Love and money reshape family in China
- From: pluto <pluto@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 11 Aug 2005 10:01:51 +0800
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1215/p01s04-woap.html?s=spworld
World > Asia Pacific
from the December 15, 2004 edition
DATING: A couple hold each other as they walk through a Beijing shopping
area. In the changing values of urban China, love and emotion are playing a
greater role in relationships.
NICK OTTO - SPECIAL TO THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
Love and money reshape family in China
China has gone from arranged matches to the 8-minute date in the span of
one generation.
By Robert Marquand | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
BEIJING ? Bright and earnest, Zhu Zi and Gao Yanping fill out a wedding
application in neat Chinese characters at a marriage registry above a
bakery.
Zhu waited years to find a husband like Gao. It was Zhu, a little saucy,
who first phoned Gao, a little quiet. They hit it off: Both are under 30,
engineers, smart, living in Beijing, and, most crucial, they are from the
same province, Shaanxi, which means annual visits home together. They lived
together unmarried for 14 months, something illegal until last year, before
Zhu, tired of waiting, proposed. Gao right away said OK.
Flush with cash and opportunities from the country's economic boom, young
people and their elders are bucking tradition and redesigning that
cornerstone of Chinese society - the family.
Part 1 -12/15/04
Changes in courtship
Love and money reshape family in China
Part 2 - 12/16/04
New family types
Family ties take new shapes in a prosperous China
Part 3 - 12/17/04
A stronger role for women
Women in China finally making a great leap forward
Getting married in today's China is far easier than even four years ago:
The couple took a number, waited in line, and said "I do" in just over an
hour. The certificate costs about $1.15. Marriage forms no longer ask
frightening questions about parents' history or Communist Party
affiliations. Nor must couples seek permission from their "work unit" boss,
a major shift from last year. Marriage and public security bureaus are
reportedly no longer connected.
Today, urban Chinese are free as never before to pursue what have become
the twin engines of family dynamics here: love and money. In the 200 cities
with more than a million people, love and money are dictating historic
changes in the traditional family that had already been shrinking due to
the one-child policy. Dating and romance are in, living with parents is
out, wives and daughters enjoy enhanced roles. A new galaxy of attitudes
and values is transforming the basic building block of Chinese society.
Yet if it is easier to tie the knot in urban China, little else about
marriage and family is so simple in a country constantly rebuilding,
protean, where the pursuit of wealth and the sense of time are
accelerating.
"It is easier to meet people now, but it is harder to find the right one,"
says a young female junior exec as she sips from her water bottle. "We
never had cellphones or text messages before, and we can meet many new
people every day. But our expectations for a partner are so high that few
can match them."
Love and money
Now, for the first time on a wide scale, Chinese may pursue a spouse of
their own choosing. Only 2 in 10 young Chinese used to choose their life
partner; today, 9 in 10 say they have or will, according to a China Daily
report. Along with this, a discourse of "feeling" and "emotion" that used
to exist mainly in elite circles is now heard at all levels, from tycoons
to taxi drivers. Shops advertise "passion styles" for cars and kitchens.
Romance novels are a rage.
In the past, couples often did not demonstrate affection inside a strict,
loyalty-based family hierarchy. It was better not to, as Harvard
sociologist Martin Whyte points out, since it might suggest a son's loyalty
was not entirely clear. Couples always lived with the husband's parents,
and in times of argument, sons were expected to side with family elders,
not wives. Sons were dependent on parents. Divorce was discouraged and
nearly non-existent. Marriages were arranged among families or inside "work
units;" a main criterion was the communist or "revolutionary" credentials
of the spouse's family.
"My parents were teachers. They found themselves put together by their work
unit," says Qi Mei, a consultant for a paint company in Beijing. "Spouses
didn't use to have an identity, so much as a role. But now marriage is
based on feeling. That will make us a more open society."
"I want to fall in love," says Ms. Xin, a 19-year-old student at a shopping
mall. "I don't want to moan forever about money and jobs. Love is first.
Other things are important but not first."
Yet the dreams of young women like Xin can be tempered by economic
realities. She's part of the first generation who must find their own jobs
and earn their own wages. This creates some anxiety. Apartments are no
longer subsidized; jobs no longer guaranteed. Many parents have no advice
for their offspring about a China evolving at a bewildering rate.
