Coyote Blog

14 Comments

1. morganovich:

   this is an especially big deal in china where you are not really considered an adult until you are married and start your own family.

   i see huge business opportunities in mail order brides TO china.

   also likely brothels.

   June 21, 2011, 10:05 am

2. caseyboy:

   At least here in the good old US we are equal opportunity aborters. Very erudite don't you think? Little boys, little girls, no matter.

   June 21, 2011, 10:59 am

3. Ted Rado:

   Morganovich:

   What an opportunity for an enterprising business man! Let's open a string of "Bunny Ranches" all over China. We could get rich! Also, it would cure unemployment among young women. Think of the wonderful economic benefits of that!

   June 21, 2011, 12:25 pm

4. Joseph Hertzlinger:

   These are, of course, 100 million Private Ryans. There's no way they will risk their precious little lives.

   June 21, 2011, 1:52 pm

5. Roy:

   No one has mentioned the two elephants.

   1) What will neighboring India and China do when the local imbalance of now grown up people is significantly higher than in the neighbor country? The concept of war bride takes on a different meaning.

   2) AIDS.

   June 21, 2011, 3:15 pm

6. perlhaqr:

   Seems like you could solve this one with advertising, if dowries really are going astronomical: just make that fact widely known and parents will start having girls again.

   June 21, 2011, 4:16 pm

7. Foxfier:

   When my ship hit Hong Kong in '05 or '06, all the girls in the "dancing bars" were from the PI. (They stuck me on the "bar" route for shore patrol because, being female, I'd make sure the guy I was stuck with didn't get in trouble himself.)

   I wouldn't be at all surprised of the Middle East finds themselves rapidly outbid on their maids....

   June 21, 2011, 7:10 pm

8. Gil:

   If China is truly the greatest economic powerhouse then getting women to flock to these bachelors should be fairly easy. There are probably huge amount of Asian women of Chinese descent throughout the world who would migrate if the price was right. But of course many of these men are probably poor workers. To think if there was no one child policy and there was indeed famiine and dire poverty in some sectors then the population would be probably be roughly the same but the male-female ratio would be about equal.

   On the other hand, in the West you're not really seen as an adult until you have had sex. I don't know if that's worse. The way men of yesteryears seemed getting married with children was easy - you just lots of beer and possibly a paper bag.

   June 21, 2011, 10:10 pm

9. el coronado:

   y'know, this is all very reminiscent of japan in the late '80's. they were buying up trophy properties (rock center, pebble peach) at ungodly prices....american businesses hustled to learn the doctrines of dr. deming and the nuts-n-bolts of 'just in time' inventory and the meaning of the word 'kaizen'.....michael crichton wrote scary novels suggesting that maybe japan running the world wasn't such a good idea, but we were (evidently) powerless to stop it.....oracle's larry ellison roamed around his japan-style mansion in a kimono with lots of samurai armor in all the various wall niches....and it all turned out to be a phantom nonsense BS idea. never mind their export prowess and awesome savings rate, it turned out that ALL of japan's economic might apparently came from the rising cost of land in tokyo. sleazy by-the-hour motel owners found their pathetic strip of land was worth tens of millions, and borrowed against it to buy stocks. so did all the mrs. watanabes, and the giant industrial cartels. at its peak, the land in metro tokyo was supposedly worth more than all the land in the USA, or some such.

   then - surprise! - the price of tokyo land collapsed, and it all came tumbling down. sound familiar?

   now we have china. awakening dragon. incredible work ethic/capacity. 50% savings rate. everybody learning english and getting electrical engineering degrees - just like japan in the '80's. and while i'll admit it's gotten them enormous national reserves and a new, well-equipped (with stolen designs, BTW) army, they have this little problem: like japan, it's all based on one thing: exports. but now the export market's slowing down. lots of unemployed migrant workers rioting in china these days. not to mention dozens of 'ghost cities', built for 1MM+ populations, that stand deserted. the world's largest mall, in shanghai i believe, 10 times the size of the mall of America - with an occupancy rate of about 2%. *incredible** industrial pollution problems from the coal plants/chem manufacturers. etc. massive drought in progress, exacerbated by the "amazing" 3 gorges dam, which will almost certainly collapse in 20 years or less.

   and as coyote points out, they've engineered a situation that's gonna result in 100,000,000 young men unable to find wives/women.

   i submit that the wise, canny chinese have created the seeds of their own destruction, just like the wise, canny japanese did. with one difference: 100 million very bright, highly ambitious 'don't have a chance in hell of finding a woman' young men are gonna kill a LOT of people. it's probably going to start happening REAL soon, too. i wonder if that's why so many rich chinese folks are hustling off to live in vancouver??

   June 22, 2011, 2:13 am

10. Noumenon:

    I think those men will just constitute a huge and innovation-plentiful market for porn and sex toys. Make love, not war.

    June 22, 2011, 5:27 am

11. Bram:

    Joseph Hertzlinger:
    Who is they? The communist leadership would toss 50 million excess men into a meat-grinder of a war without a second thought. Long before selective abortion, Mao sent a million men to die under American guns and artilery in Korea.

    The average peasant parents wouldn't say boo - you think the Chinese authorities would tolerate dissent during a war?

    June 22, 2011, 5:40 am

12. Bertha Minerva:

    Isn't there a surplus of women in Russia, right next door?

    June 22, 2011, 1:08 pm

13. Don:

    Bertha, you hit the nail on the head. I think this is a much bigger problem for the Russians than anybody else. The guy's at the top got plenty of girls, it's the man on the street that doesn't, and when they figure out that they can go to Russia and pick up a few, well the Russian men likely won't take kindly to the competition.

    June 22, 2011, 10:14 pm

14. pst314:

    Mail order brides? Heck, considering China's notorious involvement in piracy, I wouldn't be surprised to see a massive industry in kidnapping women.

    June 23, 2011, 6:55 pm