Two years ago, I found myself massaging a complete stranger. He, in turn, rubbed my shoulders, amid the organisers’s cries to “give it a good pounding!”. He and I had been put in a group, made to chant “love slogans” and introduce ourselves in quick succession to a circle of people in avid search of marriage partners. Everything was deathly serious, and about as romantic as someone expectorating. It was a singles mixer organised by Jiayuan, one of China’s biggest matchmaking agencies, where I went to research modern dating habits. The Nasdaq-listed Jiayuan, unabashedly using the stock ticker symbol DATE, held enormously popular events, some attracting tens of thousands of participants.
My dating foray was part of a larger exploration into the effects of China’s one-child policy, the name commonly applied to the set of curbs put in place 35 years ago to slow its population growth. Though known as “one-child”, the policy was riddled with exceptions that allowed some to have more than one child, depending on your profession, where you lived and how much you were willing to pay in penalties, a system that was enormously confusing even for people within China, let alone outside.
Last week, Beijing announced a loosening of these regulations, allowing couples nationwide to have two children. But the move, done to mitigate a looming demographic crisis, will do little to avert the damaging consequences that affect the daily lives of ordinary Chinese citizens. We are used to thinking of the one-child policy in extremes. Forced abortions. Sterilisations. Infanticide. In truth, it had a stronger and more insidious impact, shaping how one-sixth of the world live, love and die. People in China debating questions such as who to marry, what jobs to choose, how to buy a place to live or how to have a comfortable old age have had the answers to these questions shaped by the policy.
A huge gender imbalance and the creation of a generation of only children – the “Little Emperors” – have vastly increased marriage anxieties. Parents with only children are hugely invested in their offspring’s life choices, especially whom they marry. And since the policy, coupled with an age-old preference for sons, has created a Canadian-sized population of surplus men – some 30 million – there are fewer brides to go around, intensifying the marriage squeeze.
More than ever since the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic, marriage has become a matter of money, valuation and investment.
The bachelor surplus has buoyed the country’s real estate market, as families with sons snap up apartments to make their offspring more desirable on the marriage market. Some economists estimate that this sex-ratio imbalance accounted for a 30-48% increase in housing prices in China between 2003 and 2009.
The phenomenon has popularised the Chinese saying, “building a nest to catch a phoenix”, and the ones best feathering their nests are estate agents. China’s soaring property prices have created a colony of mortgage slaves – fangnu – hapless people on the hook for astronomical sums similar to America’s sub-prime lending victims.
Rural practices have changed too. In 2009, I visited a central China bachelor village – a hamlet with no marriageable women. The female shortage had caused a huge rise in caili, the bride price typically offered from the groom to the woman’s family. During the Mao era of the 1970s, bride prices were typically modest – a set of clothes or perhaps a bicycle.
But starting from about 2001, the shortage of brides caused caili to rise sharply, to as much as a decade’s worth of farm income. This resulted in scams and the village I visited had just experienced a rash of runaway brides, a group of con-artists who ruthlessly met, married and made away with their bride prices, leaving the men broke, lonely and humiliated. One parent of a jilted bridegroom told me: “I wish I had daughters.”
Four years later, the shortage of women meant caili exchanges – once a quaint countryside custom – had spread to the major cities. The same year, real estate company Vanke published a map of caili rates across China. Shanghai was priciest, with brides going for $16,500 – about four times the average Chinese worker’s annual salary.
With marriage anxiety at an all-time high, companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Baidu, China’s online search and dotcom juggernaut have begun offering singles clubs as a recruiting tool. These danshen julebu not only attract workers, but reassure their parents, especially those whose only child is working far away from home. Baidu even sends an annual newsletter of its club activities to employees’ families.
The one-child policy has even affected hiring decisions: some companies explicitly advertise a preference for applicants with siblings, saying Little Emperors have been raised with such high expectations that they make poor employees. China Railway Construction Group, the country’s second largest state-owned construction enterprise, once put out a want ad stating: “Non-only children college grads from rural areas have priority”.
A human resources manager quoted in a local paper said: “We don’t hire two kinds of persons – the wealthy ones and single children.”
When China launched the one-child policy in 1980, one of the big questions was: will a generation of Little Emperors be a nation of over-indulged, spoilt children? Multiple studies have been inconclusive, but a 2012 study by Australian economists did find marked differences in the Little Emperor cohort. They were more risk-averse, less trusting and more pessimistic during a series of behavioural tests.
The idea that the Little Emperor generation is more pessimistic is perhaps least surprising to the generation themselves, many of whom label themselves as losers, a “sandwich generation”. The term kubi has become internet slang as self-mockery, used to describe a feeling of bitterness and severe pressure.
Part of the kubi attitude is due to feeling the burden of heavy expectations. A decade ago, academic Mei Zhong analysed a series of letters from only children that had been published in a book called The Only-Children Declaration. Zhong broke them into categories that revealed these children were pressured by excessive parental love and loneliness. They struggled with the burden of fulfilling their parents’ expectations – especially since many of these parents suffered under the Cultural Revolution.
Those heavy expectations on this first generation of Little Emperors will intensify as their parents age. By the mid-2020s, China will be adding 10 million more elderly to its population each year but losing 7 million working adults. The shrinking workforce will have to shoulder the burden of ageing parents, grandparents and all the financial and emotional baggage that come with this – dementia, cancer, brittle bones, broken hips – all on China’s inadequate social safety net.
This transition towards more older people and fewer young workers is happening in almost every modern society. Every major industrialised nation now lives longer and has fewer children.
This transition took almost half a century in the west and, as a result, those countries have had more time to adapt. In China, due to the artificial weight of the one-child policy, the transition will happen in just one generation and the nation is woefully unprepared.
Of all the negative repercussions of the policy, the ageing factor is the most painful, because it is definitely happening. We don’t know if China’s gender imbalance could lead to a more warlike nation. We can’t be sure if China’s cohort of Little Emperors could make for a nation of pessimistic, solipsistic low-risk takers.
While we can be fairly certain the one-child policy will be a drag on China’s economic growth – even with this latest shift to the two-child policy – we don’t know how much. We do know, however, that short of some cataclysmic plague or war, China’s vast cohort of workers will grow older: by 2050, one in every fourth person in China will be a retiree.
And who will minister to this country of the old? Little Emperors, turned Slaves. No wonder they feel kubi. Jenova Chen, a highly successful gamer named as one of the world’s top young innovators by MIT Technology Review, told me he’ll probably have only one child. “I don’t feel like I dare to have more than one child. I feel I can barely take care of my parents,” he said.
Last week’s latest move to a two-child policy is an attempt to ward off these issues and may be a prelude to the lifting of all birth restrictions.
But this is unlikely to spark the baby boom Beijing hopes for. Even though polls show many couples could have two children, many say in practice it’s unaffordable and too stressful to have more than one.
In that sense, ironically, the one-child policy should be judged a huge success, for it has thoroughly changed the mindset of people in China.
Mei Fong was the China correspondent for the Wall St Journal, where she won a shared Pulitzer. Her book One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment is published in February 2016