WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

Son Preference and the Marriage Squeeze in
China: An Integrated Analysis of First
Marriage and the Remarriage Market 1
JIANG Quanbao, Isabelle ATTANÉ, LI Shuzhuo, Marcus W. FELDMAN
1. About marriage and the marriage squeeze
Marriage is the legal union of males and females. On reaching a
marriageable age, a person, subconsciously or consciously, enters the
spousal supply and demand system in which comparison, selection and
marriage successively occur. The overall mate-selecting relationship of
males and females eligible to marry is called the “marriage market”. It
is not a strictly defined market, but the product of the introduction of
an economic approach to the analysis of social behaviour. Since
marriage includes not only first marriage but also remarriage, the
marriage market can also be divided into a first marriage market and a
remarriage market, with the latter consisting of divorced and widowed
people. Obviously for each individual, the process of marriage is
affected by social, economic, cultural and ethnic considerations, as well
as by that individual’s characteristics.
But for the population as a whole, the most basic factors are the
numbers of marriageable males and females (Guo and Deng, 1998;
Chen, 2004). If the numbers of marriageable males and females
diverge substantially and if this imbalance makes it difficult for some
people to find a spouse according to the currently prevailing criteria,
then there is a “marriage squeeze”. If the supply of males exceeds that
of females, there is a “male marriage squeeze”, and if females
outnumber males, there is a “female marriage squeeze”. In this chapter,
we analyze the marriage market and the marriage squeeze from the
perspective of the supply and demand of males and females without
1 This work is partly supported by the NCET Program of the Ministry of Education
of China.