Gender imbalance raises other issues

Re “A bachelor nation,” Opinion, Oct. 21

Joshua Kurlantzick’s discussion of the “dangerous threat to China’s development” begins with the story of the men who show up for construction work, only to be turned away. Later, they congregate in a park and get drunk.

There are too many of these men in China, Kurlantzick warns, and they are at risk of becoming “a permanent angry underclass capable of being dangerously exploited.”

So the problem is unemployment, right? Wrong. The problem, Kurlantzick says, is that these men are bachelors. What they really need are wives.

I read the relevant research on crime and marital status, and I found that the kinds of claims made by Kurlantzick are misleading.

Take, for example, the supposedly higher rates of violence among young single men than married men -- often, those statistics include only violence against other men. Domestic violence doesn’t count.

The disproportionate number of men in China, and the reasons for the imbalance, are important issues. Let’s address them with something more serious than singlism and bachelor bashing.

Bella DePaulo

Summerland

The writer, a visiting professor of psychology at UC Santa Barbara, is the author of “Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After” (St. Martin’s Press).

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We as a world desperately need full and reasoned discussion of the issues that Kurlantzick raises. However, it worries me when a visiting scholar at an important institution fails to mention aspects of an important discussion that seem obvious to an ordinary citizen.

Some variables omitted:

* The role of overpopulation in the discussion (the elephant in the room).

* The effects of gender imbalance on population growth.

* The limited applicability of lessons from the 19th century when our population was, what, one-sixth of today’s?

* The need for larger time-scales when assessing policies of this kind (apropos his use of the term “permanent underclass”).

Peter Yates

Culver City

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One way the Chinese can lessen the effect of their growing gender imbalance would be to foster increased tolerance for gay people.

An evolution of personal attitudes and government policies toward acceptance would not only alleviate pressure for single men to marry and reproduce, it is also a just cause and would bring China closer toward international norms in recognizing the innate dignity of all human beings.

David Cheung

Mountain View, Calif.