Introduction
Chinese society has changed. Life is fast, everyone works a lot, and one must work overtime every day. Young people have no time to think, to ask themselves why they are doing what they are doing. Parents have also changed their opinions. They want their children to have a good life. People think that money is the only important thing. But life is also about other things . . . People only want profit, and they think that if issues are solved quickly, profits will be higher. Feicheng Wurao Footnote 1 is a typical expression of this idea. How is it possible to make such an important decision—choosing the companion of a lifetime—in a few minutes’ time? Of course it is impossible. . .
Jason, television producer, 30 years old
The title of this article refers to a statement given by a young woman called Ma Nuo during a 2010 episode of Feicheng Wurao, a popular matchmaking programme broadcast by Jiangsu Television, the official television channel of Jiangsu Province (People's Republic of China). Ma Nuo's statement unleashed a debate on the relationship between marriage and money among the programme's viewers. The media, in particular internet-based media, fostered these discussions, which eventually were picked up by the English-speaking press as well.Footnote 2 The popularity of Feicheng Wurao and the outrage caused by Ma Nuo's words were still high in 2011 when I went to Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, in order to collect ethnographic data on marriage and class mobility in post-Mao China.
Marriage has been a prominent theme of state-led modernization projects in the People's Republic of China. According to this view, the authority of the Chinese state is related to its ability to uphold an ideal of ‘modern’ marriage. But while Maoist political rhetoric introduced as ‘modern’ a model of conjugality essentially based on mutual affection and common political aims (the building of a socialist society), the economic and political reforms that followed Mao's death brought about different ways of practising courtship and marriage. In addition, instead of socialist conjugality, romance appears today in a plethora of different media and advertisement materials as the lifeblood of ‘modern’ marriage.Footnote 3
Notwithstanding the popularity of romantic imagery, however, ensuring a good marriage is a cause of much anxiety for most of my unmarried male informants. Despite their acknowledgement that spouses should be ‘responsible’ (also materially) for each other, unmarried men complain vocally about expectations placed on the groom's family to provide for a large share of wedding expenses and for a new family house. At times young men look to the Maoist past in order to find an ideal of conjugality that does not evoke commercial transaction.
Elderly parents also voice their opinions, articulating marriage as a ‘family affair’, in accordance with ‘Chinese tradition’. In order to play an active role in the marriage choices of their children, they gather in parks at weekends and look for prospective partners for them. These social gatherings are attended by an unusually mixed crowd, as exemplified by the different stories of Mr Wu and Mr Qian. Due to their personal trajectories and different class positions, their narratives provide different standpoints vis-à-vis the politics of marriage in post-Mao China. Mr Qian, a successful businessman, praises the present day as a time of romance and opportunity that was denied to him by Maoist society; at the same time, however, he ‘looks around’ to help his son find an ideal bride. Mr Wu, on the other hand, has lost his feeling of self-worth after spending many years looking for a wife; while he blames his condition on having lost his job in the 1980s, he explains his unwillingness to marry a divorcee in terms of ‘Chinese tradition’.
In these accounts preference-based conjugality emerges as paramount to a vision of ‘modern marriage’ but not in opposition to ‘Chinese tradition’ and parental influence. On the contrary, their coexistence constitutes the foundation of a good marriage. Marriage emerges as closely intertwined with intergenerational dynamics. The social (and legal) imperative of intergenerational support, combined with an ideal of conjugality based on essentialized gender roles, constitutes the basic unit of the post-Mao trope of middle-class urban living. On the one hand, informants complain about the difficulties they face in attaining middle-class conjugality and take different positions vis-à-vis Maoist and post-Mao policies related to marriage; on the other, however, their anxiety highlights the appeal that this model exercises on urban society at large and the absence of a socially acceptable alternative to heteronormative marriage.
Introducing Ma Nuo
While Feicheng Wurao is not the only matchmaking programme in the People's Republic of China, it is widely recognized as the most popular one, both locally and nationally. Feicheng Wurao, as with other Chinese matchmaking programmes, was inspired by formats already popular in Western countries, for example the British television programme Take Me Out. During my stay in Nanjing from October 2011 to the end of June 2012, I found that the majority of my informants watched it regularly, independent of age, sex, or income. Those who did not watch the programme were bound to know about it anyway, as it was very common to have access to the programme in public places such as bars, restaurants, beauty parlours, et cetera.
Feicheng Wurao was often discussed in other media, for example in the press and, of course, on the internet. People could visit its colourful website to find out more about the participants, write them emails, watch old episodes and sign up to participate; in addition, viewers would post videos of the programme and discuss them on other internet platforms. My friends and informants in Nanjing discussed the programme with friends and relatives living elsewhere in China; the people I met on my trips to Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, and Hong Kong were familiar with the programme and asked me what I thought about it, or suggested that, since I lived in Nanjing, I should apply to be part of the audience.
During an episode that was broadcast in March 2010, a young female contestant called Ma Nuo was invited by a male contestant to take an evening bike ride with him. While the young man affected a boyish, tender attitude, Ma Nuo's reply was swift and piercing: ‘I'd rather cry in a BMW.’ Ma Nuo was an 18-year-old aspiring model who, before this episode, had built an image of herself as an uninhibited young woman by posting revealing pictures of herself on the internet. For her, appearing on Feicheng Wurao was a chance to gain visibility.
The visibility that Ma Nuo obtained on Jiangsu Television highlights the readiness of the post-Mao media to depict female subject positions that would have had little space in the Maoist media.Footnote 4 Ma Nuo's body, dress, and deportment signalled a wish to be ‘looked at’ which, in the eyes of most people, made her similar to the ‘Western’ beauties of fashion advertisements; this association in turn linked her to the ideal of social attainment largely associated with ‘Western countries’ and, implicitly, with the free market.Footnote 5 This episode unleashed an extensive media debate around the appropriateness of Ma Nuo's words, and on the role of public media in moral debates: how could Jiangsu Television, the provincial television channel, allow a young woman to openly suggest that the worthiness of a man could be measured in monetary terms?
