It’s a dating pool that no matchmaker would want to tackle, all brought on by the havoc that social engineering inevitably wreaks. Because of the communist state’s limits on how many children couples can have, and a cultural preference for boys, girls have been aborted right out of the future marriage pool, leaving more single blokes than China will be able to handle. More:

“More than 24 million Chinese men of marrying age could find themselves without spouses in 2020, state media reported on Monday, citing a study that blamed sex-specific abortions as a major factor.

The study, by the government-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, named the gender imbalance among newborns as the most serious demographic problem for the country’s population of 1.3 billion, the Global Times said.

‘Sex-specific abortions remained extremely commonplace, especially in rural areas,’ where the cultural preference for boys over girls is strongest, the study said, while noting the reasons for the gender imbalance were ‘complex.’

Researcher Wang Guangzhou said the skewed birth ratio could lead to difficulties for men with lower incomes in finding spouses, as well as a widening age gap between partners, according to the Global Times.

…The Global Times said abductions and trafficking of women were ‘rampant’ in areas with excess numbers of men, citing the National Population and Family Planning Commission.

Illegal marriages and forced prostitution were also problems in those areas, it said.”

I’m guessing the regime isn’t getting close to admitting that its family planning policies are a grievous violation of human rights, but it’s an itty-bitty step for state media to acknowledge the very predictable predicament in which China now finds itself.

(Photo by Feng Li/Getty Images)