Wealth, it turns out, has caused many urban Chinese to think and behave in
ways that don't always include families. Boarding schools have tripled in
the past decade. Extramarital relations have skyrocketed. As the cost of
living increases in urban China, many young women, often from outside the
city, are subsidized by men.
Typical is Yu Weijing, 25, who stays in Beijing by being enrolled in
graduate school. Her boyfriend is 40, divorced, has a son, and owns a
pharmacy. They stay together five days a month. He pays her rent. She is
now dating another businessman, and wonders if she should change income
sources, since she hears the pharmacist is also dating. She wants a "short
cut" to financial security and a good life, and repeats a saying here that
"a good date is better than a good job." Officials are considering
transparency laws requiring husbands to show family earnings to wives; many
divorce cases exist now where wives are suddenly left only with the
furniture.
A new concept: dating
China has 3,000-plus years of feudal order, guaranteed partly by a stable
family. That family is now undeniably changing. Consider these structural
shifts: Dating is a new concept, maybe four years old. Before, one never
talked about a "boy- friend" or "girlfriend." A special friend was a
"partner," and it implied an impending marriage. No longer. In the city,
females will ask males out. Young Chinese want to get to know one another.
The American "eight-minute date" has just hit Beijing.
In China's shift to a market economy, one key marriage player has been
phased out: the work-unit boss. For 50 years, the boss was a de facto
sergeant inside state-run enterprises. He or she policed behavior among the
sexes, assisted with family problems, often helped set up single women
approaching the unofficial "spinster" age of 30, and approved all matches.
"If you turned 28 and were still single, the danwei manager [or boss] would
step in and help," says Yu Jiang, a single 27-year-old who recently quit a
US-China joint venture. Now the work-unit boss no longer approves
marriages; the position is disappearing along with state-run businesses.
Weddings in pre-1980 China were simple, short, and cheap. Today, 70 percent
of the weddings done by Purple House, a Beijing agency, are Western-style -
vows, white dresses, churches, receptions, says Shi Yu. Mr. Yu is Purple
House's "master of ceremonies," a combination minister-DJ for the ceremony.
Weddings used to cost $40. Now they easily run $4,000 and are a status
symbol.
Once married, Chinese couples are no longer choosing to live with parents
at at home, a huge change. Some 60 to 70 percent of couples no longer live
with parents, and in the reporting for this series, virtually no young
Chinese said they would live at home if they could afford not to. "No way,"
says Jun Yaolin, who was married two years ago. "We will fight." One
counter-trend is to live a "bowl of soup" distance away - move to within a
few blocks. This neatly supplements another new trend: full-time care of
children by grandparents.
Divorce, once seen as antisocial, is now high by Chinese standards and
increases yearly. In Shanghai in 2001, 1 in 3 marriages failed, according
to Xinhua news agency.
SIGNS OF CHANGE: In Beijing, two older women rest on a park bench. The
family revolution is affecting all ages: As more couples choose to live
away from parents, the elderly are left alone.
NICK OTTO/SPECIAL TO THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
The maturing of the one-child policy, combined with the ability of couples
to buy their own apartments, is creating its own "empty nest" condition.
This means that older people are starting to experience an often terrible
new loneliness. China is still a country with respect for elders. Yet a
public-service ad on Chinese TV shows an elderly lady cooking all day. As
she sets the table for dinner, the phone calls come one by one: "I can't
make it. Can I come tomorrow?" The ad ends with a solitary figure sitting
at a table of food - and the words, "Don't forget your parents."
"The traditional family has changed, become diluted, atomized," says Dong
Zhiying, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in
Beijing. "It used to be assumed that kids would take care of parents. Now
it no longer is. In the past, older people in the family were dominant.
Young people had no choice but to respect them. Parents' authority was
based on money and power; if you don't respect them, you lose favor.
"Today, the intellectual and market development in China has come quickly,
and transformed the family. Young people aren't worshipping elders. They
can rely on their own ability - go to university, be independent, make
their own choices."
A sense of acceleration
On Nov. 27, a documentary by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, shot
in China in the waning years of the Cultural Revolution, was screened in
Beijing for the first time. Its patient camera angles show bygone urban
scenes: a lower skyline, donkeys and pigs on the street, and lots of
smiling children with tattered clothes. The film is a window on rapidly
China has moved into the modern world.
That acceleration is reflected in the way relationships are being formed
and conducted. Cellphones and the Internet provide the kind of intimacy and
instant connection never before possible in China. The nation now has 400
million cellphone users, double the number in the late 1990s, according to
Bo Landin, a former executive with Ericsson. Even many migrant workers now
carry cellphones.