Jiangsu Television is part of Jiangsu Radio and Television, a business unit of a semi-official nature. Jiangsu Television, as is the case with other broadcasters in China, is a highly commercialized business unit which strives to appeal to audiences in order to attract advertisement and succeed in a highly competitive market. Having said this, China's provincial broadcasters maintain strong financial and administrative links with provincial and state government.Footnote 6 Although this article cannot address the complexities of media governance in China, it is necessary to point out that since the early 1980s the Chinese state has been eager to develop radio and television as ‘the most modern tools in encouraging the people of the nation to strive to create socialist civilization that is both materially and culturally rich’.Footnote 7 Most importantly, central state and provincial television channels are largely regarded by citizens as the government's preferred vehicle for the dissemination of its views, and are often expected to play a pedagogical role towards society.Footnote 8
After I arrived in Nanjing in late 2011 I contacted a producer at the station in order to learn more about Feicheng Wurao. The producer, a young man whom I will call Jason, had worked on matchmaking programmes that pre-dated Feicheng Wurao. During our meeting we discussed the reasons for the programme's nationwide success. When the discussion touched upon the debate around the case of Ma Nuo, I asked him whether the whole affair had been set up by the director to attract the attention of the public and of the other mass media. Jason decidedly rejected this possibility, claiming that there was ‘no need’ to set things up. He emphasized that Ma Nuo had done nothing more than speak her mind honestly and straightforwardly, and that her statement was representative of her generation:
She is a girl of the 90s.Footnote 9 She says everything that goes through her mind. The director did not give her any instruction but: ‘Be yourself; say what you think.’ She is a Beijing girl, a spoilt only child. She wanted to be seen on TV, and when she pronounced that sentence [‘I'd rather cry in a BMW’] she became very famous; her public increased. People criticized her, and as a consequence she was even more at the centre of general attention.
Jason added that Ma Nuo's statement, far from being a mere confirmation of common sense, caused a stir in the media (especially on the internet), as well as a reshuffle of the programme's broadcasting team. In the aftermath of the Ma Nuo episode the management of Jiangsu Television decided to bring to the programme a third host, a (female) Chinese Communist Party school professor. These changes reflected the leadership's wish to publicly support an idea of courtship and marriage that was different from what Ma Nuo had suggested.
Love and marriage: the official view
It may seem surprising that the public statement of a young woman with little influence caused such an outrage both within and without official media. Yet it is worth remembering that policies governing marriage have always been held up by the Chinese Communist Party as an example of its efforts to foster and bring about a ‘truly modern’ society. Before the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Communist leadership looked for popular support by promising easier access to marriage to its male recruits, and equality between the sexes to women.Footnote 10 The idea of ‘women's liberation’, in particular, was pivotal to the socialist imaginary, since at the beginning of the twentieth century colonial administrators, foreign observers, and China's (male) educated elite had viewed the condition of Chinese women as a measure of the country's ability to become ‘modern’.Footnote 11 In order to consolidate its legitimacy, in the immediate aftermath of 1949 the new leadership produced a new marriage law, which in its first article rejected arranged and forced marriage as a feudal arrangement based on the supremacy of parents and men over children and women.Footnote 12
According to the Marriage Law of 1950, men and women were to marry according to their own free choice (hunyin ziyou); the conjugal bond had to be an expression of equality between the sexes, and the spouses could divorce in the case of irreconcilable differences. Marriage was supposed to be monogamous, and open concubinage, child betrothal, and forced marriage were outlawed. According to the law, the minimum legal age for marriage became 18 years old for women and 20 years old for men (the current minimum age is 22 for men and 20 for women).Footnote 13 Legally speaking, mutual affection became the required basis for marriage, and monogamous marriage became the state-approved arena for love and sexual relationships, as well as ‘an essential prerequisite to family continuity’.Footnote 14
The idea that marriage should be decided by the two spouses-to-be, rather than arranged by the parents alone, had already been supported by the modernist movements of the Late Qing and Republican era. However, at that time such ideas had affected only the urban, educated elites.Footnote 15 Not unlike the opposition between ‘arranged’ and ‘love’ marriages in India,Footnote 16 both discursive categories of ‘arranged’ and ‘free choice’ marriage in China need to be understood in the context of the colonial encounter, rather than as timeless institutions expressing respectively the cultural character of ‘East’ and ‘West’.
As personal choice became the pivotal element in the official vision of post-liberation ‘modern’ marriage, the nature of ‘love’ and the appropriate ways to achieve it became central themes in official writings aimed at popularizing the new model of marriage.Footnote 17 These writings, published by or under the auspices of the All-China Women's Federation, described courtship as ‘a means of preparing young people for marriage by enabling them to discover the meaning of love via the process of mutual acquaintance, friendship and trust’.Footnote 18 Accordingly, ‘modern’ marriages were not to be based on bourgeois fantasies like ‘love at first sight’,Footnote 19 but were the enactment of socialist conjugality—mutual affection and political affinity.
