One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment

by Mei Fong

  Domestically, at least, it makes sense that more men equals more strife. In 2008, economists showed that a 1 percent increase in China’s gender ratios increased violent and property crime rates between 5 and 6 percent. Researchers estimated that the “increasing maleness” of China’s young adult population could account for as much as a third of the overall rise in crime. A 2013 study by Zhejiang University found that China’s bachelors had lower self-esteem compared to married men, and much higher rates of depression and aggression.

  While women in China do not experience the levels of public assault and molestation they face in places like the Middle East or India, they do experience a great deal of violence at home. One in four women in China confronts domestic violence, according to the All-China Women’s Federation, and they have few legal protections. In 2011, Kim Lee, the American-born wife of a famous Chinese entrepreneur, tried fruitlessly to file a police report against her husband for battering her. When the police refused to recognize her beating as a crime, she went on Weibo and posted pictures of her bruises, sparking a media frenzy. Later she was awarded a divorce on the grounds of domestic violence—a landmark ruling—and emerged as a vocal advocate for women’s rights. The Chinese government only drafted a national law against domestic violence in 2014.

  Economically, the impact of China’s gender imbalance appears mixed. Economists Wei Shang-Jin and Zhang Xiaobo argue the gender imbalance may stimulate economic growth by inducing more entrepreneurship. They found that regions with a higher gender imbalance have higher GDP growth and more vigorous growth of private companies. On the other hand, Wei and Zhang also think the imbalance has led to excessive saving, as parents with sons stockpile funds to increase their eligibility on the marriage market, and the researchers calculate that half the increase in China’s savings in the past twenty-five years can be attributed to the increase in the gender ratio.

  If this is the case, China’s guanggun problem will make it harder for Beijing to transition from an export-led economy by stimulating domestic consumption. Wei and Zhang’s theories are not mainstream—economists have many explanations for why China saves—but they do add to the growing body of evidence that the one-child policy, in many respects, created a demographic structure that will dampen future growth.

  A 2014 Australian study also found that China’s gender imbalance contributed to excessive savings and rising crime rates. Unfortunately, policies that seek to rebalance the gender imbalance will take decades and slow real per-capita income growth, though the study’s writers concluded this slowed economic growth would be offset by gains made from reduced crime.

  No one knows for sure yet if China’s male surplus will decisively crimp China’s economic growth or make it a more warlike nation. But it seems safe to say that it has hugely intensified marriage anxiety in a society where parents—particularly parents of only children—are extremely invested in their offspring’s romantic choices.

  Back in 2009, high caili prices were still an unfamiliar concept to many Chinese city folk. While prevalent in the countryside, caili was still “rare in urban Chinese environments,” wrote Canadian scholar Siwan Anderson. Barely six years later, the real estate company Vanke had published a map showing caili rates across China. According to company data, cities with the most expensive caili were Shanghai and Tianjin at $16,000 and $9,600, respectively. These prices were just the tip of the iceberg, since desirable bridegrooms were also expected to own real estate.

  Vanke’s methodology was widely criticized. Some said it underestimated bride prices—why was caili in Beijing, second-largest city in China, only $1,600 and two bottles of fiery Maotai, and zero in booming Chongqing? Still, almost no one disagreed with the disagreeable notion that caili, once a quaint custom of the countryside, was now a nationwide practice. More than ever since the 1949 launch of the People’s Republic, marriage had become a matter of money, valuation, and investment.

  It may be hard for Westerners to understand how marriages can be such stark dollars-and-cents transactions. But in China, parental participation is a given. Unions are never just between the bride and groom. Both parties are not just giving themselves, but potentially everything their parents have jointly accumulated.

  With men vying for a limited number of brides, parents are chipping in to help them buy apartments and enhance their eligibility. This is called “building a nest to catch a phoenix,” and the ones best feathering their nests are realtors. (Some economists estimate that the gender imbalance accounted for an increase of between 30 and 48 percent in housing prices in China between 2003 and 2009.) Certainly, China’s soaring real estate prices have created a colony of house slaves—literally, fangnu—hapless people on the hook for astronomical sums similar to America’s subprime mortgage victims.

