The article makes it sound as if this is a modern phenomenon and as if it is exclusive to China. This pressure for women to get married has always existed everywhere. The burden has somewhat alleviated recently in Europe (maybe in other developed countries too), but it is certainly there for all the developing countries.
Yes. And while the cultural aspects are worth understanding, neither they nor the women are the real story in China. As you note, there have always been and will always be people of both sexes who are single through choice or temperament. But in China, the real story is leftover men. When you have such an enormous sex imbalance at birth for as long as China has, no amount of natural excess male mortality is ever going to even that out. So when you take the Chinese population, segregate it by broad age groups, subtract out those who are single by choice and pair off the rest, you're left with tens of millions of young and middle-aged single men.
History's solution for this, almost invariably, is both simple and guaranteed effective. The leftover men are called an army, and they either die in combat or conquer foreign lands, where they can take -- by force, usually -- the stock of available women after killing the menfolk in battle. In either case, the imbalance is corrected.
That's the real "leftover" story in China: if those men aren't to be an army, then what are they to be?
> Or they conquer their own land, i.e. a revolution.
Maybe, but that doesn't solve the problem. They're still single and would rather not be. Something else still has to give. A very long civil war might do it, if that's what you're suggesting.