‘Modern’ marriages advocated by the Marriage Law were supposed to be celebrated frugally, without lavish exchanges of wedding gifts from either party. This ideal contrasted strikingly with the customary wedding celebration, which revolved around a family-run banquet.Footnote 20 Notably, while the law condemned arranged marriage and wedding feasts as legacies of the feudal system, it never questioned other practices linked to customary marriage. For example, children's legal responsibility for the support of the elderly was confirmed, the need for girls to preserve virginity until marriage was emphasized and extended to boys, and patrilocal residence after marriage continued to be considered as the norm.Footnote 21
The implementation of the law, however, led to mixed results both in rural and urban areas. The party/state adopted a paternalistic and conciliatory approach on issues that most affected women and young people, like free choice in marriage.Footnote 22 On the one hand, the party/state ‘did not, could not and plainly did not wish to control everything’;Footnote 23 on the other hand, local cadres were reluctant to support the new model of marriage out of fear that a ‘vacuum of morals’ would ensue. Although with the 1950 law marriage had officially become an object of public policy, for most cadres it still pertained to the private domain, which external influences should not interfere with.Footnote 24
The cadres’ limited inclination to promote the Marriage Law was not the only problem for its implementation. Since state policy described courtship as strictly functional to marriage, people were at a loss in establishing what kinds of premarital contact could be deemed ‘respectable’.Footnote 25 Many young people were not accustomed to thinking about marriage in terms of love, and it was for precisely this reason that the central leadership had to clearly spell out its very meaning in official publications.Footnote 26 The mixed outcome of the implementation of the Marriage Law was also related to the political economy of the post-Liberation society. In rural areas the land reform and the collectivization carried out after 1950 did not weaken, but rather reinforced the importance of existing kin, household, and neighbourhood-based ties, thus consolidating the role of parents in marriage negotiations.Footnote 27 In the cities, the establishment of a state-led centralized system for the distribution of goods and services compelled Chinese citizens to rely once more on immediate family connections in order to secure access. Accordingly, most unions could not take place without the support of parents and relatives. Despite the formal emphasis on love and free choice, then, marriage became the object of careful negotiations between both families and generations.Footnote 28 Restrictions on wedding celebrations and exchanges were followed only to a limited extent, regardless of the fear of social and state censorship.Footnote 29
Despite these shortcomings, the Marriage Law of 1950 did introduce ‘an alternative to the established power relations in the informal social field, and in turn brought these in competition with new sources of political authority’.Footnote 30 In other words, it constituted an unprecedented vehicle through which young people could challenge their parents’ authority and women could claim the right to divorce and to hold property by calling on the support of the state.Footnote 31 The Marriage Law introduced a new idea of marriage,Footnote 32 allowing the party/state to discursively produce the pre-revolutionary era as a time of feudal oppression. Accordingly, decades after its establishment, those who admitted that its implementation had in many cases failed could readily attribute the cause of these failures to the ‘remnants of feudal thought’.Footnote 33
After the death of Mao in 1976, the open door reform ushered in visible changes in terms of social practices around courtship and marriage.Footnote 34 The state-led expansion of market economy and the spread of consumer culture created unprecedented spaces for the practice of courtship (tan lian'ai) and marriage. However, while young people move freely across these new spaces of consumption and enjoy free time with their peers, ‘active sexual involvement before marriage is still widely treated as a mark of immorality and irresponsibility’.Footnote 35 According to official policies, too, courtship should essentially aim at marriage, and marriage constitutes the only legitimate arena for sexual relationships.Footnote 36
This tension is reflected by official and commercial publications targeted at young people, where images of young, beautiful women in alluring poses are often presented alongside text that urges young people to practice self-restraint.Footnote 37 These romance-focused publications suggest to the reader that ‘in a social context governed by market emphasis on consumer interests, individual initiative and enrichment’ sexual desire is a legitimate component of love, and that love itself belongs to the private, not the collective, sphere.Footnote 38 The need for material comfort and for sexual fulfilment are commonly associated with marriage throughout the spectrum of state-led propaganda and media, and are widely recognized as important parts of a couple's marital life in urban China.Footnote 39
The relocation of love and sexuality from the collective to the private realm, however, heralds new forms of state control over these discursive spheres. Officially sponsored writings for young people urge girls in particular to preserve their chastity, describing them as emotionally, sexually, and socially weak. In continuity with post-liberation, ‘scientifically based’ discourses of sexuality, these publications establish a clear-cut difference between active, autonomous male desire and female sexuality, which needs to be aroused by men and is inevitably subsumed to women's ‘natural’ aspirations—motherhood and family. As political comradeship ceases to be the main component of a good marriage, love and sexuality become important elements of a stable family life,Footnote 40 and hence key to population control and the stability of a ‘modern’ Chinese society.Footnote 41
Discourses on ‘natural’ sexual differences are all the more powerful as they are presented as opposed to the gender ‘sameness’ that allegedly dominated Maoist social life; according to this view, as Maoist politicization of gender came to an end, Chinese people could finally unleash their own individualities and follow their natural masculinities and femininities.Footnote 42 While official publications promise young people ‘sexual gratification as one of the great bonuses of the [open door] reform programme’,Footnote 43 they also suggest that the end of Maoist puritanism allowed Chinese women to rediscover and express their ‘innate’ beauty.Footnote 44 These gender-specific ‘natural’ pleasures are articulated in terms of a global imaginary of modernity driven by market transition.Footnote 45
In this context, in 1981 the Chinese government stipulated a new version of the Marriage Law. This version of the law underwent a major revision in 2001 and several amendments later on (the most recent in 2011).Footnote 46 At the same time the central state undertook a reform and expansion of family law. The emphasis of free choice in marriage in the first chapter of the 1981 Marriage Law ‘gave implicit acknowledgement to the very partial success of the 1950s programme’.Footnote 47 Subsequent amendments addressed forced marriage, thus acknowledging the extent of the phenomenon, and divorce procedures in a context of increasing divorce suits. Overall, the post-Mao amendments of the Marriage Law indicated the family as the basic unit of Chinese society against a background of the declining power of the work unit, for example by restating children's responsibility for providing support to the elderly.Footnote 48
Love and responsibility
Within this framework, it becomes more apparent why the management of Jiangsu Television took measures to ensure that its most popular programme made constant reference to the ‘right’ way to think about and practise love and marriage. According to this ‘official’ view, coupling and, ultimately, marriage should be based on reciprocal affection and ensure long-term, stable (wending) companionship. In order to achieve this stability, marriage should be fostered by both parties’ sense of responsibility (zeren); spouses should provide long-lasting support for each other, their families, and their future children.
Throughout my fieldwork I found that most of my unmarried, heterosexual informants had similar expectations of marriage. Words like ‘responsibility’ (zeren) and ‘fulfilling (one's) responsibility’ (fu zeren) kept recurring during interviews and were extremely prominent during ritual occasions linked to coupling, marriage, and childbearing. These terms would invariably recur while my informants were publicly declaring their love (aiqing) and affection (ganqing) for their partner. This was particularly the case in situations in which young men had to make a public statement about their relationship with a (prospective) bride. Most of the wedding ceremonies I attended, for example, included public declarations of ‘love’ in which the notions of ‘responsibility’ and ‘fulfilling (one's) responsibility’ were routinely invoked.
