When a four-minute documentary-style video exploring the pressures placed on single women in China was released in April, the term sheng nu, which translates into English as “leftover women,” was new to the rest of the world. But for millennial Chinese women, it was an all-too-familiar concept. Sheng nu, which refers to any woman over the age of 27 who is still single, applies to a growing body of women seeking education, economic freedom, and a more unconventional life path than their parents. But despite the progressive movement, the message from society remains unchanged: If you’re not married, you’re doing something wrong.

“If you look before 2007, there wasn’t this extreme, extraordinary anxiety surrounding marriage,” says Leta Hong Fincher, a consultant on the documentary and author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. She believes that the Chinese government, concerned with creating a so-called “high quality” workforce that can compete in the global marketplace, coined the phrase as part of an aggressive propaganda campaign to coerce educated women out of the workforce and into matrimony and motherhood. With falling birth rates and much speculation on the impact to China’s economy, Fincher argues that the government is deliberately frightening women into believing that if they delay marriage, no one will want to marry them at all.

“The government is focused on marrying off urban, educated women but it does not want rural, uneducated women to have more babies,” Fincher explains. “This goes hand-in-hand with the population quality—they want these women to build the new generation of skilled workers.”

This campaign of fear is especially effective considering the integral role of family within Chinese culture. Rigid and hierarchical, the traditional family structure places great emphasis upon responsibility to one’s family. For modern Chinese women, it’s a precarious balancing act to keep the older generation satisfied as their country modernizes at an unprecedented pace. The documentary, produced by luxury Japanese skin-care line SK-II (which was promoted with the hashtag #changedestiny), was created as a rally cry for young women to continue the fight for happiness on their own terms.

Li Chenxi, the star of Al Jazeera’s recent documentary China’s Fake Boyfriends, paid a handsome stranger to assuage her parents’ fears about her single status. Li Chenxi, a landscape designer in her late 20s, works in Beijing, about 750 miles south of her home city, Harbin. Each Chinese New Year, she faces the lengthy journey home, and the crushing weight of parental disappointment when she arrives alone. “Sheng nu is not a positive word,” she says in the documentary, while applying a face mask and moving around her tiny apartment in a giraffe-print onesie. “In Chinese, it feels like someone has been abandoned.”