Brides are so scarce in China, some men are even considering divorced women

[Grym]

Isn't China over populated anyway? This is a good chance to solve this issue without a planned mass genocide.

Let people die without children and eventually the population number will set back to a better level.

[mizeri]

so the one child policy is working, to lower the population, maybe chinese man will evolve from this and start changing sex like some frogs

[Grym]

so the one child policy is working, to lower the population, maybe chinese man will evolve from this and start changing sex like some frogs

But then they cannot carry on the family name which is the main reason why male were preferred for the one child policy.

[Deleted]

so the one child policy ...

...has actually been replaced with a two child policy.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/27/as...-child-policy/

[Mistame]

Wow. Here, you might not know you are. Last I heard and I could be misinformed, you are if she has stayed over a few nights per week for 6 months or gets her mail sent to your address - she'd be entitled to half your stuff.

No. "Common law marriage" existed to aid those living in rural areas (or without access to marriage services) to be recognized as husband and wife, if they chose to. It was never intended to impose a "married" status on those unwilling to get married, nor is/was it legally binding in the sense that a legal marriage would be.

https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/f...n-law-marriage

[Yvaelle]

just invade Japan, the women there do not want their men anyway

But then they cannot carry on the family name which is the main reason why male were preferred for the one child policy.

Of course they can, all your asexual clones bear your name - We Are All Horatio




Edit: It occurs to me just how fortunate we all are that Trump doesn't have access to mass cloning technology!

[mizeri]

Of course they can, all your asexual clones bear your name - We Are All Horatio




Edit: It occurs to me just how fortunate we all are that Trump doesn't have access to mass cloning technology!

are you sure he doesnt?

[breadisfunny]

what the hell is wrong with marrying divorcees?

divorcees in china are looked down upon. china is much more traditional when it comes to how they view marriage.

[wheresmywoft]

Lots of dumb cultures.

By the types of responses you're capable of producing. It would appear that you only give such responses because you were raised to. It isn't some intrinsic boon to you as a person.

[Mistame]

divorcees in china are looked down upon. china is much more traditional when it comes to how they view marriage.

Too bad I'm not into Asian chics or I'd have to make a trip. Assuming there was a good portion left unbred.

[mizeri]

...has actually been replaced with a two child policy.

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/27/as...-child-policy/

so now they will have 2 sons instead

[Tennis]

Too bad I'm not into Asian chics or I'd have to make a trip. Assuming there was a good portion left unbred.

Left unbred? What does this mean? These are people not objects.

[Reeve]

I've dated more divorcees than non-divorcees, I think, at least in terms of girls I've gone on more than a few dates with.

[haxartus]

What exactly is the point of getting married and why is China so obsessed with it ? There is no reason to get married, besides tradition.

[shadowmouse]

What exactly is the point of getting married and why is China so obsessed with it ?

Bear with me for a bit, trying to explain things across a significant culture gap is difficult because that gap makes it hard to find good points of comparison.

I keep mentioning, in various threads, that China is considered a high context culture. That doesn't really translate well to short blurbs on a forum. Let's just pretend it is an alternate universe -- yes, you may not see the world that way, you may not agree with things, but work with me here. In that alternate universe, most of everyday life is about connections and appearances. Logic tend to be relational, things are reasoned by comparisons (X is like Y and so ...) nor is it incomprehensible to hold apparently conflicting opinions. Whether language causes culture or reflects it, we can see that spoken words are vague because the language is tonal and there are ways to play on homophones, the written language is somewhat clearer but it isn't written in a sense that you are used to. Instead, it is a series of symbols whose interpretation can become as convoluted as using a legal dictionary to understand English (X is considered to mean Y because over the course of a series of cases ...).

Let me give an example, I suggest two aspirin or a good beer will help because trying to make sense of this may cause a mild headache. Maybe you've watched an old Chinese martial arts movie (wuxia) and seen a moment where one character takes another as a brother, sister, uncle or whatever. That's sort of a thing here (specifics vary and it gets complicated). So, Spring Festival just wrapped up, and it is a major holiday that involves a lot of traditions and many of them involve family. I have no children of my own, but I have several quasi adoptive daughters (by tradition it would have been considered an adoption, but of course that doesn't meet current international standards). My oldest daughter's daughter is old enough now that my daughter wanted to do a family gathering for the holiday. She, her husband, and her daughter came to Beijing to see me and we had lunch together. She's 36 now, a professor, and a specialist in cross cultural communication. Our work overlaps and we have fun talking shop. At the end of the meal we were stuffed. They'd ordered too much food because that's something of a custom -- not having leftovers means you might seem stingy. We had been talking about language differences and symbolism, so she went on to explain the meaning of leftovers in Chinese, how one word sounded like another word and thus meant something very positive.

tl:dr v 1: There are a couple of points here. Connections are so important here that since family is seen as the most important, there is such a thing as family that goes beyond biological relationships. I'm "dad" and for a holiday that puts special emphasis on family, my daughter wanted to bring us all together. At the same time, just looking at the remains of lunch brought up a discussion of how similar sounding words give layers of meaning to even ordinary things.

Bungee, damn it, what does this have to do with the marriage market in China, get to the point! OK! I'm getting there!

The importance of connections, and family in particular, permeates Chinese culture. Simply invoking Confucianism or even referring to ancestor worship doesn't really quite get it right. One of my daughters was raised by her grandparents (One Child Policy, residence permits, it was complicated). When her grandmother died, I was included in the family gathering during Spring Festival, and that meant that I was included in the family memorial rituals. There were toasts, fruit was laid out, pictures were displayed, stories were told ... but in with all of that they had a framed family tree that showed the family. That was important to them.

