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How China is pushing women away from marriage and childbearing
China doesn’t have a direct translation for the word “manosphere,” but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suffer from it. In fact, the abuse of women on social media is just as toxic as it is in a democracy. The difference is that, in a country where censorship moves swiftly to silence posts that the authorities don’t like, the government tolerates the hate speech of the manosphere and focuses its energies on women. The cyberspace regulator’s campaign against harmful content specifically includes “extreme feminism,” including posts that promote celibacy.
This is just one symptom of a much broader problem that China’s older, male leaders have with the opposite sex. Unlike the other two major Asian powers, Japan and India, China has never been led by a woman in modern times. As Xi Jinping has consolidated his power, he has also increasingly marginalized women. The Communist Party’s Politburo, which usually has 24 members, has been made up entirely of men since 2022. No woman has ever made it to the Politburo Standing Committee, the most important body of power. It’s no wonder that China has been falling steadily in international rankings for gender equality.
At the heart of the Communist Party’s policies toward women lies a fundamental error. The party is concerned about the country’s demographics, but it imagines that the solution is to pressure women and tell them, in traditional tones, to be “virtuous wives and good mothers.” As a result, the approach to women will not only fail to achieve the party’s narrow objectives, but will make the lives of countless women even more difficult.
Mao Zedong once declared that women hold up “half the sky,” but today that seems impossible to believe. The disastrous one-child policy, in place until 2015, led to the abortion of millions of female fetuses. The inevitable consequence is that there are millions of women today. This shortage has other serious consequences. Comparing men aged 23–37 to women aged 22–36, China has about 22.5 million more men than women. To be considered a desirable partner, a man must have an education, a good job, an apartment and, in many regions, also pay a significant amount to the bride’s family. About a third of young migrants who intend to marry believe they have only a 50% or less chance of doing so before the age of 30.
As a result, resentments abound: many men, especially in rural areas, hold chauvinistic attitudes. This resentment is likely to spread further. Women make up more than half of students in higher education, while men who lack education or economic prospects risk being left further behind.
The Chinese government cannot suddenly create millions of missing women to alleviate this situation. However, it can undertake policies that increase the marriage rate among Chinese women while providing them with more choices.
One idea would be to guarantee women full rights within marriage. Enforcement of laws against harassment, marital rape, and domestic violence is woefully inadequate. More women might decide to marry if they were guaranteed fair treatment in the event of divorce, including child support. If women were made more easily able to divorce abusive spouses, more of them might remarry.
A fairer system of dividing property after divorce could also hasten the disappearance of payments that the groom’s family makes to the bride’s family. Studies show that a young migrant must save for six years to afford an average payment of 127,300 yuan ($18,780). A law prohibiting such excessive payments exists, but it is vague and poorly enforced. Many parents still place importance on the amount their daughter can “bring”; men’s desperation to find a partner leads those with money to pay, while divorced women sometimes keep a portion of that money if the marriage fails. However, this practice treats women as commodities and puts poor men in rural areas at a particular disadvantage.
More broadly, the government could reduce barriers to homeownership and employment that make it difficult to start a family. It should buy up more of China’s vast stock of unsold housing and convert it into affordable rental apartments suitable for young families. Recent easing of the hukou system, which regulates domestic citizen registration and makes it easier for newcomers to register their families for schools and other public services in cities, is a positive development.
Traditionalist men, including those at the top of the Communist Party, may see some of these ideas as foreign impositions. But if they stopped berating Chinese women and started asking them for their opinions, they might hear a very different story. / Adapted from "Pamphlet" by "The Economist"
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