University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Gender, family, and Chinese nation: ""leftover women,"" ""foreign f women,"" and ""second wives""

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Gender, family, and Chinese nation: ""leftover women,"" ""foreign f women,"" and ""second wives""

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GENDER, FAMILY, AND CHINESE NATION
“LEFTOVER WOMEN,” “FOREIGN F WOMEN,” AND “SECOND WIVES”

by

Xiaoxin Zeng

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SOCIOLOGY)

May 2017

Copyright 2017 Xiaoxin Zeng

ii

DEDICATION

This dissertation is dedicated to
my family in China and my family in the United States
iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My dissertation is a result of collective efforts. I couldn’t have possibly
completed it without the unrelenting support from numerous people who cared about me
and this research project.
First and foremost, I am eternally grateful for my two faculty advisors, Sharon
Hays and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. Both of them provided invaluable guidance and
mentorship that helped me develop intellectually and personally. Sharon had been my
mentor since I started my doctoral program in sociology at the University of Southern
California. I took classes with her on the topics of sociological theories, culture, gender
and feminism. These classes, together with numerous conversations with her on such
topics, inspired me to explore how cultural symbols matter for social inequality, which
was the starting point of this research project. Not only did Sharon’s theoretical insights
nourish my intellectual curiosity, but her firm commitment to social justices also became
a standard I admire and emulate in my own personal and academic lives.
I am also profoundly thankful for Pierrette. I first knew her by reading her book
Domé stica (2001) in an immigration class I took at San Diego State University. As an
international student in the United States struggling with my graduate studies and the
everyday lives in the new country, I could easily identify with the stories of immigrant
women from Mexico and Central America. I appreciated how much Pierrette understood
the difficulties these women went through and their agentic efforts to make their lives and
their children’s lives better. This book, with Pierrette’s empathy towards immigrant
domestic workers from her own standpoint, became an exemplar of reflexive sociological
iv

methodology that guided me in my interactions with my research subjects—various
Chinese women who shared their personal experiences of dating, marriage and family
with me in this research project. I benefited from Pierrette’s empathetic and friendly
approach in interpersonal interactions as well as her tireless devotion to helping and
developing her students. I remember she invited me to go to the Huntington Library with
her when I just started my doctoral studies at USC. This visit, together with various
subsequent personal conversations with her, made easier my transition into the
overwhelming American academic life. Pierrette took me under her wing when I was
feeling daunted by the dissertation writing. The vibes and care she sent, along with
occasional gentle nudges, bestowed a faith in me that I would finish my dissertation if I
kept writing on a daily basis. Throughout my dissertation write-up, I consistently
received Pierrette’s extensive, detailed, and supportive suggestions and comments that
offered the opportunity to expand the scope of my analysis beyond a dissertation.
I would also like to thank Bettine Birge and Merril Silverstein. Both of them
provided unique insights into my dissertation project from their own disciplines. I took a
graduate seminar with Bettine on gender and women in Chinese history. She introduced
me to the scholarship on gender symbolism in Chinese nationalist allegories. This
enabled me to understand contemporary Chinese popular narratives about gender as a
medium of masculinist articulation about the meanings of the nation. She also helped me
with the cultural and linguistic translation of some words from mandarin Chinese to
English. Merril offered a sociological perspective to situate my project within China’s
demographic transformations in the past several decades. He also helped me think
through my current project from a comparative viewpoint to make broader theoretical and
v

empirical contributions. Both Bettine and Merril contributed brilliant insights and
considerable time to this dissertation project.
Moreover, I am grateful to the Department of Sociology and the Dornsife College
of Letters, Arts and Sciences at USC for their generous financial support throughout my
doctoral studies. I would especially like to thank the faculty of the USC’s Department of
Sociology for helping me develop intellectually and professionally. I am also thankful to
the Department’s staff, Stachelle Overland, Melissa Hernandez, Amber Thomas, and Lisa
Rayburn-Parks. They provided consistent assistance whenever I needed it.
I would also like to thank Professor Huma Ahmed-Ghosh from the Department of
Women’s Studies at San Diego State University. She encouraged and inspired me to
embark on the academic journey that led to this dissertation. From her mentorship and
friendship, I learned that feminism was a way of living and relating, and that it took
conscious efforts to deconstruct interpersonal boundaries and reduce social inequalities.
My family in China played a central role in paving the way for my educational
success and getting me through the graduate school. My grandfather, Zhang Shunzong,
and my grandmother, Chen Xiuzhi, contributed a significant amount of time and financial
resources to my upbringing and education. My mother, Zhang Kui, had always been a
good confidant over the phone when I needed to talk. Throughout my doctoral studies,
she had been taking care of my grandparents and sharing my filial responsibilities for
them. My father, Zeng Yuchuan, had taught me the importance of persistence since I was
little. Before he suddenly passed away prior to the submission of my dissertation to the
dissertation committee, he still encouraged me to work harder and never give up my
vi

American/academic dream. My family in the United States also gave me much-needed
emotional and mental support. My mother-in-law, Mary Winner, and her husband,
Charles Winner, always welcomed me and made me feel at home when I visited them.
My sister-in-law, Kristen Kern, sent me empathy and encouragement at moments when
my motivation to write the dissertation ran low.
I owed a special thank you to my husband, Richard Kern, and my son, John Kern.
Richard’s understanding and appreciation of my intellectual work sustained me
throughout the whole process of writing the dissertation. To make time for my writing, he
frequently interrupted his busy work schedule to take care of John. His confidence in me
and my work helped my self-doubts dissipate. John was always a sweet inspiration. His
smiles melted away my frustrations that occurred when I ran out of ideas.
Finally, I am grateful to all the Chinese women who shared with me the stories of
their intimate lives. Many of them had become and remained my friends. They
sometimes sent me messages on wechat, asking me about my progress on the dissertation
and sending their wishes. Without their trust and willingness to help with this research
project, the dissertation would have been unthinkable.

vii

ABSTRACT

This dissertation examines how mainland Chinese women reject conventional
marriage and negotiate alternative lives under conditions of China’s economic
restructuring and globalization. It analyzes the popular narratives about three groups of
“deviant” Chinese women, namely, “leftover women,” “foreign f women,” and “second
wives,” to show the interlocking symbolic construction of gender, family and Chinese
nation. This dissertation argues that popular narratives about the three groups of Chinese
women are enmeshed within larger masculinist nationalist anxieties about increased class
inequalities, a frenzied cultural valorization of money and status, as well as racism and
Western cultural imperialism. It suggests that these narratives are masculinist strategies to
assert symbolic male dominance over women, and discipline Chinese women about
appropriate gender and sexual boundaries.
This study also relies upon ethnography and in-depth interviews to explore how
the three groups of Chinese women appropriate, resist, negotiate, and co-opt the
structural and cultural constructions of gender, family and Chineseness. Chinese single
women growing up in the 1970s and 1980s lived through a transition from the Mao-led
socialist state to the reformist state, and the resultant transformations in the economic
structure, gender ideology, and family relations. As a result of these changes, Chinese
single women coming of age in the early reform era experienced a transition from
androgynous girlhood to feminized womanhood. Some of them felt confusion and a lack
of practical know-how about feminine performances and interactions with men when
they entered the dating market in the 2000s. They used this gender disjuncture to explain
viii

their protracted singlehood. While these Chinese single women had adapted to the
feminized dating market and identified with marriage and motherhood, the value of inner
discipline and strength they had learned in their childhood continued to propel them to
work hard to survive the competitive labor market and establish themselves
economically. Maintaining their occupations and keeping their paychecks were their
strategy to fulfill their filial obligations and become good mothers.
This study has also found that Chinese women who dated and aspired to marry
foreign men for a variety of reasons. Their desires for foreign men included masculine
bodies, liberal modern values of gender egalitarianism, unavailability of Chinese men,
disappointment with Chinese men, and opportunities for their children to have access to
other countries. All of these women in this study looked for good matches and aspired for
enduring love. Moreover, these women variously participated in Western acculturation,
feminization and racialization to access the global dating market and make themselves
attractive to foreign men. Their agentic dating and feminizing practices perpetuated the
interactive cycle of Western hegemonization and Chinese resistance.
Another finding in this dissertation is that Chinese women who chose to engage
with rich married men for financial benefits for various reasons. They developed
practical, money-oriented worldviews as they negotiated the gendered organization of
marriage, family, and heterosexuality. Early state developmental discourses of getting
rich first mobilized these women to perceive and practice sexual engagements with rich
married men as a viable economic strategy to accumulate financial resources which they
in turn invested in real estate property and/or small businesses. For many of them,
making money, contributing to the family finance and providing access to consumer
ix

goods became central to the meanings of filial piety and good motherhood. Most of these
women invested in their bodies, engaged with emotional work, and used middle men as
their dating strategies.
These research findings have significance for the fields of gender studies, Chinese
studies, and international relations.

