Love, marriage, and property

Before I got married, my colleagues in the US and UK would send me the latest economic and demographic reports they read on China and marvel, “Looks like the population imbalance is in your favor over there!”

True, we do have a surplus of marriageable men here, but in modern China, relationships aren’t a simple game of numbers. Sometimes it feels like the whole country is toiling away just to pair up its young and produce the next generation of workers. In extreme (but not uncommon) cases, parents sell family homes in order to provide their sons with brand new apartments a deal breaker in terms of finding an attractive, well-educated mate.

China is not unlike other developing societies around the world in terms of its older generation’s preoccupation with marriage. But unlike other traditional cultures, the situation in China is aggravated by a severe, and widening, gender imbalance. About 105 men are born to every 100 women in China, and while this evens out in the long run (women generally live longer), this is small comfort to the legion of Chinese men who will most likely never be able to marry. The One Child Policy further aggravates this problem, with most parents still preferring sons over daughters, and while it is technically illegal for doctors to reveal the sex of unborn babies due to China’s history of female infanticide, the introduction of ultrasound scans in the 1980s drove the birth ratio to over 130 baby boys for every 100 baby girls in some areas. This gap has narrowed somewhat of late, but nevertheless, China continues to have a surfeit of some 40 million bachelors.

This has completely reversed China’s millennia-old tradition of dowries. A popular Ming dynasty saying held that “Thieves don’t bother to enter a household with five daughters” indeed, dowries frequently bankrupted families with few male heirs.

A new phrase has displaced this piece of ancient wisdom. Nowadays, you are more likely to hear that “Daughters are China Merchant Banks, sons are China Construction Banks.” Put simply, a girl can be a goldmine, if paired with a well-to-do young man. Few educated urbanwomen will agree to marry a man who offers anything less than an apartment and at least one foreign-branded automobile.

People who find Chinese real estate prices unbelievable (last time I checked, the cash needed for a nice apartment in Beijing buys two in Queens) should remember that home ownership isn’t a pipe dream for most Chinese it’s an absolute necessity. As a college student from Chongqing told me last week, “Not owning an apartment before getting married seems irresponsible. Do I ask my wife to move from rental to rental?”Matchmakers and mothers-in-law, still the principal powerbrokers where marriage is concerned, will likely scupper any attempt by a love-struck girl to devote her life to a man without property.

Everyone seems to be a matchmaker in China. There are parks where the elderly gather bearing signs listing the accomplishments of their offspring, hoping to connect with the grandparents of other unattached youngsters. Parents habitually divulge details of their family assets to people in their extended social networks just in the hope that a matchmaker might overhear and send a spouse their way.

Once, I was even drawn into this game against my will. A retired lady in my mother’s “dancing in the park” club grilled me about my age, educational background and occupation while I was out jogging one morning, before going on to harass my mother for weeks in an attempt to coerce me into finding a boyfriend for her daughter.

With ten to twenty extra men for every woman, why was this lady worried about her daughter? Because, at least in the minds of the ever-pragmatic fretful Chinese mother, excessive quantity is no guarantee of abundant quality. Many of my professionally successful but, by their own admission, privately unfulfilled girlfriends bemoan the limited number of educated, independent and interesting men with whom they feel they could share their lives.

“The men who aren’t intimidated by my wealth are either too busy pursuing their own careers, or they’re coalminers who can’t carry on a conversation,” one disaffected Beijing alphafemale complained to me. “In any case, I can’t compete with the hordes of young, pretty girls from the countryside who just want to become trophy wives.”

The men don’t have it easy either. The problem with matchmaking, a 30-year-old eligible bachelor (who has a house, a car, and a civil service job) from Jinan explained to me, “is that you have to clear the double hurdles the girl’s mom’s material expectations, and the girl’s personal dream of her Prince Charming.”

Sometimes, the mounting pressure to marry and the shrinking pool of marriageable candidates becomes simply too overwhelming, especially for women. When this happens, they pull out the trump card independence.

A friend of mine told a story about an art student who returned to China after years of studying abroad. “She missed the window of dating in China in her 20s and early 30s. So she bought her own apartment and car.” Nothing says “I don’t need a dowry from my parents or from a man” like providing your own dowry.