During wedding ceremonies, the host—generally a professional entertainer hired for the occasion—would require the young couple to perform on a stage in front of their invited guests. These performances, which took place in glittery restaurant halls, varied greatly according to the taste of the bride and groom, of the families, and of the host him/herself. However, the groom was always invited to declare his love for the bride, most often in terms of ‘fu zeren’. On one occasion, the declaration took the form of a dialogue between the groom and the mother of the bride. While the bride, dressed in a white, fluffy gown, was standing next to her mother, the groom pronounced his public vow of love and responsibility in front of more than 200 guests:
Mother of the bride (to the groom): ‘Are you ready to love (name of the bride)?’
Groom: ‘I am!’
Mother of the bride: ‘Are you ready to support her and help her forever? Are you ready to support your family, and be responsible towards this family?’
Groom (loud): ‘I am!’
In other cases, the groom and bride were not supposed to speak, but just to hug and/or kiss while the host was detailing their love for each other and their (in particular, the groom's) readiness to fu zeren in appropriate words. Another variation had the groom declare his love directly to the bride, often on one knee, stating that he was ready to take responsibility for their (future) family. There may be innumerable variations on this theme, but the idea that the spouses, and in particular the groom, had to love their partner and be prepared to take responsibility for the family was consistent.
In his study of state–society relations in South China, Hok Bun Ku (2003) defines the concept of zeren as the very core of social relationships (guanxi); in turn, a relationship (guanxi) implies the presence of reciprocal feelings (ganqing) and responsibility (zeren). According to Ku, while in reform China the authorities have articulated different official policies in terms of zeren, this concept is mostly enacted through emotional practices pertaining to moral and emotional discursive fields, like those related to family ties and friendship. Ties based on zeren imply mutual reciprocity between parties and the respect of ‘social, legal or moral ties as defined by a contract or a promise, for example’.Footnote 49
According to my informants ‘taking responsibility’ was a fundamental part of marriage, and those who delayed marriage indefinitely exposed themselves to criticism, as they did ‘not want to take responsibility’ for their families. According to this view, people who did not marry deliberately avoided having children, and by doing this they called into question the circle of reciprocity that linked them to their parents.Footnote 50 This circle of reciprocity reassured the parents that their children, male and female, would not shy away from taking care of them in their old age.Footnote 51
The idea of ‘responsibility’ in marriage, then, refers not only to the exclusive relationship between the bride and groom, but also to what Charles Stafford has called the cycle of yang:Footnote 52 relations of material and emotional support that both bride and groom need to cultivate with their own children, parents, and parents-in-law. As mentioned above, this social expectation is reinforced by legal provisions. This renewed emphasis on intergenerational support complements the reforms of state-provided social security which, throughout the 1990s, redefined the family as the main provider of intergenerational care, be it home-based or purchased on the market.Footnote 53 Taking responsibility through marriage, then, featured a strong material element, but this was articulated as a function of emotional attachment, as if family-wide support was a necessary by-product of conjugal affection.
Marriage in a time of insecurity
During my time in Nanjing it became clear that men were expected to express their ‘love’ for their future spouse by accepting the responsibility of providing sustained support to her and their children as well as to their parents. Although most bachelors accepted this idea, they found Ma Nuo's standards of material security a bit too conspicuous. Along with many others, Jason considered Ma Nuo as representative of a generation born and bred within late-reform consumer society—citizens who allegedly focused on commodity consumption as their main aim in life, holding purchasing power as a measure of personal happiness.Footnote 54 Jason went on to compare the views on marriage he attributed to Ma Nuo's generation with those held by his parents’ generation. According to him, the members of his parents’ generation (who were born in the 1950s) used to marry for love, not for material gain.
By referring to his parents’ generation, Jason was alluding to his perception of the Maoist years as a time in which social difference was not primarily expressed in financial terms, and young people were encouraged to articulate their feelings according to lofty ideals. Jason, a young and successful professional from a comfortable, urban family, had not experienced life in the heyday of Maoism, nor did he come across as nostalgic about the Maoist past.Footnote 55 However, he was dissatisfied with present-day practices of courtship and marriage, which in his view revolved around material wealth and sheer hedonism; these marriages might have looked ‘modern’, he thought, but they were not based on true feelings, which instead were at the centre of Maoist ideals of conjugality.
Accordingly, the young men I interviewed around the campus of Nanjing University complained about the basic conditions they had to meet in order to be considered ‘eligible bachelors’. These young men were all close to obtaining degrees from prestigious universities, and their job prospects were not hopeless. However, they invariably felt the pressure of securing a steady, well-paid job, and worried about the general expectation that they should buy a flat for their new family in the context of steadily rising housing prices. These preoccupations kept emerging from more general conversations on mating and marriage, even when unsolicited. Shortly after my first interview with Jason, another ‘young professional’ expressed his anger about Ma Nuo's statement:
It's not strange for television to give space to this kind of people [people like Ma Nuo] or statements. One may instead want to know how people can have similar opinions!
As for Jason, for this young man Ma Nuo's defiant attitude was all the more arrogant as it was displayed by a young woman who consumed fashion in order to eroticize her own body for male consumption. As already mentioned, Ma Nuo's body and deportment constituted a signifier of social attainment which could be readily associated with the reform programme that had allowed people to make money.Footnote 56 In this context, her demands for a BMW were consistent with her image in so as far as the car constituted an appropriate reward for the care she took of her body—an emblem of wealth, status, and modernity that could be read globally. Ma Nuo therefore constituted a divisive figure, because her image combined the attractiveness of a Lolita-type figure with the unscrupulous sides of (open door reform) market competition. Because Ma Nuo's performance took place during a programme on marriage, it eventually suggested that an ‘uncivil individualist’Footnote 57 like her could become a wife, mixing up courtship and marriage with mercenary exchange.