x

Table of Contents

Dedication ........................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgments.............................................................................................................. iii
Abstract ............................................................................................................................. vii
Chapter 1 Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 2 Cultural representations of “deviant” Chinese women: how some Chinese
people make sense of a modernizing and globalizing China ............................................ 39
Chapter 3 The strong woman or the little woman?: Chinese single women navigating
cultural contradictions of femininity ................................................................................. 95
Chapter 4 Gendered longings for love under China’s globalization: Chinese women
negotiating race, gender and nation ................................................................................ 131
Chapter 5 Sex, money, and sentiments: Chinese women opting for non-marital
relationships .................................................................................................................... 167
Chapter 6 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 212
Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 222
Appendix A Table 1 Demographic characteristics of Chinese single women ............... 232
Appendix B Table 2 Demographic characteristics of Chinese women who dated and/or
married foreign men ........................................................................................................ 234
Appendix C Table 3 Demographic characteristics of Chinese women who dated married
men .................................................................................................................................. 235

1

CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

In a sizzlingly hot summer afternoon, a shaded corner of a major park in Beijing
was bustling with activity, as Chinese parents of adult children streamed in to find
potential spouses for their children. Along the two sides of a passage leading to a
pavilion, parents laid out sheets that contained information about their children’s age,
jobs, income, ownership of real estate property and cars, local residency, as well as
desired criteria in a marriage partner. Many parents prepared a stack of photos of their
children in various settings and presented them to those who showed interests. From time
to time, parents exchanged contact information for their children and arrange meetings.
Some parents who were not able to find a space to set up a counter front paced up and
down, with large folders, envelopes, and sheets in their hands. They greeted the newly
arrived with their concise, yet mutually intelligible question: “Boy or girl?” (“nanhai,
nühai?”). The majority of these parents had daughters who had postponed getting married
in their late 20s and beyond. If a parent had a son, he or she was immediately surrounded
by interested parents with daughters.
The scene of Chinese parents marketing their adult children for potential marriage
prospects created a noisy spectacle in the otherwise quiet park. This park was not the only
park with these activities. In all of the five major public parks in Beijing I visited during
the summer of 2012, Chinese parents and older relatives of single adult children,
especially daughters, voluntarily gathered on two or three days a week, each time lasting
two or three hours, to market their single adult children in the hope of finding suitable
2

marriage partners for them. Sometimes, the adult children who were being offered--single
Chinese women and men--also joined the markets I visited. Journalists report that similar
marriage markets spread out in public parks across metropolitan cities in China.
At the beginning of the new millennium, the call of compulsory marriage rings
true and loud for mainland Chinese. It is central to the construction of gender and nation
in China. Marriage frames normative gender roles, legitimates sexual desires and
expressions, and mandates appropriate reproductive activities. As such, marriage defines
social and cultural visions of what it means to be Chinese in a modernizing and
globalizing China. Therefore, the boundary of marriage and family has to be securely
guarded in order to bolster and uphold a coherent narrative of Chinese nation. This
becomes all the more important as China further integrates into the global capitalist
system, and faces conflicts, challenges and threats from within and without. Both the
Party-state and Chinese people have a stake in making and maintaining narratives of
Chinese nation. While the Party-state appropriates narratives of nation to legitimate its
role and power in leading China’s modernization, the self-esteem of Chinese people
remains closely tied to the fate of the nation (Gries 2004).
The making of the symbolic boundaries of gender and nation through marriage
and family is the topic of my dissertation. The contemporary mandate of marriage and
family is gendered and gendering. It is gendered because the familial space delimits the
inner realm and has been considered as Chinese women’s social sphere (Wolf 1985). Not
only the everyday functions of a family and its economy depend heavily on Chinese
women’s diligent productive and reproductive labor, but also the very definition of
3

heterosexual monogamy is primarily inscribed upon Chinese women’s bodies. Chinese
women’s conformity to normative expectations of sexual purity, and daughterly, wifely
and motherly virtues marks the familial space as morally superior to a polluted, cruel and
dangerous outside realm (Wolf 1985). It also symbolizes the cultural and moral
superiority of China as a nation.
The inner sphere of marriage and family is gendering in the sense that dominant
notions of womanhood in today’s China are embedded in the patrilineal family system
and anchored on the roles of mothers and wives. While the expansion of higher-education
capacities and the development of a consumer culture open up possibilities for Chinese
women to enact their feminine personhood through conspicuous consumption, pursue
intellectual and career advancements, and secure economic resources, it has been widely
expected and taken for granted that they will eventually get married and have children,
and that marriage and family are their final destiny (Guisu). Young Chinese women
growing up in the reform era identify themselves with femininity, marriage and
motherhood, rendering their worker identity marginal (Rofel 1999). Practices of and
claims to domestic virtues grant Chinese women respectability and moral status.
Sometimes, Chinese women staked status claims of their sexual purity through a contrast
to their perceived and imagined sexual promiscuity of Western (white) women (Erwin
1998). Yet, Chinese women do not always strictly follow social norms pertaining to
marriage and family. In post-socialist China, the tripartite of sometimes overlapping and
sometimes conflicting power regimes of Party-state politics, a capitalist market economy,
and a family culture enable and constrain Chinese women’s resistance against and co-
4

optation of the social ideal of marriage and family (Erwin 1998).
My dissertation is concerned with contemporary mainland Chinese women who
deviate from the traditional route of marriage. I examine three distinctive groups who
deviate from conventional expectations of Chinese womanhood. One group violates
normative marital codes by holding off their first marriage in their mid 20s and beyond.
A second group enters romantic, sexual relationships with non-Chinese men. A third
group that I examine are Chinese woman who engage in long-term sexual relationships
with married men. Chinese women in each of these categories have become the targets of
public surveillance and the focus of Chinese people’s everyday gossips, media
representations, and cyber postings. Popular narratives about these three groups of
Chinese women are emotionally charged, covering a wide range of negative sentiments
from disapproving sympathy and pity to curiosity and outright anger, hatred and
indignation. These widely-circulated popular narratives attribute these Chinese women’s
transgressions to their essential moral inferiority and stigmatize them as “leftover
women,” “foreign f women,” and “second wives,” respectively.
I believe that popular discursive representations about these Chinese women are
socially and sociologically significant. These are normalizing and disciplinary discourses.
By defining and stigmatizing specific transgressive gendered dating practices for
contemporary Chinese women, these narratives reinforce the normality and desirability of
a narrowly defined marital destiny which mandates that Chinese women have the right
kinds of desires for appropriate men and express such desires through marriage at a
socially acceptable age. In addition, these essentialist accounts of morally inferior
5

Chinese women provide the discursive parameters for Chinese people to think and talk
about them, therefore, placing Chinese women and their private lives under public
surveillance. As a normalizing technique, these narratives also deploy and mobilize
strong popular troubled and critical sentiments to create a sense of shame and
abnormality in the three groups of Chinese women.
More importantly, like other historical moments of China, contemporary popular
discussions of Chinese women are entangled with larger concerns about meanings of
modernity and Chineseness (Brownell 2000; Hershatter 1997). The widely-circulated
narratives about Chinese women’s transgressions tell us more about their authors’
understandings of their positions in China and in the world as well as their views of what
means to be Chinese at the beginning of the new century than about what really happens
in the lives of Chinese women. As the authors criticize what they perceive to be the moral
defects of the three groups of Chinese women, they articulate their discontent and anger
at class inequalities, moral declines, and privileged political-business networks in China,
and Western cultural imperialism and racism on the international dating and labor
market. These domestic and global social, political and cultural conditions make China
lose “face” in front of Western audiences and create multiply subordinated masculine
Chinese subjects who feel anxious about their own status and the status of China as a
nation. Narrations about the three groups of Chinese women are expressions of such
nationalist and masculinist anxieties. They tell us about Chinese men’s outcry over social
inequalities that limit their access to resources and render them socially impotent in
China and on the international stage.
6

My dissertation engages with these newly emerged popular narratives as a starting
point to offer an exploratory look at how Chinese women, and by relation, Chinese men,
are variously positioned and position themselves relative to China’s project of
modernization and globalization. Informed by Sherry Ortner’s double meaning of
“making gender” (1996), I formulate two sets of questions. The first set of research
questions uses popular narratives to understand the intertwined discursive constructions
of gender, family and Chinese nation that create and deploy categories of deviant Chinese
women. These questions include: Why are Chinese people concerned about the three
groups of Chinese women? How are cultural meanings and structural arrangements of
gender, family and nation enacted in these narratives? What gendered subject positions
do these narratives construct? The second set of research questions concerns the ways the
three groups of Chinese women appropriate, resist, negotiate, and co-opt the cultural
constructions of gender, family and Chineseness that both constrain and enable their
agency. I ask: Are the discourse of mandatory marriage and the stigmatizing narratives
imposing themselves successfully upon Chinese women? How do these Chinese women
respond to the stigmatizing popular opinions? How do these popular narratives shape
Chinese women’s self-understanding and self-positioning? How do the three groups of
Chinese women participate in dating and marriage, and make sense of their dating
practices?

