In this paper, I focus on the fall of the marriage rates of Chinese rural
males in their early twenties and study the extent to which the rise in rural young
women’s participation in migratory work has contributed to this fall. I perform the
analysis using the self-collected rural household survey panel data from 1985 to 2005
in Zhijiang municipality, Hubei; and also examine the relationship using a nationally
representative data set from the Chinese Household Income Project (1995, 2002
waves). My findings support the following conclusions: (1) A shortage of availability
of women brought about by female out-migration presents a problem of bride drain in
rural China, a 10 percentage point increase in the local female out-migration reduces
rural male marriage propensity by 5%; (2) the impact of the bride drain was felt by
both non-migrant and migrant men, but the marriage propensity of migrant men was
affected more by female out-migration than non-migrant men; (3) the more educated
the migrant rural men, the less severely their marriage probability was affected by the
local female out-migration.