So what does the record support?

Transcript

1. Mogging is Collins' word of the year.
2. It comes from "AMOG", alpha male of the group,
3. and spread through the manosphere.
4. At the other end of the ranking: rats.
5. That's what men who feel at the bottom call themselves on one big Chinese forum.
6. A researcher who studies it says many such men feel denied sex and children.
7. This month, China's government said 4.6 million couples registered
8. a marriage in the first nine months of this year.
9. Half a million fewer than the same months last year.
10. On its own, that count can't say whether fewer people are reaching marriage age,
11. marrying later, or never marrying.
12. There is also an older imbalance.
13. In 2020, China's census counted 15 million more men than women aged 20 to 39.
14. Among 15 to 19-year-olds it was 116 boys for every 100 girls.
15. That's an imbalance, not a count of men who will never marry.
16. The Associated Press traces China's demand for foreign brides to that imbalance.
17. In 2019, it reported a list of 629 Pakistani girls
18. and women that investigators said were sold as brides to China.
19. In China itself, in 2022, a video of a mother of eight,
20. chained in a shed near Xuzhou, shook the country.
21. She had been trafficked and sold as a bride.
22. Researchers quote one remark that spread on WeChat last year:
23. policies to boost childbirth are useless; why not crack down on feminism instead?
24. The state does pay for babies.
25. Since 2025, families get 3,600 yuan a year for each child under three.
26. The state also polices how people talk about marriage.
27. In February, China's internet regulator launched a month-long campaign
28. against content "provoking gender opposition"
29. and spreading "fear of marriage".
30. Weibo said it had been ordered to mute the comedian Xiao Pa for doing exactly that.
31. Her post, written a week before the campaign: "Two days in bed with a fever.
32. If I had a husband and kids, I'd be propping myself up on the wall to cook for them."
33. The men's forums are policed too.
34. In May, Baidu briefly shut down China's biggest one, for the second time.
35. So what does the record support?
36. At 35 to 39,
37. men whose schooling stopped at primary level were about 6 times
38. as likely as women with the same schooling never to have married.
39. At master's level, it reverses: women were more likely never to have married.
40. But the census can't explain this year's drop, or why any one person is single.
41. And it can't tell us whether feminism has anything to do with it.