7

Description of Research Methods and Research Subjects
To answer the first set of questions, I draw upon archival research at the Capital
Library of China in Beijing to collect popular discursive representations about dating and
marriage in general and these three groups of “deviant” Chinese women in particular in
the summer of 2012. I identified and analyzed texts of various genres from recently
published popular women’s magazines such as Zhiyin, Jiating, Hunyin yu Jiating, Aiqing,
Hunyin, Rensheng yu Banlü , and Xiandai Jiating. These data include feature articles,
editors’ advice, readers’ correspondences, and blog articles that focused on the three
groups of Chinese women and their practices of dating, marriage and family. I paid
special attention to how these texts represented the women, what problems these texts
identified, and what solutions they offered. Given the limited space of my dissertation, I
selected and presented some texts that shared a wider echo across the popular women’s
magazines I studied in terms of the depictions of these women and moral messages
offered to them.
I also conducted an online ethnography of popular narratives of these three groups
of Chinese women on social news websites and cyber public forums between February,
2011 to August, 2015. The social news websites I researched on include Xinhua news,
China Daily, Sina News, Sohu news, QQ News, and 163 News. I retrieved news articles
about these three types of Chinese women, and followed popular opinions and
conversations of cyber users that responded to the news. The cyber public forums I
studied include tianya.com, mitbbs.com and huaren.us. I kept records of original postings
about the three types of Chinese women on these online forums and their follow-up
8

postings. For both the social news websites and cyber public forums, I utilized their
search engines, and used the three derogatory categories to search for and identify
potential texts for content analysis. Given the limited space of this dissertation, I selected
and presented only the texts that had explicitly appropriated any of the three categories in
titles and/or main texts, and had elicited multiple follow-up responses. My examination
of these discursive sources of data focuses on conceptualizations of dating and marriage,
problems identified about these deviant Chinese women, solutions proposed to resolve
the problems, and symbolic associations between gender, family, and Chineseness.
Since it is impossible to analyze and present an exhaustive list of popular
narratives about the three groups of Chinese women, I don’t intend to make broad,
definitive arguments about how all mainland Chinese people perceive these women.
Instead, my intention is to provide suggestive evidence that certain masculinist nationalist
voices have risen and resonated, particularly from social sectors that have been
disadvantaged socio-economically under conditions of China’s economic reforms and
globalization. These popular narratives, as I contend, rely on the symbols of “deviant”
Chinese women as a medium of articulation to offer their righteous interpretations of
social injustices brought about by China’s recent grand transformations. In this sense,
these interpretative, partial and situated popular narratives constitute alternative visions
of the Chinese nation that differ from the official discourse of a confident, unified China
peacefully rising in the global political economy and cultural landscapes. Albeit limited
in quantities and non-randomly selected, the popular narrations presented in this
dissertation provide a glimpse into how meanings of the Chinese nation are produced,
9

contested, and experienced at the popular level.
Moreover, to answer the second set of questions, I conducted a 9-month
ethnography with a marriage introduction agency in a coastal city in Southeast China
(May-August of 2011, July-November of 2012). This privately-owned marriage
introduction agency started to operate in 1994, with the endorsement of the local All-
China Women’s Federation in its efforts to promote Chinese women’s well-being. It
introduces domestic and international marriage openly, and introduces and negotiates
relationships between single Chinese women and married men covertly. While the owner
of the marriage introduction agency is a local Chinese man, all the five match makers
working for him are Chinese women. By the time when I started my field work there, it
had more than 3000 members who paid and registered for their services and 80 percent of
them were women. During my research, I worked as an office clerk and was responsible
to compose a file of information about all its members (e.g. name, age, marital status,
education, occupation, address, phone number, and things they look for in partners),
arrange introduction meetings, and contact members to follow up on their dating
progress. I was able to attend introduction and follow-up meetings and observe first-hand
how Chinese women participated in dating and marriage negotiations. Working for this
agency enabled me to identify and recruit Chinese women who fell into the categories of
“leftover women,” “foreign f women,” and “second wives” for future interviews.
Additionally, I conducted 56 open-ended in-depth interviews, including 32
Chinese women who have never married in their late 20s and beyond, 10 Chinese women
who are ever involved with non-Chinese men, and 14 Chinese women who are
10

romantically involved with married men on a long-term basis. I initially identified and
recruited interviewees through networks of family and friends and through my
involvement with the marriage introduction agency. To expand my pool of interviewees,
I employed the snowballing method and asked each interviewee to introduce me to their
friends who fell into the three categories. Contrary to the totalizing popular accounts of
these Chinese women, they vary widely in socio-economic backgrounds, age, and urban-
rural origins. These are diverse women. For example, the 32 single Chinese women I
interviewed, between late 20s and late 30s at the time of interviews, occupied a wide
range of job categories. They included accountants, company directors and managers,
college instructors, electronic engineers, kindergarten teachers and managers,
governmental cadres, website editors, nurses, salesgirls, customer service representatives,
small private business owners (getihu), cost appraisers of civil engineering projects,
peasants, and factory workers. Two of them were unemployed. While some of them were
from urban origins, others were from the countryside and migrated to take up jobs in
cities. I interviewed these single women in their homes, or private rooms in restaurants.
My interviews focused on their perspectives on gender relations, dating and marriage in
general, and their self-positioning and dating practices in particular. Instead of soliciting
their responses to negative popular opinions about themselves, I let them bring up this
topic. Each interview lasted from 1.5 hours to 3 hours. Since some of these women were
recruited through my work for the marriage introduction agency, I was able to attend
their meetings with men and observe how they interacted. On various occasions, I joined
these single Chinese women in their hiking, visits to beauty salons and warm spring spa,
11

shopping trips, and meals in restaurants. I also accompanied one Chinese woman to a
speed-dating event sponsored by a well-known online dating company.
The 10 Chinese women who dated or married non-Chinese men had similarly
diverse backgrounds. They spread out across the age and socioeconomic spectrum. One
of them was a college English professor, Wang Laoshi, 56, who met her white Australian
husband at a professional academic meeting in China. Another one, Liqing, 38, met her
white American husband when both of them were in a tourist group visiting Hainan
Island in China. She was a middle-school drop-out and had engaged with various small
businesses at different times of her life (e.g. selling tobacco and wine, selling lottery
tickets, etc.). When I interviewed her, she was the assistant to her husband’s home-based
English classes to young Chinese children. Both A Yu, 62, and A Zheng, 60, were
unemployed, but had steady sources of income. They actively looked for non-Chinese
men through the marriage introduction agency I worked for. At the time of interviews, A
Jun, 27, was the owner of a bar in Togo in West Africa. She was engaged to a Lebanese
man whom she met in her bar. Yue, 34, finished her doctoral degree in the United States
and was a stay-at-home mother when I interviewed her. She met her Jewish American
husband through her friend’s introduction. Ming, 34, got her Master’s degree in business
administration in a New York university and her African American husband was her
fellow graduate student. She stayed at home, looking after her two young children and
expecting another baby. Tianlin, 22, was a doctoral student in an American university.
She met her white American boyfriend when she was an undergraduate student in China.
Shuya, 45, met her white American husband 20 years ago when he was working in
12

