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Journalism of Courage
In 2018, 30-year-old Teresa Xu, fresh from a breakup and thriving in her career, visited a hospital in Beijing to inquire about egg freezing. Though she dreamed of having children someday, she wasn’t convinced that marriage was a necessary step.
At a time when China’s birth rate has dropped by 68% since 1988, the government has been encouraging couples to have children by making in-vitro fertilisation and other reproductive services more affordable. However, Xu’s request was denied, with doctors insisting she must be married first. A year later, she filed a lawsuit, arguing that her rights were being infringed upon. Despite numerous appeals, Beijing’s Third Intermediate People’s Court ruled in favour of the hospital, stating that Chinese law only permits married couples to undergo the procedure.
Xu’s case underscores a broader dilemma faced by Chinese women and presents a challenge for the state. Beijing risks struggling to maintain its workforce and manage a rapidly aging population without a substantial increase in births. While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has introduced incentives for married couples to have more children, it simultaneously restricts single people from adopting, accessing reproductive healthcare, and receiving maternity benefits.
Marriage itself is becoming increasingly unattractive to Chinese women. Between 2013 and 2020, the marriage rate dropped by 40%, with last year marking the lowest percentage of marriages on record, according to government census data. While factors such as cultural norms, economic pressures, and the legacy of the one-child policy contribute to this decline, a deeper conflict is emerging between state-driven pro-marriage campaigns and a rising feminist consciousness. Women are redefining their autonomy, resisting traditional patriarchal structures, and inadvertently challenging the CCP’s demographic objectives.
The traditional practice of marriage in China is emblematic of centuries-old Confucian culture rooted in patriarchy. The CCP has continued this tradition, framing marriage as a patriotic duty. Its chairman, Xi Jinping, has repeatedly urged women to uphold the “family civilisation” through marriage, and to bear children “at the right age.”
According to Isabelle Attané, a senior researcher at the French Institute for Demographic Studies, “In China, there is a strong stigmatisation of women who don’t get married.”
“Men are treated as the victims, with women being blamed for the fact that many men can’t find a wife,” Attané tells indianexpress.com.
As documented by journalist Leta Hong Fincher in her seminal work Leftover Women (2014), unmarried women over 26 are referred to as shengnu, a word loosely translated from leftover food.
In Chinese society, this concept has been used to shame unmarried females. Even the All-China Federation of Women (ACWF), a leading woman’s rights organisation, stated in a 2011 post that “girls with an average or ugly appearance…hope to further their education to increase their competitiveness.” The article, titled Leftover Women Do Not Deserve Our Sympathy, goes on to dispel that notion, stating that by the time these girls get their MA or PhD, “they are already old, like yellowed pearls.”
This, according to Fincher, is emblematic of the fact that “women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of rights and gains relative to men” under the CCP.
That being said, the emphasis on marriage affects both genders. In Self-Defense Corps, Violence, and the Bachelor Subculture in South China: Two Case Studies (1989), anthropologist James L Watson writes that prestige is only an attribute of “married men who have families to protect and obligations to fulfil.” Bachelors, he adds, “remain perpetual adolescents who cannot play a full role in society.”
Underscoring the importance of the institution, the CCP has employed both the carrot and the stick. On one hand, single men and women are positioned as subversive to state unity, shamed into either marrying or risking being alienated by society. On the other hand, the government has launched campaigns promoting marriage, including paying couples who marry young, funding pro-marriage influencers, and even letting couples register their union in social media-friendly locations.
Yet, these efforts clash with a grassroots feminist awakening.
In Career Development and Marriage Attitudes among Young Women in China (2020) , L. Tang and Z. Li write that unmarried women who face a lot of social pressure are more likely to have a negative attitude toward marriage, especially if they view marriage as a duty rather than a personal decision.
An increasing number of women, especially educated urbanites, are pushing back against the state’s constant push to force them into heterosexual marriage and child-rearing.
As Fincher argues in her 2018 book, Betraying Big Brother, “Virtually all of China’s persecuted feminist activists come from the exact demographic that the government is targeting in its pro-marriage, pro-natalist policies.” Although these women eschew overtly political messages, by mobilising women to break free of patriarchal structures, they are “sabotaging the government’s fundamental objective of ensuring that women remain baby breeders and docile guarantors of social stability.”
As to why so many women choose to remain single, the reason lies in the gendered nature of marriage itself.
A woman who graduated from a university in Southern California in 2016 returned to her home city of Shanghai, embarking on a career as a student councillor. Soon after her parents urged her to marry a close family friend. “I didn’t want to disappoint them after all they had paid for my education. So even though I was young, I agreed to the match,” she tells indianexpress.com.
At first, the relationship went well. The couple bought a house near her in-laws’ place, she was allowed to keep working, and at the age of 26 bore a baby girl. However, her husband soon grew discontent, and one night, physically abused her. She called the police who dismissed her complaint, and who urged the couple to resolve the dispute internally. She was scorned by her husband’s family and finally returned to her parents’ home. “I spoke to the police, to doctors, to my in-laws, but all of them seemed to think the fault was mine for not being a better wife,” she says.
According to ACWF, in 2022, around 66,000 women in China filed cases related to domestic violence. The actual number is likely higher.
