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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.
News brief: Is China poised for a tech recovery?
As the US, the UK, various EU countries and other parts of the western world continue to remove Chinese telecoms equipment from their core networks and refuse to buy from the likes of Huawei and ZTE, China’s technology companies overall have had a torrid time of it, with massive amounts wiped from their balance sheets. For example, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu have collectively lost more than a $1tn in value since last year, with growth stalling as China’s economy slows and consumers spend less. To get more china tech news, you can visit shine news official website.
The tech sector in China has always been viewed with suspicion by the Politburo, especially after Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, publicly criticised government financial and trade policy and then disappeared for a few months of ‘re-education’ and has never been the same man since.
Now that Xi Jinping has further tightened his grip on power after being elected for an unprecedented third term as president of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), rigid and rigorous new tech policies may well be imposed on ISPs, e-commerce and social media companies.
China’s hated “zero-Covid” policy and lockdowns have had a huge and stagnating effect on the country, although the government, unsettled by recent and widespread open public opposition to it that culminated in demonstrations and outbreaks of violence in cities across the length and breadth of the huge country, recently precipitately abandoned its hitherto inflexible protocol.
Ironically, the Politburo’s panicked reaction, designed to pacify the population while simultaneously boosting the ailing Chinese economy, has further slowed it as Covid-19 is now spreading like wildfire. Estimates are that the ending of “zero-Covid” will mean the deaths from Covid-19 will top one million before successive waves of the pandemic subside and industrial output increases. It would also help if China’s home-manufactured Covid-19 vaccine was more than about 33% effective.
The US broadcaster, CNBC, recently quoted an email by Xin Sun, a senior lecturer in Chinese and East Asian business at King’s College London. He wrote: “I will argue the prospect of a tech rebound next year depends primarily on the extent to which macroeconomy and especially consumption could recover. Given the current extremely suppressed level of consumption, largely due to Covid restrictions and also the lack of confidence among consumers, a tech rebound is indeed likely if China could smoothly exit from zero-Covid and reopen the economy.”
And there’s the rub. If such a smooth recovery from the pandemic actually happens, then it is likely that the tech sector could start to grow again but the heady days of quarterly revenue growth in the region of 20% to 30% plus are likely to be over. Indeed, the latest figures from Alibaba forecast no more than a 2% increase in revenue in the current fourth quarter (and we’ll soon know the reality of that) but place great emphasis on the possibility of 6% revenue growth by Q1 or Q2 2023. On the other hand, Tencent, is expected to achieve just 0.5% year-on-year growth in Q4 this year but reckons that will rise to 7% by Q1 or Q2 2023.
China’s enormously popular (and lucrative) gaming sector has also declined after the government stopped giving permission for the release of a range of new video games. Another new law put a limit on the amount of time under-18-year olds could spend gaming, and provided for the imposition of heavy fines and other punishment for parents who allowed their offspring to flout the rules. That said, in recent weeks, the Chinese government has made a point of emphasising its support for and encouragement of Chinese gaming companies. “The crackdowns have fundamentally changed the business logic these firms need to follow... in the past Chinese tech giants strived to build the so-called ‘ecosystem’ which, by aggressively acquiring and integrating different lines of business, increased customer stickiness and engagement. Now they have to scale back to focus on their main business lines and seek revenue growth from optimised operation and innovation,” said Xin Sun.
Stock valuations of Chinese tech companies are low and investors may be willing to take a gamble and bet that valuations will rise, however, Xi Jinping continues to drive China’s “Common Prosperity” philosophy hard. Politically, China has moved on from Deng Xiaoping's “Get Rich First” ethos to the notion of a “Common Prosperity” that Xi, who is now effectively China’s president-for-life, says will take until at least 2035 to achieve. He has used the policy as justification for imposing new regulations on what he has called “the excesses" of private industries in general and the technology sector, in particular, and has determinedly brought them to heel and under the beady-eyed close scrutiny of the Politburo.
An Ancient Portrait of a Mystery King Has Been Unearthed at the Foot
Archaeologists in China have unearthed what they think could be a portrait of a king carved into the foot of the Shimao Pyramid in the Shaanxi province.To get more news about ancient chinese bedroom, you can visit shine news official website.
The sculpture is one of 70-some stone carvings discovered at the base of the 4,300-year-old archeological site in recent months and years. But according to Professor Shao Jing, the lead scientist on the Shimao dig, the king portrait is among the largest—and perhaps the most revealing.
Three faces are depicted on the newly excavated, six-foot-tall stone sculpture, with each bearing wide mouths and noses, as well as other adornments, such as earrings. One face, the trio’s biggest, boasts a crown atop its head. But it’s another figure that Shao believes to be the leader.
