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Comments on Taiwanese Marriage Trend Spark Outrage

A legislator’s comments in Taiwan have touched off a public furor over one of the island’s stickiest social issues. Increasingly, Taiwanese men are choosing wives from overseas, and some say that is leaving growing numbers of local women without husbands.

Opposition legislator Chang Show-foong, a former writer, sparked the controversy by complaining that more and more local men are taking wives from Taiwan's poorer neighbors. Statistics show about 427,000 Taiwanese men have married foreign wives, mainly from China and Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, up to one-third of Taiwanese women over the age of 30 are unmarried, according to some estimates.

Chang said during a debate on policies for new immigrants that men often prefer the women from overseas. She said the trend of seeking wives from outside Taiwan has caused "tremendous losses to the nation" and suggested that the government offer a subsidy to the island’s unmarried women.

Chang is telling a parliamentary meeting that whenever a foreign bride comes in, a Taiwanese woman is being passed over. There are only so many men on the island, she argues, so Taiwan is left with many women who may never marry.

...Taiwan's increasingly well-educated women are often entering professional careers and earning large salaries that make them want to be accepted as equals by men.

Arrigo says that is unacceptable to some tradition-minded men, many of whom are encouraged in their views by conservative mothers. So they are turning instead to poorer, less educated women from Southeast Asia.

Many of the men who look abroad for wives are from the lower economic classes themselves, making them less appealing to upwardly-mobile Taiwanese women....

Vietnamese women wed foreigners to aid family: Many decide that a foreign husband is the best way out of poverty

Nearly 70 young Vietnamese women swept past in groups of five, twirling and posing like fashion models, all competing for the hand of a Taiwanese man who had paid a matchmaking service about $6,000 for the privilege of marrying one of them.

Sporting jeans and a black T-shirt, 20-year-old Le Thi Ngoc Quyen paraded in front of the stranger, hoping he would select her.

"I felt very nervous," she recalled recently as she described the scene. "But he chose me, and I agreed to marry him right away."

Like many women from the Mekong Delta island of Tan Loc, Quyen had concluded that finding a foreign husband was her best route out of poverty. Six years later, she has a beautiful daughter and no regrets.

From the delta in Vietnam's south to small rural towns in the north, a growing number of young Vietnamese women are marrying foreigners, mostly from Taiwan and South Korea. They seek material comfort and, most important, a way to save their parents from destitution in old age, which many Vietnamese consider their greatest duty.

...Quyen has not gotten rich — her husband earns a modest living as a construction worker — but the couple have paid off her father's debts.

Young women have become Tan Loc's most lucrative export. Roughly 1,500 village women from the island of 33,000 people have married foreigners in the past decade, leading some to call it Taiwan Island.

Women in Tan Loc and other delta towns began marrying foreigners in the 1990s, when Vietnam opened up economically and many Taiwanese and South Korean firms set up operations in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's southern business hub.Poverty and the close proximity of foreign businessmen seem to be major reasons for the trend.

...With money from foreign sons-in-law, many residents in Tan Loc have replaced their thatch-roof shacks with brick homes. They have also opened small restaurants and shops, creating jobs in a place where people have traditionally earned pennies a day picking rice and other crops in the blistering sun.

The luckier families received enough to build ponds for fish farming.

Western Union has opened a branch to handle the money sent by newlyweds.

"At least 20 percent of the families on the island have been lifted out of poverty," said Phan An, a university professor who has done extensive research in Tan Loc. "There has been a significant economic impact."

...most young women in Tan Loc seem eager to marry a foreigner. Le Thanh Lang recently went to the town hall to get papers confirming she is single and eligible to marry.


"Any country will do, I'll take anyone who will accept me," she said, waving the papers. "I need to send money to my parents."

Besides the marriage broker's fee, the groom gives about $300 to his bride's family, Lang said. After that, if all goes well, her husband may send up to several thousand dollars a year to her family — depending on what he can afford.

Husbands send money to brides' families
Many Tan Loc families with married daughters abroad have big homes with color TVs, new furniture and karaoke machines.