Not surprisingly, Ma Nuo's image hardly corresponded to my young informants’ ideal image of a wife. According to most of them, in fact, a prospective wife had to be pretty, but also sweet (wenrou) and have a good character (xingge hao). My informants also mentioned sexual propriety as a necessary feature of their future wife, making statements such as: ‘She should have not had too many boyfriends before me.’ These were the qualities that enabled young women to ‘be responsible’ for their future families according with their ‘natural’ sexual difference. For example, while having the right to her own professional life, a woman was supposed to devote time and energy to meeting the demands of a three-generation family.Footnote 58 A wife had to be fit for motherhood, and for this reason she needed to be physically healthy, caring, and intelligent—in other words, able to raise high quality children.Footnote 59
If the ideal bride had to be intelligent, pretty, gentle, and caring, my informants’ words and practices suggested that the ideal prospective husband was expected to bear most of the marriage expenses, as well as providing the new family with a place to live. This did not mean that the bride was excused from her duty to provide material support to her family.Footnote 60 My unmarried female informants, too, were expected to perform well in their careers, especially if they were only children. At the same time, however, they were also subjected to a range of competing, often mutually exclusive demands as they negotiated their relationships with families, the state, and the market.Footnote 61 These complexities tended to be reflected in young women's anxieties about marriage, which revolved around multiple issues, including being good-looking, performing as a good-natured girl, combining work and family, being a good daughter and a good daughter-in law, et cetera. Here, however, I highlight the discursive practices whereby the husband is routinely depicted as the legitimate breadwinner, as they illuminate my male informants’ ‘financial performance anxiety’.
My informants’ views were a response to strong continuities in the state's discursive construction of the conjugal ideal since the 1950s. While Maoist women were encouraged to better themselves through work and serve their husbands ‘in the name of public good’, post-Mao official discourses on conjugality remind both women and men that the former should focus on supporting their overburdened husbands and raising high-quality children.Footnote 62 These discursive linkages correspond to continuities in the political economy of marriage across the watersheds of the liberation and the open door reform; as mentioned above, for example, wedding exchanges were an important feature of pre-liberation marriage practices, which partially declined—without disappearing—only because of strong state intervention during the 1950s.Footnote 63
While recognizing the increasing importance of bridewealth in post-Mao China, Yan Yunxiang relates it to a rising ideology of individual satisfaction which pushes rural young couples to claim full control of wedding gifts. Yan compares this situation with the ideal patrilineal standard in which bridewealth remains under the elders’ control, and concludes that marriage ‘is no longer a strategy employed by parents to . . . improve the economic and social status of the household’.Footnote 64 While Yan's analysis is based on an implicit opposition between lineage and alliance, other authors look at bridewealth and at its devolution to young couples as a means of reproducing family class and status in competitive post-Mao society; in her study of wedding exchanges in South China, Helen Siu argues the conjugal fund is central to the continuation of the family, together with the prestige that a desirable bride can bring to the family of her groom. According to Siu, those parents who have the means eventually agree to pay for large wedding feasts, expensive gifts, and new housing ‘to win a bride of appropriate background, to acquire prestige in the local community, and to strengthen personal networks’.Footnote 65
In other words, since the beginning of China's transition to a market economy, the choice of marriage partners and marriage transfers have been playing a pivotal role in the realignment of class position not only for young couples, but also for their own natal families. Thus, while for women marrying a man with a house and a good job ensures a comfortable future, for a man getting the right bride constitutes a strategy to acquire symbolic and social capital that could help him and his family to advance their position in post-Mao society. Housing, in particular, plays a key role in post-Mao class formation and gender relations; housing is routinely expected to be purchased by men for women as a guarantee of security for the whole family, and is an increasingly important element in the articulation of feelings of self-worth for both men and women.Footnote 66
My informants’ anxiety, therefore, was linked to the importance that making a good marriage held in the context of class formation and mobility in post-Mao China. This anxiety was not limited to the young, but was also shared by their parents, who felt responsible for making sure that their children married well.Footnote 67 Thus, many parents spent their free weekends gathering in the town's main parks to exchange their children's resumes, a practice that they would subsume under the larger category of ‘xiangqin’.Footnote 68Xiangqin denoted all those practices through which people evaluated possible marriage partners. The elderly parents convening every weekend in the park gave life to veritable ‘fairs’ of xiangqin. In Nanjing there were at least three main locations for these spontaneous ‘fairs’. Matchmaking agencies promoted similar events in parks or commercial spaces, but these did not gather much attention since they were largely seen as marketing devices for the agencies themselves.
At the fairs, parents hung profiles of their children on walls or on ropes, and waited for interested people to come forth, or otherwise strolled around, looking at each other, chatting in small groups, and reading the profiles hung up by other people. If they found someone ‘compatible’ with their child, they took the phone number and passed it on to them. Standard information on the profiles included age and/or Chinese zodiac sign, height, weight, level of education, occupation, and salary. Some of the men's profiles mentioned their good character; others highlighted home ownership as a bonus. Women's profiles highlighted desirable physical and/or temperamental features.
During my early visits to the xiangqin fair at the most central park in Nanjing, I asked the elderly people I met there why their children did not come themselves. The elderly parents would invariably laugh and say: ‘They'd feel they are losing face!’ or ‘My son/daughter does not even know I'm coming here myself!’ I then asked them to explain why they would come to evaluate possible partners for their children. The replies were forceful: for the elderly parents these meetings offered a chance to ‘give a hand’ to their children in a matter that, according to them, was of serious concern for all family members. Parents, they declared, should help their children to find a good partner, lest they be deceived into an imprudent marriage. The parents I interviewed could not assure me of the success rate of these events, but claimed that some people had found a spouse in this way. The presence of professional matchmakers suggested that at least some of these parents were quite determined in their search.
After a few visits I realized that many of the ‘advertised’ profiles described people in their mid twenties to mid thirties; many of them had high levels of formal education (high-school graduates to postgraduates) and were formally employed. The crowd I met there, however, appeared to be more mixed. The xiangqin fairs were popular with middle-aged, unmarried men like Mr Wu, who was so ashamed of his single status that on the occasion of our first meeting at the fair he pretended that he was looking for a spouse for his daughter. It was only after several meetings that he told me he was looking for a wife.
