MCLC: bachelor padding

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Paul Draper <pdraperchina at gmail.com>
Subject: bachelor padding
***********************************************************

Source: Foreign Policy (9/28/12):
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/28/bachelor_padding

Bachelor Padding 
How lonely single men created China's dangerous real estate bubble.
BY ROSEANN LAKE 

BEIJING — When Xiaobo Zhang got married in the early 1990s, he and his
bride, like millions of other couples across China, were given a small
room to live in by his danwei, or work unit. At the time a lecturer at
Nankai University in Tianjin, Zhang's room was utilitarian and
unremarkable, virtually indistinguishable from the ones inhabited by his
colleagues. In a word: average.

In the China of the 1990s, which was characterized by a pubescent limbo
between the economic reforms of the 1980s and the last decade's explosive
growth, Zhang recalls that mostly everyone was average. People were neatly
packed into work units, generally laboring under the same conditions,
eating in the same canteens, and sleeping in the same blocks of
industrial-looking housing provided by their employers. There was little
disparity in salaries, and few cars and luxury handbags to spend those
salaries on.

During these times, Zhang explained, occupants paid minimal rent for their
work-unit housing -- which was issued based on seniority, family size, and
rank -- and could essentially stay in it forever. There was no legal
market for buying and selling property in China, even in rural areas
without employer-provided housing, where families built their own homes.
Then, in 1998, the Chinese real estate market was born. It began with a
decision by the Chinese State Council to monetize housing in an attempt to
develop a commercial private market for real estate. In other words,
instead of just providing apartments for lifetime occupancy, companies,
nonprofit organizations, and government agencies began to give their
employees the option to purchase the housing they lived in. Fourteen years
and a serious housing construction boom later, China's property market has
allowed for one of the world's largest accumulations of real estate wealth
in history, valued at $17 trillion in mid-2010 by HSBC Global Research and
worth some 3.27 times China's GDP. (To better understand the scope of the
construction boom that precipitated this massive accumulation of wealth,
it's worth noting that between 1998 and 2008 alone, 14.4 billion square
meters of residential housing space were constructed in China, according
to China Statistical Yearbook figures. That's equivalent to 160 times all
the residential space on the entire island of Manhattan.)

This is where the definition of "average" in China starts to go a little
wonky.

As a result of the real estate boom, reports
<http://www.globaltimes.cn/NEWS/tabid/99/ID/701733/Home-prices-still-too-hi
gh-report.aspx> in Chinese media indicate that the average property in a
top-tier Chinese city now costs between 15 and 20 times the average annual
salary, though J.P. Morgan reports
<https://mm.jpmorgan.com/stp/t/c.do?i=EAB2D-4&u=a_p*d_425812.pdf*h_25kqhc3m
%0D%0A> indicate something closer to 13. (For purposes of comparison, in
most of the world's cities, the housing-cost-to-income ratio hovers
between 3-to-1 and 6-to-1, rounding out at about 3-to-1
<http://www.zillow.com/blog/research/2012/06/29/comparing-price-to-income-r
atios-to-affordability-across-markets/> in the United States.) This is
especially problematic in China, where thanks to still-prevalent Confucian
ideals of the male as the "provider," home ownership has become an
unspoken prerequisite to marriage.

It's a tough, competitive life for men in China these days, in part due to
the aftershocks of the one-child policy, which has left the country with a
gaping gender imbalance of 120 boys for every 100 girls. Author Mara
Hvistendahl reports in her book, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over
Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men, that by late 2020, 15
percent (or roughly one in six) Chinese men of marriageable age will be
unable to find a bride. She predicts that China will see an increase in
what's already happening in Taiwan and South Korea, where men doomed to
bachelorhood as a result of gender imbalance are boarding planes to
Vietnam. Roughly $10,000 covers their flight, room and board, and the
price of a Vietnamese wife, according to Hvistendahl, and this practice
has become so common that the imported wives "get a booklet translated
into Vietnamese explaining their rights when they get married at the
Taiwanese Consulate."