Beijing. She was doing international business at the time of interview. Jing, 31, was
married to a white American man who did international business between China and the
United States. She was a stay-at-home mother of 4 young children. I conducted most of
the interviews with these women in China when they were working and residing or
visiting their friends and families there. Interviews with Tianlin, Shuya, and Jing took
place in the United States where they worked and resided. I interviewed them with
questions about their views on gender relations, dating and marriage in China, and
international dating. I also asked them to describe their dating experiences, with a focus
on their relationships with non-Chinese men. In response to my question of how their
natal families and friends saw their relationships, some of them brought up the topic of
how Chinese people perceived Chinese women in international, inter-racial relationships
more generally. Each interview lasted between 2 hours and 3 hours.
I identified the 14 Chinese women who was involved with married men through
the marriage introduction agency. They covered an age range between 22 and 44. Only
two of them were formally employed, one teaching modern dance at a school on a
contractual basis and the other working for a nightclub. The other Chinese women all
engaged in various forms of financial investments. Some were owners of either private or
commercial real estate property. Some of them owned small businesses. Prior to their
first relationships with married men, one of them was a single mother, another one was
dating a white-collar single Chinese man, and all the others were divorced with or
without children. These women went to the marriage introduction agency I worked for
and voluntarily sought out married men with financial resources. I interviewed them on
13

their general perspectives of gender relations, dating and marriage as well as their
particular experiences with marriage and dating. Most interviews took place in a private
meeting room in the marriage introduction agency. I conducted two other interviews in
women’s homes and one interview in a private karaoke room of the nightclub one
informant worked for. Each interview lasted between 2 and 4 hours. Due to my
ethnographic work with the marriage introduction agency, I was also able to observe how
they met and interacted with potential partners, and how they negotiated a good deal with
married men through their flexible manipulation and the mediating role of the agency. To
complement the interview data, I visited an income property of one of these women
which she divided into five small bedrooms for rent. I also went to a beauty and spa salon
one woman owned.
My single status and ethnographic immersion helped me gain trust and develop
friendships with the Chinese single women I studied. At the time of my ethnography in
China in 2012, I was a 30-year-old mainland Chinese single woman working on a
doctoral degree. I myself was under the enormous pressures from my family to get
married. My status as a “leftover women” made me an insider to the groups of single
Chinese women in their mid 20s and beyond. 11 of them initiated contact with me after
our mutual friends told them about my research. They expressed their interests to
participate in this dissertation research because they perceived me as one of them. Many
of them told me that it was good to vent their stress to another woman who shared the
“leftover” status. Moreover, some of these women showed a lot of empathy towards me
because they knew that female Ph.D. graduates were perceived as one of the most
14

undesirable categories of “leftover women.” Two of them sympathized with me because
they didn’t think that I would be able to find a job with a degree focusing on gender
studies and feminism. They told me that they were very happy to tell me about their lives
and help me with my dissertation. During my fieldwork in China, I immersed myself in
the social lives of the Chinese single women I interviewed. I joined them as they went
about their daily lives, for example, eating in restaurants, going shopping in malls,
visiting salons, hiking, and attending introduction meetings. One woman told me that all
her other girlfriends were married and that it was good to find someone to hang out with.
These shared activities helped me develop mutual trust and friendships with the Chinese
single women I interviewed.
Additionally, my identity as a Chinese woman had a positive impact on my
relationships with the Chinese single women. A Western white male ethnographer may
have found it difficult to recruit unmarried Chinese women for a research project because
his interactions with Chinese women pose symbolic threats to their sexual and moral
integrity in mainland China, as is the case for John Osburg (2013). In contrast, the
Chinese single women I interviewed didn’t have such a concern as I approached them
and tried to engage them in my dissertation research. Instead, many of the 32 Chinese
single women were eager to tell me about their perceptions and practices of femininity,
dating, marriage and family, as if they were sharing the most intimate aspects of their
lives with their girlfriends.
My experience of living a transnational life between China and the United States
enabled me to identify and empathize with Chinese women’s intercultural, interracial
15

relationships. This facilitated my interactions and communication with my interviewees.
When I first met Liqing, she told me about her cultural shocks as she was negotiating her
relationship with her American husband. She was feeling secluded and alienated when
she was staying in the United States. I shared with her my stories of personal struggles
between the two cultures. As an international student, I could also easily identify with
Yue, Ming and Tianlin, all of whom had been enrolled in American universities. We had
gone through a similar long process of taking TOEFL and GRE exams, applying for
American universities, navigating the American system of visa application, as well as
surviving in graduate schools. We shared common references as we discussed aspects of
the American culture, such as geography, food, brands, and stores. In a word, my own
transnational experience helped deconstruct the researcher-subject boundary between me
and the Chinese women who dated and/or married foreign men.
Moreover, during my ethnographic fieldwork in China, I also worked as a
linguistic intermediator for A Yu and A Zheng. Both of them were looking for foreign
men to date by using the marriage introduction agency and some English-language-based
online dating websites. But neither of them was able to speak English. I helped them
translate the profiles of potential foreign dates, the messages and emails they received
from foreign men, as well as their responses thereto. When an Australian man was calling
A Yu on the phone, I interpreted their conversation for them. By offering linguistic
assistance with their relationships, I was able to observe first-hand how A Yu and A
Zheng interacted with foreign men, as well as establish a rapport with them.
More importantly, I spent a considerable amount of time socializing with the 10
16

women who dated and/or married foreign men. For example, I frequently chatted with
most of these women on QQ or wechat, and kept myself updated on their lives over the
course of my dissertation research. I hung out with Liqing three nights a week for five
months in her condominium when my little nephew was taking the home-based English
class her husband offered. Sometimes, I met some of these women and their foreign
husbands over banquets in restaurants when the couples were visiting their families and
friends in China. Occasionally, I went shopping with two women who were living and
residing in the United States. I also celebrated a few different Chinese holidays with three
women in their homes in the United States. By engaging in these social activities, I was
able to establish and maintain friendly relationships with the research subjects.
Furthermore, my position as a graduate student helped me gain access to the
practical aspects of sex-money exchange in Chinese women’s intimate relationships with
married men. Throughout my dissertation research, all the 14 Chinese women who dated
married men were very vocal about their desires and needs to make money as well as
their flexible manipulation of sex and men. I believe that they had opened up to me since
I started to interact with them partly because they perceived me as an idealistic student
who didn’t know much about the valorization and worship of wealth that had swept
across mainland China in the last several decades. On a few occasions, Chen Yan, one
informant, and her mother were eager to teach me about the real, money-oriented world
outside the ivory tower of academia. Chen Yan offered to bring me along to the
nightclubs and bars she frequented with her girlfriends. Similarly, other Chinese women
who dated married men also tried to talk me out of what they perceived to be my
17

inflexible, impractical engagements with life by openly sharing their stories of how they
used sex to manipulate men for financial gains.

The Configurations of Class, Gender and Nation in post-Mao China
Since the implementation of the reform and open-up policies in the late 1970s,
China has undergone dramatic transformations in almost every arena of society. This
unsettled context has nourished the emergence and circulation of popular stories about
“leftover women,” “foreign f women,” and “second wives.” Therefore, an understanding
of this context is crucial to explore how gender and Chineseness are symbolically created
in conjunction to articulate experiences of social inequalities.
Class, Status and Consumption
The economic reform launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 initiated a transition
from a centrally planned economy to a market-driven one. This economic restructuring
has resulted in new class inequalities and stratification. The gap between rich and poor
has widened, both nationally and between and within rural and urban areas (Khan and
Riskin 1998; Khan and Riskin 2005; Li 2000; Xue and Zhong 2003).
The emergence of labor and capital markets after Deng’s South Tour in 1992 put
the urban economy under a market allocation of resources and the capitalist logic of
competition, although the state retained a monopoly over vital industries (Bian 2002).
This led to the end of the “iron rice bowl” (i.e. the state guaranteed assignment of
18

permanent employment), massive layoffs, and the creation of short-term contract workers
(Hanser 2005; Rofel 2007; Solinger 1999). The urban reform has brought about a
devolution of central power to local governmental officials and cadre-managers of state-
run enterprises (Rofel 2007), while state-sector workers have become decentered and
disempowered (Bian 2002). Private entrepreneurs have also risen as a business elite class,
but they are weak politically (Bian 2002). They often form close allies with political
elites (Wank 1999). Both the economic and political elites reap great profits from China’s
fast-growing economy (Goodman 1995).
Another aspect of the economic reform is the shift from state investments of
resources in heavy industry to a developmental focus on light and service industry
(Hanser 2008). As a result, retail venues and forms proliferate and diversify, giving rise
to a burgeoning consumer culture. Chinese cities are boasting giant shopping centers and
small-scale markets that are overflowing with domestic and international products and
services. With the aid of the mass media, the consumer culture in China is more about
creating than fulfilling an acute desire for modernity, urbanity, and cosmopolitanism,
because only a small portion of the population can afford global luxury goods and most
Chinese are on the market for essentials (Schein 1997a; Schein 2001). Conspicuous
consumption of expensive products and services has become an index of class
distinctions.
The recent intensification of social difference and hierarchy is justified through
what Lisa Rofel (1999) calls an “allegory of postsocialism,” a narrative that rejects the
Maoist past as impeding the development of human nature (i.e. gender) and deferring
19