Disclaimer: China isn't as monolithic as it may sound sometimes. It is a large country, both geographically and in terms of population. Things that are done one way in one region may be much different in another. For a very crude analogy, imagine a person visits one part of the US, let's say the Midwest. They go home and tell everyone what American pizza is like. Yeah, you know where this is going. They had pizza in a small town in the Midwest. It wasn't New York pizza, it wasn't Chicago style, etc.

So, getting back to the thread, and the question I quoted. The importance of family relationships means that divorces complicate things. They do in the US too, in-laws are seen as part of a family, but most American families don't take a two week holiday every year that includes offerings of fruit and alcohol in front of a family tree. In that alternate high context universe I've invoked, a person is always part of a matrix of relationships.

But there's always a catch, right? Yep. The pressure from family to produce the expected male heir is so great that gay guys may go ahead and get married to meet expectations. At the same time, women have both family and social pressure. There is an expression that goes around, the "leftover" woman (sheng nv). A woman who is not married by 30 is frequently seen as personally defective and a shame to her family. Hey, look, when there are 40 million guys who can't find brides, how the hell did she not manage to find one, right? Pressure on the man, pressure on the woman, pressure on the families ... now, our special guests Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand! Yep, how could this be more of a mess? Bride price! As Mr. Smith would tell us, market pressures are bound to come in to play. Lots of men, not so many women, that sounds a bit like supply and demand. Now look at the chart in this article to see how tradition + the Invisible Hand turn into a bidding war: http://www.econlife.com/gender-issue...riage-markets/ If this seems to make no sense, have one more beer and remember we're treating this like an alternate universe.

Bungee, WTF! Even as an alternate universe this doesn't make sense!

Did you go to one of those insane high schools? The ones that tend to be the source of teen move material? The one with the stereotypical cliques, the back stabbing, conniving politics and all that? Yep, there are times when social pressure in China goes wrong and it goes somewhere beyond those movies. Young Chinese are, however, caught in that environment. Things are changing, they're even changing somewhat rapidly give the large number of people whose attitudes form the common consensus and that China has really only just moved more than 100 years beyond the days of a very rigid, feudal past. They get married because it is such an absolute social expectation, it is an expense that goes beyond even the cost of buying a house, marriage is still treated as an alliance between people and families, and you can imagine how divorce plays out in all that.

To round out the answer to the question that I quoted -- aside from social pressure to get married, marriage is an alliance that doubles each sides connections. Things often get done because a person knows somebody, who knows somebody else, who can talk to someone. Those connections go beyond being purely social, family connections are an entire off the books set of financial arrangements. Family loans money, family covers expenses for things (like the huge cost of marriage), and the money keeps going around and around.

I'm going to wrap this wall of text. It is hard to answer the question concisely because when a high context culture is involved things within that setting only make sense when everything else is taken into account. Taken in isolation, many of these things make no sense as we would view them ... and we have similar looking situations that make the distinction even less clear. It may not make sense to us, but using their logic and social structure it makes sense to them.

[Raynre Valence]

Imagine the shaaaame...

[THE Bigzoman]

what the hell is wrong with marrying divorcees?

If we're using past behaviour as a predictor for future behaviour (economists do)


The odds aren't in your favor that the marriage lasts.

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah, technically, I guess it kind of has worked. It has slowed the population growth quite a lot. Its expected to cap around 2030. They repealed it in 2013 because it had served its purpose.

Was it worth it on a humanitarian level? Probably not. All sorts of problems with unwanted female children.

Only children get more resources from their parents and tend to do better econoically and socially than people who are siblings.

Some economists think that the one child policy is part of the reason why most chinese kids do just as well or better than the west.

[dextersmith]

Yeah. Since couples could only have one kid, they would abort female fetuses or kill them off once they were born to try and have a male to carry on the family name.

It's not just a name issue. The bride lives with the husband's family so her parents won't be financially supported or physically cared for in old age.

[shadowmouse]

The bride lives with the husband's family so her parents won't be financially supported or physically cared for in old age.

Yes, that's part of the purpose for the bride price. By tradition the wife became part of the husband's family and would be expected to take care of them rather than her own family.

As a further example of how complicated things used to get: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_..._%28Chinese%29

When it comes to death customs, an unmarried Chinese woman has no descendants to worship her or care for her as part of a lineage.[4]:127 In every household, an altar is prominently displayed with the spirit tablets of the paternal ancestors and the images of the gods. A married woman's tablet is kept at the altar of her husband's family.[5] However, should a woman of eligible age pass away unmarried, her family is prohibited from placing her tablet on the altar of her natal home.[1]:83 Instead, she will be "given a temporary paper tablet, placed not on the domestic altar but in a corner near the door."[1]:83 Hence, the important duty of Chinese parents in marrying off their children[6]:254 becomes increasingly important for their daughters. Since women are only able to acquire membership in descent lines through marriage,[7]:148 ghost marriage became a viable solution to ensure that unmarried, deceased daughters still had "affiliation to a male descent line"[1]:82 and could be appropriately cared for after death.

As far as I know this kind of tradition has generally fallen out of favor, but it isn't particular far in the past and shows a kind of thinking that probably continues to have reflections today in things like the pressure for a woman to marry quickly.

[Kezotar]

what the hell is wrong with marrying divorcees?

Nothing. Just comes with A LOT of baggage. Most of the times.
If you're fine with carrying that, then go ahead.