Leftover in China Read online

  Though sex-selective abortion is certainly not exclusive to China, of the 163 million females estimated to have been aborted in Asia between 1985 and 2005, roughly 32 million were Chinese. In addition to “missing” a female population equivalent to the entire citizenry of Poland, throwing things even further off kilter is the fact that the resulting shortage of females is not evenly spread out across the country. As reported by Mara Hvistendahl in Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, there are places in China like Yichun, in Jiangxi province, where the ratio is 137 males for 100 females under age 4. That imbalance rises to 153 males for every 100 females of the same age group in Guanxi, and in Tianmen, Hubei, it escalates to a perilous 176 to 100, or the mathematical equivalent of 1 in every 3 men being unable to find a bride. What becomes evident when connecting these demographic dots is that with little exception, the vast majority of China’s surplus men were born in the most rural and impoverished areas of the country. As only sons, they were required to stay behind and tend to their family farms, whereas any females born into their same villages were free to migrate in search of menial jobs, and often husbands who would provide them with better lives. Now grown bachelors in a land where women their age are already in short supply, they face fierce competition to attract a wife and are known as guang gun, or “bare branches.” In Chinese, the term is most commonly used to refer to a man whose circumstances force him to be single (or who simply chooses to remain a bachelor), while also hinting at the strong likelihood that he will never produce “offshoots” of his own.

  “Bare branches” face great difficulty in China, where to be married is to be on track; it’s the hallmark of a properly functioning member of society, and the official sponsor of adulthood. Failing to produce an heir is among the most egregious violations of xiao, or filial piety, a concept that the Chinese continue to approach with extreme reverence. Further complicating matters are still prevalent Confucian ideals of the male as chief provider, which require that men not only out-earn their wives, but that they own a home in which to welcome a future wife. China’s fiercely hierarchical household registration system—known as the hukou—doesn’t make things any easier. Under this system, rural-born residents have rural hukou, and urban-born residents have urban hukou, both of which are issued for life. As a result, rural male citizens, in addition to being poor, are forever linked to their rural status, making them the nadir of the Chinese marriage chain.

  None of this was an issue in the days when Chinese work units known as danwei automatically provided their (male) employees with housing, but following the privatization of the Chinese real-estate market in 1998, property prices have soared, forging a formidable chasm between the country’s haves and have-nots.

  Which is where the lightning rods come in.

  Average Zhou

  To help their sons get married, the parents of rural surplus men often pour all of their life savings into property, reasoning that a deed will improve their sons’ marriage prospects. This is true to the extent that in a recent study, Shang-Jin Wei, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia University; Xiaobo Zhang, a professor of economics at Peking University and a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC; and Yu Liu of Tsinghua University found that the intensity of competition in the marriage market in China has considerable consequences for housing value and size. Specifically, they estimate that 30 to 48 percent of the real-estate appreciation in thirty-five major Chinese cities between 1998 and 2005 (or the equivalent of US $8 trillion), is directly correlated with China’s sex-ratio imbalance and a man’s need to acquire wealth (property) in order to attract a wife.

  Wei, Zhang, and Liu arrived at this percentage after examining different regions of China with a significant variation in the gender imbalance for the marriage-age cohort, and discovering that across both rural and urban areas, there is a strong positive association between the local sex ratio and the ratio of home value to household income. In other words, the more skewed the average sex ratio, the more expensive the average home.

  As a control, the researchers looked at rental prices and discovered that they did not appreciate at the same rate as housing prices, adding credence to the idea that the elevated home prices are less indicative of a demand for living space than they are of the need to hold a deed. They also found that the increased home value is a result of two main factors: people paying a higher price per square meter for their homes, and a trend of buying bigger homes.

  Just how much bigger?

  Zhang, courtesy of whom I came to know of the “church village” in Xiaoshan, also introduced me to the concept of homes with “phantom third stories.” This type of construction refers to a two-story house with an unfurnished, unfinished third story built expressly to make the house appear more grandiose from the outside. The trend has taken off in neighborhoods where the competition for a wife is particularly fierce, and in some areas, it has become mainstream to the extent that matchmakers won’t schedule an appointment with a man’s family unless his house has the requisite phantom floor.

  For an extra edge in the marriage market, parents who are especially keen to see their sons married have taken to adding height to their phantom third story abodes by bedizening their rooftops with lightning rods. Zhang explains that this has turned into something of a competition, with proprietors visibly striving to outdo their neighbors by upping the size of their rods to delirious proportions. While having the tallest house in town may warrant some unsolicited attention for a lonely bachelor trying to improve his odds in the marriage market, it’s critical to understand why his family must go to these lengths, widths, and heights to have him married: the odds are completely against them otherwise.

