In 2007, the Ministry of Education slipped a new word into the official Chinese lexicon, sheng nu, meaning leftover women, borrowing a character from the vocabulary of expired food. Officials wanted earlier marriages. They got a national vocabulary problem instead. China's one-child policy left the country with roughly 30 million more men than women of marriage age. Among the specific cohort born during the one-child-policy years, Dongguan shows the widest gap in the country,