Shanghai Pathways Blog

A few months ago, I saw a Chinese article about what makes a good woman. In short, it says that most of the Chinese men wanted a traditional type of Chinese women as their wife.

A GOOD WOMAN SHOULD BE

“Never open to other people, never open to other man, never go out.

Should give son to the family

Never be angry, always soft and smiling to the man

Never does house work wrong, never burn food”

Over 90% of the Chinese men sadly admitted that they had never met such a woman in their life. Perhaps such a women simply does not exist in the real world.

My first reaction towards it was “Seriously? Are we really living in the 21^st century or is it the dark-ages all over again?”

But then, most of my Chinese male friends wish that modern Chinese women can turn back to being traditional again. A common belief is that good Chinese women are not expected to be dominant in the family and capable of everything. Being able to navigate flexibly between appearing strong and weak is thought to be the key of feminine radiance and attraction – not a women who overtakes a man’s capabilites.

In the patriarchal Chinese society, the traditional ideology was that a good woman should follow the “three submissions and four virtues.” The three submissions were that a woman was expected to loyally submit first to her father as his daughter, then to her husband as his wife and to her adult son (the family heir on the death of her husband). The four virtues were women’s virtue (fu de), women’s speech (fu yan), women’s appearance (fu rong) and women’s work (fu gong).

For centuries, the family household in Chinese society was separated between the inner (nei) quarters for the women and the outer (wai) quarters for the men. Outside affairs were not to be discussed in the women’s quarters and inside affairs were not to be spoken of outside the inner quarters.

Therefore, most people believe in the stereotype of good Chinese women, those who are soft, demure, reserved, shy, alluring, and near ethereal-like creatures. But in reality, lots of modern Chinese women are really strong-willed and some men find out that sweet looking Chinese women can even be dragon ladies.

Many Chinese women today enjoy new personal freedoms that were previously, up until very recently, denied to them. Historically in China only the number of a man’s sons would be used to refer to the size of his family. When a woman married, she was expected to leave her family to live with her husband in his hometown, where the wife was subordinate to the whims of her mother-in-law.

Huge change happened following the advent of the 1979 single-child policy. This policy  led to a shortage of prospective daughters-in-law (with parents favoring sons in the womb) and has also produced a generation of doted-upon only-children, many of whom happen to be girls. As a family’s only child, girls are pampered and spoiled in the same way as the boys, especially in big cities like Shanghai and Beijing. Deprived of sons, parents and grandparents heaped their high expectations on daughters and grand-daughters. The ambitions of Chinese women remain curtailed by family though. It is them, more than men, that are expected to care for aging parents — an entrenched cultural bias.

In China, “the ethos of the last 30 years is that to get rich is glorious, that instinct is surprisingly gender neutral.”

Born as a Shanghai woman, I never experienced gender inequality in my life or know anyone who had a bad family experience just because she is a girl. Being a Shanghai girl, we were the only beloved ones and people expected us to be better than our parents. Since a very young age I never ever hid my desire of wanting to excel in school and getting rich in life. Therefore I worked extremely hard and tried my best to have a great career.

To understand what happened with the good Chinese woman, consider these numbers:

• The number of Chinese women in senior management positions has recently doubled, with 51% of those jobs held by females, in this China stands alone in Asia.
• Some 550 publicly-traded companies or about 21% have women on their boards. Shenzhen based Ceetop Inc. and China Teletech Holding Inc. are two of the four companies in the world with all-female boards.
• Half of the world’s self-made female billionaires are Chinese.

This big change has also happened in rural areas. Chang’s book Factory Girls(2008) explores the lives of the factory girls who had migrated from their villages to operate the assembly lines that produce the clothes we wear, the computer parts we need, the shoes, hats, handbags, games, and gadgets that make the Western world go round. They work up to 13 hours a day, live in cold, dirty, overcrowded dormitories and eat poor food. They have no free time, health insurance, holidays or pension provision beyond the paltry state minimum. Five years ago their average wage was between 500 and 800 yuan a month. Today, a shortage of labor means that young women in their 20s, the elite of the migrant workforce, can earn five times as much, or more.