  More baby boys than girls have been born every year in China since even before demographers began to take notice. Prior to ultrasound machines, the one-child policy, and the ensuing female abortions that caused the gender imbalance, female infanticides were already happening across the country. Even in cases where female babies weren’t killed upon birth, China’s strong cultural preference for boys entitled male babies to a somewhat higher rate of survival. During times of hardship, for instance, male offspring were generally given a greater share of resources (in other words, food) to ensure their survival, resulting in a higher mortality rate for young females. A demographic study cited in Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky found that thirty-nine thousand baby girls die annually in China because parents don’t give them the same medical attention they give to their sons—and this is just in their first year of life.

  I mention this not to be grim, but to convey a more complete sense of the accrued surplus male population in China. In other words, when we see that a province has 120 males for every 100 females born during a certain year, it doesn’t simply mean that twenty-five or thirty years later, when those males and females are looking to be married, that 1 in 5 of those males will be without a wife. In real terms, it means that 20 males out of every 100 from that year of birth, plus all the other males born before them who didn’t find a wife in previous years, will all be in search of one.

  “It’s like going to the movies,” says Christophe Guilmoto, a demographer at the Centre Population et Développement in Paris, who likens each seat in the movie theater to a woman available for marriage. “As a man seeking a wife, you go to the afternoon showing, but it’s sold out,” he explains. “You try again later that evening, queuing two hours in advance this time, but there are still no tickets because a new batch of theater-goers has arrived ahead of you, and they’ve already gotten in.” Since there is only one theater in town playing this film, what is a man to do? He either keeps trying to get into future showings—thereby continuing to increase the demand for a wife—skips the movies altogether (remains a bachelor), or goes to see another film.

  In the case of rural Chinese men with limited resources, that other film might be Br
ide-Buying, starring Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, North Korea, and a few other neighboring Southeast Asian countries. It is well documented that China’s gender imbalance and resulting marriage squeeze has manifested itself in increased instances of bride trafficking and other unsavory practices, but perhaps most alarmingly, there is little sign that balance will be restored any time soon. Between 2001 and 2010 alone, an average of 1.3 million more boys than girls were born in China each year, indicating that sex-selective abortions are still occurring and continuing to upset the laws of nature. In other words, what we’re seeing play out today is just the beginning of a marriage squeeze that China’s rural bachelors will face for generations.

  Urban Oasis

  As China’s countryside saw the boom in baby boys that has led to its current gender imbalance and marriage squeeze, a very different story was unfolding in cities. Though birth records from Beijing and Shanghai indicate a gender imbalance strong enough to prove that sex-selective abortions had taken place, they represent a fraction of what was happening in more rural areas. In addition to a more balanced gender ratio, city life for only children—regardless of gender—was also very different. Urban only sons were raised as the proverbial “little emperors.” Showered with all of the attention and resources that two parents and four grandparents living in a suddenly much more open economy could possibly offer, they reaped the best of everything. And as luck or the lack of competing XY chromosomes would have it, urban only daughters did too.

  Born in an urban area, Christy already has one of the most desirable hukou available and doesn’t need to marry into a better one. Educated and well employed, she also has enough capital to purchase her own home, in addition to one day inheriting the Beijing apartment that her parents currently occupy. As far as living conditions go, she is light-years ahead of China’s bare branches, and yet her struggle to find a marriage partner is just as pronounced, but for radically different reasons.

  “We didn’t give it any thought—we just accepted the child we were given,” explains Christy’s mom. “My mother-in-law wasn’t too keen at first, but I was happy to have her, and my husband stood by me.” Christy can overhear our conversation and I see her nod. She later tells me that she’s long sensed her paternal grandmother’s preference for a grandson. “She has made us very proud,” continues her mom. “But she works so hard—we’ve always encouraged her to—it is very dangerous for a woman in China not to have her own livelihood, but now she must make space in her life for a man.”

  Like so many women in her age group, Christy is among the first generations of females born under the one-child policy to have reached the age by which according to societal prescriptions, they should be wives and mothers and after which they become known as sheng nü, or “leftover women.” The prefix “sheng” is the same as in sheng cai, or “leftover food”—hardly a palatable association. In more rural areas, this term may be applied as early as age twenty-five, whereas in larger cities, it kicks in closer to thirty, or what is generally considered the last stop before spinsterhood. In extremely progressive circles the lifeline may be pushed to the early thirties, but beyond that, it’s commonly acknowledged that a Chinese woman has limited her dating pool to bulbous sexagenarian divorcés who suffer from severe halitosis and are the fathers of at least one irascible adolescent.

  Brookings Institution demographer Wang Feng estimates that there are 7 million never-married women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four in urban China. They are concentrated in China’s top-tier cities, with Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai topping the charts, and like most things in China, they are a phenomenon of the last thirty years. Wang notes that in 1982, less than 5 percent of urban Chinese women in their late twenties were unmarried. That percentage doubled by 1995, tripled by 2008, and is advancing, full-steam ahead, toward 30 percent. For a country where just over thirty years ago, marriage was obligatory and universal, that’s a considerable change of course.