In a way not found in the West, young Chinese take their new cellphone
liberation and Internet relationships seriously. There is even a sense of
generational separateness between 24-year-olds, who got their first
cellphones in college, and 19-year-olds, who have been talking to each
other since junior high. Text messages allow young men or women, who are
often painfully shy, to conduct a rapid-fire dialogue that has its own
interpersonal language. Twentysomethings in China will hold hands on the
street; teenagers feel no remorse about kissing in public.
The generation gap and pace of relationships is clear to Liu Jin, a mom who
works at a joint venture. At first, Liu got excited when her son brought
home his girlfriend. She sized up the young lady as a potential
daughter-in-law. Then the young man brought home another, and another, and
they still keep coming. Liu gave up trying to figure out her son's wishes.
It isn't how we used to do things, she says.
The new craving for "feeling" has brought new experimentation - not always
with happy results. The most popular film in China last year, "Shouji
(Cellphone)", centered on a man who cleverly used his cellphone to shield
his lovers from his wife. The film introduced the phrase "aesthetic
fatigue," which describes a culture of too many overripe relationships. The
pace is often so intense that the passion burns out quickly; too many
relationships are based on sex alone, Chinese complain.
"Singles aren't talking about marriage, lovers aren't talking about the
future," as one put it. A saying among high school and college students
describes a weariness with a growing pattern of "one-week" relationships:
"On Monday, you send out vibes. Tuesday, you express true desire.
Wednesday, you hold hands. Thursday, you sleep together. Friday, a feeling
of distance sets in. Saturday, you want out. On Sunday, you start searching
again."
At the same time, sex is becoming common at an ever-younger age. One
college freshman who started an "innocent youth" campaign on the Internet
asked visitors to the site to sign a vow of purity. But few would sign. One
wrote, "If it comes to being a virgin or breaking up with my boyfriend, I
won't sign it."
High-tech has made introductions easy. White collar companies now woo
recruits by bragging about their weekly singles mixers. Introduction
services have cropped up, advertising that clients will "find that right
spouse." One service in Beijing offers four levels of matchmaking
possibility, ranging from a $25 Web inspection of members to an $800 "Gold"
membership featuring a party for you with booze, balloons, and an "A" list
of prospective females. Yet our reporting shows that couples rarely find
each other at these places. Rather, it remains friends, alumni, work, and
family where marriages develop.
"Women now speak very differently about men," says Li Yinhe of CASS. "They
rate them as A, B, C, or D. They find it hard to locate an A man, and much
of the talk I hear is about settling for a C-group man."
China debates 'family values'
Most Chinese agree the family is undergoing tremendous change. But views on
what that means run the gamut. Some feel society is headed for serious
disorder due to a loss of values like sacrifice, family loyalty, and
fidelity. Others see a better China emerging after a period of shakeout,
with greater choice and maturity.
At one level, the fight is between traditionalists and progressives. Many
of the former feel that an avaricious new money culture will corrupt China
and send it into uncharted waters. They see women becoming sex objects and
couples devaluing each other. They see the years from 1950 to 1980 as a
stable period of happiness, when moral values were predominant and families
found meaning in serving the state.
"The opening up of the 1980s is only now showing itself in the way wives
and husbands are chosen," says Xia Xueluan, a professor at Beijing
University. "Now, when a girl meets a boy the first question is, 'Do you
have a house? Do you have a car?' This causes great strains in marriages,
and on husbands, to produce income. I'm worried."
Progressives feel that few Chinese want to lose recent gains like choice.
Both sexes are more liberated, they feel. In the past, marriage was limited
by family background. Divorce was not allowed, often not even in abusive,
dead-end situations.
"In the past, there was no money and people were forced to rely on others.
The choice for a better life was simple: struggle for food and shelter,"
says Dong Zhiying with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. "We all
lived together and ate at the same table; we had 'salty or sweet' depending
on what was available. Now you can order your own dishes."
Many in China do feel problems with the money culture are underestimated,
but don't want a return to state dictates in their private lives. They feel
that an obsession with grades, colleges, and jobs has led parents to ignore
a traditional emphasis on good behavior, modesty, and politeness. They are
troubled by studies showing rising levels of early teen sex and recent
cases of teens involved in homicides. They want a form of new moral
education that teaches a humane social contract.
============================================
cheers
pluto
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