A Park for Mrs Bennet
Why thousands of Chinese parents are turning up at Beijing’s parks every week in search of partners for their children
It’s a hot summer Sunday morning, and Mrs Zhao is making herself comfortable on a hard wooden park bench. In a couple of hours, this quiet section of Zhongshan Park, a green oasis adjoining the Forbidden City in the heart of Beijing, will be noisier than a fish market. It is business that brings Mrs Zhao here, but it is a trade that is going to be far from straightforward.
She lays out on the ground in front of her bench a carefully laminated A4 paper that has on it a few lines of text. “Born in 1989,” it reads. “Works for a government company. I want a man who is 1.8 metres tall, and owns a house. Born 1982-86. No smoking, plays sports.”
Four crisp sentences to describe her ideal son-in-law. Mrs Zhao is only one of more than 3,000 Chinese parents who descend on this Beijing park every week. They are all here for one purpose: finding a spouse for their reluctant children. “If my daughter got her act together,” she says with a sigh, “I wouldn’t be here. It’s getting harder and harder to get her married, so I have no choice but to come every Sunday.”
Marriage markets are a curiously Chinese phenomenon. They first sprouted across Chinese cities in the 1980s, after the end of the Cultural Revolution and the start of reforms—a time of churn when people began to move to cities and to have more freedom to choose their partners from beyond their villages.
As younger Chinese became more independent— and reluctant to have their parents decide their love lives for them—the markets began to fade. But there are signs of a resurgence now, driven by several converging social trends: a worsening demographic imbalance, an out-of-control housing market in a country where, for some, home ownership is a prerequisite for marriage, and a new resurgent pressure on women to marry early, sparked by demographic fears.
It was the inability to find a bride for her son that brought Mrs Wang, who is in her 60s (and declined to give her first name), to the park. “My son is 40. Until we can find someone for him, because he doesn’t seem able to do this for himself, I will keep coming here,” she
said determinedly. Parents consider meeting face to face a better alternative to finding matches online where, they complain, imposters proliferate. Besides, they can also better gauge their potential in-laws.
At Zhongshan Park, there are parents from not only all over Beijing, but some who have come in from nearby cities such as Tianjin. It is the biggest such market in the Chinese capital—there are smaller gatherings in other parks such as the Temple of Heaven—and even larger than China’s most well-known marriage market in Shanghai’s People Park.
The thousands of marriage posters on display at Zhongshan present a snapshot of what young Chinese—or in many cases, their parents—want. The market even has separate sections depending on age and location: the general category is the largest, with smaller reserved sections for those based overseas, above the age of 40, and divorced.
Mrs Wang, like many parents of boys, complains that girls’ families “want too much these days”. The biggest obstacle, she says, is the rising house prices in Beijing, where a 60 sq m. apartment cannot be acquired for less than 1-2 million yuan (roughly Rs 1-2 crore). For many, she says, no house means no deal.
For girls, a boy with a house is the most common demand; for boys, it’s the asset they advertise most prominently. One poster reads: “Boy, master’s degree, works in real estate, 1.73 metres tall. I look young! I’m from a military family. I have one house, and have bought a second. (No mortgage on either!) I have a car. I want someone younger than 34. No other requirements.”
Marriage advertisements are certainly simpler in China than in India, unencumbered by caste and religious restrictions. Yet there are some similarities. It’s not only about the money: surprisingly, astrology, a crucial aspect of matchmaking in China, persists as an important factor despite decades of government campaigns to rid the country of ‘old habits’. Most important is your Chinese zodiac, determined by the year of birth, because some are seen as incompatible with others.
One typical poster reads: “Beijing boy, Snake (born in 1989). Owns a house. Looking for a girl who is kind and optimistic, and has a stable job. Anyone born between 1989 and 1995, but no Horses or Sheep (born in 1990 or 1991)!” His mother explained, “Obviously, because Snakes and Horses can’t match. But Snakes and Chicken are fine. And no six-year age gaps: that will doom any marriage! Five or seven, no problem.” As in India, there is also a premium on fair skin. “Beijing beauty!” said one not-so-modest poster. “With both talent and good looks. White skin. Master’s degree. School teacher. 1989. Wants a man with a house.”