China’s ability to achieve modernity. This narrative discursively defines things and
people associated with the Maoist era and the state-planned economy as out-of-step with
China’s rapid modernization. The temporality of modernity is projected and mapped on
newly marginalized social groups. The urban working-class (Hanser 2005), women
coming of age in the socialist revolution and the Cultural Revolution (Rofel 1999), rural
people (H. Yan 2003), and ethnic minorities (Schein 1997b), are all cast as mired in
backwardness.
Gender Relations
In reform-era China, gender stereotypes about differential intellectual abilities of
boys and girls have led to gender discrimination in school enrollment. There is a decline
in girls’ representation in formal school as the educational level goes up (Croll 1995;
Hooper 1984). In the early 1990s, women were 70 percent of all illiterates, one third of
vocational and technical students, one third of university undergraduates, and a quarter of
graduate students (Croll 1995). Yet there is contradictory evidence that during the 1980s
and 1990s, the percentage of female students in high schools and colleges rose in urban
areas (Tang and Parish 2000).
But women’s education does not necessarily translate into their occupational
opportunities, as employers openly discriminate against women in hiring on the ground
that women’s housework and child bearing interfere with their productivity (Croll 1995;
Honig and Hershatter 1988; Hooper 1984). Chinese women concentrate in low-paying
sectors of the economy that can be considered as an extension of domestic work (Bian,
20

Logan, and Shu 2000). Moreover, they face limited promotion, large-scale layoffs,
retirement at an earlier age, and gender disparities in urban waged work (Bauer et al.
1992; Bian et al. 2000; Maurer-Fazio, Rawski, and Zhang 1999). There is even a
tendency to push Chinese women back to the domestic domain.
Marital and familial relations have also reconfigured, with divergent effects on
Chinese women’s lives. There is a shift from the corporate family composed of self-
interested members sharing a common household economy to the private family based on
love, familial affection and joint decision-making (Y. Yan 2003). The decline of the
family patriarchal order allows individualistic pursuit of affection, intimacy, and sex,
which have become the focus of courtship. Today, young people have more autonomy in
mate choice, albeit not completely without parents’ involvement (Honig and Hershatter
1988; Y. Yan 2003). With the rise of conjugality, nuclear families become the dominant
urban family form (Whyte 1993). Chinese women, especially young women, have more
control over their own lives and family issues, and their husbands sometimes have to
compromise by sharing housework, especially when their wives earn an income and
contribute to the family finance (Choi and Peng 2016; Parish and Farrer 2000; Y. Yan
2003). Some upper-middle class Chinese women even engage in extramarital love affairs
(Erwin 1998).
On the other hand, jostling with Chinese women’s new autonomy on domestic
relations is the revival of the cultural and moral ideal of “virtuous wives and good
mothers” (Honig and Hershatter 1988). But this ideal has acquired new meanings. In her
ethnographic study of elite Shanghainese in the 1990s, Kathleen Erwin (1998) argues that
21

images “virtuous wives and good mothers” exist side by side with modern values and
practices. Women are expected to engage in romance, have a single-child family, and
enjoy a middle-class, consumer-oriented lifestyle associated with Hong Kong, Taiwan,
Japan and the West. In response to these normative ideals, elite Shanghainese women
reconstitute the Chinese family in modern and often transnational terms. For some of
them, the Confucian ideal of virtuous wives and good mothers means "access to a
domestic-centered social space, free of both overt parental control and state policies"
(Erwin 1998:59). Some women have extramarital affairs, but they reconcile this with the
"virtuous wife and good mother" ideal by asserting their dedication to their only child.
Erwin points out that modern motherhood has become an essential component of the
modern family and modern womanhood in China. For elite Shanghainese women, it
means spending "quality" time with their only child, attending to his or her psychological
needs, and showering him or her with consumer goods.
Besides changes in family structure and meanings, the reform era has ushered in a
new consideration of ideal marriage partners. Women from poorer inland provinces have
begun to marry out to coastal areas, while men from poor rural areas are willing to enter
uxorilocal marriage (Davin 1997). James Farrer (2002) notes that urban Shanghai women
in the 1990s are pressured to use marriage as a strategy of social mobility. Since women
have experienced a decline in job security under the reform, they stress the importance of
finding men who can provide them material security as well as romance and emotional
intimacy. For young men, they do not only feel the imperative of providing for the future
wife, but also understand that they need to learn how to express their feelings. Urban
22

women have begun to achieve social mobility through transnational marriage to
foreigners. Between 1982 and 1997, marriages between urban Chinese and foreigners
nearly tripled, with nearly all such marriages taking place between Chinese women and
foreign men (Brownell 2000). For urban Chinese women, overseas Chinese and foreign
men symbolizes modernity and wealth (Erwin 1998).
Moreover, a sexualized notion of femininity anchored on beauty and youth has
flourished in the cultural and social landscapes which were once dominated by the
gender-neutral ideal of female socialist revolutionary workers under Mao-led state
feminism (Yang 1999). Images of beautiful women adorned with trendy clothes and
luxurious accessories abound on billboards, magazine covers, and television screens
(Evans 2000). The prevalence of this new womanhood is shaped by and in turn contribute
to the consumer culture. With increased transnational flows of goods, images and ideas,
this womanhood has taken on a cosmopolitan look and taste.
Young generations of Chinese women growing up in the reform era have actively
participated in the globalized feminine consumption. Some of them purchase and
consume products and services to enact youthful and attractive appearance (Yang 1999).
Others use their consumer knowledge and skills to first locate and buy products from
Western countries, and then market and re-sell them to Chinese women in mainland
China (Zhang 2015). Such consumerist or prosumerist practices, infused with values of
respectability, independence, self-promotion, as well as class and transnational mobility,
have become a defining feature of Chinese women’s imagining and making of modernity.
Through identifying with this modern feminine womanhood and striving to approximate
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it, Chinese women transform themselves into both the object of a desirous masculinist
gaze and the desiring subject of global consumer citizen. Yet not all Chinese women are
equally objectified and subjectivized. Despite the omnipresence of its visual
representations, the feminization of Chinese female bodies mediated by the consumer
market is exclusionary, defining and limiting Chinese women’s access to it along the
lines of class, age, generation, nationality, as well as a rural-urban divide and inter-
regional differences. Such conspicuous feminized consumption has reified hierarchical
categorical differences among Chinese women, and has become a visible status symbol.
Chinese Nationalism and Gender
With the demise of Maoist revolutionary ideologies, a cultural and ideological gap
has become salient in contemporary China. Not only the Chinese Communist Party has
lost its legitimating power, but most Chinese face a “crisis of faith” in socialist ideology
(Unger 1996:xi). Nationalism remains or even (arguably) surges to fill this void and serve
as a unifying force and an anchorage around which Chinese political and intellectual
elites, and ordinary Chinese people enact their political visions, positions and identities.
Scholarship on Chinese nation in international relations, political sciences and
cultural studies has shed light upon the complexity and diversity of contemporary
Chinese nationalism that encompasses state-inculcated patriotism (Callahan 2010;
Hughes 2006), cultural narcissism and self-loathing (Barmé 1996), regionalism
(Friedman 1996), anti-imperial and anti-foreign resentment (Barmé 1996; Callahan 2010;
Friedman 2008; Gries 2004), national pride and national humiliation (Callahan 2010;
24

