Goodbye to the stereotype of the 'cool girl'
Female, over 27 years old, single,
financially independent, focused on her work and in no hurry to start a family.
In China, that status has had a name for years: '
sheng nu'.
It is not an empathic term.
It translates as
'leftover women'.
Researcher
Chihling Liu, from Lancaster University,
explained it in the pages of 'The Conversation': "The label was deliberately invented to
curb the growing number of single women
in a traditional society that sometimes considers not getting married to be a transgression. morality. Some even consider it
a threat to national security."
Chihling, who has a Ph.D. in marketing, has delved into the issue with research that puts her at
seven million single women between the ages of 25 and 34
living in urban China, and who are among the top contributors to country growth.
"Depictions of single women as
lonely, desperate, overqualified and intimidating
appear regularly in the Chinese media. But they are changing the way others see them, not through protest or activism, but
through their economic power.
They are using consumerism to
counter long-standing stigma
about their single status," the researcher analyzes.
Single women without children, a problem in China
Six years ago, there was a stir in China over a documentary that explored the pressures placed on single women in a society that continues to send the same message to young women:
if you're not married, you're doing something wrong.
The documentary, produced by SK-II, a famous Japanese skin care brand, encouraged single Chinese women
to go their own way without falling under the usual family pressures.
"My mother calls me every week to ask me if I already have a boyfriend.
And my father always tells me that he will buy me a house if I find a good man and get married. They don't understand that right now
I feel like being alone,
and that I am very happy like this," explains Li Hejian, a 28-year-old girl who works in a real estate agency in Beijing.
"Chinese women are now much more independent
and, at least in big cities, they no longer get married at 22. The world has opened up to them and they prioritize their professional development,
look more into their pockets and postpone the idea to form a family",
explained in an interview to this newspaper the North American writer Roseann Lake, author of the book 'Leftover in China'.
"The social and economic change that China has experienced in a very short time has been like a perfect storm that has caused a superclass of women who
have come out on their own, without depending on any man.
They focus on their studies and then immediately begin to work", sentenced the writer.
"First our families pressure us to have a boyfriend,
then to get married and then they want us to be mothers. Everything almost at the same time. My parents, who are from a very small town, went many months without speaking to me when I told them that I I had moved in with my boyfriend, but we didn't want to get married. That was four years ago. Last summer, my partner and I got married. Everything was fine with my family. But now they're angry again because I told them that for at least a couple of years
we will not consider having children,"
says Jin (30 years old), who lives in Beijing with her husband.
From the one-child policy to encouraging motherhood
China has lived for four decades with the one-child policy, in force until 2015, when it was possible to have two. In May last year, with the birth rate plummeting,
the government welcomed large families,
allowing them to have up to three children after realizing that its restrictive policy had contributed
to the rapid aging of the population
and the reduction of a labor force that could harm the economic stability of the country.
Last Monday, the National Statistics Office published that
the birth rate plummeted for the fifth consecutive year
to reach a new historical low in 2021. The most populous country in the world registered 10.62 million births last year, only 7, 5 births per 1,000 inhabitants, marking the lowest level since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.
Ning Jizhe, head of the National Bureau of Statistics, explained that the decline in births was due to a
"decrease in the number of women of childbearing age,
a continued decline in fertility, changes in attitudes toward motherhood, and
delays in childbearing."
young marriage".
The problem is that, despite the flurry of propaganda slogans to encourage more births, as many children as the Communist Party would like are still not being born.
The high cost of living in big cities, especially property and education, and the lack of social mobility are frequently cited as
contributing factors to young people's reluctance to become parents.
Many women who have already been new mothers, and who have assumed most of the childcare,
are also becoming less willing to have a second child.
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