Abuse and infidelity might be one end of the extreme but even on the other, the reality for some women is unappealing. According to the state-funded China General Social Survey (2021), 60 per cent of men believe that women should be responsible for childcare. Attané states that while the domestic situation has improved (men can cook and clean), “Generally speaking, families emphasise professional success for men over women, impacting the division of household labour, and making marriage a male-dominated institution.”
To make matters worse, divorces are harder and harder to come by. According to China expert Charles Minzner, the CCP is “steadily turning against divorce.” In China’s Doomed Fight Against Demographic Decline (2022), he points to statistics indicating that only 40 per cent of divorces are granted because for many judges, “it’s easier to strong-arm women to drop divorce cases, endure domestic violence, or even give up custody of their children.”
Rising living expenses and unemployment are significant challenges, yet the added gendered economic burden only deepens the crisis. Women find themselves in a double bind: they are expected to contribute financially, especially as housing prices soar, while still carrying a disproportionate share of childcare and household responsibilities.
Among the seven million single women aged 25-34 in urban China, many are key drivers of the nation’s economic growth. Today, women contribute roughly 41 per cent to China’s GDP, the highest share of any country in the world, according to the World Economic Forum.
Numerous studies, such as Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Second Shift (2012) and Veronica Jaris Tichenor’s Earning More and Getting Less (2005), have demonstrated that increased earnings for women have not necessarily translated into greater influence within their marriages.
A 2011 interpretation by the Supreme People’s Court specifies that unless legally challenged, marital property essentially belongs to the individual whose name appears on the property deed. In modern China, this individual is usually a man. A 2012 survey by Horizon China and iFeng.com of home buying in China’s leading real-estate markets revealed that only 30 percent of marital home deeds include the woman’s name, even though over 70 percent of women contribute to the purchase of the marital home.
Thus, even when a woman’s income is high, the bargaining power within the relationship rests with the man. And as women occupy an increasingly large portion of the labour forces, many question why they need a man. According to Vincent Dong, owner of Chengdu Siyuans Aviation Technology Co., “In the new China, women and men are basically equal, and thus women can support themselves without looking at men’s faces.” In an interview with indianexpress.com, he says that these educated women can “realise their own dreams” and don’t want to “get involved in family life dragging them down.”
However, not everyone agrees with Dong’s assessment.
In Seeking Western Men (2022), sociologist Monica Lui argues that older women struggle to find work in China, especially within the service sector. This in turn, has spurred a USD 2 billion dollar business in which commercial dating agencies pair semi-skilled women with men outside of China. Caught between taking up less desirable jobs like street vending, or leaving the country, many opt for the latter. According to Lui’s research, 83 per cent of financially struggling women married and moved abroad.
By either perspective, women across China are choosing alternative routes for economic stability, a decision that has massive repercussions in a country where men far outnumber women.
As a result of China’s now-defunct one-child policy, the sex ratio between males and females lies at 109 to 100 – well below the number needed to sustain its population. As journalist Deborah Jian Lee states in a 2011 report for the Pulitzer Foundation, while this may seem beneficial to women having more choices, “as the first generation touched by sex ratio imbalance grows up, the silent biological discrimination that is sex selection has been exacerbated by more visible threats to women, including sex trafficking, bride buying, and forced marriages.”
The imbalance is particularly profound in rural marriage markets. In an interview with indianexpress.com, Pan Wang, a professor in Chinese and Asian studies at the University of New South Wales, argues that “rural bachelors struggle to find brides, while urban women reject transactional marriages.” The surplus of men does not translate into better conditions for women, but instead, exacerbates competition, leading to exorbitant bride prices.
In Unnatural Selection (2011), author Mara Hvistendahl interviews a man from Suining in Sichuan province, named Wu Pingzhang. She recounts, he told me “not getting married, not having children – not possible.” His two twin boys will have to marry, but in a market where prospects and familial capital are intrinsically linked, Wu is forced to incentivise the deal. He hopes that his collection of Chairman Mao pins will be worth enough to find suitable brides for his sons.
Although bride price (essentially the opposite of a dowry) may seem like an advantage for women, it often has an adverse effect on their standing within a relationship. As Hvistendahl argues, “Attracting a high bride price is not the same as gaining more autonomy, and the increased value experienced by the eastern Chinese woman occurs only on the most basic level since the real test of equality is not what material goods a woman can ask a man to deliver but how she can expect him to treat her after marriage”
Additionally, middle and upper-class men use the system to ‘buy’ poor women while women are forced to marry up. Subsequently, according to Lee, “men at the bottom of society get left out of the marriage market, and that same pattern is coming to emerge for women at the top of society.”
Changing sexual norms is another factor. Many men still prioritise female purity, insisting their wives be virgins at the time of marriage. Certain elements of social media also encourage women to remain single, providing them with an online community that theoretically replaces marital companionship. Hashtags such as #AntiMarraige and #SingleUnion reflect these trends. The so-called ‘singles economy’, offering solo travel and tiny apartments, capitalises on it.
While statistics suggest that most women, even those who are highly educated, still subscribe to traditional marriage norms, the culture is changing. As the foreign educated counsellor says, despite the risk of family isolation and the shame of being a leftover woman, “I’d rather be single than be a servant.”
