China’s one-child policy had exerted unexpected forces on marriage. By promoting the use of condoms on an unprecedented scale, it delinked sex from reproduction and spurred a mini sexual revolution. But it also heightened competition: When sonogram technology spread in China in the 1980s, couples aborted female fetuses in order to wait for a boy. As a result, China has twenty-four million men who will be of marrying age by 2020 but unable to find a spouse—“bare branches” on the family tree, as they’re known in Chinese. Women were barraged with warnings in the Chinese press that if they were
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