This was a familiar predicament for mid-level Mandarin students. Each character means something by itself—often it has multiple, unrelated definitions—and then can combine with a second, third, or a string of characters to gain a full meaning. Sometimes these combinations are practical: the words for old and home combine to mean hometown. Other times they are poetic in their practicality, as if an ancient Chinese poet had come back to life and done his best to describe modernity’s awesome advances: trains are “fire cars” and movies are, eerily, “electric shadows.” Other times the combinations were far more cryptic. I assumed shèng nǚ was a case of multiple or hidden meanings.
So I asked Wendy directly. Few things are more horrifying than learning you have addressed a question about a perceived social inadequacy to someone who is affected by said perceived social inadequacy. For instance, it would be truly unfortunate if a young Chinese person learning English in the United States politely asked someone who weighs a hundred pounds more than their ideal body weight to please define the term morbidly obese. I was doing just that.
Shèng nǚ, Wendy explained, does in fact mean leftover woman. According to Wendy, it refers to a woman who has not married by the age of thirty. Everyone else I’ve asked since then, as well as the official literature promulgated by the All-China Women’s Federation, the state-run organization meant to stand up for women’s interests, marks the expiration date at twenty-seven, an inconsistency I did not bring to Wendy’s attention. The idea behind leftover women is that a Chinese woman who is older than twenty-seven and not married has something wrong with her, that she is flawed, that she is and remains socially “inedible.”
“Like bad food,” Wendy asserted factually, her face an expressionless mask in our cold apartment. She was sitting at her desk facing an open window. Outside, a cold winter rain was coming down in sheets. An old laptop was open on her desk, and the lonely brightness of a British romantic comedy paused on the screen threw shadows on Wendy’s round face. Her suitcase dominated the space between her bed and desk, so she could not swivel her chair. The door to Wendy’s room barely cleared the edge of her single bed, which was pushed tightly against the wall. The walls were bare and cracked. If Wendy had not been so opposed to the use of heat, the room would have been cozy, albeit a bit cramped. Instead, it was quite literally freezing. Dressed in a hat, mittens, boots, and a puffy winter coat, Wendy would sit at her desk watching foreign movies and listening to the sound of the rain. As she explained, Wendy absently played with an abacus our landlord had left behind. Her face bore the blank look she always wore when she explained new pieces of language or tried to teach me to cook a local dish.
The tradition behind the concept of leftover women was one of the most doggedly persistent I encountered in China. The Chinese often joke about how they make small talk—a couple of pro forma questions—“Where are you from?” “What do you do?”—and then, without missing a beat, “How much do you make?” “Do you have a boyfriend?” “Are you married?” “Do you have a child?” At first I thought people were asking me the second set of questions in the hope of setting me up on a date with a friend—a delusion that, as an American, I was a hot-ticket item in China. We’d exchange numbers and I’d wait for a match, but it turned out they were just curious to see if I was married and, if I was, whether I had a Chinese wife. These basic questions seemed to provide enough data to satisfy most people’s social-measuring mechanisms. Once you provided the answers, you could almost hear the gears whirring, the motor thrumming, and then—thud—you had been successfully categorized, labeled, and stored.
Chinese ask these questions daily and often. Strangers ask them the first time you meet, and then friends and family constantly ask them again to see which stats may have changed. A change necessitates a recataloging, so the gears grind, and the motor churns back to life. The process is unabashedly judgmental and, with people like Wendy, brutally unforgiving as the machine yet again spits out a verdict. With a malicious look of pity, the questioner stamps you as Leftover and files you under Inadequate, which is stacked right next to Failure.
I’d been around a handful of times when strangers had leveled these questions at Wendy. Wendy never bucked or fired back roughly. She would shake her head no with a bland smile, her mouth moving but her eyes still staring a few feet past the person to whom she was talking. The look was unreadable. It had the toughness of something hardened over time.
Since my return, however, Wendy had seemed irregularly distraught. It became clear she wanted to talk. I had read about a strategy used by local managers of Chinese factories during the 1990s when workers had grievances. It was called “talking into exhaustion.” The idea is that you let the distraught person vent, say everything they want to say for as long as they want to say it, and the process will quell the person’s grievances.
Wendy began talking at midnight. By 3:30 a.m., when Wendy was showing no signs of exhaustion or catharsis, I asked if we could break for sleep.
Here is what Wendy told me: She both strongly resented her parents and felt an even stronger commitment to them. Her parents had not berated her so much as pestered her about her life. By their measure, Wendy told me, she had failed them: no grandchildren, no son-in-law, and no prospect she would be able to support them in the future.
They had raised Wendy the same way many Chinese parents had raised their children. On the one hand, Wendy’s was the generation of little emperors. She received food, clothes, and especially attention in exaggerated amounts. She was, on the surface, spoiled, the gleeful recipient of her entire family’s focus.
On the other hand, all that attention had a sharp edge. When Wendy was a child, no one applauded her efforts unless they produced desired outcomes. Her mother would outright call her stupid each time she did poorly on a test, a berating I witnessed regularly with other students and was told about by many Chinese friends. Westerners would regard Wendy’s mother as lacking empathy and understanding.
