Divorced, in his 40s and fearing a solitary future, Zhou Xinsen went online like thousands of other Chinese men to find an affordable and fast solution to bachelordom — a Vietnamese bride.
He was among millions of his gender struggling on the sidelines of China’s ultracompetitive marriage market, where a decades-long one-child policy and sex-selective abortions of daughters have resulted in a massive gender gap.
“It’s very hard for people my age to find a Chinese wife,” 41-year-old Zhou said.
Single men, many in remote rural villages, are known as “bare branches,” a pejorative term in a country where pressure to marry and extend the family tree is sharp.
Running out of time, Zhou forked out nearly US$20,000 to find his second wife, Vietnamese and aged 26, whom he relocated to Jiangsu Province.
“For people my age, time is bought with money,” Zhou said.
Having fixed his romantic quandary, Zhou then opened his own matchmaking business, taking a small slice from China’s multimillion-dollar annual trade in foreign brides.
He charges about 120,000 yuan (US$17,395) to connect Chinese men with Vietnamese brides via his Web site, which shows photographs of women aged 20 to 35 “waiting to be married.”
The business is “profitable,” Zhou said, remaining coy on the amount of money he has made.
A portion of the money from matches is meant to be funneled back to families in poor Mekong Delta countries.
While many unions flourish, others quickly lurch into crisis, with women disappointed at swapping village poverty in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar for life in rural China.
China’s single men are often older, divorced, disabled or too poor to pay the traditional “bride price” — a dowry in gifts or cash — for a Chinese wife.
Those costs rose to between US$22,000 and US$29,000 in parts of the country last year, official media reported.
Problems start when the brides feel duped about what they are getting into, said Zhou, who sends a monthly remittance of US$175 to his wife’s family as a show of goodwill.
“This is nothing to us, but for them it’s lifesaving,” he adds.
Chinese men face a barrage of economic, psychological and cultural pressures to find a wife, said Jiang Quanbao (姜全保), a professor at Xian Jiaotong University’s Institute for Population and Development Studies.
“Marriage is not only a personal matter, it concerns an entire family ... especially the parents,” Jiang said.
As women — especially in the cities — push back marriage while they work, study and enjoy single life, China’s villages are fast losing their female populations.
Sons left unmarried become an issue of family “face” in tight village communities, Jiang said.
That crushing social expectation has driven a grim trade in brides.
Increasing numbers of women — and teenage girls — from neighboring countries are kidnapped, tricked or forced into marriage, several rescue groups across the Mekong told reporters.
“Buying a woman who has been kidnapped becomes a kind of hopeless choice,” Jiang said.
Last year Chinese police rescued women sold into forced marriages in China’s Henan, Anhui, Shandong and Jiangsu provinces as the buy-a-bride trade billowed out to the eastern provinces.
Under Chinese law, the abduction and trafficking of women or children is punishable by five to 10 years in jail, but critics said that the law needs updating as the trade surges.
“It’s extremely profitable and there’s no incentive at all for traffickers to stop,” said Mimi Vu of the Vietnam-based Pacific Links Foundation, which works to prevent human trafficking. “The demand is there and the money, the profit is there to be made.”
Beijing switched from a one-child to a two-child policy in 2016, but experts said that it could take decades to see a rise in the number of women of marriage age.
That means that the bride trade is unlikely to dissipate anytime soon.
Zhou said he was performing “a public service” in a country where there are 33 million fewer women than men.
However, the outcomes for Chinese men are often far from perfect, with money warping motives throughout the system. Cautionary tales — of dodgy brokers, trafficked women and brides pocketing money, then fleeing — abound on Chinese social media as the market widens.
“It is an industry, and many of them [marriages] are fraudulent,” one Weibo user wrote. “It’s time the government takes care of this business.”
A man in Hubei Province told official media that he paid a broker US$8,700 to meet a young Vietnamese woman who left him after three months, later aborting their baby as she went on the lookout for another husband.
“Now I have neither a wife nor the money,” he told the Chutian Metropolis Daily. “I’m a laughing stock in the village.”
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