Share Facebook

Twitter

Whatsapp

Mail

Whatsapp By 2020 sociologists in China expect an extra 35 million Chinese men to women, leaving millions of men little chance of finding a female partner.

A government-sponsored campaign to shame educated women into marrying young has been underway for several years in China. Though concerns have been raised internationally, there’s little opposition inside the communist nation due to government control and censorship, writes Alex McClintock.

‘Pretty girls don’t need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family, but girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult,' wrote China's Xinhua News Agency three years ago.

'These kinds of girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is, they don’t realize that as women age, they are worth less and less, so by the time they get their M.A. or Ph.D., they are already old, like yellowed pearls.’

The state media began very aggressively pushing the term through news reports and commentary and columns and cartoons, really stigmatising these women who are educated and still single and telling them that they need to lower their sights when they're choosing a husband or time will run out for them and they'll be single forever.

The article was published on International Women’s Day, 2011. If that seems like a strange sentiment to voice on a day that marks women’s economic and political achievements, stranger still is that it was reposted on the website of the All-China Women's Federation, the government body supposedly responsible for promoting women’s rights.

The editorial was part of an ongoing government campaign aimed at pressuring young, educated women into getting married. The multimedia push warns women that they will become ‘leftover’ and ‘unwanted’ if they have not found a partner by the time they reach their late twenties.

‘The leftover women media campaign started in 2007 when the All China Women's Federation defined the term,’ says Leta Hong Fincher, a sociologist and the author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. ‘The state media began very aggressively pushing the term through news reports and commentary and columns and cartoons, really stigmatising these women who are educated and still single and telling them that they need to lower their sights when they're choosing a husband or time will run out for them and they'll be single forever.’

Read more: Chinese matchmaking for the modern woman

For many reasons, the one child policy and a longer-term preference for boys among them, there are about 117 boys born for every 100 girls in China. In cities like Shanghai, mass outdoor matchmaking events hosted by the All-China Women's Federation have attracted upwards of 40,000 people. Yet the campaign isn’t only targeted at women; it aims to bring pressure to bear from relatives as well.

‘A lot of these young women who are very highly educated are quite progressive in their own gender norms,’ says Hong Fincher. ‘They're very ambitious, they're talented, they've accomplished a lot in university and in fact today Chinese women are better educated than ever before. But parents are one of the most direct ways that this pressure is exerted on these young women to get married, so the media campaign is targeting the older generation.’

Listen: A love affair with China

Despite the concern voiced by women’s groups overseas, there’s little opposition to the campaign from within China, where civil society groups for the most part do not exist. According to Hong Fincher, there are some feminist activists working, but they do so alone, essentially as free agents. Groups have to apply to the government for legal status and even if they are approved, are subject to shutdown with little notice, as was the case with a major anti-domestic violence network shut down this month.

These attitudes are particularly perplexing in a country that was once streets ahead of the west when it came to women’s place in society and the economy. Even 1000 years ago during the Sung Dynasty, women had very advanced property rights and in the mid-20th century they played a crucial role in China’s rise to superpower status.

China's 'leftover' women Listen to this episode of Late Night Live.

‘Mao Zedong famously declared that "women hold up half the sky", and in the early period after the communist revolution in 1949, the Communist Party really did a lot to promote women, particularly in paid employment,’ says Hong Fincher. ‘So they had initiatives in the cities assigning women jobs and that included putting women in managerial positions. China had a very high female labour force participation and women were publicly celebrated as contributing to the country's economic development. But with the onset of market reforms over the last three decades, all of the gains that women made in the early part of the communist era have been eroded to some degree.’

‘It's really quite ironic, because China's population crisis is one of surplus men. There are no surplus women. So I argue in my book that there really aren't leftover women, they are concoction made up by the government to stigmatise single women. There is no reason why they should be pressured into marrying at that age if they don't want to.’

From razor-sharp analysis of current events to the hottest debates in politics, science, philosophy and culture, Late Night Live puts you firmly in the big picture.