  I met one such fangnu in Tian Qingeng, twenty-five, a good-natured lathe operator, in 2013. Tian lives in Ninghai, a pleasant little city a few hours from Shanghai. Tian works in a factory, making about $400 a month. That’s not much even by Ninghai standards, where average incomes are about $3,000 monthly. To increase his eligibility, his parents emptied their savings—all $45,000—and borrowed an additional $35,000 from relatives, to buy a two-bedroom apartment in central Ninghai.

  Every month, mortgage payments take up roughly 80 percent of Tian and his parents’ combined monthly income. That makes life a complicated dance of calculations and costs. Heat? Too much. Furniture? The bare minimum. Vegetables? Only what can be grown in the family plot at Tian’s parents’ country home. The only indulgences they allow themselves are lottery tickets.

  Tian invited me to his apartment. The development itself was fairly new and boasted a pond, a topiary, and a rock garden designed to resemble Guilin’s famous karst mountain scenery. As we walked through the courtyard, I heard the anthems of the middle class: the blip-blip of video games, somebody torturing John Thompson on the piano.

  Tian may have staked his future on a nest to catch a phoenix bride, but it is a grievously bare one. Aside from built-in fixtures bought cheaply from the previous owners—a divorcing yuppie couple—the apartment is sparsely furnished and chilly. His mother made some attempt to soften the place with needlepoint pictures and handmade pillows. In Tian’s bedroom, she’s placed a three-foot-tall stuffed rabbit and bamboo plants. But the plastic sheathing on the bunny is covered with dust, and the bamboo is withering, for Tian never remembers to water it.

  Tian has acquired the love nest but made few efforts to find someone to share it with. The trouble is, he doesn’t quite know how to set about finding this person. Ninghai is not a major city like Beijing or Shanghai, with gyms and nightclubs and a rich singles life. People still wash their clothes at the river on fine days, and courting is still done the old-fashioned way, through introductions by someone you know. Horoscopes and auguries are still important. One of Tian’s friends finally found a girlfriend, but they delayed the union to avoid marrying in the Year of the Horse. Astrologers see a Horse year as tumultuous and bad for marriage and counseled waiting for the more union-friendly Year of the Sheep, explained Tian. Of course, the couple must then take care not to conceive too soon, as Sheep babies are seen as too passive, too unlikely to succeed in life.

  This whole clash of modern and traditional has proved too much for Tian. He’d rather retreat into his room and play computer games. There’s another name his relatives freely call him: zhai nan, or geek. Literally “residence male,” the term is derived from the Japanese otaku, “house male.”

  A few months before we met, Tian went on his one and only date, a fix-up arranged by his uncle. All he knew about her was that she was in her twenties and a fellow factory worker. After frugally working out a budget, Tian arranged to meet her at a café where $3.50 would buy him endless coffee refills, even though he dislikes caffeine. The conversation was turgid. He was disappointed. Her face, he complained, wasn’t “harmonious.” He said he didn’t know what to say to her. In truth, he didn’t know what to say to any woman his
age, having no sisters and working in an all-male environment.

  I asked him what he was looking for in a wife.

  After a long silence, he ventured, “She must have a nice personality.”

  What does that mean? I pressed him.

  “She must obey my parents.” Pause. “And obey me.”

  Each weekend Tian’s mother takes a bus from their countryside home to cook and clean for her son. In between bouts of floor wiping and slicing tomatoes, she drops hints: “Don’t you think it’s time?” and “I’m not too old to help with children.” (I was amused to learn she works at a factory making horsewhips.)

  It’s imperative that Tian marry, not only to meet parental expectations. He calculates that his parents have about a decade of wage earning left in them. He needs to find a partner who can help him service the mortgage once they retire. Of course, this isn’t necessarily fair to the future Mrs. Tian, who will be expected to help pay for Tian’s flat but whose name isn’t likely to end up on the property deed.

