Chinese gender imbalance will leave 24 million men unable to marry. We wonder: Why didn't anyone see this coming?

I agree, and have thought exactly what you have written here. It's happening also in India, and other countries that value having a male child than female because of misplaced notions of worth. I'm actually surprised that the numbers aren't higher.
This is truly the beginning of a crisis that will peak in 30-50 years when the male children being born now and within the next 10 years reach sexual maturity and there wont be any women around. Violence will escalate, wars will be started because of sexual frustration and high levels of testosterone. It's all going to blow up in the Chinese governments face and they will have no one to blame but themselves.
Also, it's not like the government can "import" or entice women from other countries to move to rural China to fix the problem. Everything about the location, the country, and even the men are extremely undesirable. How desperate does a woman have to be to get married if she wants to move to the boonies of corrupt China and have an illiterate, poor, stunted, effeminate husband? The question answers itself, and also answers as to why there is such a high degree of kidnapping and forced prostitution wth girls and women. The best thing would be to remove the women completely and put them in safe houses far away from there, and let the men fight it out and balance the population that way. Sounds harsh, but they brought it on themselves, and now have to lie in the bed they made. Alone.

What do you do when there's an excess of men over women? Historically, you joined either a monastery or an army.

There are very few monasteries in China.

China isn't the only country where this is an issue. It's also a problem in India: http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-04-20/news/17147047_1_singhpura-become-small-towns-india-s-once-overwhelming-poverty-sukhpal-singh-tomar

Not only have many people seen this coming, the Chinese govt. has crafted policies to allow it's male citizens the opportunity to marry citizens from other countries. Maybe even part of a 'Chinafication' approach? Maybe part of their 500 year plan?

Also, it seems this number is too low. I've seen forecasts that say 5 to 10x this number of males (mostly from non-urban areas) will not be able to find a Chinese wife.

What's so bad about this (besides the human misery aspect)? What kind of trouble can 100M hopeless people get into? Yikes. What if China re-directs their internal strife toward an external enemy? What if it's us?

I recall reading several articles on this subject starting in the early 1980's, well before the Internet, in newspapers and magazines (I believe one was in the Economist, when it was worth reading).

So "they" have seen it coming for quite some time. Even the numbers sound familiar.

that's ridiculous. well now those poor men will not pro-create and the population will not increase--in the plan, perhaps?

It was because of the old traditional chinese thinking that are in those villagers mind that causes all these to happen. I believe most of the rural villagers are lowly educated and think that males are the only one who can continue the heir are more valuable. Poverty in the late 70s and early 80s that lend the government to introduce the one child policy and cause this scene to happen.

I had many china friends who are only child in the family and many are the only girls who had good education even doing post grad studies. So i guess these happened mostly in rural part of the country which are so inaccessible.

it is a nations self genocide by not being able to reproduce due to lack of eligble partners.

they have done this to themselves and india is very close to being the same way. what is so great about boy babies anyways? without girls you can't HAVE the boys. stupid stupid stupid.

1)Name one culture that values a female child over a male child. This could have happened in any culture.
2) A lot of mail order wives arrive in the US everyday, so they are losing more females then the numbers you have listed above. I see these women all over. Young Chinese women with old men at the gym. You can tell they do not speak english and they are married to these men, gross. I also see Russian mail order wives too.
This is not a surprise, but I have to agree with the Chinese government. The earth cannot support all those people and I would rather have less children starving.
3)

I'm chinese i was born in the us but my brother was born in china. we moved here so my parents could have two kids. i think it's smart to have the one child thing for population controll. and chinese people like having boys better because they carry the family name and if a girl were to get married they live with the husbands family, its culture. and the men doing that are sick but it happens everywhere. and kittykat um they're government never said having a boy was better. culture prefers it. what u said kind of offended me because im chinese and it's like you trying to make china look bad.

DUH!!!!! They are creating their own population control. It just will on take place for another 75 or so years.

sometimes i think those chinese are so stupid. All they care about money money money and to be taken care of when the parents get older. No one never thought if everyone has a girl who is going to bear babies. It's not like majority of them are from house of noble that they need male heir...maybe this will teach them a harsy lesson to not to trying play God in this regard!

Weren't we just worried about China's population over growth a couple decades ago? Go get em' Darwin!
It is terrable what has and is occuring, but nature always wins.

I agree with the comment by Laureli, can't say I feel bad for them what with their female abortions all the time. The world can't run on men alone people! But honestly, whoever didn't see it coming must have been blind to the idea itself or had not heard about it.

Actually this works well for the Chinese goverment the brightest and most resourseful men will get married and have children.

Before you start hating on the Chinese families you make the "choice" to abort female children, it might be worthwhile to realize that sex selection abortions happen in the United States too. Once abortion is a legal option for any reason, people will take advantage of that fact. Sex selection is just the first step, the more detailed genetic testing becomes the more people will use abortion to kill normal, but not "ideal" children, whatever ideal that woman happens to hold--down syndrome babies are aborted at an alarming rate already in this country. Eugenics is a dangerous thing, you would have thought we would have learned the lesson by now.

This is totally horrible. I think China needs to hurry up and change some laws before they are screwed.

They have to pay the price for messing with mother nature. I do feel bad for those 20 plus million chinese men. I am curious to see how things work out in the next 10-20 years. Will there be war to fix this? What will the govt. do?

Um, pretty much everyone saw this coming. I did a paper on it all the way back in high school, and if American teenagers know about a foreign policy issue, you can bet the Chinese government does. The study you mention is just a new set of statistics- the overall pattern has been been predicted and observed for several decades now, and is pretty common knowledge.