In China, life-long bachelorhood is seen as a failure to attain fully fledged adulthood and become ‘real Chinese men’. Bachelorhood was also a reality in pre-liberation China but, since the 1990s, the combined effects of the one child policy and of China's escalating class inequality has forced more men into this condition. Meanwhile, state policy and Western academic discourse have labelled China's unmarried man as ‘surplus men’ and dangerous for the social order.Footnote 69 Yet Mr Wu—a tall, well-dressed, pleasant-looking man in his early fifties—did not at all correspond to the widespread stereotype of the ‘bare branch’ (guanggun)—the low-quality, rustic bachelor.Footnote 70 When he revealed to me that he had never married and was looking for a partner, I asked him why, in his view, he had not been able to marry before. He promptly replied:
I have been thinking about this a lot. I think it's because of my job troubles. You know, with the reform, lots of things changed. At that time, I had just started to work. My factory closed down and many of us lost our jobs (xiagang). Maybe you cannot understand, because nowadays losing one's job (shiye) is quite common (zhengchang). At that time it was not . . . it was something new . . . at that time people would have a job for life. If you were xiagang, people thought you were weird, they could think there was something wrong with you, and that for that reason you had lost your job. Think about it! In that situation, one can lose all his self-confidence (zixin)! One can start thinking that he is really different from the others . . . it took me a while to get out of that predicament. Eventually, I managed to start my own business, and now I cannot complain . . . my income is certainly not low. But in the meantime, the years passed, and I lost many opportunities. At my age, most women are already married, and I do not want to marry someone who has experienced a divorce. We Chinese do not like to marry people who have already divorced . . . at least, I do not want to. You may feel this is a traditional attitude . . . you are a foreigner . . .
I then asked Mr Wu whether his friends and family members had ever introduced him to single women, as custom would suggest, in order to help him to find a girlfriend. He replied that they had done so, but that he had not liked many of these women. ‘And those whom I liked, did not like me back,’ he added. ‘So you see, it's complicated. Once we used to be told that we were different from the foreigners, that they were capitalists. Now we can even talk to the foreigners!’
For Mr Wu, his failure to find a suitable match was intimately linked with the experience of the open door reform. For him ‘jumping into the sea’ (xiahai) had not been a choice motivated by a new entrepreneurial spirit. Starting a business was the only way out of what had become a difficult situation. Despite the time that had passed since the reform had been introduced, he was still struggling to make sense of the political, economic, and social changes that he had witnessed, and felt that, despite his comfortable income, he had paid a dear price for them. His words and restrained attitude highlighted that his inability to marry at the age commonly deemed appropriate had seriously affected his self-worth, and was perceived as a failure by him as much as by others.
Mr Wu's dissatisfaction was shared by many of the people I met at the xiangqin fair. These people would complain loudly about how in recent years disparities between the rich and the poor had grown ‘too much’. Their concerns centred on the assertion that ‘keeping a job’ had become increasingly difficult, and that living costs were too high. Informants at the fair complained most of all about the price of housing and of newly privatized services like health and education. Such services used to be provided for free through the work unit during Maoist times, and for this reason they were often seen as entitlements by urban residents.Footnote 71
Marriage in a time of opportunity
While for many the reform had brought about uncertainty, other people I met at the xiangqin fair seemed to have fared well after the end of Maoism. An example was Mr Qian, who came from the northern city of Shenyang, but had been living in Nanjing for the past 30 years. Now in his late fifties, he held a managerial position in the car industry, and when we first met at the xiangqin fair he was looking for a girlfriend for his 28-year-old son. What set Mr Qian apart from the crowd attending the xiangqin fair was his relative affluence, signified by the high-quality clothes he wore, when many other people were shivering in cheap polyester clothing. On our second meeting, Mr Qian picked me up in his large Volkswagen and insisted on driving to a shopping mall where, he said, he could easily find a parking space. While driving, Mr Qian commented on the qualities he was looking for in a bride for his son:
In China, marriage is something that involves two families. For this reason, when you go to xiangqin (meaning the park-based fair), you see few young people, but many parents. One tries to get an idea about the children on the basis of how the parents look. For this reason, I almost never find anyone to introduce to my son. I need to find someone that inspires trust, someone whom I can consider a ‘good’ (bucuo) person.
When I asked whether he was probably more demanding than his son himself, who was after all the potential groom, he was quick to agree and justify his position:
Of course. The father's life experience influences the son's life. And besides, things are not as they used to be when I was young. Back then, men and women did not have so many chances of being together. Someone would introduce a person to you, and unless you had serious reasons to reject her, there was not much further discussion. One would have felt bad if he had refused, as if he had been in the wrong . . . So once they had introduced a woman to you, you would marry her after a short time.
Now it is different. There are many opportunities, young people always have more chances to meet somebody else. If a man has a girlfriend, he still thinks that he could meet another one, a better one.
For Mr Qian, the present signified chance and opportunities that had been denied to the older generation, for example the opportunity to have ‘fun’ through premarital romantic adventures. In this prospect, the moment of ‘settling down’ was indefinitely deferred, as the possibility of meeting a more beautiful, more exciting woman would always be there. Accordingly, Mr Qian used to joke about the fact that while he was keen for his son to get married, his son did not seem to be in a hurry at all:
My son has been travelling, he studied and worked in different European countries: Italy, Germany, and Switzerland. Now he works for a magazine . . . most of his colleagues are married women, some of them way older than him. So he does not have many opportunities (to find a girlfriend) at work. And then he is very busy, he has to work overtime every day . . . So I come to the park to take a look around for him. I understand him . . . a young man like him, who has travelled the world . . . his vision opened up, you see. As soon as his eyes see something, they already move on to look somewhere else . . .
According to Mr Qian, his son was a man of his times, who had travelled and seen the world, and maintained the same entrepreneurial, cosmopolitan attitude in his personal dealings with women. Mr Qian thought that while for the moment his son preferred to stay unattached, sooner or later he would have had to marry anyway; in the meanwhile, he could make the most of the opportunities that his times allowed him, and look for personal happiness through the pursuit of a hedonist lifestyle.Footnote 72
Mr Qian's constant references to his son seemed all the more conspicuous as he did not mention any other family member unless I explicitly asked him. When I asked how he had met his wife he replied:
We were both in the army. That is how we met each other. Then our superior suggested that we get together. He was concerned about the fact that neither of us was married yet,Footnote 73 so he thought we would be a good match.
