South Korea: Importing Foreign Brides

As in India and China, there is a shortage of young women available for marriage. South Koreans are having fewer children, and they prefer to have sons.

Back in the early 90s or 80s, I recall that the South Korean government initiated a campaign encouraging women to have more children. They put up billboards featuring pictures of African women, captioned with warnings that if families don’t start having more daughters, then their sons would need to import black women from Africa. At the time, this terrible for Koreans to even contemplate.

Instead, they are importing Asian brides from other countries, like Vietnam…

Korean Men Use Brokers to Find Brides in Vietnam

Norimitsu Onishi (NY Times)

More and more South Korean men are finding wives outside of South Korea, where a surplus of bachelors, a lack of marriageable Korean partners and the rising social status of women have combined to shrink the domestic market for the marriage-minded male. Bachelors in China, India and other Asian nations, where the traditional preference for sons has created a disproportionate number of men now fighting over a smaller pool of women, are facing the same problem.

The rising status of women in the United States sent American men who were searching for more traditional wives to Russia in the 1990s. But the United States’ more balanced population has not led to the shortage of potential brides and the thriving international marriage industry found in South Korea.

Now, that industry is seizing on an increasingly globalized marriage market and sending comparatively affluent Korean bachelors searching for brides in the poorer corners of China and Southeast and Central Asia. The marriage tours are fueling an explosive growth in marriages to foreigners in South Korea, a country whose ethnic homogeneity lies at the core of its self-identity…