  “Of course not,” said Tian, when I asked if he would have the property jointly listed with the future Mrs. “My parents and I bought it,” he said firmly.

  Only 30 percent of marital home deeds in China’s major cities include the wife’s name, even though over 70 percent of women contribute to the purchase, according to sociologist Leta Hong Fincher. That becomes a huge problem when marriages sour and matrimonial assets are divided up in divorce court. In 2011, China issued a new interpretation of its Marriage Law specifying marital property as belonging to the person named on the property deed—almost always the husband. Given that much of the recent wealth creation in China has come from appreciating values in soaring property markets, Chinese women have therefore been left out of what is arguably the biggest accumulation of residential real estate wealth in history: some $27 trillion worth, estimates Hong Fincher.

  The paucity of dating options in a little city like Ninghai contrasts with big-city offerings. There are high-tech choices, with matchmaking sites like Jiayuan and Lotus, and low-tech, such as parents placing ads in public parks on behalf of single children. This last method has been going on for over a decade and came about when retiree parents got together with peers to lament their children’s single status. Soon, they started swapping information, and out of this were born the so-called marriage markets in China’s public parks.

  I first stumbled across one of these marriage markets by accident in 2006. It was cherry blossom season in Beijing’s Yuyuantan Park, when I spotted a clutch of people gathered around a corner of the park. Curious, I wandered over and saw batches of handwritten notices, laid on the ground or clipped to lines strung between bushes.

  I fell into conversation with a man who’d put out an ad for his son, who was in his mid-twenties and made his living as a painter reproducing famous artworks. The father had even brought photos of his son’s work. “See? Isn’t he talented?” he said, pointing to a copy of Van Gogh’s Irises. Like most of the others advertised in the park, the son did not know his father was trolling for dates for him. “He would be very shy to know I’m introducing him to you,” said the father. I quickly added I was married. His face fell. Carefully, he put away his son’s pictures. Surely, I asked, it was a little soon to start worrying about his son’s singlehood? He sighed. He knew China’s marriage squeeze was on.

  Over the years as I came across these marriage markets, I noticed a trend in the ads: the men tended to be in their mid-twenties, without a college education. The women advertised tended to be older and better educated. This is not just because China’s legal age for marriage—again, twenty for women, twenty-two for men—creates a built-in expectation that men should seek younger (and presumably less established) mates. It is also of a piece with China’s deep-seated hypergamous culture, where women marry up and men marry down. Naturally, this adds to an already tight marriage market. Hypergamy obviously disadvantages rural bachelors like the men of New Peace, but it also limits the choices of highly educated women, leading to a common joke: “There are three genders in China: male, female, and female with PhD.”

  I doubt many of these marriage market ads actually result in unions, but they do show the strong role parents play in China’s dating scene. In her book Who Will Marry My Daughter? sociologist Sun Peidong found only three matches made at Shanghai’s People’s Park marriage mart, out of sixty-five postings. Despite this failure rate, Sun concluded that the marriage mart filled an important need, providing a forum for the parents of the one-child generation to share their fears about their children’s future. It also reflected their anxieties about the growing frailty of China’s family structure.

  I wanted to know more about modern dating methods, in which singles were active participants, not their parents. In 2013, I took part in a group matchmaking event organized by Jiayuan. The NASDAQ-listed company—ticker symbol DATE—is one of China’s biggest matchmaking agencies with over 110 million registered users. The three-hour event targeted white-collar workers and cost about $16. About one hundred participants had registered for it, which was a relief, as some of these group-dating events had tens of thousands of participants.

  Since I was decidedly on the older side and a foreigner to boot, my researcher, Shuang, and I came up with a cover story: I would introduce myself as her older cousin, an overseas Chinese, working in Beijing, who was accompanying her on her search for a mate.

  It was a good thing we’d come prepared, for we were required to produce IDs at the registration desk. Nobody could creatively embellish his or her age, for we were furnished with tags indicating the decade when we were born. Shuang had a big red sticker saying “90s.” Mine, of course, said “70s,” which in Chinese dating circles classified me as 3S—Single, born in the Seventies, and Stuck. It felt like the scarlet letter. I asked the organizers how many of these “70s” stickers they gave out. “Not many,” sniffed one, eyeing me dubiously.

