Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World’s Next Superpower

197 Pages·2018·1.63 MB·English

by  Roseann Lake

LEFTOVER IN CHINA
THE WOMEN SHAPING
THE WORLD’S
NEXT SUPERPOWER
ROSEANN LAKE
For my dear parents, Rosa and Ken—
it doesn’t look like I’ll ever become an ophthalmologist,
but I hope this makes you proud.
For Steven Lake—the little brother like no other.
Os quiero!
CONTENTS
Preface
1 ULTRASOUND CHECKS AND IMBALANCES
2 “GOLDEN TURTLES”
3 DOORS AND WINDOWS
4 MARRIAGE AND MORTARBOARDS
5 CHICKENS AND DUCKS
6 FREEDOM AND SUBMISSION
7 HIGHER CALLINGS
8 LOVE, WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS
9 CARS, HOUSES, CASH
10 EAST MEETS WEST
11 BAMBOO CEILINGS
12 THE WAY FORWARD
EPILOGUE: NEW BEGINNINGS TO HAPPY ENDINGS
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
PREFACE
Just after Chinese New Year, I returned to the office of the Beijing television
station where I had been working to find that all of my usually chipper young
female colleagues were in decidedly different spirits. Even Shan Shan, the
megawatt producer, had toned it down several joules and was
uncharacteristically mum for a Monday morning. “Did everyone have a nice
holiday?” I asked. I got a few unenthusiastic nods, a few forced smiles, and was
handed a half-eaten bag of sesame balls that had been circulating around the
newsroom. Puzzled, I went to see one of the network supervisors, a woman who
was about ten years older than most of the women on staff. “They are sad
because they are not getting married,” she said, as if this answer would make
perfect sense to me. She then turned back to her computer, leaving me to wonder
if China’s answer to Mr. Darcy was coming to town, or if the Communist Party
had just issued millions of free honeymoons to the Maldives.
Sitting down to lunch with Shan Shan later that day, I learned that Chinese
New Year is famous for being the time of year when red envelopes are stuffed,
dumplings are steamed, and singletons skewered. As the grand apotheosis of the
Chinese lunar calendar and the longest yearly holiday that most Chinese workers
are entitled to, it’s heralded by the mass migration of over 300 million people
traveling home to feast and set off fireworks with their families. Yet as extended
clans unite to eat, drink, play, and be merry, tidings of betrothals commonly take
center stage. Gathered around tables festooned with fish heads, singles over age
twenty-five are often assailed with well-meaning but often completely
misguided offers of blind dates. Women, especially, are targeted in this marriage
offensive, as it is considered imperative that they tie the knot by a certain age,
lest they risk becoming “sheng nü” or, literally translated, “leftover women.”
In addition to finding it highly objectionable that my still young and
presumably fertile colleagues (the oldest just a few days over twenty-seven)
were being referred to as the stuff of doggie bags and garbage disposals, I
struggled to understand how this was all happening in modern China, the
world’s largest economy,* which by no coincidence is also home to 650 million
women—the largest female population in the world. In a country where, until
fairly recently, women had few personal, social, economic, and even bipedal
freedoms (see: foot binding), my colleagues were a stunning deviation. They
were a fleet of educated, independent young women who were doing things that
their mothers and grandmothers could never have dreamed of. In my eyes, they
were the toast of the nation—a glittering testament to the increased educational
and professional opportunities that Chinese women had accumulated over the
past thirty-odd years, though their label clearly indicated otherwise.
While at the studio, I found I was spending most of my time surrounded by a
dynamite team of young female writers, editors, directors, and producers like
Shan Shan. Quite naturally, over the course of delayed flights to Inner Mongolia,
sleeper trains to Shanghai, and delirious overtime hours in our Beijing office, we
bonded. Gradually, I became privy to their more personal conversations—the
juicy ones—regarding their family histories, their aspirations, and increasingly,
their love lives. The more I learned about the quirks of their dates and the
complexities of their courtships, the more I was confused, surprised by what
appeared to be a glaring inconsistency.
At the time—2010—the reports in Western media with regards to Chinese
women had a very sanguine glow. As articles in Forbes, Newsweek, and Time
were indicating, Chinese women were at the top of their game. They represented
the highest percentage of self-made female billionaires in the world, and with 63
percent of GMAT takers in China being female, they were attaining MBAs with
a ferocity that was making the boys blush. According to National Bureau of
Statistics reports, 71 percent of Chinese women between the ages of eighteen
and sixty-four were employed, and they accounted for 44 percent of the
country’s workforce. The first one would soon be sent into space.
From what I could see, this was all true. Professionally, these women were so
tenaciously pushing the limits of what was possible for their half of the sky, as
far as I was concerned, they were all astronauts. Yet personally, and when it
came to matters of the heart in particular, they appeared beholden to the
playbook of another galaxy—a distant, anachronistic realm that seemed straight
out of a Jane Austen novel. Much to my surprise, the recurring topic of our
conversations quickly became marriage. They spoke of it as one might speak of
an ingrown toenail—with urgency, a niggling element of pain, and the full
knowledge that if it wasn’t addressed in the imminent future, things would only
get worse.
Sensing that something wasn’t adding up, I began to do some digging beyond
the scope of my newsroom comrades. Three years and several hundred
interviews later, my curiosity has led me to understand the story of China’s rise
and development under a radically new lens. It’s a story that begins with an
impoverished Communist nation where marriage was universal, compulsory, and
a woman’s only means to livelihood. Fast-forward thirty-plus years to an
