China's Crawling One-Child Catastrophe

For all the worry still expressed about “Little Emperors”—over-entitled singleton boys (One Child‘s cover is of a young boy perched in a throne-like chair)—the reality, now that they have become adults, seems to be as much about young men crushed by responsibilities. None of these is greater than finding the family member who in China has always done the heavy lifting in elder care: the daughter-in-law. Sex-selective abortions, rigorous birth control among those lucky enough to win the son-first-time-around lottery, foreign adoptions, hidden (and thus housing- and education-deprived) daughters, all mean that China’s missing hundreds of millions are disproportionately female. Hence the anxiety and heightened competition for wives, the bachelor villages in the countryside, child-bride trafficking, and, perhaps, even (perhaps) the macho military posturing.