Asia Tomorrow, Gray and Male
Mini Teaser: Barring the contingency of utter catastrophe, we can already estimate, often in surprising detail, what lies in store for East Asia in demographic terms over the next fifteen to twenty years.
Unless bachelorhood suddenly becomes much more socially acceptable in
East Asia, both China and South Korea are poised to experience an
increasingly intense, and perhaps desperate, competition among young
men for their country's limited supply of brides. What forms will
this competition take, and how will these societies be affected by
it? In South Korea, a minister of health and welfare "quoted a
scholar saying that if the sex imbalance ratio exceeded 120 males to
100 females, riots may take place over the shortage of females for
marriage." (His pronouncement, one may note, was offered before the
country's statistical authori