by Mei Fong
Family fragility in China, says Du, is also exacerbated by the tendency of one single child to marry another. Only children also come under great pressure to sacrifice job mobility, career choices, and migration in order to please their parents, he said. To ameliorate this, Du suggested measures such as improving government compensation for the death of only children as well as the establishment of insurance for accidental deaths of only children. (So far, no commercial offerings of this nature appear to be available.)
These all seemed reasonable ideas. But in addition to advising tougher traffic laws and heightened safety standards in schools to protect only children, Du also suggested banning violent online games as “harmful to children’s physical and mental health” and counseled that all government organizations take steps to “carry out activities being favorable to only children’s safety.” It was startling that Du seemed to advocate a coddled existence for only children.
VI
In 2013, I caught up with Liu again. He was still living at home, in the same small town. Among my circle of China acquaintances, this level of permanence was unusual. There were small changes, of course: He was no longer living in the glare of celebrity. There were no more rent-free apartments; he and his mother had moved to cheaper accommodation, a small five-hundred-square-foot apartment they had expanded through a series of built-in partitions. It looked like an elaborate system of bunk beds.
Liu had graduated in 2009. He’d managed to find a low-paying job in the university library. A few years later he found a graphic design job in Hangzhou but quit after less than a year. The high cost of living in a major city stretched his slender salary, he said, and long weekend trips home to see his mother also ate into his time. He was living on savings and writing his autobiography.
I found Liu unchanged, like a Chinese Dorian Gray. He was still thin, still dressed in shapeless large T-shirts and jeans, that long thumbnail, that sweet mien. Yong Min, on the other hand, looked younger than she had five years back. The lines of her face were smoother; her hair seemed glossier and had been cut into a fashionable bob. She was full of plans to make trendy air filter masks, modeled on Korean designs. Such things were becoming more popular in China’s smog-filled cities, she said.
Liu, on the other hand, was drifting. In many ways, his situation seemed to confirm my assumptions: given the stifling demands of his parental obligations, he was not free to pursue his dreams, and indeed the cramped horizons had created a learned response of helplessness.
Liu reinforced my suspicions when he told me he’d auditioned for a reality TV show on Zhejiang TV. The show, called Chinese Dream, was modeled on BBC’s Tonight’s the Night, where ordinary people were assigned mentors to help them realize their dreams: starting their own business, or starring in a West End production, for example. Liu got an audition on the strength of his previous celebrity.
For his audition, he played the guitar and sang “Mother,” the song that had been specially composed for him. But he didn’t make the cut. “I told them my dream was to live happily and in peace with my mother, maybe write a book,” he said. “They said my dream wasn’t big enough.”
When he saw me off at the bus station, I noticed he was wearing Converse-style rubber shoes with the label Bu Xiang, written in Romanized script. It’s a cheap brand, very popular among youth from rural areas and factory workers. I’m not sure what the brand’s name means—likely something positive—but the Pinyin script Bu Xiang could also be read to mean “Not thought of” or “Not dreamed”: 不 想. I watched him walk away, his shoes rising and falling. Bu Xiang. Bu Xiang. Bu Xiang.
I felt sad.
I was wrong. In 2014, Liu finished his book, We Will Be All Right. Then he came out with a bombshell: he’s transgender.
Liu had struggled with this secret the entire time he was being showered with accolades and called a national role model. Liu outed himself in a photo spread in Southern Weekend, a major newsmagazine, with startlingly intimate photos: putting on makeup, trying on a bra, debating whether to use the men’s or women’s toilets.
“Folks kept telling me not to be a sissy, to stand up, be worthy of my Moral Hero title,” he said, “but deep inside I was torn because I knew I was in the wrong body.”
All this time I had worried his horizons were too narrow, he had been nursing a dream of transformation.
Liu’s mother had been devastated at first. The likelihood of grandchildren receded further into the distance. “People hope I can give birth to a child, which is the biggest sign of filial piety. I was conflicted,” said Liu.
Eventually, he came to believe “when you can live well, you can have filial piety to your parents. I think it’s time to give filial piety a new definition.”
Soon, one of China’s most famous Little Emperors will become an Empress.
Welcome to the Dollhouse
Sons shall be born to him:
Daughters shall be born to him:
They will be put to sleep on couches;
They will be put to sleep on the ground;
They will be clothed in robes;
They will be clothed with wrappers;
They will have sceptres to play with . . .
They will have tiles to play with.
—Book of Songs
You’re going to have a gigantic mass of horny young men in China.
—Paul Ehrlich
I
In 2009 I was flipping through news items in search of a story when a headline caught my eye: “Runaway Brides Strike in Central China.”
The story, a minor item, talked about how a small village called New Peace in Shaanxi Province had a rash of runaway brides. These women had decamped soon after their weddings, leaving bankrupt bridegrooms who’d paid substantial bride prices. It reminded me of the bride-buying story Liu had told me on our train journey the year before.
