The professor, Xie Zuoshi, blogged his idea. He has a lot of readers — 2.6 million followers for one of his 3 blogs — and this idea went viral — though the post itself has "been removed."
By 2020, China will have an estimated 30 million bachelors — called guanggun, or “bare branches.”...One answer is: Stop aborting girls. But Xie's solution takes the current situation as it is.
Many men, especially poor ones, he noted, are unable to find a wife and have children, and are subsequently condemned to living and dying alone without offspring to support them in old age, as children are required to do by law in China. But he says he believes there is a solution.Old-age pensions from the government? No:
“The guanggun problem is actually a problem of income. High-income men can find a woman because they can pay a higher price. What about low-income men? One solution is to have several take a wife together. That’s not just my weird idea. In some remote, poor places, brothers already marry the same woman, and they have a full and happy life.”Xie is criticized for offending traditional morality, but he says: “If you can’t find a solution that doesn’t violate traditional morality... then why do you criticize me for violating traditional morality?" Feminists don't like it either, because it's not seen as an improvement in the lot of women, but treating women like "commodities," and allocating them in a shortage, and the shortage is the result of ongoing sex discrimination: "Behind the imbalanced sex ratio of 30 million bachelors lie 30 million baby girls who died due to sex discrimination." (The reference is, I assume, to selective abortion, though the linked NYT article is scrubbed of the word "abortion.")
Polyandry has been practiced before in China, particularly in impoverished areas, as a way to pool resources and avoid the breakup of property. And apparently, there are Chinese who think polyandry may already be legal....
Another criticism is:
“This professor’s logic is typical heterosexual-male-centrism,” A Qiang wrote. “If heterosexual men can’t find a wife they can share one, thereby solving heterosexual men’s marriage problems by turning women into material goods. The legalization of same-sex marriage therefore is not to secure marriage equality for L.G.B.T. people, but to save women for straight men. This is on the same level as comments that go: ‘Let these men be homosexual to save more women for me.’ ”Was that hard to understand? The NYT helps: "Many gay men in China marry women to conform socially and to have children." Got that? Xie is criticized for supporting gay marriage, because gay men want to marry women, and it's wrong for heterosexual men to try to shunt them into marrying men so there will be more women for the heterosexual men.
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91 comments:
Interesting. So there's real world example of polyandry driven by economic benefits to the participants? I thought the economic arguments only applied to gay marriage.
And, yes, the argument that gay men shouldn't marry women does turn the typical argument against gay marriage in the West on its head.
What kind of "man" shares his wife? You can look at Mrs. Tank, but, if you're thinking about sharing her, think about a 9 MM or a 12 gauge.
"(The reference is, I assume, to selective abortion, though the linked NYT article is scrubbed of the word "abortion.")"
Abortion, the forbidden love of American progressives, the love that dare not speak its name.
"Take my wife...please".
Tank - polyandry is rare, but most often found in the form of brothers collectively taking one wife. Where otherwise they could afford none, it is something of a practical solution.
True, you may end up supporting your brother's child rather than your own, but that's still passing on the family genes.
In China, to make this work one would have to have a significant relaxation of governmental birth control. If a woman were married to two men, she would need to be allowed to have at least three children to make it work. That would be two sons and the spare girl.
But consider the next generation. The girls permitted to be born in such an arrangement will be very few, so the children born of these arrangements would have an even greater sex disparity. It is hard to see it as a long-term solution.
Sometimes, the feminists are right!
This problem is in the process of solving itself.
Japanese sex robots, built in China and imported to the US, will replace traditional biological wives here. After 16 years of a Hillary administration there will be plenty of public support for exporting left over American women to China to help offset the trade imbalance.
New income stream for Planned Parenthood: live fetal wife tissue.
Did the NYT actually let slip past a statement that, even if not explicitly, indicates that aborting unborn baby girls is killing them? If they're nonpersons, why does it matter? And, heck, polyandry is better than the alternate solution, kidnapped "brides." -- but if a single woman is expected to meet the sexual and reproductive "needs" of multiple men, how many would really volunteer for the task?
