More and more educated Chinese women tend to remain unmarried, most of them preferring to stay single. Considering the fact that the authorities are concerned about the trend, the question doing the rounds is: is education a privilege or a burden for women?

The National Bureau of Statistics of China and state census figures say that one in five women between the age of 25 of 29 remain unmarried. Unwed men, in the same age group, averages one in three.   

The educated, unmarried women in China are derisively called ‘leftover women’ because there is still a stigma attached to women who do not marry. It is a strange orthodoxy considering that Chinese society is modernising by leaps and bounds, thanks to education and technology.

In the big cities of China, or, for that matter Hong Kong and Singapore – the number of highly educated Chinese women staying single is growing year after year. There is already a debate on how the lower income residential areas are getting gentrified because of the deluge of single employed women. They have money; so, they buy up flats in such localities and stand out as those who can afford to buy things the local residents can only dream of.

Unable to force women to marry either by intimidation or through law, the Chinese ministry of education came up over a decade ago with the phrase – leftover women, Sheng-nu in Chinese – to describe these women. The authorities are now being advised to sign up unmarried women in the rural areas, impart skills to them, and ‘export’ them to the urban areas where they could marry and prove a counter to the ‘leftover women’.

Leta Hong Fincher, author of ‘Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China’, has an interesting take. According to The Vogue magazine, “She believes that the Chinese government, concerned with creating a so-called ‘high quality’ workforce that can compete in the global marketplace, coined the phrase as part of an aggressive propaganda campaign to coerce educated women out of the workforce and into matrimony and motherhood.

With falling birth rates and much speculation on the impact to China’s economy, Fincher avers that the government is deliberately frightening women into believing that if they delay marriage, no one will want to marry them at all. ‘The government is focused on marrying off urban, educated women but it does not want rural, uneducated women to have more babies’, she opines. ‘This goes hand-in-hand with the population quality—they want these women to build the new generation of skilled workers.”

The derisive label, Leftover Women, is now being popularised to curb the rising number of single women. The society at large views not marrying as a “social transgression”. Some with extreme, nationalist views consider such women a threat to national security.  The media is beginning to portray them as “lonely, desperate, overqualified and intimidating”.

There are reports of some women succumbing to the pressure and getting married. But many single women are involved in a push back as well. Official figures say there could be seven mission single women in the 25-34 age group in urban China. Highly educated and in highly qualified and paying jobs, these women are among the largest contributors to the growth figures. Official data shows that “women now contribute some 41 per cent to China’s GDP, the largest proportion in the world”.

These power women are forcing conservative Chinese society to change how they view them, not as women against marriage or challenging social mores but as people who are garnering economic power thanks to their education and jobs. They contribute to the economy; they constitute a sizeable section of committed consumers and are thus contributors to the country’s growth.

These women are pursued by the consumer industry and high fashion because they love to spend money on branded items, from sun glasses to expensive dresses and coats and shoes and laptops. They awe their families and critics with their consumerist image. It is their way of convincing the two sections that they can afford better things in life.

Backing them, the Chinese market recognised their contribution by coming up with a “Singles Day” in 2009 – which is now an annual feature on November 11. Some would say it is a kind of anti-Valentine Day celebration, but both days are marked by heavy sales in markets.

Interestingly, unlike in Mainland China, the ‘leftover women’ fare better in Hong Kong and Singapore. The Conversation magazine said: “if you’re a woman and you’re single on the mainland, it’s viewed negatively. Unmarried women over the age of 27 are called ‘sheng nu’, or ‘leftover women’. But in Hong Kong it’s seen in a more positive light. There, they’re known as ‘xing nu’, or ‘blooming women’.”

Over the last decade, neighbourhoods in Hong Kong and big mainland cities have changed. The ‘leftover women’ are investing in flats and houses. What happens is that such capital investment upgrades the profile of the neighbourhoods. Secondly, they displace lower income families who have traditionally occupied these localities, replacing them with the upscale single women.

The process of gentrification involves capital reinvestment into neighbourhood that encourages their physical upgrading, along with the displacement of groups of lower incomes who have traditionally occupied these communities. The social and cultural change this brings about is the neighbourhoods are dominated by single women.

But it is not only the occupational structure that is changing within these neighbourhoods. These gentrifying areas have been increasingly dominated by single women.

This is not to say that the single women never marry. They are not against marriage, as many of them have confessed to the media. Being highly educated and with high incomes, they can no longer marry men their families choose. They themselves want to choose their partners and they look for prospective husbands with modern outlooks and importantly, similar education and jobs as them.  

Considering that both educated single men and women usually come from poor backgrounds, their current economic status is drawing an invisible social barrier with family members.  (Poreg)