Gries 2004), traditionalism (Callahan 2015; Carrico 2016; Guo 2004), and Han ethnic
identification (Sautman 1997). Some scholars adopt a top-down approach to understand
concepts of Chinese nation as manipulative constructions of different Chinese state
regimes to legitimate their power and control people (Callahan 2015; Hughes 2006; Zhao
2004). Some look at how Chinese nationalism emerges as bottom-up movements and
sentiments (Brownell 2000; Gries 2004). There are still others who examine the
interactions between official nationalism and popular nationalism in China (Gries 2004).
Despite the vastly different approaches, all of them attend to the historical specificity of
narratives of Chinese nationhood.
Four theoretical contributions in the extant literature on nation in general and
Chinese nation in particular are of significant relevance to my dissertation. First, a nation
is not only a political entity, but also a symbolic boundary and an “imagined community”
(Anderson 1991). The symbol of nation is constructed, contested and transformed
through cultural representations that generate meanings of national identity (Hall 1996).
Narratives of nation are stories people tell about themselves, their positions within a
society, and their relations with the world (Brownell 2000; Gries 2004). I design my
dissertation within this conceptual paradigm and understand the storied nature of Chinese
people’s lives as they articulate and make sense of who they are in terms of gender and
Chineseness.
Secondly, emotions and sentiments play an important role in narratives about
nation. Through representational strategies, stories of nation “stand for, or represent, the
shared experiences, sorrows, and triumphs and disasters which give meaning to the
25

nation” (Hall 1996). As William Callahan (2010) demonstrates, the CCP-led patriotic
discourse builds upon, and strategically represents, existing strong Chinese public
feelings about an ancient imperial glory and a humiliated modern history. He (2010:19)
terms the double-sided emotions of national pride and national humiliation in Chinese
nationalism a “structure of feeling” that integrates state patriotic propaganda and popular
sentiments. In my research, narratives about the three groups of Chinese women are
teeming with largely denunciatory sentiments. Both national pride and national
humiliation structure how Chinese national identity is interpreted and envisioned.
Narratives about “leftover women,” “foreign f women,” and “second wives” define what
is inappropriate gender and sexual relationships that tarnish the Chinese civilization. In
doing so, they imagined, defined, defended and shored up traditional heterosexual
monogamy between Chinese men and Chinese women as the moral and normal form of
gender relations that will make China a great nation.
Thirdly, narratives of Chinese nation are both inward-looking and outward-
looking. Contemporary Chinese people’s ardent search for meanings of Chineseness take
place through self-reflexive criticisms of domestic problems that make China lesser than
great and civilized. Geremie Barmé (1996) observes that Chinese people have a tradition
of self-loathing and are the harshest critics of themselves. This tradition has its historical
and psychological roots in the deeply felt anxiety about cultural, military and economic
inferiority under colonial powers. The list of internal social problems Chinese people
complain about is “long and harrowing” (Barmé 1996:194). On the other hand, the
symbolic boundary of Chinese nation is constructed in contrast to other nations,
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especially the West. Peter Gries (2004:35) argues that Chinese national identity is formed
partly by alluding to the United States, and that the United States, which symbolizes the
West for China, has become China’s “alter ego.” There is an ambivalence towards the
relative symbolic relations between China and the United States. Sometimes, the latter is
imagined as what China should emulate. But at other times, the latter is represented as
evil, giving the former a superior moral status. This ambivalence resonates well with the
two-sided emotions of national pride and national humiliation.
My dissertation research documents these two orientations of Chinese people’s
search for meanings of Chineseness. Narratives about “leftover women” and “second
wives” are moral stories Chinese people narrate about what they perceive to be domestic
social problems that arise with the rapid social, economic and cultural changes in China.
Stories about “leftover women” imagine single Chinese women’s uncurbed ambitions for
intellectual accomplishments, career advancement, and quality men (youzhi nan), and
identify them as national problems that need to be redressed. Sometimes, these stories
assume that “leftover women” are sexually promiscuous, because their sexuality is yet to
be confined by the bounds of marriage. At other times, there are stories that assume that
“leftover women” are sexually inactive, and admonish them to seize their prime time to
get married and enjoy their sexual lives. In essence, both these stories conceptualize
monogamous heterosexual marriage as a symbol of Chinese morality and as an institution
that monitors, confines and teaches Chinese women about appropriate sexual
relationships. This concern about female sexuality and cultural morality is a repeated
theme in all the three narratives. Stories about “second wives” are explicitly critical of
27

Chinese women who they describe as selling sex to married men for financial gains.
Similarly, narratives about “foreign f women” imagine and denigrate these women’s
insatiable desires for sexual pleasure and migration. Ultimately, the popular concern
about a domestic moral decline is entangled in a larger uncertainty and anxiety about
liberal and individualistic values that rise with the market-oriented economic reforms.
I also observe that narratives about “foreign f women” clearly demarcate the
boundary between the Chinese nation and other nations through comparing masculinities.
Relying on real or imagined contrasts between a Chinese culture and Western cultures,
these totalizing, essentialist narratives delineate a hypersexualized American masculinity,
which is instinctive, biological, unruly, and uncivilized, and an obligatory Chinese
masculinity, which is sexually restrained, and focuses on social and familial
responsibilities, and economic accomplishments. Narratives about “foreign f women”
elevate the moral status of Chinese men by bestializing non-Chinese men, especially
those from Western countries. But in the meantime, underneath the surface of the cultural
pride is a deeply felt anxiety about the perceived sexual impotency of Chinese men in
comparative discussions of penis size in these narratives. Western (white) men embody
“the hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 1987) and serve as an ideal against which
subaltern Chinese men enact and evaluate their masculine identity.
Fourth, while most writings on Chinese nationalism do not attend to the semiotics
of Chineseness in respect to other identities, a few scholars have written about the
gendered nature of Chinese nationalism (Carrico 2016; Duara 1996; Gries 2004). Chinese
women figure prominently in representations of Chinese nation. Prasenjit Duara
28

(1996:46) points out that historical narratives of Chinese nation use the family as a master
metaphor for the nation and this symbolic appropriation enables different representational
strategies for incorporating Chinese women into nationalist discourses. While the purity
of Chinese women stands for the purity of the nation, their bodies raped by foreigners
symbolize the invasion of the nation by these foreigners (Duara1996:47). By contrast,
narratives of Chinese nation define Chinese men as the subjects who are responsible to
“fight over territory, possession and the right to dominate” (Duara 1996:47), as well as to
protect their women from being violated or killed and, through symbolic association,
defend the integrity of the national boundary. When China as a nation loses face on the
global stage, Chinese men feel a loss of status. To gain face for China as a nation is to
gain face for Chinese men (Gries 2004).
Recent feminist research on China has greatly expanded our understanding of
gender as both structuring and being structured by narratives of Chinese nation (Barlow
1994; Brownell 1998-99; Brownell 2000; Hershatter 1997; Rofel 1999). Echoing Duara
(1996), Susan Brownell (2000) makes a compelling case that throughout Chinese history,
national masculine subject positions are formed through and in contrast to the subjection
of Chinese women. She demonstrates that Chinese nationalist ideologies rely heavily on
the image of suffering Chinese women, but they are really about the impotency of
Chinese men who fail to undo social injustices done to them through their women.
Another insightful writing that inspires my work is Gail Hershatter’s (1997)
historiography of cultural representations of prostitutes in Shanghai from the late 19th
century to the late 20th century. She argues that shifts in categories of Chinese female
29

prostitutes tell us about Chinese men’s interpretations of their own positionings in society
as well as their visions of what this world should be like at different historical times in
China. Tani Barlow (1994) offers a genealogy of categories of Chinese womanhood as
they emerged and transformed with respect to changing regimes of kinship and state.
Another brilliant work on gender and Chineseness is Lisa Rofel’s (1999) ethnography of
how notions of femininity which emerged in relation to concepts of Chinesenes and
modernity under different state regimes shaped the understandings of Chinese women
from three generations of womanhood, marriage, family and work. These feminist
writings have shone much-needed light upon the cultural constructions of gender and
Chineseness.
Yet the existing feminist works remain limited in quantity and marginal to the
scholarship of Chinese nationalism. Additionally, given the widening gap in
socioeconomic indexes among Chinese people in post-Maoist China, it is important to
assess how class inequalities inflect the intertwined symbolic constitutions of gender and
nation. As I have observed, narratives about “leftover women,” and “second wives”
reveal strong public resentments against the newly rich and political-business alliances.
These class-based stories denigrate those who benefit from the economic reforms as
greedy, corrupt, and sexually promiscuous, all characteristics that tarnish the glory of
Chinese long civilization and undermine the officially announced peaceful rise of China
in the global political economy. They are contemporary Chinese “sour grape” stories.
While they give a moral status to Chinese men who have little access to the distribution
structure of the reformist state and market economy, they locate the source of class
30

inequalities in the moral inferiority of the Chinese economic and political elites,
therefore, hindering an effective political account of power relations.
Moreover, since most of the existing feminist writings on this topic rely solely on
texts as units of analysis to understand the hegemonic constructions of gender and nation,
it is difficult to gauge how these dominant discourses really impact Chinese women’s
lives and identities. This difficulty is partly due to a lack of articulations of Chinese
identities from the perspectives of Chinese women who are represented as national
symbols, but rarely speak or write about and for themselves. These neglected narrations
on Chinese women’s own terms can tell us how they comply with, resist, negotiate, or co-
opt the hegemony of femininity and Chineseness, furthering our understandings of the
formations of subaltern gendered Chinese identities. Further, there are few ethnographic
accounts of how narratives of gender and nation frame social interactions, leaving
unanswered questions of whether and how Chinese women actively participate in the
making of gender and Chineseness in their everyday lives. I find that Ortner’s (1996)
theory of making gender is especially useful to address this theoretical and
methodological lacuna. She proposes a practice theory that studies the two intertwined
processes of how discursive structures create subjects and how subjects in turn (re)make
the world they live in. She conceptualizes agency as structurally embedded and structure
as intention-full, and emphasizes the disjunctions in structure and creativity of women.
Within this theoretical paradigm, my dissertation relies on a discourse analysis of popular
narratives about “leftover women,” “foreign f women,” and “second wives” to parse out
the interconnected symbolic constructions of gender and Chineseness, as well as in-depth
31

interviews and ethnographies to explore Chinese women’s agentic roles in narrating and
negotiating meanings of gender and Chinese nation.