One of the side effects of collective farms was the mass starvation of millions of Soviet and Chinese peasants. One of the side effects of legalized abortion was the killing of millions of female pre-natal babies.
Ann's proposed solution isn't actually a solution. If her solution were implemented today exactly as written, by 2020 there would be more 4 year old girls available, and still the estimated 30 million bachelors.
The Chinese have another solution to address their pro-choice dysfunction, which meets both their resource and social needs: emigration and colonization of Africa, etc.
Scott, nice comment.
Well, if the feminists like Sarah 'Sorry, it's a Boy' Silverman get there way, the west will help redress that gender balance. Then all the western bachelorettes can marry chinese bachelors. Problem solved.
Iran has set the precedent. In that country they coerce homosexual men into undergoing sex change operations. There's no reason the same thing couldn't be done in China. There would be economies of scale, and I'm sure the doctors would become really good at it. If there are not sufficient numbers, they could have a lottery or draft where man could be selected to undergo a sex change operation until such time as the gender numbers reach equilibrium. You've got to think outside the box.
One answer is: Stop aborting girls.
I don't know how Pro-Choice the professor is, but this statement seems to be an admission that the fetus has some sort of identity beyond being just a mere clump of cells. A gender identity.
And how do you know that "girl" is the chosen gender identity of the fetus? Let's not be robbing the unborn of their right to gender identity by simply labeling them with 20th century chromosome sex identification.
Or, just start aborting the boys at an equal rate. Like insurance rates, rather than diminish the cost on one gender, raise it on another.
There's all kinds of solutions.
eugenics
"doctrine of progress in evolution of the human race, race-culture,"
from Greek eugenes "well-born, of good stock, of noble race,"
Progress simply denotes monotonic change which is an ambiguous concept that must qualified. And evolution is merely a chaotic process directed by a fitness function.
The Chinese have chosen unwisely.
It can't be true that 30 million baby girls died, because fetuses aren't babies. Right?
"What kind of "man" shares his wife?"
How about 2 gay men who want a family?
China, we'll send you some DVDA videos to get you started.
I am Laslo.
"Ann's proposed solution isn't actually a solution. If her solution were implemented today exactly as written, by 2020 there would be more 4 year old girls available, and still the estimated 30 million bachelors."
I'm not really proposing to solve everything, just observing that if you create a pressure release valve, there's less chance for solving the original problem. I can see that it will be extremely hard to change the abortion choices people are making even if people are aware of and worried about all the men without wives.
War is always an effective means of reducing excess male population.
Traditionally, these sort of problems are sorted out on the battlefield. Excess men invade a someone else's territory and either die or succeed in killing off the invaded territory's men and take the women for themselves.
And that's exactly what is going to happen in this instance as well.
Society-wise, their policies basically put pee-pee in their Coke.
I am Laslo.
"What kind of "man" shares his wife?"
A real or simulated eunuch.
"This is hard to believe. Those wise Chinese central planners are usually so gosh darn prescient. "
-Thomas Friedman
It's not about the ability to have sex, it's about the need to have a child who will support you when you're old.
Many men, especially poor ones, he noted, are unable to find a wife and have children, and are subsequently condemned to living and dying alone without offspring to support them in old age, as children are required to do by law in China.
Know why girls are aborted so heavily in China?
Because that law requiring the children to support the parents is for MALE children, specifically. Not the females. So, if you can have one child, girls are a terrible choice to have. They are net liabilities (if the girl cannot get married, the parents must still support her --- not so with boys)
Making both sexes support the parents would drastically reduce the sex selective abortion issue.
What kind of "man" shares his wife?
Cuckolds, mainly.
Why not? Why limit marriage to two?
What kind of "man" shares his wife?
Over the course of a marriage, lots of men do -- they just usually don't find out about it.
Incredibly sad - can you imagine a society where a large chunk of males were destined to be impoverished and unmarriable their entire lives? It's hard to fathom. Another reason to hate the Communists.
There is the other, more common, solution to the problem of having too many unmarried young men in your country.
Ann Althouse said...
"What kind of "man" shares his wife?"
