Freelance copywriter Chai Wanrou thinks marriage is an unfair institution. Like many young women in China, she is part of a growing movement that envisions a future with no husband and no children, presenting the government with a challenge it could do without.
“Regardless of whether you’re extremely successful or just ordinary, women still make the biggest sacrifices at home,” the 28-year-old feminist said at a cafe in the northwestern city of Xian.
“Many who got married in previous generations, especially women, sacrificed themselves and their career development, and didn’t get the happy life they were promised. Living my own life well is difficult enough nowadays,” she said.
Photo: Reuters
President Xi Jinping (習近平) last year stressed the need to “cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing” as China’s population fell for a second consecutive year and new births reached historic lows.
Chinese Premier Li Qiang (李強) also vowed to “work towards a birth-friendly society” and boost childcare services in this year’s government work report.
The Communist Party views the nuclear family as the bedrock of social stability, with unmarried mothers stigmatized and largely denied benefits. But a growing number of educated women, facing unprecedented insecurity amid record youth unemployment and an economic downturn, are espousing “singleism” instead.
China’s single population aged over 15 hit a record 239 million in 2021, according to official data. Marriage registrations rebounded slightly last year due to a pandemic backlog, after reaching historic lows in 2022. A 2021 Communist Youth League survey of some 2,900 unmarried urban young people found that 44 percent of women do not plan to marry.
Marriage, however, is still regarded as a milestone of adulthood in China and the proportion of adults who never marry remains low. But in an other sign of its declining popularity, many Chinese are delaying tying the knot, with the average age of first marriage rising to 28.67 in 2020 from 24.89 in 2010, according to census data.
In Shanghai, this figure reached 30.6 for men and 29.2 for women last year, according to city statistics.
“Feminist activism is basically not allowed (in China), but refusing marriage and childbirth can be said to be ... a form of non-violent disobedience towards the patriarchal state,” said Lu Pin, a Chinese feminist activist based in the US.
NO APOLOGIES
After decades of improving women’s education levels, workforce participation and social mobility, Chinese authorities now face a dilemma as the same group of women have become increasingly resistant to their propaganda.
Long-term single lifestyles are gradually becoming more widespread in China, giving rise to online communities of mostly single women who seek solidarity from like-minded people.
Posts with the hashtags “No marriage, no children” from female influencers often in their thirties or forties on Xiaohongshu, China’s Instagram, regularly gain thousands of likes.
One anti-marriage forum on Douban, another social media platform, has 9,200 members, while another dedicated to “singleism” has 3,600 members who discuss collective retirement plans, among other topics.
Liao Yueyi, a 24-year-old unemployed graduate in the southern city of Nanning, recently declared to her mother that she “wakes up from nightmares about having children.”
“No marriage or kids is a decision I’ve made after deep consideration. I don’t owe anyone an apology, my parents have accepted it,” she posted on WeChat.
Instead she has decided to “lie flat” — a Chinese expression that means doing just enough to get by — and save money for future travels.
“I think it’s okay to date or cohabit, but children are a huge asset investment with minimal returns,” she said, adding that she has discussed renting a house with some female friends when they all retire.
Many of the women interviewed cited a desire for self-exploration, disillusionment with patriarchal Chinese family dynamics and a lack of “enlightened” male partners as the main factors behind their decision to stay single and childless.
Gender equality also plays a role: all the women said it was difficult to find a man who valued their autonomy and believed in equal division of household labor.
“There’s an oversupply of highly educated women and not enough highly educated men,” said Xiaoling Shu, professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis. Decades of the one-child policy have led to 32.3 million more men than women in 2022, according to official data.
“College-educated women become stronger believers in advocating for their rights and status in society,” Shu said. “Well-educated women in search of supportive life partners find fewer suitable men who also endorse women’s rights.”
While not all the women interviewed identified as feminist or viewed themselves as deliberately defying the government, their actions reflect a broader trend of Chinese female empowerment expressed through personal choices.
And even though some analysts believe that the number of people who remain single for life will not grow exponentially in the future, delayed marriages and falling fertility are likely to pose a threat to China’s demographic goals.
“In the long run, women’s enthusiasm for marriage and childbirth will only continue to decrease,” said feminist Lu.
“I believe this is the most important long-term crisis that China will face.”
China has begun recruiting for a planetary defense force after risk assessments determined that an asteroid could conceivably hit Earth in 2032. Job ads posted online by China’s State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defence (SASTIND) this week, sought young loyal graduates focused on aerospace engineering, international cooperation and asteroid detection. The recruitment drive comes amid increasing focus on an asteroid with a low — but growing — likelihood of hitting earth in seven years. The 2024 YR4 asteroid is at the top of the European and US space agencies’ risk lists, and last week analysts increased their probability
Feb. 17 to Feb. 23 “Japanese city is bombed,” screamed the banner in bold capital letters spanning the front page of the US daily New Castle News on Feb. 24, 1938. This was big news across the globe, as Japan had not been bombarded since Western forces attacked Shimonoseki in 1864. “Numerous Japanese citizens were killed and injured today when eight Chinese planes bombed Taihoku, capital of Formosa, and other nearby cities in the first Chinese air raid anywhere in the Japanese empire,” the subhead clarified. The target was the Matsuyama Airfield (today’s Songshan Airport in Taipei), which
On a misty evening in August 1990, two men hiking on the moors surrounding Calvine, a pretty hamlet in Perth and Kinross, claimed to have seen a giant diamond-shaped aircraft flying above them. It apparently had no clear means of propulsion and left no smoke plume; it was silent and static, as if frozen in time. Terrified, they hit the ground and scrambled for cover behind a tree. Then a Harrier fighter jet roared into view, circling the diamond as if sizing it up for a scuffle. One of the men snapped a series of photographs just before the bizarre
For decades, Taiwan Railway trains were built and serviced at the Taipei Railway Workshop, originally built on a flat piece of land far from the city center. As the city grew up around it, however, space became limited, flooding became more commonplace and the noise and air pollution from the workshop started to affect more and more people. Between 2011 and 2013, the workshop was moved to Taoyuan and the Taipei location was retired. Work on preserving this cultural asset began immediately and we now have a unique opportunity to see the birth of a museum. The Preparatory Office of National