While Singapore is trying to get its people to have more babies so we can avoid becoming like Japan, China, until a few years ago, was trying to get its people to have just one child.

The one-child policy, despite the Chinese government's best intentions more than three decades ago to pre-empt a population boom, has resulted in many unintended consequences.

With forced sterilisations and infanticide, the human toll has been immense.

And that's not counting the sex-selective abortions that've caused a dramatic gender imbalance which means millions of men will never find female partners.

Gay Chinese men giving in to social pressure

The policy also meant that Chinese men who have no other siblings are under even greater pressure to marry and have an heir to continue the family line.

Not producing an heir is the most serious way of being an unfilial son, according to Confucian values.

The same applies to gay men as well, who are expected to marry a woman and go through the same motions as per "normal"

Zhang Beichuan, one of the pioneering researchers on LGBT (lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender), says that an overwhelming 80 percent of the estimated 20 million homosexual men in China are currently or have been in a fake marriage.

This contrasts with the estimated 15 to 20 percent of gay men in the United States in 2010.

A husband, father, and sex worker

An article on Sixth Tone, a media platform that uses layered narratives to show countries outside of China what China is really like, touched on the plight of one of these gay men who entered a loveless marriage with a woman.

Da Xiong, or "Big Bear", is a gay man in China who is not only married to a woman, but also has a daughter with her.

The woman he's married to is his good friend for more than 10 years.

They had shared the same apartment before and she got pregnant with his child.

He married her as he felt obligated to do so and it also made his parents happy.

He's now working as a sex worker to pay off his debt and support his family, while his wife is under the impression that he's working in a factory in Suzhou.

He sends her regular photos of a factory where his friend works so she doesn't suspect anything.

As a sex worker even at the age of 40, he earns anything between 7,000 and 10,000 RMB per month, as compared to just 3,000 RMB back in his hometown in Inner Mongolia.

Da Xiong says that it's impossible to get a better job for he hasn't even graduated from high school.

While he doesn't want to work in the sex industry for fear of getting arrested or catching a sexually-transmitted disease, he has no other choice but to continue doing it.

Gay rights in China

In 1997, the Chinese government abolished the law on hooliganism, which criminalised homosexuality.

And of 2001, the Chinese Society of Psychiatry declassified homosexuality as a mental disorder.

Since then, China's LGBT community has been able to find a relatively more comfortable living spaces, with more gay parks and bars popping up in big cities.

The legalisation of same-sex marriage in Taiwan has shown the Mainland that the very same Chinese blood and culture (the reason China uses when insisting that Taiwan is an inalienable part of the Mainland), albeit under a different administration, can also accept same-sex marriage.

However, homosexuality is not widely accepted yet in China.

The government in March last year, banned the depiction of homosexuality on film and TV as "pornographic or vulgar," putting it in the same category as portrayals of incest and sexual abuse.

Also, according to a 2013 Pew survey, only 21 percent of Chinese people approved of homosexuality.

The shame of being stigmatised as homosexual causes these men like Da Xiong to enter such sham marriages in the first place, which have also given rise to the phenomenon of tongqi, or wives of male homosexuals who were deceived into entering such loveless marriages.

A less hurtful way that is getting increasingly popular is xinghun, or "cooperative marriages".

These are essentially marriage contracts between gay men and lesbian women that act as smokescreens to hide their true sexual orientations from their families.

Top image via Tianya999