China's Leftover Women

Late Marriage among Professional Women and its Consequences

Sandy To

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415723619
• eBook ISBN: 9781317934189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The term "sheng nu" ("leftover women") has been recently coined in China to describe the increasing number of women, especially highly educated professional women in their late twenties and over who have not married. This book explores this phenomenon, reporting on extensive research among "leftover women", research which reveals that the majority of women are keen to get married, contrary to the notion that traditional marriage has lost its appeal among the new generations of economically independent women. The book explains the reasons behind these women's failures to get married, discusses the consequences for the future make-up of China's population at the dawn of its modification of the one child policy, and compares the situation in China with that in other countries. The book provides practical solutions for educated women's courtship dilemmas, and long term solutions for China's partnering issues, gender relations, and marriage formation. The book also relates the 'leftover women' problem to theories of family, mate selection, feminism, and individualization.

1 Introduction to China’s ‘Leftover Women’

Highly Educated, Accomplished ... and Unmarried

DOI: 10.4324/9781315857596-1

The official definition of sheng nü, or ‘leftover women’, by the Chinese Ministry of Education (2007) is ‘urban professional women who are over 27 years old who have high educational level, high salary, high intelligence, and attractive appearance, but also overly high expectations for marriage partners, and hence are “left behind” in the marriage market’. The very first origins of the term sheng nü have been much contested, and it is virtually impossible to find out exactly when and who first coined the term, be it television dramas, talk show hosts, magazine articles, or academic circles. But the most sig-nificant aspect of the 2007 official definition that has been endorsed by the Chinese government, and continuously propagated by the government-run All-China Women’s Federation, was that the single women themselves were the ones to blame for being unable to find husbands, and it was because they had overemphasized their career ambitions and professional goals to the detriment of their ‘personal happiness’, which was getting married and having a family.

Perhaps it could be surmised that, in line with China’s paternalistic culture, the government’s critique of single professional women served as a ‘benevolent warning’ for them to not ‘leave it too late’ to find a husband and to have children, for it was the common belief that women’s marriageability declined with their age, and there would be fewer eligible men to choose from given how the ‘A-grade’ bunch would all be seized by younger women. The ‘solution’ provided by the government was that the women with the ‘three highs’ – high educational level, high salary, and high expectations – should relax their ‘high expectations’ for marriage partners, given how, according to the age-old traditional partner choice practice, women habitually searched for men who were mendang-hudui (from similar backgrounds). On the whole, it was believed that by being ‘less picky’, and being more proactive about resolving her marital ‘crisis’, presumably by relaxing her career goals to put more effort into cultivating her relationship goals, that a single woman could successfully shed her ‘leftover’ status.¹

The main presumptions made about ‘leftover women’ were hence that they were destined to get married, somehow, sometime, and to not do so would be defying the tradition, or even more egregiously, that they would come to regret their own decision if they found themselves without a husband and children when they were old. As regards the ‘leftover women’s’ partner choices, it was also presumed that they were bound to be ‘picky’ in terms of men, given their own high accomplishments, and would therefore expect to find an equally, if not more accomplished marriage partner. It was therefore suggested that ‘marriage to an accomplished man’ was what all single professional women aspired to at the end of the day.

Nevertheless, these very sketchy generalizations conferred by government sources were no different from media sensationalizations which could not give an integrated and intellectual account of the sheng nü or ‘leftover women’ phenomenon. Without the presence of a ‘real’ or empirically grounded explanation of why so many professional women of marriageable age were unmarried, there would be no clue to finding a ‘solution’ to the marriage problem.

Government agendas to get ‘leftover women’ married off

On a wider level, why would the Chinese government be so keen to promote the concept of ‘leftover women’ and to urge their single women to marry and discard their stigmatization? Like many developed countries, China is experiencing the same problem of a declining birth rate and consequent ageing problem, and the most direct and obvious solution is to encourage couples to have more children. Granted, a range of factors serve to deter women or couples from having children, and again, the more general explanations include the rise of living and childrearing costs, work commitments, infertility, or one’s own family planning and lifestyle choices. However, in a conservative society like China where children outside wedlock are virtually nonexistent, the first and foremost step to increasing the birth rate is to get the unmarried to get married.