By 2020, there will be at least 24 million more men than women in China in the 20-45 age group. China has one of the world’s most skewed sex ratios, a legacy of millions of abortions and strict family planning restrictions. The imbalance is especially acute in the countryside. Chinese media are full of reports of “bachelor villages”, which have dozens of young men but not a single woman in their age group. Chinese newspapers frequently report surging “bride prices”—a “reverse dowry”, where families in villages pay tens of thousands of yuan for brides. In some villages in Hebei province, this dowry exceeds 150,000 yuan (or Rs 15 lakh) on average, according to media reports.
Women in China have fared far better than in India on almost every indicator, from health to education. One of the legacies of the Communist movement was ridding feudal and discriminatory social practices, encapsulated in Mao Zedong’s oft-quoted proclamation that “women hold up half the sky”. Whether female labour force participation or the number of
A STIGMATISING STATE MEDIA CAMPAIGN IS PUTTING PRESSURE ON WOMEN TO MARRY EARLY, WITH REAL ESTATE FIRMS REINFORCING THE NEED FOR A SPOUSE WITH A HOUSE
women entrepreneurs, China leaves India far behind.
But there are signs that new pressures are eroding those giant strides, forcing women to marry early and sacrifice their careers for family. “One new factor is the state and state media strongly pushing women to marry,” says Leta Hong Fincher, sociologist and author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. In the past few years, the term “leftover women”, referring to women in their late 20s, has become commonplace in Chinese media, part of what the author describes as “a stigmatising state media campaign to make women and their parents believe they have to marry by their late 20s”.
It is this anxiety that is pushing many parents—most of whom are there with their children’s approval— to go to parks every Sunday afternoon. “The idea is that a woman must marry by her late 20s, or she misses out on the opportunity to marry at all,” says Fincher, who sees “a big clash going on between government priorities related to the population crisis and the increasing education of women.” In her book, Fincher explores the curious connection between real estate and marriage in China, where she echoes the widespread belief that “a woman won’t marry unless a man has a home”. While this is largely true in the countryside, Fincher’s research found it to be a myth in the cities—one reinforced ad nauseam by both state media and real estate companies, to such an extent that it has now become self-fulfilling. In fact, says Fincher, citing one large-scale survey, women actually contributed as much as 70 per cent to purchasing marital homes in the four biggest cities. But despite doing so, their names were included in deeds in only 30 per cent homes, leading to a “tremendous gender gap in property ownership”.
“I have interviewed many well-educated and successful women. They are not marrying not because a man does not own a home,” she said. “These women are not stupid. They do not want to marry a random guy their parents have found. But at the same time some of them do give in to very intense pressure to marry.” Rather than women having “too high expectations”, as many parents complain, Fincher says, it is more a case that “their standards are too low because of the intense pressure to marry.”
The posters at Zhongshan Park have some highly qualified women, from a judge in a Beijing court to a cancer researcher in the United States, a top economist and a highly paid lawyer working in Japan. The parents of two of them said their daughters “neither approved nor disapproved” of them finding spouses in the marriage market, but both felt the pressure to get married “before it was too late”.
Among the throng of parents one recent Sunday afternoon, one person stood out: Jack Zhang, a shy, bespectacled 26-year-old, who was carrying his own poster in hand and standing quietly in a corner of the park. He came to Zhongshan after a number of failed dates arranged through the Internet. “The Internet was full of people who just want to cheat you and take your money,” he complained. His poster was brief: “I earn 7,000 yuan (around Rs 70,000). I don’t own a house. I have no demands in my spouse. I just want to find a good person.”
Intrigued by the sight of a prospective groom showing up at the market in person, a group of older parents waited in line to chat with Zhang.
As the market wound up for the day, did he find many takers? “Not many,” he sighed. Once he bought a house, some parents told him, they would be happy to get in touch.
Follow the writer on Twitter @ananthkrishnan