SEVERAL YOUNG MEN IN MINQUAN COUNTY, Henan province, have been swindled out of 160,000 yuan ($22,754) each by fraudsters posing as a transnational matchmaking agency. China Daily writer Wang Yiqing comments:

The fraudsters promised to organize marriages for the men with women in Pakistan and arrange for them to bring their wives back to China. The men paid the money and held "wedding ceremonies" with the women in Pakistan but were unable to bring their "wives" back home.

Such fraudulent matchmaking agencies that claim they can help unmarried men find foreign wives from Vietnam, Ukraine and Pakistan, as long as the men pay a large sum of money for the cost of a blind date, wedding and bride price have been frequently exposed by the media recently. These agencies are frauds in the name of transnational matchmaking, and some of them are actually involved in human trafficking.

These illegal matchmaking agencies that have well-organized transnational chains should be seriously cracked down on to safeguard the interests of not only the Chinese men but also the foreign women.

But we should also pay attention to the root cause of the problem, which is the issue of so-called rural left-behind men. It is a unique characteristic of China that the so-called left-behind women who remain unmarried are usually well-educated urban women, while the so-called left behind men are always less-educated rural men.

Traditionally, Chinese women tend to marry a man with equal or higher social status, economic condition and educational background. To some extent, the phenomenon of "left-behind" women can be attributed to the personal choice of well-educated women, who are unwilling to choose spouses that don't meet their standards.

But for the "left-behind" men, who are always in rural areas, there are different social reasons.

Experts estimate that the number of men of marriageable age will be 30 million, more than the number of marriageable women in the next three decades due to the serious imbalance in the gender ratio, which is particularly evident in rural areas and is the result of illegal gender selection due to the traditional Chinese preference for sons rather than daughters. With more boys born in rural areas due to the gender bias and their relatively weak economic attractiveness in the marriage market, there are more men in the countryside competing for wives.

To fundamentally solve the problem, we should end the "preference" for sons and strictly enforce the ban on gender selection to restore a balanced gender ratio.