Sydney (CNN) — In the mid-19th Century, two devastating floods of the Yellow River, and the famine that followed, ravaged northeastern China.
Outlaw bands, known as nien, attracted young men in unprecedented numbers, aggregating into militias that wrought chaos on the troops and infrastructure of the ruling Qing. Although this Nien Rebellion and the larger Taiping rebellion in the South were eventually crushed, they devastated the Chinese economy and contributed to the ending of the Qing dynasty.
According to political scientists Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer, widespread female infanticide during the famine meant that as many as one quarter of young men in the region were “bare branches” — as the Chinese expression goes — unlikely ever to bear fruit. The Nien rebellion, they argued, was propelled by these surplus young men who had so few other prospects.
This story of the Nien Rebellion foreshadows one of the biggest issues that China will face in coming decades: the dramatic excess of young men.
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I once edited a thesis about a related situation – evidently the scarcity of Chinese women has resulted in many men marrying ladies from Thailand and other SE Asian countries, but these ladies often experience social isolation due to language differences, etc. This thesis was about the prevalence of post-natal depression in these groups – yet another serious social problem that can in turn lead to others.