Both women and men may suffer from pressure to get married, but this may be experienced and expressed in different ways according to gender. The pressure to marry is felt particularly strongly by women and usually starts at an earlier age than for men because women are expected to marry earlier than men. A woman may start to experience pressure to marry starting in her early twenties, around the time when she finishes her education, and peaking when she approaches her mid-twenties.
Women not only have to face marriage pressure at an earlier age, but they are also less capable of escaping such pressure because their freedom of mobility is still much more limited than that of men in China. It was particularly the case for the middle-class, university-educated young local women I met in Shanghai. Their freedom to move out of their parents’ home before marriage or to relocate to another city is relatively restricted. This is related to the social control of young women’s bodies and the cultural perception of what is considered to be ‘proper’ femininity. Restrictions on mobility and living arrangements are more common for women from well-off urban families or from economically more developed cities such as Shanghai, Beijing and Guangzhou (Kam 2013). Compared with women from rural or less developed areas, it is harder for women in the so-called rich cities to use economic reasons to convince their families to let them relocate to other parts of the country. Marriage is usually the most convincing way for young women to lead a life away from their natal families.
Economic disadvantage is another factor that puts many women in a negative position regarding marriage pressure. The ever-widening gender income gap in post-reform China indicates a diminishing economic possibility for women to have a financially independent life outside of marriage. According to the statistics provided by the All China Women’s Federation (ACWF news website 2013), the governmental women’s organisation in China, the income of women in urban and rural areas by the end of 2010 was 67.3 per cent and 56 per cent of men’s income respectively. In this regard, marriage becomes a practical choice and in some cases, one of the few possible ways for women as a disadvantaged gender group to attain upward social mobility. In general, women are expected to marry men who are economically better off. For instance, the contemporary marriage custom in Shanghai, China’s economically most developed coastal city, requires the male’s side of the family to provide housing for the new couple. Housing is always the biggest economic investment in a marriage. There is a popular saying in Shanghai which goes: ‘Having a daughter now is much better than having a son since the investment in a son for his marriage is far more than that for a daughter’. This popular belief testifies to the unequal economic status of women and men in a marriage. Women are made to believe that marriage is a way for them to obtain material security.
For men, the pressure to get married also leads to pressures to accumulate socially recognised cultural and economic capital. The most widely recognised symbol of material success for a man is whether or not he possesses his own apartment and a car (which is more of a class symbol than an everyday necessity in most parts of urban China). In cities, available housing is generally agreed to be the most important item prior to a proposed marriage. Men are usually expected to provide or be the major investor in the marital home. The bride or her natal family might invest equally in the marital home in terms of paying for renovations, furniture, down payment or even the monthly mortgage, while the groom is expected to take the lead in purchasing a home before marriage. The expectation that a bride should seek a wealthier husband negatively affects the chances of those men who are economically less well-off to find a wife. The cultural expectation that ‘women marry up, men marry down’ has resulted in the stigmatisation of both economically privileged single women (the so-called shengnu) and their less well-off male counterparts from lower social class or rural backgrounds.
There is a history of stigmatising women who depart from the state-enforced heterosexual monogamous model in China. Women who deviate from the dominant model are not only marginalised in formal or informal ways, but they are also categorised as sexual deviants and considered a threat to social order and morality. The category of socially unacceptable women consists of unmarried women, childless women, sexually active women, asexual women, homosexual women, and sexually dominant women. In contemporary China, among all these categories, the least stigmatised are unmarried women and barren women, followed by sexually active heterosexual women.
Homosexual women are a category of so-called sexual ‘deviants’ who receive the least social recognition. Unlike sexually active heterosexual women, women who engage in same-sex relationships are more often dismissed by society. Their sexuality is unthinkable in terms of the dominant heterosexual model of an active male and a passive female. Li Yinhe (2002a: 254) argues that, since same-sex sexual activity is not associated with marriage and reproduction, it is considered both ‘improper’ and ‘insignificant’. Female homosexuality is still considered abnormal in the popular imagination. Female same-sex sexuality may be much less severely regulated and punished by the legal establishment than male homosexual acts, but the cultural dismissal ofwomen’s same-sex sexuality is as serious as other more visible forms ofsocial penalty (Kam 2013).
Many younger lesbian women in Shanghai resort to telling their parents they want to stay single for life, in order to lessen the stigmatising effect of being simultaneously unmarried and a homosexual woman. A celibate life does not challenge the core values of heterosexuality, whereas homosexuality is an unambiguous departure from the norm, violently disturbing the entire heterosexual framework of marriage and reproduction. Nevertheless, prejudice against single women is still widely present in society. Prior to the reform period, dating qingnian (‘overage young people’, which means those over the marital age who remain unmarried) were regarded as a social problem. ‘Overage’ unmarried women, from their late twenties and above, are often associated with physical unattractiveness, poor interpersonal relationships, poor health, and personality defects. Marriage status is therefore understood as closely associated with one’s personality, social skills and other individual characteristics. Failure to get married is considered to be a personal failure. This obscures the fact that marriage is a social construction and that whether or not one gets married should be seen as a personal choice.
The popular understanding of single women is still dominated by negative stereotypes. Staying single for life is understood to mean leading a miserable and incomplete life. In the decade starting from the year 2000, the first generation to be born after the implementation of the one child policy in 1979 reached the suitable age for marriage. However, for this generation, newly acquired economic freedom and geographical mobility has not automatically translated into opportunities to break away from family control. In fact, the pressure to marry faced by an only child can be much more severe. The social stigmatisation of single women is not as pronounced as before for economically and professionally privileged women living in cities. But for socially less privileged women or for those with a family that strongly favours the marriage norm, marriage is not so much a personal choice but an obligation for the sake of one’s survival in family and society.
As mentioned above, shengnu is a newly invented negative label for single women who are at or above the marital age. Shengnu literally means ‘leftover women’. It first appeared in the popular media to refer to single women in cities. Recently the term has been adopted by official organisations such as the party-affiliated All China Women’s Federation (2013), the most influential governmental women’s organisation in the country, which uses the term in their publications. In 2007, the Chinese Ministry of Education listed ‘shengnu’ as one of the 171 new words of the year. In the same year, the All China Women’s Federation defined shengnu as unmarried women over age 27 and since then started to publish a number of articles on its website stigmatising unmarried women.
In a similar manner, state media are eager to warn the public of the possible undesirable impacts on society of the rising number of single men, in particular an increase in the crime rate. Due to the cultural preference for boys resulting in widespread abortion of female foetuses, the sex ratio of boys to girls at birth in China has continued to rise in the past decades. In 2011, China’s national female-to-male sex ratio was 100: 117.78 (the natural sex ratio should be about 100 newborn girls to 103—7 newborn boys) (Xinhuanet 2012). The sex imbalance is much more severe in provinces with primarily rural populations. While it is said that there is a growing population of unmarried women in the cities, in rural areas it is primarily economically deprived men who remain unmarried. The ‘bachelor (guanggun) crisis’ is also an emerging gender issue that has been widely discussed in society.
In the past decade, there has been a surge of popularity in matchmaking television reality shows in China. They are aired during prime time and a few of them have enjoyed high ratings for years. The countrywide discussion of shengnu (shengnan usually receive far less attention) and the craze for matchmaking reality shows further demonstrates the importance of marriage in China. A more critical way of considering the growing number of single women and men in China is to understand that the phenomenon indicates young people’s mounting scepticism regarding the institution of marriage, especially women’s concerns over the unequal gender roles that are inscribed in heterosexual marriage. This is discussed in detail below.