  We were then ushered into a ballroom, where chairs were arranged in squares, in groups of ten. In a corner were some refreshments: fruit, soft drinks, and sweet biscuits, no alcohol. I sidled over to a group, eyeing the other participants: a woman with the big “70s” sticker partially hidden under her hair and plastic Crocs on her feet, and a man in his thirties who never lifted his eyes from his phone. We were given small slips of pink paper on which we were supposed to write our details: name, hobbies, QQ number—QQ being a popular instant messaging service. The idea was that if we saw any potential suitors, we would exchange slips. Everybody gave furtive glances around before busying themselves with the pink slips.

  When the MC bounded on stage, it was a relief, but not for long. “Everyone! Stand up! Turn to your partner! Massage your partner!” I gingerly rubbed a skinny twenty-something’s shoulder blades, before turning around so he could rub mine. Absently, I noticed I’d creased his beautifully ironed shirt. “That’s it! Give it a good pounding!” roared the MC, and we dutifully thumped each other’s shoulders.

  We were told to pick a slogan as a group—something romantic—and then chant it together. The group that produced the loudest noise or the most creative slogan—I wasn’t quite sure which­—would win. Our group came up with the anemic-sounding “Eternal Love Warriors.” We sounded as loud as newborn kittens when our turn came to chant, despite the energetic efforts of a forty-something I’ll call Zhang, who had appointed himself the group’s leader. “Come on! All together!” he screeched. “Eternal! Love! Warriors!”

  We yelped again, feebly.

  Then it came down to introductions. Everyone was dreadfully serious. All the women kept saying they were “looking for someone sincere.” All the men enumerated their accomplishments: degree, job, car, and whether or not they had that all-important Beijing hukou. Nobody pretended they were just there for a good time, or to make friends, or to find a companion for walks on the beach. The desire was naked—to find a partner with a view to marriage—and it was about as romantic as someone spitting. Zhang, the sel
f-appointed ringleader, introduced himself as someone who owned his own import-export business. He didn’t go as far as some other men, who detailed salaries and apartment size, but said, with raised eyebrows, “Let me just say, I have what it takes.” The woman in Crocs said she was a doctor whose busy schedule made it hard for her to meet people. She was the only female in the group who said she didn’t mind dating someone younger.

  When it came to my turn, I hastily trotted out my cover story: I was just there to accompany my cousin. Zhang eyed me sternly, “Yes, but let me ask you, are you sincere?”

  And then we were asked to move on to the next group, to repeat the cycle: the massage, the slogan, the chanting, the introductions.

  After we staggered out, I asked Shuang what she thought. She rolled her eyes. “It felt like I was back in school,” she sniffed. “All those childish games.”

  The somberness of these dating events turns off many people besides Shuang. Sensing an opportunity, Alex Edmunds, a twenty-six-year-old Princeton graduate, launched a company called CaoCaoBa (the name means “Hey, Let’s Get Together”) that bills its mixers as “networking events” with built-in activities, such as hiking, badminton, or dinner. Many of Edmunds’s clients are tech companies like GE, IBM, Microsoft, Sohu, and Baidu, which subsidize these events to the tune of $5,000 to $6,000 each time, through each company’s Danshen Julebu—literally, “Singles Club.”

  “Nobody wants to go to a dating event—that’s a big turnoff. We call it networking, but it’s clear these things are held for people with the inclination to date,” said Edmunds.

  These companies aren’t matchmaking for altruistic reasons but as a way to decrease staff turnover—married people are less likely to job-hop—and provide an increasingly valued company perk. These Singles Clubs not only attract workers themselves; they draw and reassure the parents, especially those whose only child is working away from home. Baidu, for example, sends an annual newsletter of its club activities to employees’ families. Parents send back handwritten notes urging “more singles events,” according to the Financial Times.