Despite my years in China, it was pretty much the first time I’d heard of caili, a kind of reverse dowry given by the groom’s family to the bride’s. In rural China, there is usually an exchange of money and gifts on both sides: dowries from the groom’s family, and bride price from the bride’s side. Usually, the balance tips in favor of caili, reflecting the economic value rural women brought as cooks, bedmates, and baby makers.
During the Mao era, such exchanges were modest—a set of clothes, or enamel washbasins. Wealthier families might, perhaps, rise to the heights of a Flying Pigeon bicycle or a suite of rosewood furniture. But starting from about 2001, caili values rose sharply when China’s first one-child-policy generation started to reach marriageable age.
China’s historical preference for sons predates the one-child policy, of course, but there’s no question that the imposition of the one-child policy on this culture created the biggest gender imbalance in the world. By 2020, China will have 30 to 40 million surplus men. The country’s population of single men will equal or surpass the number of Canadians or Saudi Arabians in the world. Ten years later, one in four men in China will be a low-skilled bachelor.
Son preference also exists in other cultures, but nowhere else is it as extreme as in China. Forced to limit their choices, many Chinese couples turned to infanticide, daughter abandonment, and, with technological advances, sex-selective abortion to ensure they had at least one son to carry on the family name. In India, where there is also son preference but never a one-child policy, there are 108 boys born for every 100 girls. In China at the time the policy shifted to a two-child rule, a staggering 119 boys were born for every 100 girls. (The global average is 105 boys to every 100 girls, seen as Nature’s way of compensating for risky male behavior, which makes boys more likely to die earlier.)
The world has never seen such a huge national collection of bachelors, men who will not be able to find mates unless China opens its doors to massive immigration, a highly unlikely scenario. There is a name for these men: guanggun, or “bare branches,” biological dead ends.
It seemed like New Peace might be a guanggu
n village. It is located in Shaanxi, which is one of the ten provinces in China with the dubious honor of having the most unequal gender ratios. If you look at a map of China, New Peace would be located somewhere squarely in the middle, geographically centered, culturally on the fringes. The nearest major city is Hanzhong, whose heyday was back in the Han dynasty, when the city was hailed as the birthplace of paper. Since then the city, population 3 million—about the size of Chicago, but small by China’s standards—has bumped along with no national significance. Hanzhong didn’t even merit a direct flight from the capital, Beijing.
I was curious about what a guanggun village might be like. I imagined groups of horny, sullen men lurking in village squares and Internet cafés, lust and violence as palpable as the polluted haze of Beijing skies.
To be on the safe side, I decided to travel to New Peace with our office’s lone male researcher. The precaution turned out to be unnecessary. New Peace is like most villages in China, filled with old women and children. All the young people of working age—including the guanggun—were off earning money in the cities, as there was nothing but subsistence farming on the village’s tiny rice plots. Since men stood to inherit family land, many retained their rural household registration status. The young women of New Peace, however, having nothing to inherit, hightailed it for bright lights and big factories as soon as they could. Few returned permanently.
In New Peace, Shufen, the mother of one of the duped bridegrooms, welcomed me into the family home. It was a comfortable dwelling, with a traditional sloping roof and big wooden doors, hospitably open to let in light and the occasional neighbor. The only thing out of place was a scarlet motorcyle parked in the living room, red rosettes drooping from the handles. It had been a present for the runaway bride.
While showing me wedding pictures, Shufen related the sad story of her son’s aborted marriage. Zhou Pin, her son, had left New Peace as a teenager to work in southern China’s factories. Long hours and regimented life on the line gave him little opportunity to meet women. Year after year, Zhou dutifully trudged home for Spring Festival, only to meet his parents’ increasingly agitated queries. In New Peace, a single son approaching his mid-twenties is a big source of shame, said Shufen.
A family friend told Shufen that her nephew had married a girl from Sichuan Province. The bride had three Sichuanese friends visiting her who might be interested in marriage, said the friend.
In the old days, marriage with outsiders would be frowned on by New Peace’s insular villagers. Why, Sichuanese people didn’t even speak the same dialect, said Shufen. But New Peace, with fourteen thousand inhabitants, had thirty bachelors on the books and no women of marriageable age. Clearly, they would have to adapt to changing times. Shufen took matters into her own hands and set up a meeting. She summoned her son home.
Zhou’s wooing was swift and businesslike. He met the three women and proposed to the youngest and prettiest after the first meeting. The woman agreed, with a proviso: caili of a little over $5,500, which represented about a decade’s worth of farm income for the Zhous.
Three days later, the couple registered their union. They posed for studio pictures, the bride’s cheeks Photoshopped ivory to match her wedding dress. In another picture, the couple are resplendent in traditional embroidered Chinese outfits of red and gold. The bride pretends to light a string of firecrackers. Zhou mugs a grimace, hands to his ears.
At the wedding banquet a week later, Shufen formally handed over the caili—half of it cobbled together from family loans—to a woman she believed to be the bride’s cousin.