Their neighbors live in huts.

Tran Thi Sach's concrete home, with four large rooms and shiny green tile floors, is a mansion by island standards.

"Since my daughters got married, I've retired," said Sach, 59, who used to toil in the rice fields with her husband.

"We lived in a shack," she said. "We had to work no matter how hot it was, no matter how much it rained, from 5 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon. Sometimes we could only afford rice porridge."

When her daughter Tho first said she planned to go to a marriage broker, Sach objected. What if her in-laws abused her? Where would she turn for help?

Tho married six years ago, and her younger sister Loi two years later.

"Their husbands are gentle, handsome and hardworking," Sach said. "They are really fine men."

Next door, Nguyen Thi Chin lives in a two-room shack with the roof so leaky that when it rains she must move from spot to spot to avoid getting wet. Each of her seven children married a Vietnamese, all of them poor. At 70, she is still working, pulling mussels from the muck in the Mekong River.

"I could never have a house like that," Chin said, glancing next door. "It's my destiny to be poor. If I had another daughter, I'd ask her to marry a foreigner."

...More than 100,000 Vietnamese women have married Taiwanese men over the last 10 years and the numbers are rising, said Gow Wei Chiou of the Taiwan representative office in Hanoi. In the same period, roughly 28,000 Korean men married Vietnamese, according to the Vietnam Women's Union...

In recent years, one in five marriages in Taiwan was to a foreign bride, mainly from China and Vietnam. In this paper we study the impact of foreign brides inflow on the domestic marriage market. We find that an inflow of foreign brides raises fertility and reduces the divorce risk of domestic couples. These results, we argue, are consistent with a model of marriage in which men employ women to produce children but women can shirk--the penalty of which is divorce. From the threat of foreign bride competition, women exert more effort, fertility increase and divorce risk declines. Our dataset consists of the universe of all marriages, divorces and the subsequent birth records between 1998-2006 in Taiwan. To address the endogeneity problem, we exploit a policy change in 2004 which restricts the entry of Chinese brides. We find that every 10 percentage points increase in foreign bride share increases local women's probability of having a child by 9.9 percentage points and decrease local women's probability of divorce by 0.79 percentage points.

There are already slightly more women than men in the US. Maybe the women aren't the problem, here.

There are already slightly more women than men in the US. Maybe the women aren't the problem, here.

There are already slightly more women than men in the US. Maybe the women aren't the problem, here.

I don't know at what age the ratio of men to women evens out, but I suspect that it is past the breeding age.

Well, thanks for shooting down the proof. Before you mentioned that, it did seem like the poet had made a pretty solid case.

...In a patriarchal culture....

Is China's Mosuo tribe the world's last matriarchy?

Women from the Mosuo tribe do not marry, take as many lovers as they wish and have no word for "father" or "husband". But the arrival of tourism and the sex industry is changing their culture

...what makes the Mosuo unique is their practice of zuo hun, or "walking marriage". From the age of 13, after being initiated, females may choose to take lovers from men within the tribe, having as many or as few as they please over their lifetime. Male companions are known as axias and spend their days carrying out jobs such as fishing and animal rearing, and visit the women's homes at night, often secretly; any resulting children are raised by the woman's family. The father and all adult men are known as "uncles" – there is no stigma attached to not knowing who a child's father is.

As commerce tries to elbow tradition out of the way and younger generations of the Mosuo are tempted by outside influence, a darker, seedier side has emerged in recent years. Tourism is booming, and the Chinese government is keen to market and monetise the Mosuo to Chinese tourists, even installing a toll booth charging $5 to enter the area from the newly laid main road. Curious and frisky visitors are lured in by the suggestion that the Mosuo women offer free sex – hotels, restaurants, casinos and karaoke bars have been built, and sex workers shipped over from Thailand dress in Mosuo traditional dress in the "capital village", Luoshu.

"Arriving in Luoshu was a shock – it was tacky and not how I expected," says Locatelli. "There were a lot of people asking for money: bar owners and prostitutes that are obviously not Mosuo – it's all geared towards male Chinese tourists."...