Although instances of bride-buying and bride-napping are often reported
<http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/08/19/north-korea-human-traffic
kers-and-the-chinese-market-for-brides.html> in China, men are also
turning to the web in the face of increasingly heavy competition to
attract a mate. On China's mega microblogging website, Sina Weibo
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/weibo.com>, a page called "Save a Single
Police Officer" was created by the deputy director of a police station in
Sichuan province to help his employees find a spouse. He feared that given
the gender imbalance and the grueling work hours of his men, they would
become guang gun, or "bare branches," a term usually used to describe men
in China who cannot find a wife.

The page launched this February with the profiles of five police officers
<http://img.chinasmack.com/www/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/chengdu-wuhou-pol
ice-advertise-single-policemen-01.jpg>, including a strapping young man
with a gun who goes by the name of "Cola427." Offering a mix of local
news, weather reports, and the profiles of single officers (including some
female ones) who have been added to the mix, the page
<http://weibo.com/wuhoupolice> now has more than 55,000 followers. This
July, a post <http://anonym.to/?http://medooo.com/article/201224000269918>
encouraged all citizens to rejoice because Cola427 (with over 6,000
followers of his own <http://weibo.com/u/2339647025>), age 29, measuring
in at 1.78 meters and 70 kilos, had found the love of his life through the
site.

Millions of other Chinese men are not so lucky. While the most
disadvantaged are the country's poor male farmers, who now live at
society's rock bottom in rural villages devoid of women their age (as
females tend to leave in search of better jobs and marriage prospects),
the marriage challenge is rippling its way up through the classes. It is
manifested most clearly in China's real estate market, where -- given the
highly desirable nature of property -- men are pouring all their savings
as a means of improving their chances of finding Mrs. Right, or any Mrs.
for that matter.

"Mathematically, they can't get married," says Zhang, referring to younger
Chinese men and their double burden of financial demands and the shortage
of available women to marry. In 1994, he moved out of his danwei to study
for a Ph.D. at Cornell University in the United States. Today, he works as
a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research
Institute in Washington and as a professor at Peking University. Along
with Columbia University economist Shang-Jin Wei, he has published several
studies on China's economic growth, including one
<http://www.nber.org/papers/w18000.pdf?new_window=1> that shows how 30 to
48 percent (or $8 trillion worth) of the real estate appreciation in 35
major Chinese cities is directly correlated with China's sex-ratio
imbalance and a man's need to acquire wealth (property) in order to
attract a wife.

"Mother-in-law syndrome" -- the idea that Chinese mothers-in-law are
driving up the price of real estate by refusing to allow their daughters
to marry men who are not homeowners -- has been widely reported
<http://msn.china.ynet.com/view.jsp?oid=63869864> in China, but Zhang and
Wei take things a step further. They show how Chinese cities with the
highest ratio of men to women are also consistently the ones with the
highest percentages of real estate appreciation, which follows the logic
that fewer women means more competition among men and a greater need for a
flashy house. At the same time, rental prices in these cities have
increased minimally by comparison, lending credence to the theory that the
rise in real estate prices is not driven by an actual demand for housing,
but by the demand to own a house.

This demand has no doubt contributed to fears over China's housing bubble,
which has been the source of concerned speculation now that China's
economic growth has slowed to 7.6 percent, the lowest since 2009. A recent
IMF publication <http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2012/cr12195.pdf>
shows how a decline in the Chinese real estate market could do everything
from affect the price of zinc and nickel to trigger a trade slowdown with
South Korea, Japan, and other G-20 partners. Yet from the marriage-market
perspective, the demand for property appears unrelenting.

* * *

Berlin Fang, a columnist, literary translator, and associate director at
the North Institute for Teaching and Learning at Oklahoma Christian
University, argues that the demands of the marriage market and China's
relatively new market economy are so heavy that "Chinese men have lost the
ability to be average." Like Zhang, he recalls the days of the danwei with
bittersweet nostalgia, as a time when people weren't so quick to size each
other up in terms of their market value. There was a certain comfort and
ease to being average, one that has become extinct, given the extreme
competition to be one of the "haves." In such a densely populated country,
Fang insists that "average is the new mediocre."

