The 30 women were seated on wooden chairs, facing each other in a rectangular formation. At the front of the room was the hammer and sickle logo of the ruling Communist Party, with a sign declaring the meeting’s purpose: “Symposium of Young Single Women of the Right Age.”
Officials from Daijiapu, a town in southeast China, had gathered the women to sign a public commitment to rejecting high “bride prices,” referring to a wedding custom in which a man gives money to his bride-to-be’s family as a condition of engagement. The local government said it hoped people would abandon such retrograde customs and do their part to “start a new civilized trend.”
As China grapples with a shrinking population, officials are cracking down on a longstanding tradition of betrothal gifts to try to promote marriages, which have been on the decline. Known in Mandarin as cailipayments have skyrocketed across the country in recent years — averaging $20,000 in some provinces — making marriage increasingly unaffordable. Payments are generally paid by the parents of the groom.
To curb the practice, local governments have launched propaganda campaigns like the event in Daijiapu, instructing single women not to compete with each other to command the highest prices. Some town officials have imposed caps on caili or have even intervened directly in private negotiations between families.
The tradition has met with increasing public resistance as attitudes have changed. Many of the more educated Chinese are likely to view it as a patriarchal relic that treats women like property to be sold to another household. In rural areas where the custom tends to be more common, it has also fallen out of favor among poor peasants who must save several years or go into debt to get married.
Still, the government campaign has drawn criticism for reinforcing sexist stereotypes of women. And in describing the problem of rising marriage payments, Chinese media have portrayed women seeking big money as greedy.
After the event in Daijiapu went viral on social media, a surge of commentators questioned why the burden of solving the problem fell on women.
By targeting women, official campaigns like the Daijiapu event evade the fact that the problem is partly the work of the government itself. During the 40 years of the one-child policy, fathers preferred boys, resulting in an unbalanced gender ratio that has intensified competition for wives.
The imbalance is most pronounced in rural areas, where there are now 19 million more men than women. Many rural women prefer to marry men in the cities in order to obtain the urban household registration permit, or hukouwhich provides access to better schools, housing and health care.
Sociologists say a more effective way to curb tradition would be to put more funds into child care and healthcare for the elderly. A new generation of women, more educated than their parents, may also be playing a role in changing attitudes on the issue. A 2020 survey found that highly educated couples were less likely to pay the bride price, believing that loving each other was enough.
Cities are trying to popularize the idea of getting engaged without exchanging money. Last month, Nanchang officials organized a free mass wedding for 100 couples who got married in a sports stadium, under the slogan “We want happiness, not bride price.”
By: Nicole Hong and Zixu Wang
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6635402, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-03-29 21:10:09
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