In China’s Hinterlands, Young Women Can’t Find a Man. Literally. from buzai232's blog

In China’s Hinterlands, Young Women Can’t Find a Man. Literally.

After college, Zhao Junru made the selfless decision to move back to her hometown in central China’s Henan province. As an only daughter, she felt duty bound to live close to her aging parents, even though she longed for the freedom of big city life.To get more news about traditional chinese women, you can visit shine news official website.

Yet two years later, Zhao’s relationship with her parents has collapsed. Things have gotten so bad recently, she’s no longer welcome in the family home. Her crime? Still being single at 27.

“There is no real intimacy between me and my parents,” Zhao tells Sixth Tone. “They act like I’ve made a big mistake by not being married yet, and that stresses me out.”For Zhao’s parents, their daughter is being stubborn and selfish by refusing to settle down. But Zhao insists that the problem isn’t her attitude toward marriage; it’s the men in her hometown.

She is a college-educated teacher who enjoys writing poetry and making jewelry in her spare time. She’s looking for someone from a similar background, but those men are almost impossible to find in her remote corner of Henan: nearly every college-educated man goes to live in the city. Zhao has almost given up hope.

“There are no men of my age at work,” she says. “And the men I’ve dated here have nothing good in them.”

Millions of young Chinese women find themselves in a similar position. It’s a major — though often overlooked — reason why China’s marriage rate has plunged to historic lows over the past few years.

Many in China blame the declining number of marriages on a change in values. Millennials — and especially female millennials — are accused of being more self-centered than previous generations: choosing to spend their 20s focusing on their careers and personal fulfillment, rather than starting a family.

A growing number of Chinese women are indeed remaining single by choice, despite the social stigma associated with being a “leftover woman.” But the word “choice” can be misleading; it hides the fact that many Chinese women — especially those living outside the major cities — have their options heavily constrained by the country’s distorted human geography.

In vast swathes of China, there is an acute shortage of college-educated men. It’s a gender imbalance born of many Chinese families’ conservative social attitudes: When their children graduate from college, parents tend to encourage their sons to go and seek their fortunes in the big cities, whereas they often pressure their daughters to return home and secure a safe, public sector job.Though data on this trend is scarce, several Chinese studies have reported similar migration patterns, with young women far more likely to return to their hometowns after college than young men. Ouyang Jing, a professor at the Jiangxi University of Finance and Economics, says her research has found stark gender imbalances in white-collar workplaces across rural China: county-level schools, for example, have almost no young male teachers, she says.

“I only have a girl, and I feel safe if she is near me,” Ouyang recalls one interviewee, a director at a local government bureau, telling her. “If I had a boy, I wouldn’t have any concerns about safety. Boys should go out and do something big.”

The upshot of this is a wildly skewed dating scene. Female graduates who move back home, such as Zhao, often find that there are barely any single men in their area who are of a similar age and career background. Though many are open to getting married, they often end up staying single for years, as they’re simply unable to find a compatible partner.The issue received national attention recently, when a 25-year-old woman from Yushan, a county in east China’s Jiangxi province, posted a video complaining about her frustrating dating life that went viral across Chinese social media. She had previously studied at a top Chinese university and in the U.K., before moving back to her hometown.

In the video, the woman says that she simply cannot find a man in Yushan who has a degree, a reasonably open outlook, and an acceptable appearance. There are only 20,000 men with a bachelor’s degree in the entire county — which has a population of over 500,000 — and many of those men are already married, she says.

Sometimes, the woman says her lack of options becomes absurd. At a recent dating event, she was matched with two men: one was already in his 40s; the other was a teenager still in middle school. And she knew both of them.

Women in this situation often feel trapped between two worlds. Miao Guo, an associate researcher at the Jiangsu Academy of Social Sciences’ Institute of Sociology, says unmarried women in Chinese counties tend to share the same attitudes toward love and marriage as those in megacities like Beijing and Shanghai. Yet the communities where they live are far more traditional, which can leave them feeling isolated.