“Tiger mothers,” hard driving and results driven, like Wendy’s, were prevalent in China. The West has come to applaud the results achieved by tiger mothers. But no one asks what happens to the cubs who can’t cut it, who do not become concert cellists or medical students. Pushed just as hard, the kids who do not achieve positive results face the rawest rejection a child could face from their parents: “We’re not mad, we’re disappointed.”
That same high level of parental involvement persists throughout the lives of young Chinese adults. When they are young, test scores are of paramount importance, so parents will heavily emphasize study. Once the children, especially the women, hit their midtwenties, that energetic, involved parenting is channeled toward marriage.
And so, as Spring Festival rolled around, Wendy would again confront her culturally awkward status as a single woman as she filed onto a “fire car” to fulfill another long-standing tradition: returning to her “old home.” There she would spend time with her parents and all the people she grew up with (“Still not married? Really?”).
“Older Chinese women have always faced the leftover woman stigma. It is a tale as old as time,” Wendy said. Done with her explanation, she turned back to her movie.
* * *
Wendy was wrong. Although the idea that women should marry young is consistent with traditional China, labeling someone as a leftover woman is a recent innovation. And it seems to have been an invention of the Communist Party itself. Leta Hong Fincher pioneered research surrounding the leftover woman phenomenon while completing her Ph.D. in Sociology at Tsinghua University, in particular the term’s ties to government. Beginning in 2007, the All-China Women’s Federation defined the term leftover woman as referring to a single woman older than twenty-seven, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency, the official mouthpiece of China’s Communist Party. “Since then the Chinese state media have promoted the term through articles, surveys, cartoons, and editorials stigmatizing educated women who are still single. These state organs refer to a c
risis in growing numbers of educated women who “cannot find a husband,” Fincher Writes in her book Leftover Women.1 Today, the term leftover woman has become mainstream. Wendy’s parents know it. Wendy is used to it. Smile and her parents, my landlords, who barely speak Mandarin, knew it too.
The campaign shaming women into marrying young at first seems inconsistent with the Communist Party’s traditional attitude toward men and women. In 1949 Mao declared, “Women hold up half the sky.” It was a somewhat radical statement at the time, as some women still underwent foot binding, an excruciating process of tightly wrapping the feet of young girls to stunt their growth to make them more attractive to men. A woman with bound feet could do little work of any kind. To have a wife with bound feet was a luxury. It announced the household could afford servants.
Mao’s decision to be more inclusive of women was pragmatic. He needed women to work if his newly formed People’s Republic of China was to be successful. To “Surpass England and Catch Up to America,” the drumbeat slogan driving China’s Great Leap Forward, an attempt to push China into modernity overnight, the chairman would need the full strength of his population. Mao exhorted all the nation’s comrades to work as one toward a common goal. In Chinese, comrade—同志, tóngzhì—means “of the same ambition.” Mao was a man of great ambition. He enabled both halves of his mighty population to achieve his ambition for his country. It is no wonder, then, that the Chinese Communist Party’s preferred term of address, Comrade, is gender neutral.
Today in some ways China has a more level playing field in the business world for men and women than most other developed countries. China is already home to two-thirds of the world’s self-made female billionaires. Of China’s fifty wealthiest women overall, thirty-six are said to have earned their fortunes themselves.2 In the realm of self-made money, Chinese women are in a league of their own, globally. More women in China work in government than women in the United States; 24 percent in China and 19 percent in the United States, according to World Bank data.3 However, in China notably few women hold senior positions in the Communist Party. With the exception of the 10th Party Congress in 1973 and the 11th Party Congress in 1977, women have never made up more than 10 percent of the total membership of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and no woman has ever been a part of the Politburo Standing Committee, the most powerful decision-making body in the Party.4
China’s efforts at gender parity are far from perfect, but there is a sense that capable women are able to rise, if not in government, then certainly in the private sector. But with the leftover women campaign, the Party seemed to be reneging on the gender equality Mao seemed to have attempted to establish.
In its attitude toward women, the Chinese Communist Party is pragmatic, not progressive. Mao needed women to work so that the country’s economy would function. His priority was growth. Today the Party has a different set of problems. Economics is just one factor in creating a happy populace. While growth remains a major area of focus, the Party is focused on a different priority: stability.
One of the biggest threats to China’s future stability is tens of millions of single men. During a lecture I attended Fincher explained, “The irony of this campaign to denigrate single women is that China’s one-child policy, preference for sons, and widespread abortion of female fetuses have caused a surplus of men due to the severe sex-ratio imbalance, which the State Council called ‘a threat to social stability.’”5
As of 2015, China’s population had thirty-four million more men than women, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics.6 Because Chinese parents want only the best for sons-in-law—they should be tall, rich, and handsome—the rejected men are also likely to be undereducated, poor, and not-so-great looking. In the minds of government officials, this population of unmarried men is a potentially destabilizing force. Few threats to social stability are greater than tens of millions of angry, uneducated, and sexually frustrated men who feel like they’re being cheated of participating in what their society bills as the central activity of a good life: creating a family.