Matrimony was catching. Soon, two neighbors sought the new bride out and asked her to introduce suitable friends to their sons. Two marriages happened in swift succession, with caili amounts similar to what the Zhous paid.
Within a month, all the brides had vanished.
There was something cinematic about this. I imagined the women sprinting across rice paddies, wedding gowns hiked to their knees, veils rippling in the wind. The truth was somewhat less picturesque. Zhou’s wife escaped by pretending to have a diarrhea attack and climbed out of the outhouse.
When I arrived in New Peace four months later, most of the duped bridegrooms had left to seek jobs elsewhere. Only Zhou remained.
It turned out the marriage, formed so quickly and in such a pragmatic fashion, had touched his heart. Very early on he had suspected his bride was not the innocent country girl she’d claimed to be, he said. She’d understood some of his references to his factory work and asked a few questions that made him suspect she had worked in a city. Even so, Zhou hoped she would adjust to New Peace’s quiet rhythms. She had seemed gentle and grateful for small attentions. He had planned to seek work closer to home and return often for feast days. He’d bought her the motorbike so she could blunt the dullness of village life with trips to Hanzhong. They made plans to see the terra-cotta warriors in Xian, a five-hour bus ride away.
I could see little to attract young women to New Peace and hold them there. It had a small shop, a one-stop outlet that sold things like washing powder and pesticide. (The latter is so commonly used in rural suicides, New York Times reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal called it “the Chinese equivalent of Valium in every bathroom cabinet.”) Farming was still hard work. The fields were too small for machinery, and so a lot of field work was done the way it had been a hundred years before. Lots of houses didn’t have running water. And while the young married women of New Peace worked extraordinarily hard in the fields and the home tending to children and in-laws, their husbands were free to roam outside for months on end. In this kind of situation, it’s not difficult to see why, until the mid-2000s, China was the only country in the world where more women killed themselves than men, with the suicide rate highest among young rural women. This is changing now as villages empty of women; it’s rural men who are increasingly the ones killing themselves.
Zhou’s family feared he would take his own life in despair, and his parents forbade him to leave the village. In truth, Shufen said, all of them were in despair, worried about how to repay the heavy loans they had undertaken for the caili. Other New Peace families were worse off. One of the duped bridegrooms had a younger brother, also single, and the family didn’t know how they could raise his bride price. His father moaned, “I wish I had daughters.”
I had initially been drawn to the story of New Peace’s runaway brides because of its tragicomic elements. I liked how this small band of women had somehow managed to strike a blow against China’s patriarchal system. As a woman and despised daughter myself, I felt the problems of New Peace and other countless little hamlets seemed like poetic justice, payback for hundreds of years of systemic discrimination against women.
But Zhou’s gallantry touched my heart. Even though his disastrous marriage had left him in debt and legal limbo, he refused to blame his wife. He didn’t hate her for leaving, he said. “She must have her own troubles.” He actually spoke to her a few times after she ran away—he said she’d called. “She said she was sorry, she had no choice.”
Not all of China’s bachelors would be as generous under similar circumstances, but they all face a bleak future that is not their doing.
II
There is no shortage of theories about how this male youth imbalance will shape China, and by extent the world. Undeniably, large groups of young males create situations ripe for social dissent and violence and are linked to developments such as the Arab Spring and the rise in rape in India. How, then, will it be for China, where the gender gap is by far the largest in the world?
In 2004, academics Valerie Hudson and Andrea den Boer’s book Bare Branches argued that China’s large population of single men could create a more warlike nation. The many periods in China’s history that have seen a male surplus include two Qing-era rebellions in areas with extremely large numbers of single males. One, a rebellion of bandits in northeast China, called the Nien Rebellion, occurred in 1851 when famine and female infanticide had res
ulted in a ratio of roughly 129 men to every 100 women. One in four men was unable to marry at all, noted Hudson and den Boer. (Today, some provinces in China have between 26 and 38 percent more males than females, according to Yi Zhang, population researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.) As Hudson and den Boer point out, a large population of single men is not, on its own, necessarily a recipe for violence. “The mere presence of dry bare branches cannot cause a fire, but when the sparks begin to fly, those branches can act as kindling, turning sparks into flames.”
While intriguing, Hudson and den Boer’s theories were considered by many social scientists as speculative and not necessarily predictive. Ten years later, their thesis gained slightly more credence, as China grew increasingly assertive in territorial spats with neighbors. In 2012, China’s squabble with Japan over some barren uninhabited islands, called Senkaku by the Japanese and Diaoyu by the Chinese, heated up to such an extent that the Economist’s cover story raised the question “Could Asia Really Go to War over These?”
In 2014, ten years after the publication of Bare Branches, Hudson and den Boer argued in a Washington Post article that a “virile form of nationalism” has begun to creep into China’s foreign policy rhetoric, which they believe has been deliberately stoked to keep the allegiance of “young adult bare branches.”