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Singles
celebrate Valentine’s Day.
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The“eight-minute
date”group dating game is popular among singles in Qingdao,
Shandong Province. |
Is there a spark at the table?
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Chinese parents have always viewed their children’s marriage
as a crucially important event. Now, as most households in the
country have just one child, they do so more than ever. While
some kids have little trouble obtaining masters’ and doctorate
degrees, or landing highly-paid jobs in multinational companies,
finding a suitable mate is evidently a far more arduous task.
When their child still lacks an appropriate marriage prospect
in his or her late 20s, impatient mom and dad quickly turn verbal
pressure into concrete action. Many Chinese cities hold “parents’
matchmaking fairs,” where parents meet to exchange their
child’s “details” with others in the same boat,
in the hope of finding a mutually acceptable partnership. Mutually
acceptable, that is, to the parents themselves.
Open or Closed?
It’s not just the parents who care. A single’s club
called Bailingtan in Beijing has also come to the rescue of these
young loveless souls, albeit for different reasons. It offers
a database of dates and organized group activities that are aimed
at bringing together the perfect partners, and it has had much
success. It now has more than 3,000 members, and many a happy
couple will be able to tell their grandchildren that “we
met in Bailingtan.”
Owner of Bailingtan Li Jingmin says, “It seems paradoxical
that in an increasingly open society, young people are more closed
up. Many long to find the right partner for marriage, but they
don’t always take practical actions to achieve this. Our
bar is the perfect place for these people to meet – after
all, every customer is searching for the same thing!”
Li Sha, a 29-year-old editor, recently joined the Bailingtan
single’s club. She obtained her master’s degree at the
age of 25, but still lives at home with her parents. A busy job
curtails her social life, and she is rarely seen outside her office
or her home. Many of her former classmates and colleagues lead
a similar life, so the young lady is beginning to wonder if she
will ever find a partner. Li Sha is hoping that Bailingtan can
help.
The problem has in recent years become a matter of public concern.
According to Shanghai’s 2004 Population Development Report,
73.59 percent of well-educated brides in the city got married
at a later age than those the previous year. Another survey shows
that both Beijing and Shanghai have a single population of more
than one million.
Yuan Yue, founder and chairman of Horizon Research, says that
young people living in big cities have become increasingly isolated
from each other, from a romantic point of view. They have plenty
of work and study friends, but these offer few opportunities for
love and marriage. A survey carried out last year by China Youth
Daily shows that 58.6 percent of respondents attributed their
own or their peers’ solitude to limited social activities,
while another 45.1 percent and 27.1 percent respectively blamed
overly-high expectations and their grueling workload.
Love – Vs – Career
It’s not the first time that this problem has come into
the spotlight in Chinese society. In the early 1980s, millions
of young men and women streamed back to the cities having spent
a decade in the countryside during the “cultural revolution”
(1966-1976). All were far above a marriageable age. To marry them
off thus became a mission for the whole nation – the Secretariat
of the CPC Central Committee even convened a meeting in 1984 to
discuss the issue’s effects on thirtysomethings.
But while the effect was similar back then, the circumstances
were quite different. Wu Xiuping, vice secretary general of the
China Marriage and Family Society, noted that compared with their
counterparts of the 1980s, today’s unmarried have much better
education and income levels, and they do not expect the government
to interfere in their personal affairs.
Wang Jie is a deputy researcher with the Tianjin Academy of Social
Sciences. He believes the courting difficulties that today’s
youth suffer in many ways reflect the irregularities in the rapid
transformation of Chinese society in the past few decades. When
Chinese society was predominantly agricultural, there was little
or no difference between the people’s educational or economic
status. And there was a large pool of prospective marriage partners
to be found in the close-knit communities that then existed. Furthermore,
wedlock was viewed as necessary for producing posterity, rather
than the culmination of affection. These days, the country’s
most ambitious youngsters view avoiding wedlock as necessary for
producing wealth and success.
Wu Xiuping notes that today’s competitive job market means
young people must complete years of schooling and training, and
toil strenuously for a few more years before they can land a good
job. They thus miss out on the optimum period of their lives for
courtship and marriage, both psychologically and physically.
Love or Money?
There is a greater proportion of unmarried women than men among
China’s white-collar population. Despite their economic and
social achievements, these ladies still hold the traditional belief
that women should marry “stronger” men, and are therefore
confined to a narrower scope of choices.
Meanwhile, social pressures, and those imposed by the opposite
sex, have caused men to postpone their plans for starting a family.
Convinced that their “career should come first,” and
that “a marriage that lacks a house and a healthy bank account
will not be a happy one,” men endeavor to provide these first.
Economic concerns have become paramount to Chinese people when
considering their marriage prospects. Yang Xiong, president of
the Youth and Juvenile Research Institute of the Shanghai Academy
of Social Sciences, says that this trend gained momentum in the
past 25 years. In 1994, he says, economic status surpassed education
level, social status and family background to become the number
one criteria when looking at prospective partners. Yang ascribes
the trend to China’s rapid economic growth.
Yin Ling, a former member of the Bailingtan Bar, is getting ready
to walk down the aisle with her French boyfriend. She believes
that Westerners place a higher value on a potential partner’s
personality traits, and supposes that this is the result of the
already high living standards in their respective countries.
Bachelorhood as a Way of Life
In today’s bustling China, interpersonal ties are often
loose while individualism is exploding. Many simply view the single
life as the simpler life. Sha Qing is a 37-year-old college professor.
He commands a large salary, and resides in a beautiful, spacious
home, but he lives there alone. Sha Qing believes that it is impossible
for two individuals with strong personalities to totally accept
each other through the trials and tribulations of boring, everyday
life. Love may be sweet, Sha Qing reckons, but marriage is not.
“Today’s young people are more reluctant to change their
own personalities to suit their partners. If they do so, the love
decays.”
Women these days actually get more gingerly about marriage than
men. Professional women fear having to swap their high-flying
career for a life of household chores, child rearing, and looking
after a husband and his parents-in-law. Others doubt that their
marriage will succeed, and wish to avoid getting into a situation
where divorce, still considered ignominious by many, will be the
only way out. Lack of confidence in the bonds of marriage seems
epidemic among many women of today.
But parents will not give up hope, and matchmaking fairs are
drawing still larger crowds. Another who feels optimistic about
the situation is Li Jingming. He passes out cards and wine to
his customers, while offering consoling words like, “Your
soul mate must be waiting in a quiet corner.” Li Jingming’s
livelihood, though, depends on that corner not being empty.
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