Towards a Practice Theory of Gender, Family, and Chinese Nation
Building on the strengths of these above-mentioned writings, I argue in Chapter 2
that popular narratives about the three groups of deviant Chinese women are enmeshed
with larger masculinist nationalist anxieties about increased class inequalities, a cultural
valorization of money and status and a frenzy of pursuing them, as well as racism and
Western cultural imperialism. These multi-levels of local and global social problems
identified in the popular stories about the three types of “deviant” Chinese women not
only deprive many Chinese men of access to money, sex and marriage, but also make
China lose “face” in front of global audiences, all undermining Chinese men’s self-
esteem. The figures of “leftover women,” “foreign f women,” and “second wives”
symbolize these social, economic and cultural challenges that have eroded some Chinese
men’s power and authority. Chinese men understand such challenges as social and moral
decadence. Through narrating stories about the three types of “deviant” Chinese women,
they righteously interpret and reflect how sweeping economic reforms and grand open-up
policies have reconfigured domestic social relations of class and gender, as well as
relations between China and other nations, all of which significantly inflect meanings of
Chineseness.
The figures of “leftover women,” “foreign f women,” and “second wives” also
32

embody liberated and sexualized femininities over which many Chinese men lose control.
While the representational focus is on Chinese women, these stories are about subaltern
Chinese men’s feelings of subordination and emasculation in response to the rise of
femininities that are not anchored or confined by marriage. By creating and deploying
stigmatized categories for these Chinese women, Chinese men deflect the pains from
deep cuts into their masculine selves, establish symbolic dominance over Chinese
women, and regain some of their lost self-esteem. After all, as the popular stories go,
Chinese women are at fault for social and moral declines. Through invoking a sense of
shame and abnormality in “deviant” Chinese women, popular narratives seek to re-orient
and discipline Chinese women into traditional roles of wives and mothers, and preserve
the normative boundary of traditional marriage that authorizes Chinese men’s domination
over Chinese women. Official explicit or implicit endorsements of these narratives and
categories show that the state has a stake in upholding the institutional and symbolic
organization of marriage and family as well as the appropriate gender and sexual order to
alleviate a masculine crisis and maintain social stability.
The stigmatizing narratives of “leftover women,” “foreign f women,” and “second
wives” have imposed themselves upon the lives of these Chinese women in various ways,
as my interview and ethnographic data reveal. They frame how Chinese people perceive
and talk about these women. At the beginning of my fieldwork, as I sought assistance
from my relatives and friends in identifying single Chinese women at and above 25 years
old, some people asked me why I would study these women. They told me that “leftover
women” were weird (guai), that something must be wrong with them, and that they must
33

not be approachable because of their bad personality. Similarly, when I asked to be
introduced to Chinese women who ever dated non-Chinese men, the owner of the
marriage introduction agency said they were bad. After my probing into what he meant,
he described Chinese women dating foreigners as barely-clad and revealing. When some
friends knew that I was looking for “second wives” for this research, they expressed
concerns that it would be difficult to recruit them for interviews, because what they did
was bad and they would keep their stories underground and would not be willing to share
them.
Moreover, the discursively structured assumptions about the three types of
“deviant” Chinese women shape people’s social interactions with them. During my
research at the marriage introduction agency, people working there used the narratives
about “leftover women” as old and undesirable to persuade single Chinese women into
meeting men who did not match what these women looked for. The match makers at the
agency also utilized the image of “foreign f women” as sexually desiring and desirous to
create representations of Chinese women for the gaze of Western men. For instance,
when they were introduced to Western men for the first time, the match makers of the
agency advised them to dress up in body-hugging clothes and reveal their body contours,
and explained that foreign men liked sexy women. Similarly, the stereotype of “second
wife” relationships as commercial in nature enabled the match makers at the agency to
play a role in negotiating the terms of sex and money exchange between Chinese women
and married men.
The three groups of Chinese women variously respond to their subjection. While
34

single Chinese women over 25 feel external pressures to marry and get themselves out of
the stigmatized “leftover” status, all of them in my study aspire to marriage and envision
that they will become mothers and have their own families one day. Born between the
early 1970s and the late 1980s, single Chinese women in my study live through a
multiplicity of gender regimes that have created contradictory norms of Chinese
femininities. On the one hand, the one-child family policies, a competitive educational
culture, the rise of the market-oriented economy, as well as the lingering Maoist gender-
neutral language combine to compel young Chinese girls to focus exclusively on
intellectual achievements. Under high expectations to do well at school, young Chinese
girls are discouraged from paying attention to femininities. On the other hand, after
graduating from high schools or entering colleges, many of the single women in my study
experienced a sudden change from an androgynous upbringing to a feminizing culture
where they had to learn to adorn their bodies and interact with boys to prepare themselves
for a sexualized, feminized dating market. This passage from girlhood to womanhood,
characterized by what I call a fault line of gender socialization, is further complicated by
an increasingly competitive job market that requires Chinese women transform
themselves into productive workers by committing long hours and/or constantly update
their skills and knowledge. Single Chinese women draw upon these multiple gender
expectations to create narratives about their dating, marriage and singlehood. To achieve
their marriage aspirations, they engage in “self-love” acts through diligent work for
economic security and consumption of middle-class or upper middle-class lifestyles to
make themselves more desirable. Chapter 3 documents the complicated social and
35

cultural contradictions “leftover women” live through that lead to their protracted
singlehood as well as their agentic practices in producing themselves as loveable and
achieving their marriage ideals.
Unlike the popular narratives on “foreign f women” as avaricious for sex or
tickets to migration, Chinese women in my study offer highly differentiated accounts of
their decisions to date foreign men. Their desires for foreign men include, but are not
limited to, masculine bodies, liberal modern values of gender egalitarianism,
unavailability of Chinese men, disappointment with Chinese men, and opportunities for
their children to have access to other countries. Almost all Chinese women who fell in
this category in my study intentionally sought to date foreign men, variously through
internet chats, personal networks, and/or dating agencies. To a varying degree, these
women participated in the process of racialization, feminization and acculturation to
become attractive to foreign men. The creation of racialized and feminized bodies
sometimes was done through the eyes of professional match makers at the agency. While
some of them focused on producing attraction, most of them incorporated the Chinese
ideal of “virtuous wives and good mothers” into their relationships with foreign men.
Although Chinese women who desire foreign men express their outrage at the
stigmatizing narratives about “foreign f women,” they believe that such stories are
discursively constructed out of Chinese men’s anxiety about losing Chinese women to
foreign men and jealousy over Chinese women’s attractiveness to first-world (white)
men. These Chinese women’s desires for foreign men and their efforts to win acceptance
and love from them are embedded in China’s ambitious endeavor to gain recognition and
36

status in the global arena. Chapter 4 explores Chinese women’s structurally embedded
desires for global love and their roles in making their own desirability. But they produce
racialized femininities to attract and please foreign men, especially those from first-world
countries, therefore, reinforcing the symbolic high status of first-world nations and men.
Chapter 5 turns to Chinese women who became involved with married men on a
long-term basis. While they were keenly aware of the social stigma of “second wives,”
these women in my study all boldly laughed it off. Instead of understanding their sex-
money exchange with married men as shameful, they took great pride in their flexible
manipulation of their bodies and men that enabled them to accumulate financial resources
and acquire social status through conspicuous consumption of luxury products. These
women entered sexual engagements with married men for various reasons. They
developed practical, money-oriented worldviews as they negotiated the gendered
organization of marriage, family and heterosexuality. Early state developmental
discourses of getting rich first and their experiences with the stratified labor market also
mobilized them to perceive and practice sexual engagements with rich married men as a
viable economic strategy to accumulate financial resources which they in turn invested in
real estate property and/or small businesses. For many of them, making money,
contributing to the family finance and providing access to consumer goods became
central to the meanings of filial piety and good motherhood. Their successful negotiations
with married men relied heavily upon investments in their bodies. Through following
rigid cosmetic, dietary, and sex regimen to maintain a healthy, young-looking, and
sexually attractive body, “second wives” reached good deals with married men who were
37

