If you were thinking the discussion over the 'leftover women' (shengnü) phenomenon in China couldn't get any more stupid, you were wrong. A recent Labour Daily survey found that the number of single women in Shanghai is rising because they are 'too aggressive'.
Or at least, that's what the reports in the Chinese language media and in the English language China Daily would have you believe. However, headlines aside, the survey is actually a positive one for anyone sick of the made-up "leftover women crisis".
The survey, of 1,300 singles at a local matchmaking event in November, found that over 70 percent of male respondents believe that a husband does not need to earn more money than his wife. Furthermore, 90 percent of those surveyed said it was acceptable for a woman to be as much as five years older than her husband.
Both of these points – mentioned in passing in the Labor and China Daily write-ups as if they don't fundamentally contradict the headline – show how artificially constructed the supposed "shengnü" crisis actually is. As the vile, anti-feminist All China Women's Federation wrote in 2011:
Pretty girls don’t need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family, but girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult. These kinds of girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is, they don’t realize that as women age, they are worth less and less, so by the time they get their M.A. or Ph.D., they are already old, like yellowed pearls.
If this were true, respondents should be rejecting successful older women, but the survey results show the complete opposite. And yet, state media chooses to frame the story in a completely negative fashion, attacking women for being "too aggressive" (whatever that means) and scaring off the precious flowers that make up Shanghai's single male population. Why would the media engage in this kind of scaremongering?
[The Women’s Federation website] posted its first article on “leftover” women in 2007, shortly after China’s State Council issued an edict on strengthening the Population and Family Planning program to address “unprecedented population pressures.” These pressures include the sex-ratio imbalance — which “causes a threat to social stability” — and the “low quality of the general population, which makes it hard to meet the requirements of fierce competition for national strength,” according to the State Council. The State Council names “upgrading population quality (suzhi)” as one of its key goals, and appoints the Women’s Federation as a primary implementer of its population planning policy.
Right.
[Image via Pokémon]
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