Economist Says Polyandry for Low-Income Chinese Men to Share Wives can Solve China’s Gender Imbalance

Low-Income Chinese Men should Share Wives to Deal with Gender Gap

Economist Says Polyandry can Solve China’s Gender Imbalance

People's Daily Online  

October 29, 2015

Chinese economist and professor Xie Zuoshi has suggested that if legalized, polyandry would be a perfect solution to solve the 30 million single men’s sexual needs, which he believed could be the most important factor in igniting social unrest.

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China announced today the end of its one-child policy, which has been in effect for the last 35 years. Just days earlier, the nation had an uproar over an economist's proposal for coping with the enormous gender imbalance that the policy has helped to create.

According to South China Morning Post, Xie Zuoshi, an economics professor at the Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics has suggested that China should resort to normalizing polyandry, the practice of allowing women to have more than one husband, in order to solve the gender imbalance in the country.

He said that sharing wives was the most logical solution to the nation’s uneven sex ratio. The economist said that the only other option is for Chinese men to marry partners from abroad.

“I am not joking. Any reasonable person applying critical thinking will come to the same conclusion. We can not deprive those men of wives just to be moral,” Xie said.

An official cartoon in the People's Daily announcing China's new two-child policy. Will the picture make room for two or more husbands?

For decades, China has been raising a lot more more boys than girls. Last year the birth ratio was 116 to 100. Traditional Chinese culture values sons over daughters, and the one-child policy, with its heavy sanctions, gave most parents just one chance. Early sex testing enables selective abortion of female fetuses (illegal but common), and many girl babies were put in orphanages to be adopted overseas. Or they quietly died at birth, with no inquiries as to how.

Chinese authorities estimate that by 2020, there will be 33.8 million excess males unable to find wives. By 2050 these unwilling bachelors — guang gun, "bare branches" — may amount to at least 20% of all Chinese men.

Throughout history and around the world, when a society has a large pool of excess males who will never find mates, they find family in criminal gangs and freelance armies. To preempt this, governments have often recruited them into real armies and gone to war to keep them occupied. US intelligence analysts worry about this.

Western polyfolks have long suggested that in China, polyandry — one wife marrying two or more husbands — is likely to arise here and there and ease the situation slightly. It is already said to happening informally a bit.

Earlier this week, Chinese authorities officially allowed the idea onto the table for public debate.

Economist Xie Zuoshi suggested that two or more men should be allowed to marry a woman jointly, with full legal rights and privileges. The official People's Daily (circulation about 300 million in all editions) reported his ideas, indicating government approval for the question to go public. Was it a trial balloon?

“It is a reality that we have so many more men than women.” Xie said. “Serious social problems, such as rape and assaults, will happen if men cannot find wives. But it doesn’t have to be like that if they are given choices.”

Citing the law of supply and demand, Xie, who is 50 and married, said more bachelors means women would be in higher demand and thus rise in value. Men with high incomes would select wives first and low-income men could share wives.

Xie has strongly called on the Chinese government to abandon laws that are in favor of monogamy in marriages and open up the institution to polyandry.

Polyandry has been practiced in China and other countries, particularly in impoverished areas, as a way to pool resources and avoid the breakup of property.

Xie’s proposal was not well received online with some questioning his moral stand for political correctness. Yet Xie said he received lots of supports.

He added: “That’s not just my weird idea. In the remote, poor places, brothers already marry the same woman, and they have a full and happy life.” He may have in mind China's Mosuo.

His supporters said they agreed with Xie even though some criticised him because it was common in rural areas before 1949 to have a bachelor living with a couple to share the wife and economic burden of the family.

People supported him told an interesting story. During the nineties of last century, in the remote villages, the young men went out to work during the whole year and only commuted back home on weekends as well as Chinese holidays and festivals. The villages' married men took the initiative to share their wifes on regular basis with those young unwed men when they came back home to live with their families.

Xie also encouraged Chinese authorities to perform legal formality for married women to have extramarital affairs with bachelors.

In China, the percentage of married women who have had affairs surged from 9% in 2000 to 21.5% in 2010. This reflects an ongoing societal shift in which women are enjoying more personal freedom and social and financial equality. It also reflects their greater bargaining power in the sexual arena caused by a worsening shortage of marriageable women due to the impact of the one-child policy combined with the traditional preference for male offspring.

Interestingly, women's extramarital affairs have unexpected limited effects on their family lives. The survery results show that women who have had extramarital sex enjoy a richer and higher quality sex life within their marriage. Chinese women are increasingly better at dealing with this kind of complex relatioships. More than half of married women said they are able to balance a life with a spouse and a lover. About a fifth reported that affairs did have some impact on their marriages but they had no intention of leaving their spouses.

Broad-based surveys in China revealed noticeable relaxing of men's attitudes toward female partners' extramarital affairs. Men have changed in their attitude toward their female spouses expressing increased tolerance for their wives to have sexual relationships outside the marital bounds.