  “Women in China are still seen primarily as biological beings,” says Wang, who as a demographer and sociologist, has studied marriage in China for over twenty years. He adds that since age twenty-seven or twenty-eight is still considered the ideal for child-bearing in China, thirty has become the threshold after which a woman becomes “leftover” based on the simple logic that she is out of her child-bearing hot zone. “It’s a very dangerous characterization,” he says, “because it unnecessarily squeezes women over 30 out of marriage. At that age, their fertility window is still fairly large.”

  But as far as the general Chinese public goes, thirty is the magic number. “,” or “Men at thirty are still in bloom,” begins a delightful Chinese idiom, which reflects the commonly accepted notion that a man entering his third decade is still well within his prime. The second half of the idiom, “,” is slightly less poetic. It likens women over thirty to tofu pulp—the insoluble parts of the soybean that cling to the tofu press or cheesecloth, after the rest of the soy milk has cooperatively passed through and coagulated into a big, smooth block.

  Though “leftovers” in China are viewed with a sundry mix of disdain, awe, and sympathy, it is generally agreed that they are the products of their time. They are a living testament to the increased educational and professional opportunities afforded to Chinese women over the last three decades, which have made marriage less of an immediate necessity or priority for them. Though not all of these women are only daughters, the majority are characterized as being well-educated, career-oriented women whose life experiences and relative financial independence have made them more discerning in what they seek in a mate. Refusing to marry because they’ve reached a certain age, or because everyone around them is telling them that they must, their attitude toward marriage is often considered irreverent, though as it turns out—not entirely without precedent.

  Renegade Reelers

  At the turn of the nineteenth century, in a little pocket of the Canton River Delta, lived a group of female renegades. Master runaway brides before the dawn of sneakers, they were known to escape from home on the morning of their marriages or bolt from their bridal sedan chairs and hide from their grooms in empty graves until everyone had given up looking for them. Of those who did accept marriage vows, many took fierce precautions to avoid one of their side effects: pregnancy. On the night of their nuptials, these renegade ladies were known to stay awake and vigilant, barricading themselves from their betrothed with as much furniture as they could muster. Using a technique called “body-wrapping,” some would mummify their genitals using a whopping undergarment equipped with several layers of fabric. Sewn into the garment like human dumplings, they remained stitched inside for as long as three consecutive days, taking pills to suppress nature’s calls.

  While the methods of these renegade women varied, their mission was the same: to keep marriage and motherhood at bay. This, in the China of the 1890s, was supremely saucy. As discussed in Janice E. Stockard’s fascinating Daughters of the Canton Delta, an unmarried woman during these times—in addition to being a social anomaly—was a source of great distress. Her spirit was believed to cause crop failure, infertility, and a host of other misfortunes. It was said that grass would not grow on the site where an unmarried woman had died, so moribund maids were taken out to pass away in deserted areas where the damages incurred by their spouselessness could be minimized. Then of course there was the predicament of an unmarried woman’s soul, which, lonely and restless, might come back to haunt the living and the wed.

  Central to the bravado of these unmarried women was the fact that they were all reelers; silk reelers. During the peak years of their marriage-resistant activities (between 1890 and 1930), the Canton River Delta area of China where they lived was responsible for one-ninth of the entire world’s silk production. Stockard reveals that by 1930, the region had more than 300 filatures, and nearly 4,000 tons of silk were produced there annually, creating an unprecedented economic opportunity for young women. Hired to complete the highly challenging job
of pulling silk threads from their cocoons, silk reelers were paid handsomely for their skilled work, which required excellent eyesight and extreme dexterity, and was critical to the silk-making process. They earned up to $1 per day, or nearly double the salary of field-laboring men.

  As a result of hard work and high silk-sales, silk-reeling women spun themselves a cocoon of financial independence. And when their families decided it was time for them to marry, few of them got hitched without a fight. Those who didn’t run away from marriage bought their way out of it, writes Stockard. They contracted what were politely known as “compensation marriages,” or a marriage in which a reeler woman paid her betrothed’s family about $300—the rough equivalent of one year of her salary. This fee was for the groom’s family to use toward the purchase of a muijai, or little maid. Essentially an outsourced wife, the muijai would bear children, care for in-laws, manage the desires of the man of the family, and do all of the other wifely things that renegade reelers would rather not do themselves. Despite not being present, this exchange allowed reelers to earn an official marital status. This came with the perk of a dignified burial place within the man’s family plot, where their souls could rest peacefully in the afterlife.

  More enterprising reelers saved themselves the compensation fees by marrying dead men. Known as “spirit marriages,” these were arrangements between a woman and the family of a prematurely deceased bachelor who feared he would be lonely in the afterlife. They were all the rage in southeastern China of the 1900s, and dead men a shockingly hot commodity. As recounted by one of Stockard’s sources, “It was not easy to find an unmarried dead man to marry! When the family of a deceased son decided to arrange his marriage, the news spread quickly.” According to Stockard’s accounts, upon hearing that one was available for marriage, women would often fight viciously among themselves to marry him.