China is in the grip of a marriage crisis. In 2020, only 8.13 million couples tied the knot, a 12% drop from the previous year, and the seventh consecutive year of decline. The problem of surplus bachelors is even more dire in the countryside, where a growing number of young women have left their hometowns and moved to urban areas for more job opportunities and better dating prospects.
Identifying this as some situation that needs to be dealt with, a county in Hunan Province has suggested a direct solution: Make women stay and make them marry!
The policy is included in an action plan issued recently by the local government of Xiangyin, a county in Hunan’s Yueyang city. In response to a letter submitted by a local official, who described rural men’s difficulties in getting married as “a social issue” that requires “urgent attention,” the county’s Civil Affairs Bureau released the document, which includes a variety of proposals aimed at helping male villagers get hitched.
“Education and guidance should be provided to make women born in rural regions feel passionate about their hometowns and willing to improve the environment they grew up in,” local officials write. “They need to be encouraged to stay and change the face of their villages, as well as make their contribution to correcting the gender imbalance in the countryside.”
The proposal is categorized as “propaganda work” in the plan. Under the same section, the Bureau also pledges to popularize a new style of “modest” dating and marriage in the county, one that’s freed from old traditions like complicated wedding customs and betrothal gifts, which typically include pricey items such as houses and cars.
Most of the ideas put forward by Xiangyin are not original. Under a nationwide campaign led by the central government to crack down on China’s increasingly extravagant wedding culture, a village in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, decided in 2018 to cap betrothal gifts at 20,000 yuan in an effort to ease the financial pressure on potential grooms. Last month, local officials in the city of Bozhou, western China’s Anhui Province, announced that they would host weekly events where local bachelors can meet and mingle with single women willing to date.
But the part where Xiangyin urges women to stay in their hometowns is new, and it has struck many people on the Chinese internet as an insulting suggestion that only serves the interest of single men and local officials. “Xiangyin looks like it’s trying to manipulate women into thinking that they have to marry local men if they love their hometowns. And this is nonsense,” a Weibo user commented.
Others raised concerns that Xiangyin might be planning to take a more aggressive approach to solve its bachelor crisis, one that could involve restricting women’s ability to move to urban areas in the future. “Girls in Xiangyin, leave that place as soon as you can. Why stay at a place where you are treated like objects to satisfy its surplus of bachelors when you will find more freedom and receive more respect elsewhere?” another person wrote.
