Women in China: Not playing the marriage game

A 29-year-old friend from Heilongjiang province starts thinking up the story she is going to tell her parents about her new, imaginary, boyfriend, in the weeks before she travels north to her family for Chinese New Year.

The clash between a rapidly-urbanising society and traditional Confucian values of filial piety and acceptance of a daughter’s traditional meek role means millennial Chinese women have major emotional pressures to handle when they make the annual pilgrimage home during China’s most important holiday.

The toughest challenge is coping with being a sheng nü or "leftover woman", which refers to any woman over the age of 27 who is unmarried and applies to the swelling ranks of women who want education and economic independence and who do not wish to follow the traditional paths set out by their parents.

Social change happens quickly in China. More and more women are standing up to the endless harassment and badgering. They are building their own lives in the cities, especially as urbanisation means many young women can escape the family home to live independent lives in the cities.

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"If you're an unmarried woman in her late 20s or early 30s, you enjoy being single, and you are free if you live in the city, but when it comes to Chinese New Year I am afraid to go home. I get asked questions by my mother constantly, by my aunts, everyone, and I have to suffer their judgment," says my friend, who wishes to remain anonymous. "The pollution is bad in Beijing, but I can breathe more easily than in my hometown," she says.

More independent

Shi Mei, a single 38-year-old, believes women are far more independent now and don’t need to rely on a partner to make a living. But the family duress is there.

“Marriage is not the necessity it once was. I’ve been single for a very long time. The main pressure I get is still from my family, because they hold very traditional values and believe that the happiness of a woman comes from having a happy marriage,” says Shi.

Working for a foreign company, her marital status is not an issue and doesn’t make any difference in terms of her career path.

“Society is much more tolerant and open-minded. There are lots of openly gay people, for example, so I guess that women not getting married shouldn’t be a big deal either. But if you are working for a state-owned company, maybe it’s not so easy. I also have more guilt towards my parents, because of their traditional way of thinking,” says Shi.

Evidence that women are standing up to the pressure can be seen in the data. Since 2013, the number of newly-registered marriages has dropped by more than 9 per cent, a worrying trend for a government trying to raise the birth rate to try to counter a greying population.

This year the Japanese skincare brand SK-II released a powerful TV commercial about "leftover women", which clocked millions of hits within hours and showed a group of courageous women who defy their parents wishes and choose to make their own decisions, at their own pace. It has become one of the most influential advertisements ever shown in China.

In one scene, a family is sitting at a table making jiaozi dumplings, a traditional Chinese New Year pastime. A woman’s father says it’s time “to fix this problem . . . don’t be so cruel to me”. The daughter talks of her dread of Chinese New Year, her grim expression in contrast to the scenes of dancing dragons from the lunar new year festival.

Parents give painfully frank assessments of their daughters’ prospects – “too old” or “not too pretty” – and say how they feel their daughters are incomplete without getting married.

One young woman breaks down. “Maybe I am being selfish. I want to say sorry to them,” she says, while another speaks of how not getting married is a huge sign of disrespect to your parents.

Matchmaking market

The ad moves to a matchmaking market in the People's Park in Shanghai where parents post profiles of their daughters, listing their income and job details, desperately seeking suitors.

This time, the profiles are replaced with giant posters featuring the women – presumably wearing SK-II beauty products.

A father and mother read their daughter’s poster, which says: “I want to take the time to find the right person. I will always support you,” and now it’s the parents turn to reflect, their turn to cry.

Another woman tells her mother she is happy being alone, being free. The mother responds: “My daughter is beautiful. ‘Leftover women’ should enjoy their single status.”

Leta Hong Fincher, author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China and consultant on the SK-II ad, believes "leftover women" is a government-created category that stigmatises single, urban, educated women. It's striking how much pushback there has been against that negative categorisation.

“When I wrote my book I focused a lot on this incredible marriage anxiety and a lot of women I interviewed were just unaware of their own oppression. It wasn’t just the stigma of being single, they too often made these tremendous compromises and sacrifices when they got married, in part out of this incredible anxiety that it was a terrible thing to be single,” she said.

Social changes

“The government is very strongly trying to suppress these natural social changes that are taking place in women’s awareness of their status. Women are urban and educated, they are becoming much more aware of the need to stand up for themselves and protect their economic independence, or the desire to avoid being pushed into marriage and having children,” said Hong Fincher.

A therapist working at a hospital, Zhang Jingwen (26) is unmarried, but is in a relationship. “For unmarried women after 30, well, I think they are more free than before of the feeling they must get married, but somehow, many of my friends have internalised the pressure and feel anxiety themselves,” she says.

“They don’t stop doing blind dates, even though they hate it. The dating game is so cruel, treating men and women like products ready to be traded.” She believes growing awareness among women will eventually win out over the traditional pressures.

“But for now, I feel more confident as a feminist, because I always fight and really take woman’s rights and power seriously. I am not afraid to make my own voice heard.”

– (This is the second article in a series of four. Tomorrow: How family planning rules in China are being loosened to help ease demographic pressures and reflect social change)