The very high sex ratio in rural China: Impact on the psychosocial wellbeing of unmarried men

► In China a combination of high male to female sex ratios at birth and rural-urban migration has led to villages depleted of young women. ► In the villages numbers of unmarried men over-30 exceed unmarried women by nearly twenty to one. ► Most unmarried men were poor, with limited education, and blamed their failure to marry on poverty and shortage of local women. ► Most unmarried men felt profound failure, describing themselves variously as hopeless, depressed, angry and lonely.