The distinction between "average" and "mediocre" is one that has been
ticking on the Chinese national psyche, as indicated by one of the
questions on last year's gaokao, China's notorious college entrance exam:

<<Please write on the theme of refusing to be mediocre and accepting to be
average. People cannot be mediocre. Mediocrity means no creation, no
development, no progress. Living in this world, we should not be mediocre.
We should have principles, insights, and persistence. Write 800 words in
any genre except poetry.>>

Fang notes that the question was a source of heated debate
<http://news.163.com/11/0609/03/762V4V1P00014AED.html>, as there were
concerns that today's students might not be able to distinguish between
"mediocre" and "average." In a country where the social pressure to excel
is so acute and mediocrity is rarely an option, Fang agrees that the
question is knotty. He suspects it was designed to make students
understand that it's acceptable to be average, so long as it's an
aspirational average, not a feckless one.

Examples of responses that earned perfect scores can be found on Chinese
news portal Sina.com <http://www.sina.com.cn/>, including one
<http://edu.sina.com.cn/gaokao/2012-06-03/2039340634.shtml> that tells the
story of Wang Xiaobo. Following a subpar performance at the office, Wang
does not receive the bonus he was expecting. When, over a meal of freshly
prepared fish, he reveals to his wife that he was denied his bonus, she,
"putting down her chopsticks and losing color in her face," laments that
she is destined to live a lowly life, having such a good-for-nothing
husband. After nursing his woes with a bit of alcohol, Wang hands his life
savings over to a shady investment banker and eventually loses everything.
Naturally, he heads to a lake to commit suicide, but instead ends up
saving a nearby drowning woman. This good deed restores his honor, and he
eventually becomes the hardworking, well-earning man whom his wife wants
him to be.

While Wang's story certainly reflects a triumph over mediocrity, the fact
that his wife's well-being is so dependent on his financial performance,
and that Wang is so clearly depicted as her provider, reflects how
ingrained these ideas remain in modern Chinese society.

Yet because it's nearly economically impossible for most Chinese men --
average or otherwise -- to be the providers they aspire to be, they
frequently have to rely on their parents for financial support. This is a
slippery slope, as it often gives progenitors more control than warranted
over their son's choice of a partner, but Chinese parents -- keen to have
their sons dutifully snuggled into wedlock -- gladly chip in. Zhang and
Wei's study shows how this plays into China's household savings rate,
which at 30 percent is among the world's highest. They argue
<http://www.voxeu.org/article/mystery-chinese-savings> that this fact is
of particular economic concern, as the high marriage-related savings rate
contributes to China's current account surplus, which in turn drives down
China's exchange rate and perpetuates the global trade imbalance.

"It's completely unsustainable," says Zhang, arguing that the exact
opposite -- less saving, more spending -- is what China's economy needs to
keep afloat. But because men need to buy homes, they save. And because
their demand for homes drives up real estate property, everyone else must
save too, in order to keep up.

Seventy-one percent of single women prefer that their future husbands be
homeowners, according to the 2010 Marriage Market Survey in China. It is
culturally approved -- even expected -- for a woman to "free-ride" and
move into her husband's house without making any contributions to it, but
given the astronomical cost of housing, more women are helping to cover
costs too. Doctoral research by Leta Hong Fincher of Tsinghua University
focuses on Chinese women who are pitching in, if not shouldering, the
joint purchase of a home with their husbands. She points out that this may
work to their disadvantage down the road. Due to traditional, yet
increasingly improbable, ideals of the man as the sole provider, homes are
generally registered under a man's name. According to Chinese law,
property belongs only to the person whose name it is registered under, so
in the event of a divorce, women who are not listed as co-owners will lose
out on financial contributions to their former marital home. Fincher also
cites <http://nytweekly.com/columns/intelarchives/07-06-12/> instances in
which young women are hassled by parents into transferring their life's
savings to a bachelor relative, so he can use the money to buy a house and
increase his chances of finding a wife. Because it is assumed that a woman
will marry into a house, the logic goes that she has a less pressing need
for savings of her own.