How about 2 gay men who want a family?
LOL, exactly.
Or some emasculated super beta modern idiot of a man.
Soon, Chinese Wives will have to Wang Chung Tonight.
And after Wang and Chung there is still Chen, Wong and Huáng to go.
I am Laslo.
It is not our right to interfere with the abortion choices being made by the Chinese. It's their right to choose, and that's all there is to it.
If you don't want a polyandrous marriage, don't participate in one.
Why is it that progressives can object to that statement even though they think the same logic applies to SSM, abortion, and any number of other issues with moral and social repercussions?
What is the Chinese word for Bukkake?
I am Laslo.
Hey China, here's a concept: we call it "Social Security". Hope that's not too communistic for you.
Let us comply with the Biblical standard...one man, 700 wives, 300 concubines. 1 Kings 11:1-3
Skipper:
That's not the proposed standard, but rather a historical warning. The standard is the marriage of one man and one woman for life.
So, Social Security was the impetus for the selective-child policy. The solution to China's overpopulation problem is then more contributory entitlements and packing people like sardines in urban ghettos.
Limits on abortion?
No comment.
Since the number of babies is practically limited by the number of breeding women available, the deliberate shortage of women is one of the best measures yet undertaken to reduce climate change and secure the future of the plane 's flora and fauna.
The USSA, on the other hand, still maintains pro-natalist policies that serve to pollute the planet, squeeze out wildlife and deplete natural resources.
C Stanley:
Progressive liberals are pro-choice. Whether it is pro-choice/abortion, planning/cannibalism, or congruence ("=")/exclusion, they find solace for their bigotry in a cult of selective principles. While the transgender/homosexual community is not numerous, they have a wealthy 1%, and are thus a politically favored constituency. The other classes of orientations and behaviors simply do not enjoy the same leverage.
"Let us comply with the Biblical standard...one man, 700 wives, 300 concubines. 1 Kings 11:1-3"
Didn't 999 men go without wives then? Or did the monarch consume those male bodies in war?
Let us comply with the Biblical standard...one man, 700 wives, 300 concubines. 1 Kings 11:1-3
I always liked what Jim in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" had to say about that.
Others beat me to it, but, war will take care of the excess male population. And it won't be pretty for those nations who have allowed themselves to be ruled by the women. Especially not for the women.
Sex robots for the younger bachelors and nurse robots for the older bachelors
I had a Chinese medical student a few years ago. Her mother was a university professor and her father, who had trained as a physicist, worked as an auto mechanic because he was Christian. She had a brother and when I asked her about that, w=she said "They aren;t very smart." I took that to mean that high status women like her mother could avoid the law.
She had decided to come to the US for medical school because she said that she was preparing to support her parents when they got older. The last I heard, she was in a surgery residency. Very bright young woman who, by the way, was married to a Caucasian man from Chile, also a graduate student. I have met a number of educated Chinese women who marry Caucasian men, mostly Americans. Traditionally Han Chinese married only within that racal group but it seems high status women are not doing so. I wonder if it a sport of rebellion against the government policies. A number of them are friends of my daughter and married American men who were teaching English in China.
War is always an effective means of reducing excess male population.
The scary thing is that the two countries in the world with hundreds of millions of extra males due to sex-selective abortion over the last 30 years are neighbors and both are nuclear powers.
Because that law requiring the children to support the parents is for MALE children, specifically. Not the females
The females are expected to help support their husband's parents.
Why is it that progressives can object to that statement even though they think the same logic applies to SSM, abortion, and any number of other issues with moral and social repercussions?
Because their objections are crap. It's a tactical move to not scare the majority of people in this country, but they don't actually believe it. In fact, as gay marriage has become more and more accepted, or at least forced on us by the courts, the left has started to test the waters regarding polygamy. Articles using the same arguments as SSM, as well as arguments that gay marriage means heterosexuals need to abandon their expectations of monogamy (since gays are apparently not-monogamous).
The gay marriage fight developed their playbook. They'll put it to use with polygamy and get their results a lot fast next time.