As Mr Qian did not hide that his marriage was not happy, I asked whether initially he had considered refusing the match. He replied:
It would not have been possible to refuse. It would have felt wrong towards the person, and in addition it had been our superior who had suggested it.
Mr Qian's account contrasted strikingly with Jason's views on marriage in the Maoist era, precisely as Jason's accounts of post-Mao courtship clashed with Mr Qian's views of his son's romantic exploits. Their accounts were not faithful reports on facts; rather, they resided in the tension between ‘a historicity of knowledge and the knowledge of history’, and hence each of them can be used to ‘critically interrupt’ the other and destabilize its narrative of emancipation.Footnote 74 Jason's reflection on the Maoist past in search of ‘true feelings’ underlines Mr Qian's concern about the future—the future of his son's marriage, which had been indefinitely deferred because the young man was too busy enjoying the present.
When we arrived at the shopping mall he had chosen, Mr Qian expressed a wish to have tea at the local Starbuck's coffee shop. In the meantime, Mr Qian explained that he liked that place, but that it could not compare with the glamour of neighbouring Shanghai. In his view, Shanghai was a truly international, civilized (wenming) metropolis, where the ‘quality’ (suzhi) of people was higher, the buildings more glamorous, and the shops more fashionable than in Nanjing. In Nanjing, Shanghai was considered to be the city that best embodied the spirit of the open door reform, having developed a booming commercial sector after the end of Maoism. People often related its present-day success to the importance of its foreign concessions in the pre-Liberation years. Mr Qian also appreciated the European countries he had visited, and although he knew of their most recent economic challenges, he admired their culture: ‘People in Europe are quite civilized,’ he told me as we were sitting in his car on our way back to the city centre. ‘Not like here. You can see it from how people drive. Look at this!’ he said, while we were overtaken on the wrong side, ‘This would not happen in Europe, right? Or if it did, the driver would be fined. But people in China lack proper driving education, so they drive in an uncivilized way.’
As Mr Qian praised Shanghai and European countries in opposition to the rest of China, Shanghai emerged as an example of how the open door reform had improved, and could further improve China. Shanghai's material success was the foundation of its being civilizedFootnote 75 vis-à-vis other parts of China. Mr Qian's overt support for post-Mao commercialization set him apart once again, not only from Jason, but also from Mr Wu. Mr Qian had been able to capitalize on an already privileged status (he and his wife had been in the army) in order to consolidate and advance it, but Mr Wu, in contrast, had lost economic security following the reconversion of the industrial sector that took place in the 1980s and 1990s. Mr Wu's words referred to the ‘world of China’Footnote 76 and indicated his political and emotional uneasiness with regards to ‘foreigners’; Mr Qian's assertions, instead, confidently referred to foreign countries and to Shanghai, a global commercial hub and emblem city of the open door reform, highlighting his desire to come across as a ‘citizen of the world’.
Mr Wu and Mr Qian's different professional trajectories and experiences of social mobility affected their positions vis-à-vis the state's projects of modernity. Their class position and their political views were also related to—and reflected tellingly—their different views and experiences of marriage. Mr Wu, like other bachelors, struggled to find a prospective wife because of his perceived failure to succeed in a competitive market economy. During his afternoons at the park, he hung out at the margin of the fair with other bachelors in their forties and fifties, and lamented the loss of state-provided services and life-long employment which in Maoist times constituted the ideal of urban-based life. On the other hand, Mr Qian's desires were clearly articulated through the vocabulary of the post-Mao, open door reform tropes of modernity. According to what Mr Qian told me, if his son had married a foreigner he would have certainly welcomed the match, because he thought China had to continue to open up to foreigners.
Despite being different, however, the two men had common views, too. For both, the choice of a spouse had to be based on personal preference, and both men, in different ways and for different reasons, felt that this wish of theirs had been frustrated. This said, while Mr Wu seemed to be almost resigned to his own situation, Mr Qian found enjoyment in other aspects of life, which were accessible to him thanks to his high income, and had a strong feeling of self-worth. He thought that, in virtue of the never-ending romantic opportunities of the present day, his son was going to be freer than him in his marriage choices, and that this might propel him even further in what he saw as the world ‘outside’. Yet, Mr Qian's account of his son as the modern, internationally competitive Chinese man seemed to describe an ideal of cosmopolitan, ‘high-quality’ masculinity, rather than a person with specific psychological traits.Footnote 77 His narration of his son's limitless dating opportunities appeared all the more emancipatory as it was discursively opposed to his own marriage, which had been arranged according to the logics of Maoist collectivism.
Besides their feeling of frustration vis-à-vis marriage choice, both men were attached to ideas that they themselves defined as ‘traditional’ and ‘Chinese’. As the parents at the xiangqin fair had explained to me, they both thought that marriage was a family affair, and that this was a specific trait of Chinese marriage. Notably, Mr Wu explicitly said that his attachment to what he considered to be a ‘Chinese tradition’—his unwillingness to marry a divorced woman—accounted for much of his difficulty in finding a prospective wife of his age. Mr Qian, in turn, blamed his unhappy marriage on the pressure he had received from his army leader. He went on noting that in ‘the West’ people had no social pressure to agree to a match, and concluded that ‘in China we think that life for you in the West is very easy’. His words evoked a widely held view according to which ‘the individual’ was an essentially Western category, and ‘the West’ constituted a space of absolute individual autonomy. While (or perhaps because) the idea of an individual-centred West had been demonized during Maoist times,Footnote 78 Mr Qian appreciated many of its facets; however, he still took it upon himself to ‘take a look around’ on behalf of his son, because ‘in China’ marriage concerned the whole family.
