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The shortage of women caused by China's one-child policy, combined with the country's economic boom over the last two decades have made marriage a grim prospect for poor men in rural regions. These two factors have bumped up the "bride price" to hundreds of thousands of yuan, sometimes even millions, obscene amounts that most men can't hope of raising without taking a bank loan.
BBC reports that perhaps the best explanation for the ever-increasing bride price is the gender inequality in China. During the days of the one-child policy, the preference for males strong enough to work and later look after their elderly parents led to a huge increase in sex-selective abortion and even infanticide of female babies.
As a result, Harvard researchers claim that today there are 118 men for every 100 women in China, and the proportion is actually worse in poor rural regions.
"They're called 'bare branches, guys who are very poor, aren't educated, they don't have a wife or children, so they're like a tree without leaves. There are villages across China which are full of men like this," Manya Koetse, a local editor told the BBC.
"They have double trouble actually. Women leave these villages to move to bigger cities to find a man who can offer them more than the guys in the village. And the few women who remain might have 20 men each who want to marry them, so they can ask for a high bride price."
Villages are so poor that no woman wants to marry men from there. In some of the poorest villages in China, men are left with no option but to buy brides from Vietnam, because there are no local women left, or the competition for the few girls still living there is so high that they could never pay the bride price demanded by their families.
The bride price is very serious business in China, and not being able to foot the bill often times has dire consequences. Last year, a shocking story made the rounds on Chinese social media.
A man wanted to marry his pregnant girlfriend, but when he wasn't able to pay the bride price demanded by her family, the father put an end to any talk of a prospective wedding and asked the woman to get an abortion.