urbanized, globalized, economic superpower where marriage is swiftly
becoming more discretionary and an institution that increasing numbers of
educated women are committing to only after developing themselves and their
careers a bit more fully, if they’re committing at all. Factor in the aftershocks of
a nation still reeling from an onerous one-child policy that has saddled it with a
walloping gender imbalance, and the plates in this wildly tectonic shift of social,
economic, and demographic proportions begin to take shape.
Central to this shift is the idea that despite China’s dazzling superlatives,
there are strands of its culture that remain inextricably rooted in tradition, the
most significant and inexorable of which is the societal pressure to wed.
Although this pressure exists in varying degrees across many cultures and
religions, it is particularly strong in China, where marriage retains the equivalent
social force of a steamroller. This force makes it so that marrying off a child is
the mission of just about every parent with offspring under the age of thirty.
After thirty, the mission becomes a crusade.
In most cases, parents mean well. They genuinely believe that the best thing
for their children is to assure that they are dutifully snuggled into wedlock as
swiftly as possible, but there is a formidable cultural disconnect between
progenitors—who were raised through poverty and revolution—and their
progeny, who grew up through an economic boom and the birth of the individual
in an otherwise fiercely collectivist society. This cultural disconnect is the
essence of the infinitely textured and complex set of sparring values, obligations,
traditions and tensions that define modern China, where like the perennial wind
chime, changes in marriage policies and patterns have heralded the most
significant shifts in China’s sociopolitical climate. This has been true for the past
five thousand years: a time during which—it’s critical to note—marriage has
been the cornerstone and pinnacle of a woman’s life.
In the span of just over thirty years, all of that has changed. For women
especially, marriage has become less of an imperative, largely because of the
unprecedented educational and professional opportunities that accompanied
China’s reforms, beginning in 1979. Elements of this evolution will surely sound
familiar in the Western world, where women were once meant to be seen (in the
kitchen) and not heard (in the workplace), though there are a few salient factors
that make the situation in China especially alarming. Of greatest significance are
the more than 30 million female abortions and infanticides which occurred
during the peak years of the one-child policy and have resulted in a surplus of
poor, uneducated, rural males who are doomed to remain without a bride
because there are simply not enough women in China to marry. On the other side
of that potential demographic disaster are urban only daughters: women whose
parents chose to allow a daughter into the world during a time when everyone
else wanted a son. These are women who for lack of competing XY
chromosomes in the family were given unprecedented opportunities and
resources that may have previously been reserved for male offspring. They came
into the world at a point when China was aggressively expanding its number of
institutions of higher learning, and were pushed to study, succeed, achieve, and
bring honor to their families as if they were sons. Yet contrary to what Mao and
his modern-day disciples might have us believe, women have not been able to
seamlessly slip in alongside the men and work as equal comrades.
The bedrock of a population of educated women that are entering the white-
collar workforce in numbers that rival and surpass those of men, China’s
“leftover women” are the ultimate linchpin to the country’s rise and
development. They are broadcasting a cultural shift so massive that it defines not
only contemporary China, but also the single greatest demographic movement of
our era across the world.
For the magnitude of the transition to be fully absorbed, it must be
contextualized in the grander scheme of development. Half of the world, the
United States included, has gone through the thick of it. American women have
been the dominant earners of college degrees in the United States since 1981, but
it wasn’t until 2014 that professional college-educated American women became
just as likely to marry and have children as their lesser-educated counterparts.
Previously, to be educated and to be ambitious often meant foregoing a life
partner in favor of a career, but lines are blurring, timelines are changing, and
new priorities are emerging. We are becoming a globalized world of classes,
instead of cultures. A well-educated, professional woman in Beijing or Shanghai
now has more in common with a well-educated, professional woman in New
York or Los Angeles than she does with a female Chinese factory worker from a
town just an hour’s train ride away. One generation ago this would have been
unheard-of.
Whether this is a cause for celebrating globalization or lamenting
homogenization is still up for debate, though it’s clear that when you strip away
the idiosyncrasies of China’s demographics, economics, and sociopolitical
baggage, what remains is a country where women are starting to face the very
same challenges that American women have been weathering for decades. Why
are we not joining forces and voices? How much more could be learned and
accomplished if these issues were considered on an international scale?
Across the world, an increasing number of women are standing up for their
right to determine their own futures. Whether that means being able to decide
where or what to study, whom, when, or if to marry, whether or not to have
children, or how to best define and achieve that ever-elusive ideal of “having it
all,” the population of women taking bolder steps to map out more fulfilling
lives is expanding. So must the conversation.

* According to the IMF, China’s economy is the world’s second largest economy by nominal GDP and the
world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity.
LEFTOVER IN CHINA