You know, those power grids in China

Interesting report about China's gender imbalance:

A bias in favor of male offspring has left China with 32 million more boys under the age of 20 than girls, creating “an imminent generation of excess men,” a study released Friday said.

For the next 20 years, China will have increasingly more men than women of reproductive age, according to the paper, which was published online by the British Medical Journal. “Nothing can be done now to prevent this,” the researchers said.

Chinese government planners have long known that the urge of couples to have sons was skewing the gender balance of the population. But the study, by two Chinese university professors and a London researcher, provides some of the first hard data on the extent of the disparity and the factors contributing to it.

In 2005 , they found, births of boys in China exceeded births of girls by more than 1.1 million. There were 120 boys born for every 100 girls.

This disparity seems to surpass that of any other country, they said — a finding, they wrote, that was perhaps unsurprising in light of China’s one-child policy.

Pundits and science fiction writers have asked what the future for a China with a massive oversupply of men might be. I tend to be pessimistic, so I imagine things going a bit more negatively. A mild export of the gender imbalance to other countries is almost certain. A decrease in the position of women is likely, either due to growing demand for them or a backlash against women trying to use their new found rarity to improve their lot. And at what point does war become likely, either to distract an unruly male population or because of unrest?