The idea of a ‘Chinese tradition’ that puts the family at the centre of everything recalls the idea of responsibility (zeren), which recurred in conversations about love and marriage. As mentioned above, most of my informants thought that, for a man, the fulfilment of his responsibility towards his spouse and his family ‘naturally’ featured a material element. Notably, while my informants mentioned the importance of ‘Chinese tradition’ in marriage, they also all agreed on the importance of personal preference in marriage choice, and saw it as key to having a ‘modern’ marriage. In this view, ‘Chinese tradition’ does not represent an impediment to modernity or modernization, but constitutes the fine national past that provides the moral foundation for a dominant modernity.Footnote 79
Through the narrative of a common ‘Chinese tradition’, it is also possible to downplay the contradictions and inequalities that emerge in the social arena in general, and in the xiangqin fair in particular. However, while most people at the xiangqin fair were keen to reclaim the ‘fine national tradition’ as their own, it was evident that some were better placed than others to fulfil the responsibility that the same ‘Chinese tradition’ put on them. For some time, for example, Mr Wu had felt unable to compete successfully in the new market economy and to guarantee a secure future to a prospective bride and family. On the other hand, the wealthy Mr Qian, who had earned large profits after the reform, did not suffer from ‘financial performance anxiety’; on the contrary, he was keen to secure a prestigious alliance for his son. It was therefore not surprising that, when I asked him what he thought about Ma Nuo's straightforward association between a BMW and romantic involvement with a man, Mr Qian was not critical, but rather sympathetic to her view:
I think it's understandable. Life is very short. Why not enjoy it to the full?
I objected that Ma Nuo had said she would rather cry in a BMW. Did that sound like enjoyment to him? Mr Qian kept a jovial attitude and told me that crying was never enjoyable, but sooner or later one would have to face difficulties, and at that time it would be better to be in a BMW than on a bicycle. In Mr Qian's view Ma Nuo's stance was no more than a legitimate claim for her right to ‘enjoy her life to the full’—a desire that was natural and human, and as such easy to understand. Post-Mao consumer society offered ample opportunity for such enjoyment, as long as the consumer/citizen could count on a high level of disposable income.
Mr Qian's standpoint differed from that of my younger informants; Mr Qian had already married and had a son, and having already fulfilled family-related social expectations, he was not looking for a ‘good mother’ for his future children. Equally importantly, following the open door reform Mr Qian had become a wealthy and successful businessman; he delighted in displaying his wealth through the consumption of what were considered to be luxury products, and he took much pride in his taste for the good things in life. These desires for prestige and enjoyment could very well be embodied by young women like Ma Nuo, who asked for something that Mr Qian could provide without any problem. Accordingly, Mr Qian's words depicted his wife as a flaw in what would have otherwise been an enviable life, as an ‘old bicycle’ waiting to be put aside for a ‘fast car’.
Conclusion
Li Zhang argues that in present-day urban Chinese society, people's feelings of self-worth increasingly emerge from the tension between the discursive field of love and emotions and that of property and wealth. In addition, since these discursive fields are strongly gendered, these feelings of self-worth are mainly articulated through distinct enactments of masculinity and femininity.Footnote 80 For a man like Mr Qian, the issue raised by Ma Nuo's statement could be easily solved, allowing him once more to display his wealth and flatter his own feeling of self-worth. At the same time, the display of largesse was a way of articulating attachment that, in his view, a young woman like Ma Nuo could expect from her partner. To put it in other words, as a wealthy, cosmopolitan man, Mr Qian felt that he could ‘take responsibility’ for providing a high standard of material security.
Most of my other informants, however, felt outraged by Ma Nuo's assertiveness and saw in it a measure of how consumer society had spoilt women (and men) of her generation, turning them into ‘uncivil individualists’Footnote 81 without true feelings and principles. While they professed their readiness to provide support to their future families in virtue of their sense of responsibility, the young men I interviewed could not consider the emblems of wealth and glamour exacted by Ma Nuo as ‘family support’. At the same time, they were aware that their chances of making a good marriage depended on their ability to embody the successful post-Mao man: a reliable breadwinner with a house, a car, and a good job. For Jason, the lack of an alternative model implied the need to look back to a time in which modernity, love, and conjugality were construed by the state as opposed to wealth and commercial exchange. This, however, was an ideal that he was not able to recover for himself.
Maoist marriage emerged as a less romantic affair from the words of Mr Qian. His unhappy marriage arranged by his army superior appeared as a burden of the collective past.Footnote 82 Mr Wu, on the other hand, regretted the closing of his factory after the end of Maoism, and saw in it the origin of all his troubles. Ironically, the two men's ideas of marriage were similar; for both, marriage had to be based on personal preference and also follow ‘Chinese tradition’. Accordingly, none of my informants told me that they would marry against their parents’ wishes. As much as marriage was assumed to be a matter of negotiation between families and generations, ‘freedom of choice’ in marriage indicated the opportunity to ‘look around’ and, most importantly, to refuse an undesirable partner.
Similar findings among middle-class informants in IndiaFootnote 83 suggest that not only is ‘modern’, companionate marriage not necessarily articulated in opposition to parental influence in marriage choice, but also that the imaginary of love-based conjugality plays a pivotal role in the enactment of a middle-class lifestyle. In the case of urban China, post-Mao ideas of romantic love are recast in terms of responsibility and, coupled with the imperative of intergenerational support, reinforce the model of the heteronormative middle-class family.
The anxiety that most bachelors experience in order to embody the ideal of a post-Mao middle-class lifestyle exposes the absence of alternative models of manhood in post-Mao China. Thus, marriage remains for both men and women the only socially viable path to adulthood. In the eyes of many young bachelors, competition and consumption constitute moments in which they are called upon by larger institutions to take responsibility for themselves and their families’ economic, social, and moral wellbeing. In this respect, what may appear as spaces for individual expression become social imperatives, as well as moments of individuation that eventually re-embed the social actor in class society via family responsibility.Footnote 84
The centrality of the family in discursive practices of ‘Chinese tradition’ emerges here as the one specificity that makes Chinese marriage both modern and specifically Chinese.Footnote 85 This discourse ties in with the Chinese state's effort to propose a believable model of social cohesion and stabilityFootnote 86 at a time in which the competitive market and the social inequality that boost GDP growth are also largely perceived as lack of social justice. In this context, the collective, the familial, and the individual need to be rhetorically reconciled in order to provide the foundations of an ideal modernity in which all, winner and losers, might recognize themselves.
