MCLC: all the shengnu ladies

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: all the shengnu ladies
***********************************************************

Source: Salon.com (3/12/12): http://salon.com/a/sQ769AA

All the shengnu ladies
Accomplished Chinese women are a new "leftover" generation: Too successful
to marry, but disrespected without a man
By Roseann Lake

Barring the odd empress, China is historically not a very glorious place
to be a woman. From foot-binding to female infanticides, Chinese women
have suffered their share of gender-specific hardships. Today, these women
are 650 million strong. They represent the world¹s largest female
population, the highest percentage of self-made female billionaires, and
with 63 percent of GMAT takers in China being female, they¹re attaining
MBAs with a ferocity that¹s making the boys blush. And yet, no matter how
ambitious or accomplished, they remain bound. Not by their feet, but by
something that can be just as inhibiting ‹ marriage.

In China, there¹s a deep-seated tradition of marriage hypergamy which
mandates that a woman must marry up. This generally works out, as it
allows the Chinese man to feel superior, and the woman to jump a social
class or two, but it gets messy for highly accomplished females. Their
educations and salaries make them hard to compete with, and so their
Chinese male counterparts shy away in favor of younger, more ³manageable²
beauties.

As these women age, their marriageability plummets, and they acquire a
snazzy new name: ³shengnu.² Used to describe an unmarried woman ever so
precariously teetering near the age of 30, this word literally means
³leftover woman.² The prefix ³sheng² is the same as in the word ³shengcai²
or ³leftover food.² Loosely translated, it implies that single women of a
certain age in China are the stuff of doggy bags, Tupperware and garbage
disposals.

Lynette (her English name) is turning 30 in two months, and all her
parents wanted this Chinese New Year was for her to announce that she was
getting married. A successful television producer in Beijing, she returned
home for the holidays with plenty of gifts ‹ but with no romantic
prospects on the horizon, she was subject to endless needling from family
and neighbors.

³One of my neighbors heard that I worked in television, and offered to set
me up on a blind date with someone compatible,² she said. ³I learned that
he was a network administrator, and that he made 3,000 RMB ($476) a month.
My neighbor considered this to be a good salary, because she thought I
worked in a TV factory. Little did she know, as a producer, I pay my
entry-level directors more than that. But I still went on the date. The
man was very uncomfortable. It was supposed to be for dinner, but we just
ended up having soybean milk, because I think he knew nothing could come
of it.²

That well-educated, well-employed American women are finding themselves
with fewer ³marriageable² (men who are better educated and earn more money
than they do) options around them is a well-documented phenomenon. It¹s
the ³All the Single Ladies² crisis, as described by Kate Bolick in the
Atlantic. ³All the Leftover Ladies² of China are facing a similar fate,
but with slightly different characteristics.

As a result of China¹s one-child policy and ensuing female infanticides
due to the traditional preference for males, China¹s male to female ratio
is seriously skewed in favor of the fairer sex. According to the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences, by 2020, there will be 30 million more men
than women of marriageable age in China. This surplus is unprecedented for
a country at peace, and equates to 1 in 5 Chinese men being unable to find
a bride. Fears of China expanding its military have been expressed, as
have concerns over the increased prostitution, violent crime and bride
trafficking that such a disproportionate number of males generally spurs.
But certainly, and perhaps more trivially, a surplus of 30 million men
should at least improve a girl¹s chances of finding someone she might want
to marry?

That¹s not been the case. In 2007, the Chinese Ministry of Education
listed ³shengnu² as one of the 171 new words of the year. The Communist
Party sponsored All China Women¹s Federation, China¹s most influential
women¹s organization, published the results of a survey that breaks women
down into different categories of ³leftover.² Beginning at 25, it details
how women must ³fight² and ³hunt² for a partner, so as not to wind up
alone. By 28, it implies the heat is really on, telling women ³they must
triumph.² Between 31 and 35, these women are called ³advanced leftovers,²
and by 35, a single woman is the ³ultimate² leftover. This woman has met
great professional success, but like the Monkey King ‹ to whom she is
compared ‹ she is flawed in thinking that she is higher than the mandate
of heaven, which we can only assume is marriage.

The survey appears to stress the urgency to marry, which, this being a
Party-propagated document, is best viewed with a critical eye. Here we
have a government that is feeling the aftershocks of one of its most
onerous policies. Since statistically, men will already be hard-pressed to
find a wife, might the Chinese government have a vested interest in
ensuring that a maximum of its female citizens are married off? And, as
Leta Hong Fincher suggests in Ms. Magazine, might the government, in a
gentle swipe at eugenics, be particularly keen to pressure the country¹s
best and brightest females to get married and produce babies that could be
especially enriching to the nation¹s gene pool?

While the exact motives of Zhongnanhai are difficult to discern, the
political power of marriage in China is undeniable. Towards the decline of
the Qing Dynasty at the end of the 19th century, Chinese women were
considered a negative influence on their own children because they were
uneducated and superstitious. In an attempt to strengthen the nation,
Chinese intellectuals during the first half of the 20th century championed
the idea that a stable home space meant a stable nation, and began a
movement to train women for their jobs and responsibilities as household
managers. The home came to be seen as a small-scale model of the imperial
order of society, and its management became central to national concern.
As Helen M. Schneider writes in ³Keeping the Nation¹s House, Domestic
Management and the Making of Modern China,² ³Managing the domestic space
was an important responsibility; a wife who managed well and without
complications enabled her husband to attend fully to public Œoutside¹
affairs.²

This historical precedent for marriage makes it easier to see why the
³shengnu,² a woman who is very much involved in the ³outside² space, might
encounter challenges when it comes to marriage. It also provides insight
into how the Chinese government has used marriage as a political tool in
the past, making it plausible that it may still be doing so with its
slanderous classifications of single women.

