Enterprising young women are, we hear, fleecing desperate bachelors in rural China. First the vixen ask for an exorbitant “bride price,” next get quickly hitched, and then get out of Dodge even quicker.

The Wall Street Journal reports that decades of population control policies have led to an amazing surplus of 32 million “extra” young men. Whole villages are simply bereft of eligible young women. Enter the grift.

27-year old Zhou Pin met Cai Nuocuo through friends.  She was one of three girls visiting from a neighboring province. He quickly proposed, and agreed to her bride price of about $5500 (about 5 years worth of farm income). He even did a background check first – and it checked out. Aweek later they were married. The other two girls also married young men from his village. The marriages all went fine, then about a month later all three young women vanished the same night. Believe it or not, Cai is the eleventh runaway bride this small town has seen over just the past few years.

Once again we see that the Law of Unintended Consequences is alive and well. Just as kudzu was introduced into the South to prevent erosion ended up a pest week, a.k.a. “the vine that ate the South.” Just as the Treaty of Versailles helped lead to the Nazis and legalized abortion may have  led to lower crime rates (or not, depending on who you read).

Just as minefields in the Falkland Islands have become de facto bird sanctuaries.

Well, just like that we see how Chinese population control in the 80′s has pretty much created a cottage industry today.

1. In 1979 Maoist China approaches overpopulation with the blunt instrument of its mandatory one child one family rule.
2. Traditional Chinese culture favors boys over girls.
3. When forced to have only one child, many couples resort to abortion, abandonment/adoption, or even infanticide of unwanted girl babies.
4. China ends up with a male-female ratio of about 120:100, one of the highest in the world.
5. America ends up with a bizarre number of adopted Chinese girls named Brittany.
6. Thirty years later rural China ends up with a generation of increasingly desperate young bachelors.
7. Practically speaking, they can’t all get their own TV show.
8. Despite recent economic gains, the vast majority of rural Chinese women are very poor.
9. And now they are suddenly much in demand.
10. Enter the grift.

To Zhou’s credit, he has kept a philosophical attitude about his ertwhile soulmate:

“I feel I can’t hate her,” says the deserted husband, who is now so depressed his parents have forbidden him to leave the village, as he longs to. “She must have her own troubles.”