China has too many unmarried men due to its severe gender imbalance: 30million by 2050 to be exact.
And one professor has called on authorities to consider letting women have two or more husbands at the same time to help resolve the long-standing social issue.
Yew-Kwang Ng, a 77-year-old economist, said that his proposition could be a way to help the nation's army of bachelors find their better half as well as happiness.
Ng, a Special Chair Professor at the School of Economics of Fudan University, stressed that single Chinese men would have more and more difficulties in securing an ideal partner in the coming years due to growing competition.
Unwed middle-aged men would have to compete with much younger rivals to win the heart of a limited pool of single women, the Malaysia-born expert said.
'[If a man's] natural biological and psychological needs cannot be met appropriately, it will certainly bring a substantial negative impact on his happiness,' Ng noted in an opinion piece published on June 2 through popular Chinese outlet .
In the column, he put forward two possible solutions.
One is the legalisation of prostitution, and the other is polyandry, a form of polygamy that allows a woman to take two or more lawful husbands.
Neither practice is permitted by Chinese law.
Ng said while prostitutes might satisfy men's urgent biological needs, they would not be able to provide life companionship as wives would.
He went on to explain the history of polyandry, especially in Tibet, before clarifying that he proposed the method not to promote the notion, but to find a fix for the Chinese society.
'If it weren't for the serious imbalance of the male and female ratio, I would not think of polyandry at all,' he argued.
'Secondly, I do not promote or encourage polyandry. I only think that faced with [the problem of having] more men and fewer women, [the government] may perhaps consider polyandry.'
He suggested that many men, such as him, would agree to share a wife with others than running the risk of having no wife at all.
Ng is not the first expert who has come up with unconventional ideas to help unmarried Chinese find their significant other.
Mao Shoulong, a renowned scholar, said in 2017 that the government should allow more foreign women to live in the country in the hope that some of them would end up marrying its 'leftover men'.
He wrote: 'It could be an advisable tactic to aptly improve the reformation of the immigration policy and let more foreign women come to live and work in China to relieve the "bachelor crisis".'
Traditionally, baby boys are preferred by Chinese parents because of their ability to carry forward the family name.
Decades of illegal baby gender selection, prompted by the one-child policy, has caused the country to suffer from a severe gender gap.
The gender ratio between baby boys and baby girls has reached 1.3 to 1 at its highest.
Around 15 million Chinese men between the ages of 35 and 59 won't be able to find a wife by 2020 and by 2050 the number could be nearly 30million, it is estimated.
Many Chinese bachelors, mostly from southern China, have paid high prices to marry Vietnamese women after failing to find a Chinese partner, prompting human-trafficking concerns.
What is China's one-child policy?
A mandatory one-child rule was launched in late 1970s by Beijing when China's population was fast increasing - due to a post-war baby boom encouraged by Chairman Mao.
It was said the one-child policy was aimed at keeping the Chinese population under 1.2 billion at the end of the 20th century.
The ruthless policy was strictly enforced in urban areas. If a woman was pregnant with her second child, she would be asked to abort it.
If the couple decided to keep it, a fine would be applied - usually three times the family's annual income.
Selective demographics in the country, such as rural residents and minority groups, however, were not bound by the policy.
MailOnline