The Chinese government issued a warning, the state-run Global Times reported on Monday, to its male citizens in Bangladesh discouraging the use of local matchmaking services or acceptance of offers to “buy” a wife — a growing threat to social stability as the nation’s marriage rate plummets and gender disparity skyrockets.
China is struggling with a significant disruption in social order looming as a result of, among other factors, the country’s population comprising 35 million more men than women, according to its latest census in 2020. The gender disparity follows decades of the imposition of a law known as the “one-child policy” in which the Communist Party forbade families from having more than one child, enforcing the law through mass infanticide, forced abortions, and other atrocities. Many families, knowing they could only keep one child, aborted or killed their baby girls out of a preference for having a son.
The “one-child policy” was announced in 1979 and repealed in 2015; as of 2021, it is legal for each Chinese family to have as many as three children, but no more. The Chinese government estimates that the policy killed — officially “prevented” — 400 million people through abortion.
This situation has left China with millions of single, marriage-aged men competing for a much smaller pool of women. The phenomenon has come to be known as “leftover men,” many of whom do not expect to ever marry given the low odds of finding a Chinese wife.
As China has one of the world’s most restrictive immigration systems, the country has not seen its dwindling supply of Chinese-born women replaced with foreigners. Many “leftover men” have taken it upon themselves to leave the country and seek wives abroad, however, fueling human trafficking and “matchmaking” scams in much of southeast Asia.
As a popular target nation for single Chinese men, Bangladesh has seen an increase in such multinational marriages. Local media report cases of Chinese men meeting women on social media and traveling to Bangladesh to court them — only to have women defraud them or use them to avoid a pre-arranged marital agreement. The issue has become enough of a diplomatic problem for the Chinese embassy in Dhaka to publish a statement on Sunday discouraging Chinese men from “buying a foreign wife.”
“The Chinese Embassy in Bangladesh issued a reminder late Sunday that Chinese citizens should strictly follow the law concerning foreign-related marriage,” the Global Times narrated, “avoid illegal matchmaking agents, and not be misled by cross-border dating content on short video platforms.”
“They should reject the idea of ‘buying a foreign wife’ and think twice before marrying in Bangladesh, the embassy stated,” according to the report.
The embassy reminded Chinese citizens that matchmaking services working internationally are illegal in China, “and no individual is permitted to carry out or disguise such activities through deception or for profit.”
The message reportedly concluded with a pointed warning to avoid “online romance scams.”
Reporting on the embassy warning, India’s Economic Times reported on Monday that Bangladesh is one of several regional destinations growing increasingly popular for Chinese men looking for wives. Other target nations include Pakistan, where “poor Christian families… are being forced to sell their daughters to criminal gangs who them smuggle them to China for marriage,” and Russia.
“Many Chinese men are looking at Russia to get a bride. The interesting factor behind heading to Russia is that the country has more women while China is surplus with men,” the Times observed.
Neighboring Vietnam has also struggled with an increase in human trafficking apparently related to China’s surplus of single men. A report by the Asia Times in March, citing British government statistics, noted that as many as 75 percent of victims of human trafficking in Vietnam were trafficked into China, over 90 percent of them women and children.
Plummeting marriage rates within China correlate with slowing birth rates and a resulting population decline. The Chinese Communist Party’s National Bureau of Statistics revealed in January 2023 that it had documented the first population decline in the nation’s modern history since 1962 at the tail end of Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, a campaign of mass extermination. Independent academics and other observers had predicted prior to this revelation that the population had already been in decline as Beijing has struggled to conceal the true data.
China continues to promote marriages and childbirth through increasingly desperate measures. The Global Times has reported on such trends as refurbishing kindergarten classrooms into nursing homes — in response to a lack of demand for kindergartens and to grant young women, who are expected to care for their elders, greater freedom in dating. Some local governments have also engaged in what officials describe as “fertility call checks” — regular phone calls to married women pestering them for details about their menstrual cycles and ovulation in an attempt to pressure them into getting pregnant.
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