media - China's 20 million missing women

One of the most fascinating stories from China is that of the supposedly 20 million men that cannot find a wife to marry. I hate to kill a good story, but that happened to me about 15 years ago when I did a similar story about 3,000 missing women in the little city of Kerkrade, in the south of the Netherlands.
Men in this tiny former mining place complained they could not get a decent wife, and statistics supported their claims. Women went to more prosperous places, to find richer men. The Netherlands did not have a one-child policy or a strong preference for boys or girls, but the women were missing anyway.
After having a good laugh, an expert at the National Bureau for Statistics checked the figures and had to admit I was right. Three thousand unmarried women were missing and we did not noticed that because women were living longer, so the total number of men en women was about equal.
An hour later - I had almost finished my story - he called back with a rather disappointing discovery. He had done some more research and discovered the women were missing everywhere, not only in this poor city of Kerkrade. Because women tend to marry earlier, there were more unmarried men than women. The facts were correct, the explanation was gone, and gone was my story too.
That is why I'm not too sure about the 20 million missing women in China. A large part might be due to a similar difference in marriage age in China. But that is a story journalists rather not write down.