A third-born Chinese young lady recently told me how she almost did not exist. Her father was extremely disappointed at her birth, given his wife had already born him two daughters. The father’s plan in the Anhui countryside was to leave the newborn in a field for the dogs. A grandmother intervened and took the infant in, though the hungry child had the same status in the household as a doorstop.

The result of such deeply entrenched generally accepted parochial thinking in China is that the country has way more bachelors than potential brides. The countryside of Anhui has ratios as high as 127 boys to 100 girls; deeper in the interior sees proportions of 175 boys to 100 girls; while even higher still is the Beijing municipality, where the ratio of boys to girls born is nearly 3-to-1, according to the Economist Magazine.

Now, according to the young lady, she is part of a huge “buyer’s market” of young brides who expect potential suitors to have already bought a house and provided a dowry to the girl’s parents. In the cities dowries are around 50,000 yuan (about US$7,000), while apartments in even the smaller cities can now run as much as US$150,000 to start. Countryside families of girls, Third-Child explained to me, are far more uncompromising, expecting as much as 300,000 RMB (about US$40,000) as dowry, in addition to the purchase of a home before the boy even contemplates a proposal of marriage. “In the countryside we say the men are ‘buying’ a wife; in the city, it’s a little less overt than that, though it’s still expensive for the boy.”

Third-Child told me the stress boys are experiencing now is so great that many despair, considering lives of crime to acquire the money families are extorting for their daughters, or simply giving up on finding a girl ever in their lives.”Families with girls are so happy now because they can actually make money from their daughters instead of paying it out if they had sons who needed a wife.”

Though in many instances boys can turn to the extended family to pitch in for the purchase of a marriage-nest, even extended families are finding it difficult to contribute more than a few thousand RMB to the cause of despairing nephews. “One cousin asked my parents for money, and was upset at the small amount they could give him,” Third Child explained. “My parents explained they had their own expenses living in the city, and still had to save money for themselves.”

I asked Third-born about the market for Vietnamese women imported into China. She told me, “Even the Vietnamese girls don’t want to live in the countryside. Though their families may not require large dowries or the girl may not even need a home bought first, the girls do not want to live in a situation as poor as the one from which they’d come. They want to live in the cities.”

Pity the Princelings of Pekin.