Given the political risks involved in protesting on the streets, more and more young Chinese women have fought back against gender discrimination on an individual level, by rejecting the institution of marriage. One university-educated woman in her mid-twenties spoke at length about her frustration after attending one of my talks on “leftover” women in 2013 at Yiyuan Gongshe, an informal space for activists and academics in Beijing. During the question-and-answer period, the young woman explained why she was exercising a deliberate choice to stay single:
“My strongest emotion is anger. The government has inserted itself into the tiniest, most minute details of an individual’s life… All of a sudden I have the feeling that everyone around me—my mother, all my elders, my grandmothers on both sides—suddenly become really worried about my not being married.”
In Shanghai, one 26-year-old university graduate told me flatly that she refused to marry because “marriage in China is a living hell.” She had formed close friendships with other like-minded women in Shanghai, who supported each other in rejecting the intense family and societal pressure to marry.
At the time that I wrote the first edition of this book, the views expressed by some of the single, educated women who told me they were renouncing marriage had not shown up in the statistics, which are slow to reflect rapid social changes on the ground. China’s 2010 census reported that the average first marriage age for a woman was still only 24.9, up slightly from 23.4 in 2000. In 2020, the average age for a woman marrying for the first time in was 27.95, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
In 2022, large-scale surveys showed an even clearer trend of young, Chinese women moving away from the traditional embrace of marriage. A 2021 Communist Youth League survey of 2,905 urban young people between ages 18 and 26 found that young women were significantly more opposed to marriage than young men. Meanwhile, the number of people getting married in China has fallen for nine consecutive years and in 2022 sunk to its lowest level since 1986, when the Ministry of Civil Affairs began recording the figures.
In 2023, the Chinese government announced that its population in 2022 shrank for the first time in six decades. And while more young women deliberately renounced marriage, others simply embraced their single lifestyles and found ways to ignore the omnipresent pressure to marry.
Lan Fang was a 32-year-old client-relations manager for a financial company in Shanghai when I interviewed her in 2013. After graduating from college, Lan went on to get a master’s degree in English from a prestigious university in Beijing, then moved to Shanghai, where she earned a very comfortable income of RMB 20,000 a month (around US$3,200), well above the average monthly pay in 2013.
“Where I grew up in Nanjing, I saw so many couples getting into big fights, and most of them seemed unhappy. Plus, so many men have affairs,” said Lan. She had thought about maybe marrying one day if she found a partner who could really make her happy, but she was loath to give up the freedoms she enjoys. Her typical schedule included going out with friends in the evening for dinner, and perhaps to a movie or a concert; working out several times a week at the gym; reading novels; and taking French classes on Saturdays “just for fun.”
The only thing Lan regretted about her single status was that the Shanghai government had tightened restrictions on single people buying homes in 2012, so that residents who did not possess a Shanghai hukou must be married in order to buy property. Lan had a Beijing hukou, so she was not permitted to buy an apartment in Shanghai at the time. Still, she believed the government restrictions on buying property would loosen by the time she turned 40.
“I want to buy a place where I can take shelter in my old age. The population is shrinking, so I’ll probably be able to buy an apartment of my own later in life [assuming property purchasing restrictions are lifted].” In the meantime, Lan was spending only a small fraction of her income on the monthly rent of RMB 2,000 for an apartment she shared with two friends near her office in downtown Shanghai. And she scoffed at the question of whether she might ever marry a man in order to own a home or achieve a sense of security. “Of course not! My life in Shanghai now is very rich, why would I want to change it?” she retorted. Like many other single women over 27, Lan had to endure pressure from her family and colleagues, and insults from the media, but she had learned to shrug it all off: “This is just gender discrimination and I don’t pay attention anymore.”
In 2022, even women who are in serious relationships with men no longer see the attraction of marriage. A 28-year-old, Sue Tong, is an editor in Beijing with a master’s degree in international relations from a university in London.
“When I was in college, I had this wonderful fantasy about marriage - that I would get a job, get married and have kids all before I turned 30,” said Tong. But she changed her mind about marriage after studying abroad and noticing how much one of her professors enjoyed her lifestyle as a single woman in her mid-50s with no children. “In China, women of that age are already retired and taking care of grandchildren, but she wasn’t tied down by anything,” said Tong, who saw the professor as a role model for her. “She came from a pretty conservative hometown [in Eastern Europe] and I saw her and felt like, ‘I can do it too’.”
Now Tong has a committed boyfriend but does not want to marry if she can avoid it. “I think this marriage thing is just a lot of pitfalls, whether it’s real estate, assets, household chores,” she said. “Women have to be very careful to avoid falling into these traps laid down by a patriarchal society.”
Leta Hong Fincher is the author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, 10th Anniversary Edition and she is Research Associate at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.
The text of this blog post has been extracted from pages 208-213 of Leftover Women, 10th Anniversary edition and edited to appear here with the author's permission.
Original chapter text by Leta Hong Fincher.
