Mortality, Longevity and Social Security of Unmarried Men in China: A Life Table Analysis

China’s excess of males, as a consequence of skewed sex ratio at birth for more than 30 years, has attracted much attention on the scale of marriage squeeze and the socioeconomic impact of the forced unmarried males, but studies on the death of unmarried males are underdeveloped due to the limitation of data. In this paper, we firstly develop life tables of the unmarried males and nuptiality tables of males in China. In addition, the mortality and life expectancy of the unmarried males and married males, unmarried males across education levels and health difference for the elderly by marriage status are compared. Secondly, we simulate a projection model to evaluate the influence of the relatively high mortality of unmarried males on the prediction of excess males in 21th century of China. We find that an overestimation of at least 16% to the number of unmarried males aged more than 50 could be generated if the excess mortality of the unmarried to the mortality of overall males not accounted. Finally, we pay special attention to the current social security system on the unmarried male elderly and the paper’s findings suggest a need to relax the age restriction and expand the coverage of social security programs to the unmarried males, especially in rural areas.