But truth be told, a government campaign does little to shake the
confidence of a single Chinese woman. Far more perturbing is the flak a
³shengnu² gets from society. People talk. The neighbors inquire. ³Xiao
Hong is 29 and still unmarried? Her prime childbearing years are coming to
a close. After 30 nobody will want her. She¹d better speed things up,²
they¹ll say. Parents feel social intimidation and start pressuring their
daughters. They set them up on endless blind dates. They go on about how
much they¹d like to have grandchildren. They threaten disinheritance.

Surely, this is not a phenomenon unique to China, but the country¹s
cultural conviction that everyone should be married certainly doesn¹t
help. As noted by Yong Cai, a sociologist at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, ³In most societies of the Western world, there is
always at least 10-15 percent  of the population that remains single, but
in China, until the 1980s, that percentage was always less than 1 percent.²

Basically, marriage in China has the equivalent social force of a
steamroller. It¹s simply what one does. There are Chinese work units that
have an in-house matchmaker who is tasked with pairing off single
employees. Almost every day of the week, there are marriage markets in
parks around the country where parents and grandparents gather to flip
through tomes and tomes of Xeroxed copies listing the names, occupations
and salaries of available singles with whom they might be able to pair off
their progeny.

³We talk about helicopter parents in the U.S., but when it comes to
marriage in China, I¹d say parents are air hawks,² says Berlin Fang, a
cross-cultural commentator. ³Sometimes they even drop a few bombs.²

The holiday blitzkrieg around Lynette, the TV producer, also included
another neighbor who offered to set her up with a man who had ³excellent
conditions,² meaning he earned a good salary and owned a home in the
astronomically priced real estate market of Beijing, what most Chinese ‹
parents, especially ‹ see as a very coveted asset to marriage.

³We went on two dinner dates. After the second date, he brought me back to
his apartment Š to show me how close it was to the local kindergarten.²

Lynette laughs about these blind dates because she knows most of her
single friends are being shuffled through the same motions, but admits
that both instances were terribly awkward. In the first, her superior
education and job made the man disinterested in her. And in the second,
the meeting was so pragmatically marriage-minded, that a bit of chemistry
‹ something she is looking for ‹ seemed completely out of the question.

Critics say that shengnu are single because their standards are too high.
While it is no secret that some women in China use marriage as a means to
acquire wealth, shengnu are generally educated, well-to-do females who
support themselves and have less of a need than their mothers and
grandmothers did to enter a marriage for economic reasons. This allows
them to be selective, and they are. Most of them disagree with the idea of
marriage just for the sake of it, even if it means facing ultimatums from
their parents and endless reminders that nobody will want them after 30.

Nobody, though? Where are the 30 million surplus men?

In the countryside, tending to their parents and their farms. Because in
Chinese society, it¹s expected women will marry up, that¹s exactly what
most women in rural areas do. They migrate to bigger cities, find better
jobs, marry men in higher classes, and in some cases, even end up
providing more money for their parents than the males who remain on the
farms taking care of them. In a fascinating piece for the Pulitzer Center,
journalists Sushma Subramanian and Deborah Jian Lee report that these
women are known as ³golden turtles² for the wealth they are able to
provide for their families by migrating and marrying up. Their ³success²
has given pause to China¹s traditional preference for sons, all while
leaving thousands of men behind in perpetual bachelorhood. These men, also
known as ³guan gun² or ³bare branches,² are at the rock bottom of the
marriage chain, and although equally strapped for an available pool of
partners to choose from, are not very compatible with the average shengnu,
socially, intellectually or geographically.

Shengnu tend to congregate in China¹s largest cities, where the big jobs
are. The sixth national census reveals that there are now more unmarried
women than men in Shanghai. Things are not much better in Beijing, where
in 2008, according to Baike reports, there were already over half a
million shengnu. The numbers in other Chinese first-tier cities show a
similar trend.

Making matters worse, according to a survey conducted by the All-China
Women¹s Federation ‹ again, the organization founded to further women¹s
rights ‹ out of 30,000 men, more than 90 percent said women should marry
before 27 to avoid becoming unwanted. This stems partly from beliefs about
the prime years for bearing children, but mainly, from the value that
Chinese men place on youth and looks. While they¹re hardly the only men in
the world to do this, they are rather unforgiving. A 35-year-old Chinese
male CFO is much more likely to go for a 19-year-old head-turner than a
fellow female executive. Because he can. He is successful, and therefore
has his pick of the lot. But by the same logic that makes a divorced man
in China ³broken in,² but a divorced woman in China, ³sloppy seconds,² his
female professional equivalent is likely to remain single.

And so emerges the modern shengnu: the imperishable leftover who braves
the tide of political, cultural, social and parental waves pushing her
towards marriage. For better. Or for worse. But at least, on her own terms.