On the other hand, women who are homeowners before marriage are considered
better off, and this can actually improve their chances of "marrying up"
into the echelons of moneyed men who have bigger houses than they do.
Jeannie Wang, 29, of Beijing, is one of those women. Well-employed at a
major auditing firm, she purchased an apartment as an investment and plans
to live at home with her parents until marriage. "Ideally, I would like a
man to also have a house of his own, or at least the earning potential so
that we can buy one together," she says, slightly concerned that having a
man move into her house would humiliate him. "I wouldn't mind so much if I
really cared for him, but it's something I think few Chinese men would go
for."

Her case illustrates the double-edged nature of female property ownership
in China. Own something, and it might allow you to marry someone with
something bigger. Own something too big, and it could intimidate potential
suitors.

For men, however, bigger is always better. Zhang recalls visiting villages
in China that were bedizened with a "phantom third story." This type of
construction refers to a two-story house with an unfurnished, unfinished
third story built 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; 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.

On a more recent trip to China, Zhang landed in the southwestern city of
Guizhou with a colleague from an Ohio university who was puzzled to find
himself in what appeared to be an entire village full of churches. As it
turns out, in addition to phantom third stories, owners are competing to
add height to their homes by upping the size of the lightning rods on
their rooftops. And the bigger they get, the more they look like crosses.

The most alarming thing about these budding basilicas may be that the
majority of them remain empty. After they are used to bait prospective
wives, the newlyweds often migrate to larger cities. Zhang says this is
known as the "two-rat" phenomenon, as it refers to the migrant couples who
live inurban, underground rented rooms
<http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/06/18/rat_world> like rats --
and, yes, sometimes also with rats -- while their large, rural houses are
left vacant. This phenomenon begins to explain why there are some 64.5
million empty houses in China, according
<http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Property-speculation-leaves-64.5-million-va
cant-homes-in-China-18895.html> to economist Yi Xianrong of the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences.

Wei and Zhang estimate that the pressure to accumulate wealth for marriage
is responsible for 20 percent of the growth of the Chinese economy, as men
scramble to start businesses and secure high-paying jobs in order to keep
up with expenses. The word fangnu is an example of their struggle.
Literally translated, it means "a slave to the home" and refers not to a
woman who is a slave to housework, but in most cases, to a man who must
slave at his job in order to afford a house and, by extension, a wife.

* * *

Sensing the challenges faced by Chinese men in the dating and marriage
departments, 29-year-old Vincent Qi is trying to make a difference. Born
in China, he went to college in Britain and speaks English like an
over-caffeinated grad student. Now in Beijing, he calls himself "The Lady
Whisperer <http://nvyuzhe.com/>" and markets himself as an online guru on
how to get women. Qi also teaches online classes on confidence-building,
self-improvement, and how to be an all-around better man. He has over
4,000 followers on China's Weibo, and just three months since the online
launch of his tuition-based school, he has attracted over 100 students --
all male, and all rather average. They include a motley mix of students,
small-online-shop owners, and working professionals on various rungs of
the career ladder.

"Socially, we [Chinese men] need to be average," says Qi, stressing that
"China is not a culture that values individuality." He is quick to add,
however, that from a monetary perspective, it's highly preferable to be
well above average. This creates a paradox for China's "average Zhou": how
to be far enough above average to be respected, without exceeding the
culturally enforced limitations of what is considered respectably above
average?

One of Qi's students, 28-year-old Rodman Xie, thinks he is close to
finding the answer.

"I took the gaokao three times and still only managed to get into a very
average university," he says. "By societal standards, I've failed at many
things, but I've never stopped setting goals for myself, and that's what
keeps me going." He admits that though things seemed easier in the days of
the almighty work unit, he wouldn't trade that kind of stability for what
he describes as "the diversity that contributes to a healthy society --
the sort of diversity that we're starting to have now."

A native of China's northeast, or Dongbei region, Xie works in marketing
at an export company in Shanghai, a city that he admits wasn't his first
choice, but where he moved for the opportunities. He describes the women
there as "materialistic," but seems relatively unshaken by the doom and
gloom of the gender imbalance.

He explains that in addition to a whole lot of stress, the last 30 years
in China -- his lifetime -- have also brought a whole new realm of
possibilities. "We can change cities, change careers, pursue our
interests, meet people from all over the world, and sometimes even travel
to foreign countries," says Xie. "And for now, that kind of average is
good enough for me."