throw930336

If the firstborn is a girl, the parents might try to have more kids until they have a boy. And if their family registry already says they have a kid, they might run into some bureaucratic issues that might prevent them from having more kids.

If their firstborn is a boy, they will just register him. And if they choose to have more kids after that, be it a girl or a boy, they are forced to leave them off the family registry. In this case, since they already have a son, they might not be too worried about running into issues.

And it's not just you inviting people, but your parents and their parents.

It's not uncommon to actually not know 2/3s of the people at your wedding.

The best part however is that each guest will give you a "red envelope" of money. It's basically the wedding gift. The more people you invite, the more money you can possibly make (even after the expenses of the wedding).

This money is then used for the new coupe to start their family.

One of biggest issues with the 1-child policy is that it affected the middle class much more severely than the ultra-wealth and the rural countryfolk,

> Min was born in 1986, six years after the one-child policy came into effect. She is the second of five children, a reflection of lax enforcement of family planning in the Hebei farming village where she grew up. (Min's father told me that one family in the village had six children; another man, who had fathered seven children, had been the village chief.)

> Min herself, along with everyone she knows, has two children.

> When history's largest social experiment in state-regulated childbearing comes to an end, it will have been borne disproportionately by the Chinese urban middle-class. The elaborate machinery built to enforce these policies barely touched Min at all. She was ignored by the government, living at the margins--in China, that's often the best place to be.

https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/03/why-the-on...

China is lucky in that they border a country with the opposite problem [1]:

> One feature of the Russian-Chinese relationship seemed especially telling: Cross-border marriages are overwhelmingly between Chinese men and Russian women. Much of this has to do with demographics—Russia has a surplus of women, while China has too many men.

In addition, the demographics issue might be overstated as many of the 'missing women' started to be 'found' once they turned 18 and needed to officially register with the government [2]:

> The researchers believe local government officials informally worked with farmers and acknowledged that they couldn't fully enforce the one-child policy. Instead they made tacit agreements in allowing families to have extra children in exchange for social stability in their communities. The cadres, or local governments, would then under-report “out of plan” births that ultimately influenced the national population statistics.

> To supplement the qualitative data, the researchers then examined Chinese population data by cohort, and they compared the number of children born in 1990 with the number of 20-year-old Chinese men and women in 2010. In that cohort, they discovered 4 million additional people, and of those there were approximately 1 million more women than men.

> "If we go over a course of 25 years, it's possible there are about 25 million women in the statistics that weren't there at birth," Kennedy said.

1. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/dispatches/f...

2. https://news.ku.edu/2016/11/22/study-finds-chinas-missing-gi...