They return to their villages at New Year bearing gifts: anoraks; trainers; sweets; and toys for the children; pretty jackets for their mothers. They also inject unprecedented sums of money into the rural economy. Young unmarried women now subsidize their parents, pay for the education of younger brothers and sisters, distribute handouts to elderly relatives, and command growing respect from the village as well as from their families. Some go back home to settle, bringing capital and putting up glass and stone two storey houses in the country. Factory girls may look victimized to outsiders who take them to be helpless, ill-paid and insecure, easy prey to sexual and financial exploitation, stuck on the lowest and most vulnerable level of society. But that’s not how these woman see themselves. In their own eyes they are proud, resourceful, energetic risk-takers at the cutting edge of a social revolution.

In Evan Osnos’s book Age of Ambition, he noted a large number of ground-breaking women in 21st century China. One real human story tells of Gong Haiyan, born small and sickly in a rural village, her leg and face later crushed in a tractor accident. Despite all that, Gong couldn’t repress her entrepreneurial gene. As a child, she bought and resold ice pops to villagers, mapping out a route of likely buyers and noting, “Whatever you do, you have to be strategic.”

Her mother was so dedicated to her daughter’s education after the tractor accident that she carried her up and down the stairs to classes. Gong later worked on a Panasonic assembly-line before returning to school and excelling in college. Considered ugly and unable to find a mate, she launched an online dating service, thereby breaking into the male-dominated high-tech world. By 2010, she was known as China’s number one matchmaker. She took her company public on NASDAQ and ended the day worth $77 million, shared with… yes, she found one – her husband.

Another one is SOHO China CEO Zhang Xin, the real estate developer who is transforming Beijing’s skyline. Zhang spent her teenage years on a Hong Kong assembly line but eventually made her way to the New York and prominent UK universities, then onto Goldman Sachs.

New job opportunities, better access to education and more equal positions in family life are creating a modern Chinese woman. Like China’s men in this age of self-creation, these Chinese women defied a history that told them never to try. The once “yellowed pearls” are now shining like diamonds!

Writing this article, I felt that perhaps most Chinese men are not yet ready for the modern Chinese woman – the first female generation of the single-child policy. The change is not just in the culture, dress codes, money and social aspirations of the younger Chinese women, it is in their mindset. For the first time in Chinese history women put themselves first, not their man or their relationship. They are now living the sort of lives that men have done for centuries. Who can blame them.

Women have changed. Men now need to as well.

Following last year’s article – ‘The Unmarried Crisis in China’, my editor asked me to write another story on the topic of the “leftover women”.

In the beginning, I was not sure what to write about. Then I started to wonder who actually created this crazy concept in China? The research came back with big surprises. In 2007, the Women’s Federation defined “leftover” women (sheng nu) as unmarried women over the age of 27, and China’s Ministry of Education added the term to its official lexicon.

Since then, the Women’s Federation Website has run a number of articles stigmatizing educated women who are still single. Their articles’ headlines scream out like sensational tabloids: “Overcoming the Big Four Emotional Blocks: Leftover Women Can Breakout of Being Single.” “Eight Simple Moves to Escape the Leftover Women Trap.” And my personal favorite: “Do Leftover Women Really Deserve Our Sympathy?”

Ironically, the Women’s Federation is supposedly responsible for “protecting women’s rights and interests.” But instead, they wrote the following:

Pretty girls don’t need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family, but girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult, these kinds of girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is, they don’t realize that as women age, they are worth less and less, so by the time they get their M.A. or Ph.D., they are already old, like yellowed pearls.

The above article was actually published on International Women’s Day, 2011 – a day that should have been talking about women’s economic and political achievements. The state media began very aggressively pushing women who are educated and still single, by telling them that they need to lower their sights when they’re choosing a husband, or time will run out for them and they’ll be single forever.

