Inside the cardboard box there is an orange hair tie, a packet of Q-tips, lipstick, other cosmetics and a deck of playing cards: all of these items were left behind by Afang, Li Yongshuai’s Vietnamese mail-order bride, when she disappeared last year.
Li, a corn farmer from the village of Feixiang in China’s Hebei province, turns each object over in his hand as though it contains some crucial clue and then methodically replaces it. Finally, he produces a photo of Afang. She looks 19 or 20 and is posing with a hand on one hip against a painted backdrop of a beach.
Some shiny material, resembling glitter, is stuck to the glass picture frame near her head. Asked what it is, Li says it was where she painted over her face with nail polish a few days before she left. He now realises she meant to say she was leaving, and that he should not wait for her. He scraped the nail polish off and still keeps the photo.
Afang was one of dozens of Vietnamese migrant brides who married into villages in the region in the past decade. Partly, they helped to plug a gap in the gender balance created over three decades of China’s one-child policy, which led to a surplus of boys in rural villages. The subsequent shortage of women has driven local bride prices through the roof, Li’s mother says, and so men have begun looking elsewhere for cheaper wives.
In her son’s case, they turned to the village matchmaker, an older immigrant from Vietnam who owned a hair salon nearby and had a thriving business matching local men with Vietnamese girls. That was until November 21 last year, when an event occurred that has left this little corner of China reeling. All the Vietnamese brides in the region, including Afang, said they were going to a party — then promptly vanished. Nothing has been heard from them since. The millions of renminbi in bride price money which the girls, their parents and the matchmaker had received were never seen again.
Police claim they have 28 reports of vanished brides from that single episode, though locals say they know of many more. There were four in Feixiang, dozens in surrounding villages, maybe more than 100 in total. Whatever private regrets Li has, it is the money that wounds him the most. “So much money we paid for her. Rmb150,000 [about £15,400]. She was not cheap, and they had promised us a refund if this happened, which we never got,” he says. “That’s not including all the furniture and the smart TV.”
We are having lunch at his house in Feixiang. Bales of recently harvested corn cobs sprawl across the courtyard of the house, a kerosene heater the only source of warmth in late November. We wear our coats indoors. Feixiang is three hours from Beijing by train but it feels like three decades. The streets outside are unpaved, becoming rivers of mud in the rains. Toilets are outdoors. Li and his family are comparatively well off but the village itself is poor.
His mother stoops over a camp stove boiling water, bringing us platters of steaming mantou buns and cabbage. Guests are treated well in Feixiang: whatever the villagers have they give but life is harsh and they don’t have much. “If you meet a nice girl in Handan [the regional centre, about an hour away], can you introduce us?” his mother asks.
Li, a handsome man with a ready grin from a relatively wealthy family, would normally have no trouble finding a wife. But economics and demographics have intervened. Only a generation ago, China exported black-market mail-order brides to Taiwan and Japan. Now, after two decades of growth, even corn farmers can afford to bring brides in from poorer parts of Asia.
This has become something of a necessity in this part of Hebei for men who want families. Feixiang is desperate for women, a predicament it shares with many parts of rural China. Since 1979, when the government placed strict limits on family size, fearing an environmental calamity if population growth went unchecked, the lack of girl babies has become a serious problem. Violations were punishable by heavy fines, coerced abortions, sterilisation of women, destruction of houses, loss of jobs and the removal of infants from their families.
The lopsided gender balance is mainly a problem in rural China, where preference for boys is strongest and sex selection via sonogram, though banned, was not as strictly regulated as in the city. “All the girls were aborted,” says Li Xinjiang, the father of another local man whose bride ran away. He uses the term zhi, or cured in Chinese. “We couldn’t pay the fines and they used to send people to beat us if we didn’t pay.”
This is not the first time that the unintended consequences of mass social engineering by the Communist party have hit rural China tragically hard. The industrialisation programme known as the Great Leap Forward spawned a famine in the late 1950s that killed 30 million. Today, the results of the one-child policy, combined with pervasive sex selection, are obvious. Starting in the 1990s and 2000s, the number of girls plummeted. China scrapped the one-child policy this October.
According to Chen Wuqing, a specialist in gender studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, men like Li are “just the tip of the wave”. Currently, he says, the ratio of marriage-age men to women nationwide shows no real extremes; 105 men per 100 women is actually remarkably close to the world average. Even the ratio of men to women in the 20-24 age bracket was 109 nationwide in 2013, which is not excessive. But the statistics for younger children are truly disturbing: between 117-118 males per 100 females for all age categories under 14.
That means in five to 10 years the shortage of marriageable women experienced in Feixiang today will be nationwide. By 2020, China will have an estimated 30 million surplus bachelors — called guanggun, or “bare branches”.
. . .
All over China, men and women are confronting the increasingly fraught economics of finding a partner. This is not just the result of gender ratios: uneven economic development has opened fissures in Chinese society. While the past two decades have seen millions lifted out of poverty by growth and successful reforms, this has come about largely as the result of massive urbanisation.
