Did the Party Create "Leftover Women" in China?

Source: ABC News
As I was browsing DEAN’s website, an interview with Leta Hong Fincher about the “leftover women” in China caught my eye. I was born and raised in China, and was fascinated that a Chinese American scholar took an interest in this trendy phenomenon in China.

In October of last year, The Asian Pacific Studies Institute at Duke hosted Leta Hong Fincher to speak about her book, "Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequalities in China.” The book studies women’s rights in China by focusing on the stigmatization of successful professional women who, as a result of their exceptional achievement in their education and career, have a hard time finding a husband. In her New York Times opinion piece and her lecture at Duke, she argued that “the state media mobilized to push the message that women in their late twenties are leftover,” and that such ideology has been internalized by women. I was unconvinced that the phenomenon of “leftover women” was engineered or exacerbated by the state through mass propaganda, with the understanding that deeply ingrained gender norms—alive and well in Chinese society—are clearly a more essential and powerful contributing factor.

With my doubt in mind, I set out to investigate her evidence for the presence and efficacy of state propaganda against successful single women. She cited two main pieces of evidence in her New York Times article and her lecture. First, she claimed that in 2007, China’s state feminist agency, the All-China Women’s Federation, “defined leftover women as unmarried women over the age of 27.” While I was unable to locate this source on the Women’s Federation’s website, I did find an article entitled “the Women’s Federation defines leftover men and women: single women over 27 and men over 30” originally published by Chongqing Daily Online and shared by several major news sites and social media. However, the article did not cite any source or evidence for the astonishing title; the article simply discussed a report published by Women’s Federation about the results of a survey on Chinese marriage and relationship issues. This is a classic example of sensational headlines that boast a false claim, misinforming millions of Internet users. If anything, it shows how irresponsible journalists use misleading or fabricated headlines and how social media can easily make an erroneous article go viral.

I also attempted to track down her second piece of evidence, that the Women’s Federation “has run articles stigmatizing educated women who are still single”. She quoted an eye-catching article entitled “Do Leftover Women Really Deserve Our Sympathy?” published on the Women’s Federation’s website with grossly misogynist statements such as “they (leftover women) 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.” I found the original article written by Yiming Liu, a male Journalist, first published on Xinhua.net. This article was shared by multiple websites, allegedly including the Women’s Federation (I could not find the article on its current website). I could not comprehend the logical leap that one article written by some freelance journalist shared by several websites--perhaps including a state website—somehow became a state-sponsored mass propaganda.

While the state could plausibly have a stance or agenda about the issue, such as that facilitating dating and marriage ensures social stability, Fincher’s rhetoric that the state helped “create” the phenomenon of leftover women and artificially imposed the societal pressure on them was undue and misinformed, given her sources were unreliable and weak. She misrepresented how impressionable well-educated, successful women are—when it comes to something as significant as marriage—to state propaganda, and the extent of state’s will and ability to manipulate those women.

Fincher’s argument that “gender-discriminatory norms are exacerbated by a one-party state intent on social engineering, with a massive propaganda apparatus that maintains a tight grip on information” reflects the broader tendency of the Western public and academia to attribute China’s social issues first and foremost to the authoritarian government. While I do not deny the potency of the state, I do think the role of the government tends to be overemphasized and the role of culture, history and society deserves more consideration. Because of the way Chinese culture, history and politics are represented in the West and insufficient understanding of Chinese culture which has a drastically different philosophical and behavioral framework from that of the West, Western academia is predisposed to favor the state as an explanation to Chinese social problems. Culture, generally defined as knowledge acquired through socialization, is subliminally more powerful in shaping people’s behavioral pattern and thought processes than an endogenous “state-led campaign”. Growing up in China, I have heard from everyone around me, that finding a good(rich) husband is important, that high-achieving women threaten the men, that the worth and quality of a woman’s life is by default associated with her husband more than anything else, and that when choosing husbands women should first consider their socioeconomic background. It’s hard for me not to question Fincher’s claim that the societal pressure on high-achieving single women to find a husband has been orchestrated by the state through mass media propaganda. The phenomenon of leftover women is a symptom of gender inequality, an issue steeped in Chinese culture and history.

Angie is a freshman at Duke University.