It was highly educated ‘leftover women’ who were the chief targets of persuasion, as by logic, they would be able to produce the most ‘high quality’ offspring that could raise the quality of the whole country’s population, and enhance its productivity levels. A clear manifestation of China’s pressing demands to resolve its ageing problem can be found in its recent modification of its One Child Policy in 2014. Prior to this latest revision, and over the three decades since its initial launch in 1979 where smaller adjustments had been made throughout, only rural and urban couples who were both only children were allowed to have another child, and those from the countryside were allowed to have a second child if their first one was a girl, but now, both rural and urban couples with only one of them being an only child can apply to have a second child. So far, the effectiveness of the new birth policy at instigating a larger wave of births is difficult to gauge, as it has only been a few months since its implementation. But barring other financial or personal disincentives, such large-scale institutional level adjustments are likely to stimulate the birth rate to some degree. Especially since in the past, privileged individuals have willingly paid hefty fines for exceeding the one-birth quota, or in some cases, been prosecuted and then fined extra, as in the case of the director Zhang Yimou who was recently discovered to have had three teenage sons by his second wife in addition to a grown-up daughter by his first wife. Nevertheless, the relaxation of the One Child Policy has given individuals who did have an interest in having more children the legitimacy to do so.

Can uneducated, non-career-oriented women be called ‘leftover women’?

It was emphasized in the government’s official ‘leftover women’ definition that these women had a ‘high educational level’ and ‘high salary’. This undoubtedly corroborated the official statistics that pointed to a drastic increase in the number of Chinese women enrolled in university and postgraduate degrees, ² and in previously male-dominated fields of business and finance over the last two decades.³ Did this mean that uneducated and non-career-oriented women could not be called ‘leftover women’ even if they too were single and unmarried? Why was it that non-elite women were seemingly excluded from the whole ‘leftover women’ discourse?

Certainly, not all unmarried women were highly educated and had professional careers. Despite the distinctively improved educational chances and occupational presence of women in developed societies nowadays, there were still women who were ‘left behind’ in the economic juggernaut, either because of a lack of competitiveness, or their own disinclination to participate. Either way, there was no reason to neglect the romantic trials and tribulations of these less privileged women, as their courtship and marital landscapes were just as worthy of investigation as women of the professional elite.

In Hong Kong’s early industrialization era of the 1970s, there had been a group of women whose marriages were delayed. They could be deemed as the predecessors of today’s ‘leftover women’, except they did not have high educational qualifications and highly paid jobs. Janet Salaff (1976, 1981) was the first sociologist to explore the delayed marriage phenomenon of these 1970s working class ‘leftover women’, and she found that it was seldom their own personal choice to postpone their marital affairs.⁴ Forty years ago, Hong Kong daughters’ family statuses had still been very low, and working class women were the ones who were required to sacrifice their educational chances to support their brothers’ educational and career ambitions. These ‘working daughters’ had to take up jobs in factories or other menial sectors sometimes as early as in their teenage years, and they were expected to make economic contributions to their families for as long as they were unmarried. Delaying their daughters’ marriage was therefore the best way to maximize the family income, as being in a married state meant that their daughters would contribute to their husbands’ families instead.

These less privileged ‘leftover women’ of the past suffered a lack of individual agency as they were constrained by their economic conditions and family circumstances at the time. They also suffered from patriarchal oppression that relegated them to inferior family positions, which further diminished their autonomy regarding courtship endeavours. Being required to put collective family responsibilities first, the concept of ‘marital choice’ was virtually unheard of amongst this earlier generation of Hong Kong ‘leftover women’.

To marry or not to marry? What do single, educated professional women want?

For those single women of today who have benefited from vastly improved educational chances and occupational advancements, how would they want to conduct their relationship choices? To marry or not to marry?

This ought to be the first question that a study on ‘leftover women’ should tackle, as it determines the whole direction of the entire study. If the answer were ‘no’ – that these ‘leftover women’ did not want to get married at all, then this study would have taken a completely different turn.

There are certainly studies dedicated specifically to exploring the views of single women who wanted to remain resolutely single, or which emphasized the empowerment of single women who could survive on their own and lead fulfilling lives without men. Tuula Gordon’s (1994) Single Women: On the Margins? and E. Kay Trimberger’s (2005) The New Single Woman are key representatives. Trimberger’s study explores the reasons behind single women’s decisions to remain single, and includes accounts of divorced women, single mothers, and lesbian women. It would be somewhat expected that women who had been through the painful experience of divorce would be put off by marriage to some degree, and would espouse the benefits of living for themselves, and that single mothers would rather rely on friendship networks and family support than on men who were unreliable and disruptive to their lives. However, it was not known whether these divorced single women would permanently shun marriage, given how nowadays, as Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim (2002) has observed, it is just as common for individuals to adopt serial marriages and divorced-extended family arrangements to fulfil their inherent needs for intimacy and companionship in a volatile and existentially insecure late modern world. The more distant futures of these single women’s marital trajectories were probably not within the scope of most studies on ‘single women’, as their focus would have been on the (current) self-sufficiency and personal satisfaction that single women could achieve without entering into a marital relationship, while emphasizing the downsides of marriage through their concrete undesirable experiences.

