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The one-child policy put China in a disastrous 'marriage squeeze'

Chinese wedding
Jack Loh / flickr

On Thursday, China announced that it will be expanding it's "one child policy" into a "two child policy," meaning that couples can now have two kids without fear of being fined by the government. 

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The policy had been in effect since 1980. The idea was to curb the birth rate in the world's most populous country. 

It did so, but at a price of what demographers call a "marriage squeeze." Between the one-child policy and China's hunger for sons over daughters, the birthrates of boys greatly outpaced that of girls — leading to a lack of potential brides in successive generations.

Though determining the gender of fetuses was outlawed in the 1980s, it still happens at a large, though underground, scale — giving the impression that many of the 336 million abortions that have reportedly been performed since 1971 were gender-related.

According to a 2013 BBC report, there are 20 million more men in China then there are women, and more than 33% of men aged 25 to 29 in China are unmarried, while about 20% of women are unwed. 

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If births rates were normal, China would have 66 million more girls born in 2010, the Economist reports. By the Economist's projections — which are based on one-child policy — by 2050 there would be an estimated 186 single men looking to marry for every 100 single women.

The so-called bachelor problem has gotten so extreme that one economist has called for polyandry — the practice of one woman marrying multiple men. 

As unsavory as it a sounds, a potential outcome of the "two child policy" is that Chinese parents will be more open to having daughters, so the next generation doesn't hit another marriage squeeze. 

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