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SCMP Reporter

Get your glad rags on, ladies. The guys are back. Now this is an unexpected bonus for the female population of Hong Kong, so you'd better take advantage while you can.

 You see, Hong Kong has traditionally had a small surplus of men. But this surplus has been falling steadily, and was expected to die out completely by the end of this decade.

 There were more than 100,000 spare men at the beginning of the 1990s. This fell to 93,000 in 1992, and the numbers kept dropping, reaching a low of 7,000 in 1996.

 Well, I do not know what happened in Hong Kong in 1997 (other than you-know-what) but loads of single men charged in, reversing the trend. And do not worry, they are not all pimply young guys in PLA uniforms. Census-takers do not include non-Hong Kong garrisons.

 No, the new arrivals are believed to be men here on business, both from the mainland and the rest of the world.

 Recent figures, from the end of last year, show Hong Kong has 3,327,000 men and 3,290,000 women - a 37,000-person oversupply of males. (I expect Madonna to immediately relocate to Hong Kong upon receipt of this news.)  It is worth recognising how rare this phenomenon is. The vast majority of societies on this planet of ours have a significant surplus of women.

 This is how it works. About 51 per cent of babies born are male, so boys outnumber girls through childhood and into early adulthood. But men have a tendency to organise stupid and dangerous pastimes such as wars, gang fights, beer-drinking contests and other displays of machismo (Latin for 'mashed-potato-brains'). So the dumb ones die and, at the age of 25, the number of women overtakes the number of men. That imbalance stays in place from then on, growing gradually wider.

 Thus the total number of women in any country at any time should be larger than the amount of men. The United States (population 270 million), for example, has six million more women than men. In Hong Kong, the opposite is true. The amount of men is larger than women for all age groups until the age of 65, when they become equal. After that age, sorry girls, some of you have to slow down in your love lives.

 For the over-85s dating scene, which I understand is highly active in Hong Kong, there are 34,000 women to 14,000 men, and the girls really have to wind it down (or opt for toy boys).

 But there is more bad news for women. The extra-men blip is expected to be temporary. Projections by the international data section of the US Bureau of the Census suggest Hong Kong will have a population of 7.43 million by the year 2005, and the sex balance will have come into line with the rest of the world. That means there will be 225,000 more women here than men.

 So what is the single Hong Kong girl going to do in 2005 for a bit of romance?  Fear not. Just come round to my place. (If my wife is reading this, that is a joke. If she isn't, it isn't.) No, seriously, all you have to do is head across the border. By that year, the mainland is projected to have 668,976,000 men and only 627,234,000 women - in other words, an excess of 41 million men. (At this point, Madonna drowns in her own drool.)  On April 3 this year, the total population of the world was 5,906,698,484, according to the International Programs Centre in the US. Thus today's single woman of cosmopolitan tastes has three billion partners to choose from. I mentioned this to one unmarried Hong Kong woman, and she complained: 'But half of those are Americans. My foo-mo [parents] would go mad if I married an American.'  Here is another popular misconception. Half the world is not American. It only feels that way, because people from the US are so fat.

 If you took all the people in the world and shrunk them down to a single village of 100 people, the register would read like this.

 The biggest group would be Asians. There would be 57 Asians, of which 20 would be from the mainland, 15 would be from India, three and a half would be from Indonesia, and the other 18 or so from other countries on this half of the planet.

 There would be only four people from the US. In fact, the entire New World, including all the countries of North and South America, would add up to 14 people. If all the Europeans stood in a group, there would be 21 of them. If all the people from Africa camped together, there would be a gang of eight.

 Of these 100 people, 70 would be non-white, and 70 would be non-Christian. This is not a WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) world.

 And Hong Kongers? Well, you know the adage that Hong Kong is a pimple on China's bottom? Since only 0.001 of this 100-strong village would be Hong Konger, a small pustule on the body of one of the 20 Chinese inhabitants would be just about right.

 There. I think that puts us in our place firmly enough. Unfortunately, it also reminds us that Hong Kong will be just fine - until someone from across the border decides he needs a good scratch.



The boys are back!