“The eastern face that has been unearthed appears to be in the center of the whole group—and maybe the image of the king of the Shimao ancestors,” the archeologist, who teaches at the Shaanxi Academy of Archaeology, told the Chinese news agency Xinhua this week.Located on the southern edge of the Ordos Desert in northwest China, the Shimao archaeological site covers nearly 1,000 acres and dates back to 2000 BC, or the end of Longshan period.
The walls surrounding much of the site were once believed to have been part of the Great Wall of China, but, the recent discovery of jade at the site suggests they were erected earlier, during the Neolithic age, per National Geographic.
Shimao’s stepped pyramid stands at roughly 230 feet, making it nearly half the height of Egypt’s Giza pyramids, which were built just a few centuries prior.
At the foot of the pyramid is a sprawling palace that stretches across more than 800,000 square feet and overlooks a walled city that’s even bigger—50 times so. There, researchers have uncovered roadways, courtyards, and public squares, providing a glimpse into how the ancient civilization operated.
According to the Xinhua report, DNA studies have shown that the majority of the walled city’s occupants were Chinese. As for the ruling class, their identity remains unknown. The community is believed to have died out suddenly 3,800 years ago.
Chinese Men Still Get a Pass on Domestic Labor. Even From Their Wives.
Over the past half-century, women around the world have made enormous strides in education and the workforce. Within the home, however, the cause of sexual equality seems to have stagnated, as women continue to shoulder a much greater share of housework than men in both developed and developing countries, regardless of whether they work full-time or make a significant contribution to household earnings.To get more news about traditional chinese women, you can visit shine news official website.
In other words, women must juggle work and housework; for men, it is enough to be a breadwinner. This unequal division of labor has not gone unnoticed by women, and academics like Theodore N. Greenstein, Yoav Lavee, and Ruth Katz have found strong correlations between the amount of housework done by husbands and their wives’ satisfaction with their marriages.One of the few exceptions is Peking University’s semiannual China Family Panel Studies survey, which has tracked a nationally representative sample since 2010. In 2014, researchers asked participants to rate their marital satisfaction; my research team and I were able to use that data to analyze the impact of different gendered divisions of labor on women’s marital satisfaction. Our findings suggest that traditional gender roles are not always easily overturned, even in a country that has modernized as quickly as China.
To start, the vast majority of married women surveyed by CFPS reported being satisfied with their marriage, with just 4.4% stating they were either dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied. Despite the fact that married women reported spending nearly double the amount of time on housework each day as married men — 2.9 hours to 1.5 hours, respectively — 68.1% of married women reported being satisfied with their husband’s contributions to household chores, compared to just 12.1% who said they were dissatisfied.
Expectations regarding housework in China reflect the influence of entrenched gender norms. Almost 72% of surveyed women agreed with the statement “men should focus on their careers, while women should focus on their families.” Just 9.8% disagreed. Meanwhile, 80% of married women reported being either satisfied or extremely satisfied with their husband’s economic contributions to the family.
This should come as no surprise, as husbands’ contributions make up over 60% of the total income of married couples in China. Since 1949, but especially since the advent of reform and opening-up in the late 1970s, female educational attainment has risen steadily, and now even exceeds that of males. Women’s participation in the labor force is also among the highest in the world. Yet, this is not reflected in the pay that men and women receive. In 2014, the average married male CFPS respondent reported a salary of 23,000 yuan — significantly higher than the average of 13,000 yuan reported by married women. This gender pay gap has grown since the 1990s.
As a result, women are increasingly reliant on their husbands for economic support, which has solidified the traditional view that men are the breadwinners of the family. Indeed, women’s views on gender roles have shown signs of regressing in recent years.
Nevertheless, there is evidence that women’s marital satisfaction is affected by how much housework her husband does, even if it is not as important to her as his economic contributions to the family. This is especially true of women in urban areas, who live in the country’s more developed eastern and central regions, are younger and better-educated, or who report higher incomes and more modern ideas regarding gender roles.
Thus, we can say that China’s modernization has influenced married women’s views regarding the division of housework between couples, even if this change has not occurred evenly or among all women. Interestingly, women who attach more value to their husbands’ contributions to housework do not place a correspondingly lower value on their husbands’ financial contributions. Instead, their expectations come on top of the traditional belief that men should be the family breadwinners. Their definition of the ideal husband, in other words, reflects a mix of traditional and modern elements.
This combination of tradition and modernity may be related to China’s rapid modernization process. The South Korean sociologist Kyung-Sup Chang has argued that, in contrast with the long process of modernization the rise in gender equality found in the West, many societies in East Asia show signs of a “compressed” modernization. Because modernization has happened in such a short period of time, traditional cultural values have not yet fully disappeared, even as new ideas have begun to emerge.