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Beijing / DPA
Sunday is market day at the Temple of Heaven Park in central Beijing, with lots of haggling and touting of wares.
“Woman, born 1988, 168 centimetres tall, 55 kilograms, nurse,” reads one notice among a row of other A4 sheets laid out on the paved ground.
One man who looks to be in his mid-50s appears interested, reading the advertisement closely. “My son,” he says and holds out a photo to the woman sitting behind the notice on a low wall.
Parents are busy here trying to pair off their offspring.
In China, being married is an important element in validating yourself as a full part of society, an attitude which causes endless discomfort to single women.
Chinese women are expected to be married off before the age of 30 and that is the case for around 90 per cent of women, with the average age of marriage hovering at 26, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics.
Those featured in the adverts in the park tend to be slightly over that average – they were born in 1987, 1988 or 1989.
On some adverts there’s a code that interested parents can scan with their smartphones and which leads directly to the son or daughter’s page on the WeChat social network.
It’s the marriage market in the digital age and often the future lucky couple have no idea what their parents are up to.
“It’s really embarrassing for a lot of people,” says 25-year-old Billy as he sits in a cafe in a Beijing shopping centre.
His parents, too, regularly tout potential brides for him. But Billy is only interested in men.
Single people generally run into problems in China’s marriage-obsessed society.
Around 200 million Chinese are single, and a majority of those millions are men, according to the state-run news agency Xinhua.
According to the country’s statistics bureau there will be 24 million more men of marriageable age than women by the year 2020.
Oddly, it’s the unmarried women over the age of 27 rather than the men who tend to be regarded as if they are “rejects,” says Xiong Jing, director of the Women’s Media Monitor Network, which promotes gender equality in Chinese media.
“Marriage is seen as a basic necessity in life,” she says. Being unmarried implies you can’t provide for yourself.
Even highly educated women with good jobs and who are financially independent feel the pressure to marry, says Jing.
The mere fact that there are more independent women around nowadays is a big change, she says.
China only officially ended its one-child-per-family policy last year. Most young people are only-children. So parents’ expectations are high.
“That leads to a lot of worry among some women,” says Jing.
The pressure doesn’t just apply to women, she adds. “Men also come under the same pressure, though it tends to happen later.”
But there isn’t the same stigma for men who remain unmarried into their 30s and 40s, she says.
If a single woman gets a top job, she’s quickly called a “nu han zi,” or, loosely translated, a “manly woman.”
“Man have have fewer disadvantages in that situation,” says Jing.