It will require revision of the poem:
Hogamus Higamus
Men are Polygamous
Higamus Hogamus
Women Monogamous
See this account of the provenance.
"They'll put it to use with polygamy and get their results a lot fast next time."
Yes and the same people will be pushing pedophilia once the polygamy barrier is down. They are, of course on the hard left.
Another government failure. I am sure they will come up with a suitable government policy to solve the problem central planning caused.
The correct answer of course would be sex bots developed by private sector interests.
The wrong answer will be war developed by government.
Didn't 999 men go without wives then? Or did the monarch consume those male bodies in war?
Yes to both or either. In the case of Solomon, the wives were foreign princesses. So they came from political agreements.
This was also a time in history where war and pestilence and the general non-luxury of living conditions made it more likely to have an imbalance in the other direction--women in need of husbands.
They sure have nice airports, though.
@ Mr Wibble: that was meant to be a rhetorical question :-)
And my point wasn't just the slippery slope , but a more specific objection I have to that argument that people who disagree can just opt out. Clearly some people see that the objections remain to the systemic adoption of this policy, not just individual participation in it. For polyandry, because that systemic effect is on individual freedom (for the women in that society), progressives can see that opting out on an individual basis doesn't solve the problem. Their values would be in jeopardy if others in the society were engaging in and possibly promoting polyandry.
Somehow progressives never recognize that the same can be true for other people in society whose moral hierarchy doesn't necessarily place individual autonomy above all other values.
Interesting. The article, and the thread here, have an omission in common. (Except, as I just noticed, implicitly by Strick in the very first comment.)
That is, the possibility that a man brings some advantage to a woman/family in marriage, which might be increased if two men brought that advantage to the marriage, benefiting the woman/family.
No, it's all about how men are an imposition on women, and how unfair it would be to increase that.
Serves them right for devaluing the female babies.
Wait, so does a bicycle need a fish, then? Or am I missing the part where now we agree that stable monogamous relationships--let's call them marriages--between a man and a woman are good things/a better social arrangement than some others?
Since the number of babies is practically limited by the number of breeding women available, the deliberate shortage of women is one of the best measures yet undertaken to reduce climate change and secure the future of the plane 's flora and fauna.
You feel humanity is causing global warming, which is bad.
...yet, you've not committed suicide.
Which means that you really don't believe this at all. Or you feel you're just too important.
Yes and the same people will be pushing pedophilia once the polygamy barrier is down.
Isn't it nice to know that it really isn't bad to want to fuck a 12 year old kid? I used to think that was a universally horrible thing, but man, the Left seems to be getting on board with it.
It's like the Left has turned into a 4chan prank.
Of course those unmarried, low-earning men aren't "the backbone of society" so I'm not sure why we should trouble ourselves worrying about their problems, anyway. Potential splooge stooges, all of 'em.
Why not just execute all the excess men to bring the numbers into alignment?........After the Reds took over Shanghai, they executed all the prostitutes. So there's a precedent. Gullible western journalists marveled at how, under the Communist system , society had been reformed and there were no prostitutes, nor any need for them. There's a precedent for that gullibility also.
"can you imagine a society where a large chunk of males were destined to be impoverished and unmarriable their entire lives? "
I think they're called video gamers or similar in our culture, no?
Traditionally Han Chinese married only within that racial group but it seems high status women are not doing so. I wonder if it a sport of rebellion against the government policies. A number of them are friends of my daughter and married American men who were teaching English in China.
It's not unheard of for Chinese families to have more than one child. The one-child policy is not applied to the entire population. It ends up being applicable to slightly less than half the population because the list of exemptions is long. And, yes, if you are wealthy, then even if none of the exemptions apply to you, you might choose to just pay the fine for having a second child or engage in maternity tourism.
Left unsaid in many of the articles about the marriage problem in China is that it's not only a problem of "there are x Chinese females, but 2x males in the population." The availability mismatch is even greater than that. An educated daughter isn't going to want to marry down socially. The types of men who have always been able to afford to be picky, still are. You end up with two significant subsets of the population that are unable to couple up--the poor, uneducated males and the too-educated-and-not-pretty-enough-or-young-enough females. Not surprising at all that the latter group would flock to an available pool of non-Chinese husbands.
