Twenty years ago there was a real concern among China watchers that the much greater number of boys being born vs. the number of girls, caused by aborting far more girls in response to the one-child policy, there was the concern that these cohorts of unattached young males would lead to wars as the government tried to channel and reduce their testosterone-y influence on Chinese society.
That risk seems to have passed as the cohorts have aged and in fact the war risk now seems to spring from the realization by the Communist Party that they are at a "now-or-never" moment to extend Chinese hegemony before the population decline, pretty much locked in and almost impossible to reverse, results in the realization of the underlying fear that propels development economic—that a population will get old before it gets rich.
With that longer than usual introduction here's the Asia Times, March 8:
Migrant men’s inability to find wives is raising state and public concerns about social order and stability
For the past decade or so, the Western media has been critical of the Chinese state, the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party. This criticism has been made in the context of a small number of issues, such as human rights in Xinjiang, political dissent in Hong Kong and Western citizens detained in China.
But the Western media tells us very little about how ordinary people in most parts of China live and think and how Chinese government policies impact on their everyday, even intimate lives.
The experience of intimacy among China’s rural migrant workers (nongmingong), for example, reveals how socioeconomic inequality in contemporary China impacts the love lives of underprivileged individuals and how emotional loneliness affects their sense of identity and self-worth.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics defines nongmingong, as someone “who still holds a rural hukou [residential registration permit] but who, for the past six months, has either engaged in non-agricultural work or has left home to seek non-agricultural work elsewhere.”
Nongmingong have become ubiquitous in Chinese cities, especially since the economic reforms of the 1980s. In 2016, China’s internal migrants numbered around 278 million and in 2020 that number reached 286 million.
By the first decade of the twenty-first century, about half of the migrant population were young people born in the 1980s and 1990s. These younger workers are usually referred to as the “new generation of rural migrants”, in contrast to first-generation workers who sought urban employment in the 1980s and 1990s and who are now aged in their 50s and 60s.
While the majority of first-generation rural migrants were married before migrating, more than half of those in the later cohorts are still single. Many of these younger workers are the children of first-generation migrants and have little or no experience in farming.
Sociologists of emotion are concerned with the impact of class inequality on the emotional well-being of individuals. Studies have found that people who occupy different positions in the socioeconomic hierarchy have different emotional experiences and that those in low socioeconomic positions tend to experience more emotional hardship.
It is also understood that access to intimacy and rituals of romantic consumption is stratified along class division.
How does socioeconomic inequality in contemporary China impact on the love lives of underprivileged individuals? And how does emotional loneliness affect their sense of identity and self-worth?
Interviews with around 50 Foxconn workers and four years of longitudinal ethnographic interactions conducted for fieldwork between 2015 and 2018 reveal much about the lives and experiences of rural migrant factory workers in Shenzhen and Dongguan.
Some young rural migrants steal moments of intimacy between factory shifts, incurring outrage from some and sympathy from others. Others, when visiting their village homes, emerge empty-handed from blind dates in which the size of the bride’s wealth is assessed more assiduously than conjugal compatibility.
Some rush into weddings that are sometimes followed by an equally quick divorce. While most young rural migrant men and women wait for conjugal happiness, some make sexual choices that the state deems immoral and transgressive....
....MUCH MORE