Being over 27, I don’t plan to be single and die alone. But I also don’t wish to jump on the marriage train with Mr “So-so”. In short, I am very well educated and way too independent to be brainwashed by any propaganda.

It is actually very ironic that this entire campaign is targeting so-called “leftover women”, when demographically, there are actually tens of millions of men in China who won’t be able to find brides, and even feel they have to buy brides from countries like Vietnam. According to the State Council, a sex-ratio imbalance causes a threat to social stability and lowers the quality of the general population, which makes it hard to meet the requirements needed for fierce competition and for national strength.

The Chinese government is very worried that educated women are not going to marry at all. It really wants women like me, in particular, to get married and have a child – no more one child policy, better to have two children now. Therefore, the State Council appointed the Women’s Federation as a primary implementer of its population planning policy.

What better way to upgrade population quality than to frighten “high-quality leftover” women into marrying and having a child for the good of the nation?

The main reason many girls become “leftover women” is that their standards for a partner are too high …If girls are not too picky, finding a partner should be as easy as blowing away a speck of dust

The Women’s Federation columns on sheng nu all share the same goal; convince single, educated women to stop being so ambitious and get married immediately. They even list helpful tips, such as “seduce but don’t pester” and “be persistent but not willful”:

When holding out for a man, if you say he must be rich and brilliant, romantic and hardworking … this is just being willful. Does this kind of perfect man exist? Maybe he does exist, but why on earth would he want to marry you?

And once a “leftover” woman finds marital bliss, what should she do if her husband has an affair?

When you find out that he is having an affair, you may be in a towering rage, but you must know that if you make a fuss, you are denying the man “face” … No man is capable of spending a lifetime being loyal to an outmoded wife who never changes … Try changing your hairstyle or your fashion. Women must constantly change for the better.

In short, it’s the woman’s fault for refusing to get married, and once she is married, it’s the woman’s fault if her husband has an affair. Of course.

As a child who was brought up in the communist system, I used to look up to Chairman Mao as a God, I used to believe everything in this country is correct and perfect – well, they fooled me once.

During my 20s, I spent the majority of my time learning, traveling and most of all pursuing a good career. By now, I have my own company, make more money than the average man and have a lot of interesting friends who inspire me and keep me busy. Looking back, I don’t think I would have been wise enough to make a good choice, for finding a man who I could spend the rest of my life with, because I didn’t even know what kind of life I wanted at that young age.

Now at 30, I have a bit more experience to know what the most important qualities of a lifelong partner are. Also now, I find myself more popular and patient and much more willing to learn and understand how to interact in a relation-ship. Very luckily, my parents never pushed me into marriage or set up any blind dating for me.

Here comes the question. What does a “leftover woman” really want in a man? Or why aren’t they married?

I believe there are quite a lot of reasons and possible answers, but certainly it is because women’s status is improving compared to the past. Not only can women take care of the household work, but a woman can also run a business, drive a car, repair machines, and now it is even possible to have a baby by browsing through a sperm bank’s catalog! Instead of the “WE” thinking, the Chinese woman is now much more “ME” thinking.

If marriage is good for me, then I’ll marry, if marriage is not good for me, why should I? I will only marry if a man can give me A LOT of love or A LOT of money!

My friend Lily, who is 36 years old, very pretty and successful, said, after a 10 year long marriage, she divorced her husband because he did not give her love or money. She realized that this would never change, and she doesn’t want to stay with the “mistake” for ever.

To end our story and give some advice/hope to the men, here is an interesting suggestion from a famous talk show in China.

‘For men to remember, if a women is looking for money, and you can give her enough money, then she won’t be unhappy if you have affairs with other women. If a women is looking for love, and you give her enough love, then she won’t look down on you because you don’t have enough money. If you can’t give her money or love, but ask her to accept your flirting, laziness and cheating. Then I am sorry, what you need is an idiot.’