The Price of Marriage in China
"It's not about the ability to have sex, it's about the need to have a child who will support you when you're old."
Great. There will be no foster babies in need of homes, right?
Or maybe they prefr a lot of "train" pulling...
If gay men marry women in China to have kids why would polyamory preclude them from being in a gay relationship. They could be in the relationship with the woman primarily because she can give them kids but in relationship with each other because they are allowed a gay relationship in the context of the marriage
Years ago, a society with a great number of unattached men would pose a threat to its enemies. Now, however, videogames exist.
One of my favorite birds has this one solved:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phalarope
"...30 million baby girls who died due to sex discrimination." (The reference is, I assume, to selective abortion, though the linked NYT article is scrubbed of the word "abortion.")
Isn't "died" worse than "were aborted?" To have died, you had to have first lived. And they're "baby girls" too, and not "fetus girls." Sooo, tell me more about these 30 million baby girls. How exactly did they die due to sex discrimination again? Was it because no one let them into Augusta National?
My understanding is that there is a theoretical chance that global warming will kill millions to billions. So the obvious solution is to kill millions to billions of people to prevent it.
If you are worried about the well being of flora and fauna in a warmer world, go to Costa Rica and wander the jungle, then to to the Yukon and wander the tundra and come back and tell me where the "flora and fauna" are doing better.
No one is forcing anyone to accept 'one wife, many husbands!
Yeah... the thing is if this was acceptable, this is China where they force you to do lots of things. Naive or devious: you decide!
I'm not really feeling his solution would solve the problem presented. Homosexual men will still want to get married to have children, which is not something unusual for their culture historically. Higher tier women still won't want to marry lower tier men; adding more of them is like adding zeroes. Men still don't want to raise other men's children if they can avoid it.
I think humanity naturally wants pron culture: sleep with whoever you want, whenever you want, without any consequences of any kind. Reality ensues.
... a solution ... to the problem of too few women in China to meet the demand of Chinese men who want wives.
AA: One answer is: Stop aborting girls. But Xie's solution takes the current situation as it is.
Unless you can also invent a time machine, you do pretty much have to start from the current situation.
Maybe the state could start arranging marriages.
Maybe the state could outlaw unlicensed birth.
We have a population to control and global warming to stop. Progress!
Unfortunately, you can't stop the aborting of girls because that would restrict a women's right to choose. In any case, outlawing abortions based on sex of the fetus would only solve the problem in 20 years.
A heather has two daddies and a mommy seems the best solution. I'm surprised Chinese chicks aren't pushing for it. Two men providing for them, plus the opportunity to play one off the other and plenty of drama.
Frankly, if I was a young man the whole sexbot thing seems to best route. Hire a part time maid, keep a sexbot, and make the occasional visit to whore house.
Problem solved.
Polyandra is still practiced in the remote villages of Ladakh and Zanskar, a Tibetan Buddhist region of the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir. I never understood how the math worked - a whole lot of men went off to join the monastaries and those who were left behind were far fewer in number than the women, but somehow brothers would end up marrying the same woman. Whatever happened to all the women left out, I wonder?
Polyandry isn't a real solution unless you assume a society where women have no rights. Why should any large number of women enter such a relationship when there are plenty of men who would be happy to marry them monogamously. Or maybe Chinese women will start to have husbands to whom they give a boy-child and then he gives them a boy toy - like European royalty in the old days. Or the women will have a number of boy friends which will solve one problem but those women will not want any children at all, at least not while they are young.
Originally, China wasn't going to do the one child policy for ever; it was supposed to be drastic solution lasting one generation, the idea being to cut the birth rate in one generation and then lift the restriction. But it seems to have become a part of society, unchangeable even when it is clearly destructive.
I am always struck by how much Michael K has done - surgeon, teacher, engineer, world traveler, astronaut, etc etc - yet he finds time to comment multiple times all day long on literally every post AA makes.
Curious.
