think that's quite overbroad. I understand why you're upset, I don't agree with the conclusions you're drawing over it. And that's fine, I cannot control what you think of me.
But if you wish to "shame" anyone who posted like this, I personally think you're missing the mark.
The surviving unaborted daughters, they mean. Many were also abandoned in favour of a second wife with finally a son. Some families decide these daughters are not worth anything and would rather spend the resources to support a same-family-name male cousin. Many families decide since they only have one daughter, the parents must look after themselves in retirement so they skimp as much as they could on the daughter to fatten themselves up. There are few women winners here.
Bullies and abusers know which targets are safe. You don't see these men being angry about lack of economic opportunities or the government policies that led them to this point. They know that if they bang on long enough they will see more instances of police/courts turning blind eyes to domestic abuse or forcibly confined women slaves or buying trafficked women, stalking, sexual assaults, harrassment etc
Like this case. Wuhan gov official English summary
This, despite the videos that look like masturbating, despite the fact that when confronted, he wrote her an apology letter. And after the verdict, her graduation thesis was called into question.
Oh yes, woe are the men who are without women because their parents saw female children as inferior.
I mean, yeah? When their parents were making decisions on whether or not to abort their children, they were unborn, probably not even a fetus. You can hardly blame people for things or attitudes their parents held before they existed.
The male children born under the regime are innocent.
To some extent I don't even blame the women parents too much for rejecting their girls: that they don't want baby girls born into that mess seems at least understandable, if not fully reasonable to me. (The fathers hold more responsibility because they could have been the deciding vote to say, no, our baby girl will be precious and even if our extended family treats them as inferior she still has us. That extended family will come around once they realize the last male heir refuses to take a mistress and have another child).
I thought you were going to go in the direction that maybe men forced women to abort the girl baby (plausible? possible?) or that a patriarchal society brainwashed women into thinking they needed the son. I think it's a little weird to envision a scenario where both the man and woman have the same stance ("we should have a son because a son is more precious") but that the man should get the blame because the man didn't ultimately choose to override the woman.
Oh I get that the men themselves are not to blame, merely their parents who were shortsighted enough to not see the potential problems of rejecting female babies.
Or to put another way: Don't blame the women (as manosphere bros tend to do) for the patriarchal tendencies of your parents.
| Mr Peng has 50,000 followers [on zhizhu]
This seemed awfully small to me
Zhihu’s average monthly active users (MAU) stood at approximately 83 million in 2024
It is still a lot of people, as is the 4 million mentioned on billibilli (~330m users). That's all I can really see because its paywalled, but it is unimpressive to me. Also I question whether China would just willingly send men to die. That seems like completely out of left field. A cursory glance into Chinese elderly care reveals it is a policy priority and are pumping funding into it.
Obviously none of this address the very real problem of misogyny which I certainly don't doubt still occurs in China, in the same vein I don't doubt China is suffering from their own version of the manosphere. I do think they are better suited to handle it than we in the states are.
I find that most everything from The Economist has to be taken with a heavy grain of salt these days.
To be clear, while I was humoring Gazook89's premise, I don't think China is going to engage in a major land war to kill off their extra men. Some combination of directed hatred of the other, a social safety net sufficient to make them feel that the alternatives would be worse, and regular, isolating entertainment is plenty to keep most people from engaging in the sort of actions that threaten the status quo.
Archive: https://archive.ph/psd3S
Thanks for the link!
Btw I couldnt view archive.ph links without vpn . Some kind of IP shadow ban or region lock ? ~~~~
Sorry, have no idea. From quick search it can be ISP blocking?
Maybe it could be some kind of CDN issue or something? Not entirely sure, but last few times I've tried, sometimes it loads, sometimes it doesn't, and the fact that it worked when you used a VPN maybe was just a coincidence of timing, or would possibly indicate that when you tried to reach it from a different region (assuming the VPN didn't originate along the exact same network path as your normal internet connection) that there may be some CDN where traffic from some regions reaches fine and then in the region your normal internet connection is, the CDN may not be stable.
I'm surprised we didn't see influencers with similar views to Andrew Tate blow up on Chinese social media sooner.
China has a serious demographic problem thanks to their one-child policy encouraging parents to abort or abandon girls after birth out of wanting a male heir, and a phenomenon known as elite overproduction.
So imagine you're a Chinese guy in his late-twenties. You've been pushed through cram schools and forced to study for much of your childhood and adolescence, manage to get into a prestigious university like Tsinghua or Peking, graduate with a top Bachelors degree, only to then be unable to find a graduate job. You then take on postgraduate study yet despite coming out of it with a Masters or PhD, your only prospects for work after are to register for Meituan (China's equivalent of Doordash) and earn a pittance delivering fast food orders in the gig economy. You can't find a girlfriend or a spouse because China's aforementioned one-child policy has made boys outnumber girls by a ludicrous amount, and because you're not in stable employment, you are basically disqualified from being a suitor for marriage.
There is an African proverb that best describes why the manosphere has been growing so hard in the past few decades. "The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth." China represents a rather extreme example of what is currently going on in the West (mass youth unemployment) which have left men particularly disenfranchised.
That's because they never went through a phase where that kind of figure fell out of popularity and then came back like Tate. Take Jackie Chan, famous shit husband, serial womanizer, abandoner of his daughter and utterly rejects her being a lesbian. Famous and respected and the pride of their nation.
They just passed go and did not collect 200. The same rhetoric isn't new fringe favorite because it never left the spotlight.
Their hit drama from 2025 Love Again (cn) is about this old widower being pursued by four beautiful younger women. This is still mainstream normal stuff for them: it didn't blow up because it's been big the whole time.
These men aren't rejected by the village, no, they're rejected by the rejected surviving women. It seems to me like the village is highly motivated to burn anything else to keep these men warm