Very few first marriages occur after age 30; we therefore prefer to refer to the share never married above age 30 or between 30-39, since this represent a realistic picture of the percent of years spent single in the adult male population. In the near term, this reflects proportions remaining single for life, as long as marriage rates above age 30 remain at their present very low levels.

Our findings indicate that China’s looming problems in the marriage market, and the failure of men to marry, will be exacerbated by the unequal distribution of marriage outcomes by male ‘quality’. It will be the men with the least access to financial security ─ through access to jobs, social assistance, and social insurance ─ that will also be faced with the prospect of having no familial support network. Moreover, these men will tend to cluster in the rural areas of a few provinces, creating the possibility of social instability. Our results suggest that China’s current social assistance and social insurance framework needs a radical overhaul if it is to respond adequately to projected needs. Given that China’s population is very young today but projected to age rapidly, revenue set-asides to capture economic surplus in the near future are more appealing than pay-as-you-go options.

The paper is laid out as follows. In the next section, we examine historical patterns in marriage in China. In section 3, we describe China’s current social assistance and social insurance programs. In section 4, we present the results of our macro-simulation of China’s marriage market. In section 5, we conclude with a discussion of the policy implications of our findings, and the need for China to drastically revise its method of providing and funding social assistance and insurance in both urban and rural areas.

# **2   Marital Prospects and Status in China**

In China, men of higher status enjoy significantly higher rates of marriage. The closest proxy to social standing or economic status that is available in the census is education. As shown in Table 1, over 98% of college graduates successfully marry by age 35 whereas the proportion is under 90% for men with less than a primary education. In contrast, women enjoy nearly universal marriage – across all education groupings and across all birth cohorts. The table also reflects an improvement in the marriage prospects for men. After highly male-skewed cohorts born during the civil wars and Japanese invasion of the 1930s, sex ratios at birth became less skewed. During the 1950s and early 1960s, the communal provision of livelihood reduced parents’ need to channel resources towards sons rather than daughters, so sex ratios at birth were more normal except for a small rise during the Great Leap Forward Famine. However, across all three demographically divergent samples, the centrality of completed education in predicting marital status is clear.<sup>8</sup> With the current rise in sex ratios at birth, the sex ratio of the marriage market will increase precipitously (as shown in Figure 1) – and consequently, the share of men who fail to marry will do the same. Regardless of how China’s sex ratio changes in the immediate future, there will be absolutely no effect on the marriage market until after 2025, as the men and women already born reach maturity and pass through the marriage market. Appreciable differences in

> 8 The birth cohort of the Great Leap Forward has recently been found to have lower lifetime probability of marriage, controlling for educational attainment, which the authors attribute to the reduced availability of spouses and the reduced health or attractiveness of the cohort (Brandt et al. 2009; Almond et al. 2007).

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