Why China needs to find a place in society for its growing number of unmarried men
Kitty Parkes considers the challenge of designing inclusive space that responds to society's changing face
China is facing a severe gender imbalance, with the number of single men set to exceed the entire population of Australia in five years' time, a Fujian government statistician has calculated.
A distorted sex ratio of this magnitude - with at least an extra 9.5 million men aged 20 to 29 - is unknown in China and extraordinary anywhere in history. The American frontier, the Wild West, was a rare example of a society with huge numbers of excess men, and it was the gender imbalance that made the west so wild.
It will take China - with its population of over 1.3 billion, a fifth of humanity - into uncharted territory, leaving China's bachelors, who are called guanggun (bare branches or men who will not add to the family tree), potentially disconnected from society. And the ripple effects are many.
One consequence of so many unmarried men could be a rise in conflict and hostility.
What we build and how we communicate with each other speaks volumes about us as a society and culture
A Columbia University study associates large numbers of young single men with abnormal levels of crime and violence, finding that from 1988-2004, a one-point rise in the sex ratio in China raised rates of violent crime and theft by six to seven points. What impact will this have on our cities? Is there a role that architecture and technology can play in creating places to equalise the vast gender gap?