"Do leftover women really deserve our sympathy?"

The 'goddess' and the 'manly lady' at the 2015 Chinese New Year Gala
Source: Foreign Policy
This question was posed by the All-China Women’s Federation – a state feminist agency made by the Chinese Communist Party to defend women’s rights. Since 2007, the Chinese Communist Party has used a state-sponsored media campaign called “Leftover Women”, or 剩女 (shengnu), to refer to a particular demographic with the same name: educated, professional women in their late twenties who still have yet to be married. With Chinese government agencies like the Women’s Federation and different forms of Chinese media blaming the women themselves for not getting married, the “leftover women” concept has perpetuated both gender inequality and stereotypes against women in China today.

The Women’s Federation first used the term after the Chinese State Council decided to strengthen the Population and Family Planning program to address China’s sociological issues. Some of these societal issues include China’s skewed sex ratio – the ratio in 2014 was 121 boys to every 100 girls – that has been attributed to Chinese families’ preference for male children and sex-selective abortions. People’s Daily, one of the main news channels of the Chinese Communist Party, has also stressed the importance of the country’s gender imbalance by stating, “the continual accumulation of unmarried men of legal marrying age greatly increases the risk of social instability and insecurity.”
 
To deal with the unbalanced sex ratio, the Women’s Federation has enacted several measures in an effort to help more “leftover women” get married. In columns aimed at convincing single, educated women to stop being so ambitious and to get married, the Federation offers helpful tips such as “seduce but don’t pester, and be persistent but not willful” [1], and even hosts local matchmaking events for “highly educated, high quality women”.

To promote the 'leftover women” concept, the Women’s Federation criticizes unmarried women, and attributes their failure to get married to their educational pursuits and workplace achievements.

The Women’s Federation states:

“Girls with an average or ugly appearance… 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 MA or PhD, they are already old, like yellowed pearls.”

Although the term “leftover women” was introduced in 2007, the subject has continued to be a popular topic for discussion in different forms of Chinese media. This was recently apparent when the 2015 Chinese New Year Gala--the most-watched television program in China--presented misogynistic and insensitive skits that many viewers found stigmatized Chinese women.

One skit, in which a woman instructed her subordinate on how to ingratiate herself with her new boss, played off the stereotype that female government and corporate leaders are more likely to climb the employment ladder through sexual favors.

In another skit, a Chinese woman complains about not having a boyfriend. In an effort to comfort the woman, her brothers call upon a model who performs a dance called “the ‘manly lady’ and the ‘goddess,'” – terms that respectively describe a leftover woman and a pretty woman. While swaying her hips the model (“the goddess”) chants, “I have big eyes, small lips, and a tall nose. I have thin arms and thin legs.” The “manly lady” responds with self-deprecating jokes about her own body and her lack of male suitors.

With marriage already being a sensitive subject during Chinese New Year—as daughters return home and answer their family’s questions about their lack of a love life—many women who fit into the “leftover women” demographic felt that they were the subject of the jokes presented during the Gala.

A new study by sociologist Dr. Sandy To finds that women struggle to find a lasting relationship due to the constraints of the conservative, patriarchal society in which they live. In other words, many leftover women end up remaining single because the men they date are uncomfortable with their advanced careers and achievements, and expect them to spend more time doing housework at the expense of their jobs.

Thus, with such a skewed gender imbalance that has ultimately resulted in more leftover men than women, why is the government perpetuating the leftover women stereotype instead of encouraging these women to marry, regardless of age?

Amongst scholars and the media, current discussions do not address the Chinese government’s motives. I am thus left asking myself the following questions:

To what extent is the “leftover women” demographic a remnant of the Confucian Chinese culture that stresses the idea that men are superior to women? Could this characterization just be an attempt by the Chinese Communist Party to fix the gender imbalance created by the one-child policy that influenced childbearing in the latter half of the twentieth century? Or, as sociologist Leta Hong Fincher describes, could this discrimination against high-achieving, educated women in China represent a sense of disapproval with the tremendous gains of urban Chinese women?

[1] This quote is originally from a document that the Women’s Federation posted a few years ago. The Federation took the document down after facing criticism. 

Alexis Dale-Huang is a sophomore at the University of Southern California studying International Relations and East Asian Languages & Cultures.