Not Enough Women in China? Let Men Share a Wife, an Economist Suggests

October 27, 2015

 

Men playing checkers in Beijing. By 2020, China will have an estimated 30 million bachelors.

Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 

“No one is forcing anyone to accept ‘one wife, many husbands!’ ”

 

With that bracing statement, Xie Zuoshi, an economics professor at Zhejing University of Finance and Economics, defended his recent proposal that one solution to China’s huge surplus of single men could be to allow polyandry, or multiple husbands. The proposal has gone viral.

 

Legalizing marriage between two men would also be a good idea, Mr. Xie wrote in a post that has since been removed from his blogs. (He has at least three blogs, and his Sina blog alone has more than 2.6 million followers.)

 

By 2020, China will have an estimated 30 million bachelors — called guanggun, or “bare branches.” Birth control policies that have limited many families to one child since 1979, a cultural preference for boys and the widespread, if illegal, practice of sex-selective abortion have contributed to a gender imbalance that hovers around 117 boys born for every 100 girls.

 

Mr. Xie wrote that he was approaching the problem from a purely economic point of view.

 

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.

 

“I don’t deny the fact of 30 million guanggun, but I deny that this must lead to severe social problems,” he wrote.

 

A shortage raises the price of goods, in this case, women, he explained. Rich men can afford them, but poor men are priced out. This can be solved by having two men share the same woman.

 

“With so many guanggun, women are in short supply and their value increases,” he wrote. “But that doesn’t mean the market can’t be adjusted. 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.”

 

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: The Internet has sites posing the question, especially for people born after 1990, among whom the gender gap is especially large.

 

Much of the online response to Mr. Xie’s proposal has been outrage.

 

“Is this a human being speaking?” a user with the handle dihuihui wrote on Weibo.

 

“Trash-talking professor, many single guys want to ask, ‘Where’s your wife?’ ” a user who identified as Shanyu jinxiang1887003537 wrote.

 

Attempts to contact Mr. Xie on Monday were unsuccessful.

 

On Sunday, he published an indignant rebuttal on one of his blogs, accusing his critics of being driven by empty notions of traditional morality that are impractical and selfish, even hypocritical.

 

“Because I promoted the idea that we should allow poor men to marry the same woman to solve the problem of 30 million guanggun, I’ve been endlessly abused,” he wrote. “People have even telephoned my university to harass me. These people have groundlessly accused me of promoting immoral and unethical ideas.