effect of change in the sex ratio is more significant in the decades thereafter, with 18.2 percent of men remaining single in 2050 under current conditions, which would have been nearly 9 percentage points lower if the sex ratio had been successfully contained at 1.09 in 2006 (Table 7).

Men with less education will face even more daunting challenges in the marriage market (Figure 3): over 10 percent of men with less than primary school education aged 30+ in 2030 are projected never to marry, and this figure increases to almost half in 2050 (assuming that these men are last in line when it comes to choosing a mate, as discussed above). The core result is highly robust as discussed below, finding that substantial proportions of men in China will fail to marry at very high rates during the next several decades as the cohorts born during the One Child Policy reach marriage age.

# **4.3  Province-level Results**

At the provincial level, we present the results of simulations for the open-ended age group 30+ for the year 2030. In interpreting these results, we emphasize again that 78 percent of the men aged 30+ were born in more gender-balanced cohorts and faced little if any marriage squeeze. Due to limited data on sub-national geographies, it is difficult to simulate the marriage market for closed age-groups. Our focus here is therefore not on the _actual proportions_ of men projected to remain single, but on their _geographic distribution_ .

Figure 4 maps the projected proportion of unmarried men aged 30+ in 2030 in each prefecture by quintile.<sup>22</sup> While the proportions of ever-married in the coastal region will remain close to those observed today, many more men are predicted to remain single in the areas with dark shading, primarily in the less affluent inland and western provinces.

Poor provinces are hit hardest by the marriage squeeze (Table 8). Provinces in the lowest quintile of income per capita are projected in 2030 to have unmarried shares among men aged 30+ that are 50% higher than in the wealthiest provinces. A mother in Shaanxi province, ranked 20th out of China's 31 provinces based on 2006 GDP per capita, explains that “in our village, when a boy is older than 24, 25, it is a shame on him for not marrying.” This comment is suggestive of widespread attitudes in rural areas throughout China. Incidents of bride flight in Shaanxi are already becoming widespread. In one widely reported scandal, 11 families in one village were reportedly scammed for approximately $4,800 each by a group of brides who fled after receiving cash bride-prices from families desperate to marry off their sons (Fong 2009).

Poorer provinces provide a “demographic subsidy” to richer ones, through two routes. The first is the flow of female marriage migration within central and coastal China, from the poorer to the more developed parts (Figure 2). By contrast, little female marriage migration takes place from the Western provinces, which have larger ethnic minority populations. Indeed, these

> 22 The underlying simulation technique is unchanged, but tabulations of population by sex by educational level by age are not published for geographical levels smaller than national. To more accurately calculate share never married for closed age groups in geographical areas smaller than the province would require such a tabulation, or a larger sample of the China 2000 Census microdata from which we could create our own estimates.

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