Part of the Party’s solution to its “leftover men” problem is to make sure all eligible women partner up. Just as the Chinese government intercedes in the economy to buffer it against market forces, the Party is attempting to influence the singles market by convincing women they’re less valuable than they actually are. Wang Xing Xing, a twenty-three-year-old economics student at Sichuan University, told me, “Products gain value through scarcity, right? On the marriage market in China, women ought to be way more valuable than men because of our messed-up demographics. That doesn’t really seem to be the case, though, because, with women, there is this idea that their value depreciates over time while men’s value increases. Men’s jobs improve, they become more stable, less emotional. If we live in a society that values looks and children, then a woman’s age is the greatest threat to her value on the market.”
Just as the Party exercises central control of the Chinese economy by artificially manipulating market factors to try to create a favorable economic outcome, so too is it influencing the national marriage market. A healthy stock market makes for a stable society. The Party takes the stance that a healthy marriage market does too. As Fincher discusses in her research, the Party advances a message that stigmatizes aging women who aren’t marrying by calling them society’s leftovers.
The Party singles out women who are putting off marriage to focus on their career, high-powered women who don’t see the point in marriage for marriage’s sake. China’s state media pinpointed the problem by accusing the women of clinging to the “three highs”: high education, high professional standing, and high income. As Xinhua has said repeatedly for nearly a decade:
[Leftover women] pursue perfection in excess. The problem is many of these women are too clear headed; they can’t tolerate weaknesses in their partner, especially since more and more women seek the “three highs” in their own lives. Their standards for their career and partners are so high, by the time they want to marry, they discover that almost all the men who are equal in their education and age are already married.
For the group of white-collar women who don’t find a partner, loneliness is a common occurrence. As these unmarried women age, the feeling of loneliness gets worse and worse.7
By targeting women with the “three highs,” the Party also doubled down on its effort to improve the so-called quality of the population. The one-child policy had made exceptions for ethnic minorities, who often lived in the less-developed West, and some people who lived outside the cities. The result was that the people who had the most children were often the least educated and worst paid. The women with the highest levels of education, salaries, and social standing were not having children, putting them through the best schools, and giving them the best opportunities. By advancing the stigma of the leftover woman the Party hoped to shame these high-achieving, well-resourced women into motherhood.
A twenty-eight-year-old named Lulu was a prime example of a woman who was pursuing the three highs. Lulu and I met at the WeChat Business Expo. Her large pop-up shop, if the massive exhibit can be called that, included more than twenty tables and a broad stage with a catwalk. It was front and center and by far the biggest at the expo. More than fifty representatives of her brand buzzed around the installation talking to potential customers. At the center of the runway stage that cut through the middle of Lulu’s stall, a thirty-foot screen projected an infomercial of Lulu explaining her company’s facial moisturizer. The real Lulu sat at a long rectangular table with a group of fifteen of her all-star sales team fanned out around her, smiling and greeting potential customers.
WeChat Business is an entirely new business sector in China. Its sudden popularity has changed the way the Chinese regard entrepreneurship. Essentially, Lulu and her team do direct sales through their phones. They use their WeChat “Friend Circle,” selling first to their network of friends, like Amway or Cutco sales personnel, and th
en progressively expand their clientele. Unlike their Western counterparts, the members of Lulu’s team can do all their business from the comfort of home. Whereas trying to do direct sales through their Facebook account would get most Westerners blocked by most of their contacts, in China people are far more receptive. If the deals and products are good, no one flinches, and WeChat Business has won a reputation for enabling young men and women to become successful entrepreneurs armed with only their phone, their friend circle, and mailing slips. At the expo, Lulu’s team was looking for both customers and more agents to sell their products. And each time a recruit made a sale, the recruiter got a cut.
After I had talked to Lulu for a while at her exhibit, she invited me to join one of her sales meetings after the event. Naturally, it was over a large dinner. Some people chatted while others at the table enjoyed the dishes stacked high on the big lazy Susan in the middle of the table. Lulu was independently wealthy. Although she was born into a wealthy family in China’s Liaoning Province, she had, through her own entrepreneurial spirit, built herself a small fortune before she was thirty. She got her start on a cooking show on CCTV. When WeChat Business began, Lulu took advantage of her modest fame and extensive network to begin selling. She was twenty-two when she started ordering beauty products wholesale and selling them through her ever-growing network of customers. Her monthly shipping bill alone can run up to 10,000 RMB (US$1,450) a month. Each package costs on average 5 RMB (US$0.73) to ship. So even though she acts more as a boss than a salesperson, she still ships two thousand packages a month. “I used to have to fill out those package slips myself,” she told me.
In part, she was driven by her desire to have the financial means to take care of her parents. She doesn’t exactly need to look after her parents, but it is what a good child ought to do. Lulu is a single child. Whereas caring for parents normally falls to a son, Lulu has taken on the responsibility herself. “My parents only have me as a child. I have to be both their son and daughter. If they get sick, who will care for them?” she said.
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