This study, however, as mentioned in the Preface, is about women who have never been married before, have never had children, and predominantly do have the urge to get married (and have children) in the future. In the earliest stages of this study, I interviewed quite a few divorced or separated women who shared their negative views on marriage. Expectedly so, women who had been through the whole marital experience and were scathed in the process had decidedly different views than women who had never experienced marital traumas and still exuded considerable idealism toward the arrangement. Therefore, in the end, I decided to investigate only the marriage views and courtship experiences of never-married women who had comparatively more ‘unbiased’ views regarding marriage, although there were those who had divorced parents, which may have affected their views in a negative way.

On the whole, it was found that the ‘leftover women’ in this study were ones who wanted to lead more ‘conventional’ marital lives, and were out to find suitable partners who could help them realize their marriage goals. The reasons behind their ‘traditional marriage views’ will be explored and expounded in depth in Chapter 2 of this book. As for those women who were less keen than others to get married, but were not against marriage per se, they were called ‘voluntary leftovers’,⁵ as they had less traditional marriage views and did not necessarily view marriage to be their ‘ultimate goal’ like the majority of ‘leftover women’. The more democratic, or less traditional views of these women will also be discussed throughout the rest of the book, especially in Chapters 4 and 6.

‘If it isn’t me, then it must be ... him?’ Who were the perpetrators of ‘leftover women’s’ marital dilemmas?

While ‘leftover women’ were being stigmatized and blamed by the Chinese government for not trying hard enough to find partners, the seemingly endless stream of single female contestants that flocked to go on the renowned Chinese matchmaking reality television show Fei Cheng Wu Rao (If You Are The One) signalled the opposite. Ever since its controversial inception in 2010, the show has gained much fanfare and fame across the whole of China as well as the Chinese diaspora as a result of its worldwide recruitment of contestants from almost every country. In each week’s episode, 24 single women contestants would line up on the stage to choose and to be chosen by five single male contestants who went on stage in succession. Once a female contestant was chosen by a male contestant, they would leave the stage together as a couple, and the female contestant’s original place on the stage would be instantly filled up by a new female contestant standing by in the audience.

The female contestants on the show were famously emblematic of today’s generation of ‘leftover women’ who are highly educated and have successful careers – with most of them also boasting attractive appearances and high-strung personalities in accordance with the visual pleasure-inducing objectives of reality television. Despite recent doubts and controversies surrounding the show’s ‘staged’ quality that made it resemble a large scale variety show like America’s Got Talent rather than a matchmaking show, with its male and female contestants more like singers and dancers and magical performers than matchmaking candidates, the fact that it could continuously recruit women of high standards to stand on its stage has been the key to its success over the years. Indeed the show’s ‘success’ apparently did not lie in its ‘success rate’ of matchmaking its female and male contestants – as this was yet another controversial aspect of the show – but more in how it could get so many high quality women who were PhD candidates, entrepreneurs, heiresses, and ex-Olympic champions to go on it every week.

The survival of a matchmaking reality show like Fei Cheng Wu Rao can only be sustained by a continuous and consistent supply and demand of ‘leftover women’. Not to mention that there is a large majority of ‘leftover women’ who do not feel comfortable being on national television and would not dare to apply to be on the show. These ‘leftover women’ were mostly recruited from several of China’s largest matchmaking and dating websites, which serves sufficiently to show that many single women were indeed making tremendous efforts to find marriage partners by joining these dating websites in the first place. Furthermore, it is important to mention that the majority of the single women who were recruited to be on Fei Cheng Wu Rao, or other smaller scale matchmaking shows of a more regional nature, were mostly in their 20s, with some being as young as 22 and 23. Only a handful were above 30, or had...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Introduction to China’s ‘leftover women’: highly educated, accomplished … and unmarried
• 2 Traditional marriage views of modern career women: ‘I’m very traditional so I must get married!’
• 3 Discrimination in the marriage market: ‘I have a lot of friends who are still single because men think that we are too tough!’
• 4 Patriarchal demands and difficult choices: ‘I’m quite unhappy because he made me face the choice … so I chose work’
• 5 Contesting discriminatory constraints: ‘I have a lot of Western colleagues who say they don’t like their wives not working. They think they should utilize their talents’
• 6 Combatting controlling constraints: ‘I would like to find someone who can take care of things at home and complement my schedule’
• 7 The strategies of partner choice: Maximizers, Traditionalists, Satisficers, Innovators
• 8 Conclusion: the future of China’s ‘leftover women’
• Glossary of Chinese terms
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Bibliography
• Index