More about the consequences of China's one-child policy...

Kenneth Anderson, libertarian and lapsed Mormon, notes:

'[I]n a world with scarcity of women - especially in a world of scarcity of females and yet a cultural preference for male births - the result would be increased treatment of women as property. More valuable property, yes, but increasingly as property precisely as the perception of its value increased....

'The intrinsic inequality is about the mateless men, deprived of the opportunity to even have a chance to marry and have families and children. I don't recall offhand the numbers, but it only takes a quite small percentage of men with three or four wives to create something approaching the imbalances of regions of China or India. It is in a certain sense an inequality far worse than mere economic inequality - although almost always deeply embedded and intertwined with it.

'The point is not that the mateless men have a right to have a wife, but instead they ought, in an egalitarian society, to have a right to be able to compete for one in the marriage market. Equality of opportunity, not necessarily equality of result. And of course it goes the other way around; a society in which large numbers of women were deprived of the ability even to seek a mate would be equally unattractive.'

The law of unintended consequences cannot be repealed, even by communists in the Middle Kingdom. A shortage of marriageable women in the world's most populous country combined with 30 million young men with little hope of settling in China with a wife and family means trouble. These Chinese men might do any of the following:
(1) Emigrate in huge numbers.
(2) Overthrow their government.
(3) Invade another country, perhaps two or three.
(4) Push for a true test-tube baby program.
(5) Crowd the monasteries in China and abroad.

Only one of these actions is good, and we can be sure that 30 million virile men in a country that is rapidly changing as I write will not be content with their lot. The scary part is that China has huge numbers of expendible men, organizational genius, and passionate nationalism.