"Why should any large number of women enter such a relationship when there are plenty of men who would be happy to marry them monogamously."
What evidence is there that women prefer one husband to two?
rcocean said...
"Frankly, if I was a young man the whole sexbot thing seems to best route. Hire a part time maid, keep a sexbot, and make the occasional visit to whore house."
Sexbots are going to be hotter than any real woman and many will probably be idealized versions of popular women. In short order they will "act" better during "sex" than any woman as men's sexual cues are not complicated. I don't see whorehouses being much competition and would only carry the risk of a kid you have to pay child support on.
"I am always struck by how much Michael K has done - surgeon, teacher, engineer, world traveler, astronaut, etc etc - yet he finds time to comment multiple times all day long on literally every post AA makes.
Curious"
Hahahahaha, good observation.
The scary thing is that the two countries in the world with hundreds of millions of extra males due to sex-selective abortion over the last 30 years are neighbors and both are nuclear powers.
I am a lot more worried about China than I am abut India. Much of it is location. India is somewhat surrounded by a rising tide of Islam. Yes, China has a Muslim problem too, but it doesn't seem as pressing. Much of China's expansionist energies seem to be to the east and southeast, towards Japan, Taiwan, Malaysa, and maybe the Phillipines. Partly it is the needed resources it sees under the ocean. And, partially, they see a weakening of US resolve and strength in that area. My long term hope is that they will look more to the north, to the riches under the snow in Siberia, protected by an aging Russian nuclear umbrella and a military facing some of the worst age related demographic problems in the world. The Ruskies have to be worried, with better than a billion ChiComs looking north to all that buried wealth.
Thinking of those two countries - I just started rereading Door Into Women's Country by Sheri Tepper. One of the better feminist sci fi novels around. In the book, men and women live apart, the men in army camps and the women in towns. They only get together to beget children. It turns out that the men and boys, in Roman Legion type units, run around fighting and killing each other. And, in the end, we find that the women are manipulating them to keep the population of males down, and use several of these units together to wipe out one of these units that became a challenge to the women by learning too much of the truth about all this. The obvious solution to all these excess males in those two countries is to throw male armies against each other until the excesses have been killed off. And, actually, it may be a three power block situation, instead of two, and, thus closer to the book, with the billion or so Muslims in that part of the world. While there doesn't appear to be the sex selection abortion and infanticide there as we have seen in China and India, much of the Muslim world seems to have similar excess male problems. Legal polygamy may part of the problem. Another part may be the low status women have there. And maybe partially older men marrying younger women. We shall see.
I don't see polyandry as a viable solution. Polygamy is much more stable. Why? The difference between paternity and maternity. Women know that they are the mothers of their children by having carried those children to term. Males have no such innate assurances about the real paternity of the children they think of as their own. So, over the last couple of million years, humans have somewhat solved this problem by supposedly assuring males of the genetic paternity of their putative children by giving them exclusive sexual access to their wives or partners. Polyandry works on occasion with closely related makes, because a brother's children will still share a lot of DNA with their uncles. No so with strangers. Yes, they are all good little commies, but the Chinese have given up on much of their communism because it does not, and cannot work. And absent that, millions of years of programming tell men not to trust unrelated males with their women, because to do so would ultimately result in them expending their scarce resources raising other men's children.
The one-child policy seems to overlook an infant girl abandoned in the wilderness to starve to death, giving mom and dad a second shot at a son.
The only way this madness ends is when bride prices grow high enough to support her parents through their old age.
Why do pro-choice advocates support China's forced-abortion policies?
Johanna Lapp:
Pro-choice/abortion or selective-child is actually a worse policy, because it reflects a larger population choosing elective abortion of their own young, not just the choice of a minority with the means to overlay their will.
As for the the parents, the wife's and husband's, ideally there will be a symbiotic, mutually reinforcing relationship with their children, grandchildren etc., not just through a one-time payment. The wife is not being sold, but through marriage is establishing a larger, intimate community.
This is very bad for the men in question! Because not only do they not have children to help them when they get old, they have no nieces nor nephews. Alone! Wow, that's depressing!
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