usually business men and governmental officials. Unlike the popular narratives about
their relationships with married men as merely commercial and pragmatic, their stories
reveal a lot of emotional work they did to maintain intimate connections with married
men. For many of them, traditional marriage is only perfunctory, and married men are
emotionally detached from their wives, but close to them. All “second wives” in my
study found married men and struck deals through middlemen at some point. My
ethnography shows that the marriage introduction agency negotiated agreements between
“second wives” and married men. Yet despite their barefaced denunciation of traditional
marriage, most “second wives” identified themselves as good mothers, or longed to be
good mothers. Nonetheless, they rework the meanings of motherhood, as a few of them
entered relationships with married men by agreeing to bear children for compensation.
Chapter 5 documents the rise of neoliberal market ideology that enabled Chinese women
to opt into relationships with married men and transform themselves into commodity for
masculine consumption.
Last but not least, although I am critical of the stigmatizing popular narrations that
create and deploy categories of “deviant” Chinese women, I conceptualize nationalist
sentiments articulated therein as masculinist responses to relations of social inequalities
that pervade the lives of Chinese people. The making and reinforcement of the symbolic
boundary of Chineseness is a status strategy to cope with US-dominated Western cultural
imperialism that demonizes the rise of China in the global economy (Chow 1998).
Through subjecting Chinese women to the moral discourses of family and marriage,
subaltern Chinese men articulate how they feel about the multiple interlocking structures
38

of class, gender and nation. The even more subordinated Chinese women speak back by
creatively appropriating a variety of cultural and social resources to enact their own
narratives and strategize dating and marriage.

39

CHAPTER 2
CUTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF “DEVIANT” CHINESE WOMEN:
HOW SOME CHINESE PEOPLE MAKE SENSE OF A MODERNIZING AND
GLOBALIZING CHINA

In mapping a semiotic change of the gendered body with respect to the Chinese
nation from images of sportwomen in the 1980s to representations of fashion models in
the 1990s, Susan Brownell (1998-99) points to the emergence of assertive female
sexuality in China and suggests that Chinese men are now ready to respond with an
aggressive male sexuality. This chapter builds on this work and suggests that Chinese
men cope with the rise of assertive femininities by criticizing, stigmatizing and
disciplining Chinese women whose dating and sexual practices violate normative
gender/sex codes. These masculinist criticisms are entangled in broader nationalist
concerns about what gender and sexual relationships are appropriate for China as it
further integrates into the global capitalist system. They tell us how Chinese people
(especially men) feel about China’s grand social, cultural and political transformations as
well as how they make sense of their own positions in these processes.

The Emergence and Circulation of Popular Narratives about “Deviant” Chinese
Women
During my fieldwork in coastal Southeast China in 2012, I observed self-critical
nationalist sentiments across a wide range of social interactions. From highly obligated
social banquets to daily visits between friends and relatives to random social encounters,
40

I saw Chinese people, but especially urban working-class men, talking pessimistically
about social problems that they perceived to be endemic to present-day China. Among
the social ills were Chinese women who did not conform to the traditional norms of
compulsory marriage and family. Three categories of Chinese women figured
prominently in popular critical reflections.
First, this includes Chinese women who have never married by the age of 25.
They have been widely stigmatized as “leftover women” (shengnü ) in official and
popular media, the internet, and in the public speech of officials and scholars, as well as
in everyday conversations across China. Narratives about “leftover women” also circulate
among overseas Chinese communities in the United States and frame the ways how
single Chinese women are perceived and talked about there. These stories define the
marriage postponement of an increasing number of urban Chinese women as a nation-
wide social problem that must be addressed.
Secondly, another group of Chinese women who have provoked strong popular
castigation inside and outside China are Chinese women who have dated non-Chinese
men. Popular stories about them have emerged in mainland China, and coined the term
“foreign married women” (wai jia nü ) to signify them. Derogatory narratives about these
women circulate among overseas Chinese in the United States and culminate in the
stigmatization of these Chinese women as “foreign f women” (wai f nü ).
There are still another group of Chinese women who engage in long-term
relations with married men, and have been publicly called “second wives” (ernai).
41

Representations of these Chinese women as pragmatic and greedy for money and of their
relationships with married men as sex-money exchange in nature abound on television
screens, the internet, and magazine and newspaper pages as well as in people’s gossips.
Most popular stories about “second wives” contain sarcastic or explicit castigation of
corrupt business and political elites who have resources to be involved with more than
one women. In these stories, “second wives” are both the object of elite Chinese men’s
sexual desires and the modern desiring subject whose aspirations and practices are
troubling to Chinese society.
While the specific contents of popular stories about “leftover women,” “foreign f
women,” and “second wives” vary, there are a few themes that converge. First, these
stories are articulated from masculinist standpoints that define and construct the three
categories of Chinese women as the morally inferior other. Secondly, Chinese women’s
active and assertive desires of various kinds that are not confined, defined and anchored
by the cultural hegemony of appropriate marriage are at the center of popular criticisms.
Thirdly, like public criticisms of other domestic social problems, popular stories about
the three categories of Chinese women invoke strong negative sentiments to shame these
women as a normalizing technique.
In the following, I provide an overview of the literature on masculinity, modernity
and class in recent Chinese history. Based on my reading of popular narratives about
“leftover women,” “foreign f women,” and “second wives,” I analyze how these
representations of “deviant” are enmeshed with larger concerns about China’s dramatic
social transformations. I conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of the current state
42

discourse on “harmonious family and harmonious society” and the symbolic construction
of gender and Chinese nation.

Chinese Masculinity, Modernity, and Class
Masculinity is a relational concept. Masculine identity is established not only
through a process of constructing feminine identity into an inferior complementary
opposite, but also through a process of making differentiation among men. Historically in
China, these two processes were accomplished with respect to the patriarchal family
system and social (masculinist) imaginings of the Chinese nation.
In imperial China, Chinese men’s power and authority were largely derived from
and embedded in the patrilineal and patrilocal family structure that defined Chinese
womanhood in the roles of daughters, mothers and wives. This family system was based
on a moral discourse of responsibilities to the patrilineal ancestors and kin, and therefore
prioritized the father-son relationship over the conjugal couples. The eldest men had
enormous power over family decision making and the distribution of family resources,
and expected respect and filial piety from other family members. Chinese women were
subordinate and marginal to the patrilineal family structure. Their lives were governed by
the Confucian rules of “three obediences” that prescribed their submission to their
fathers, husbands and sons when widowed. After Chinese women got married, they
moved to live with their husbands’ families. The patrilocal residency transferred Chinese
women’s productive and reproductive value from their natal families to their husbands’
43

families, therefore explaining the preference for sons over daughters. In this family
system, Chinese women were objectified as a property exchanged between two families
to cement and strengthen their alliance. The hegemonic Chinese manhood rested on
men’s fulfillment of their responsibilities for the patrilineal families in the roles of fathers
and sons, and on their control and management of family resources and their women.
One way to fulfill their responsibilities to the patrilineage was bringing honor and
status to the family by mastering Chinese classics, excelling in the national civil service
exam, and being promoted into the scholar-gentry class. This imperial exam system
institutionalized classics-learning and created a highly bureaucratic structure. The
entrance and success in this exam system depended on a classical education which
required “leisure and wealth” (Stacey 1983:17). It also forbade women to participate and
denied them access to official positions in the imperial courts. This exam culture and its
resulting scholar-official class gave meaning to hegemonic Chinese masculinity that was
characterized by a primacy of cultural and artistic refinement (wen) over physical
prowess (wu) (Louie 2002).
In the late nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century,
Chinese intellectual men challenged the traditional Chinese family structure in the May
Fourth/New Cultural Movement. At that time, the last Chinese Dynasty of Qing fell, the
civil service exam was eliminated, and Western countries and Japan invaded China via
treaty ports, turning China into a semi-colonial society. Subordinated intellectual men
who felt emasculated and feminized by Western and Japanese imperialism attributed the
weakness of China as a nation to the oppression of Chinese women in the Confucianism-
44

influenced family system. One of their focal strategies to modernize and strengthen China
as a nation and restore collective esteem to Chinese men was the liberation of Chinese
women from the patriarchal Confucian family structure. Their appropriation of the
empowerment of Chinese women as a symbol of the strength of China as a nation
pioneered the subsequent formulation of elevating Chinese women’s status in
revolutionary ideologies and policies of modern nation-state building from both the
Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Party (Hershatter 2007). Nationalist
ideologies envisioned Chinese women’s liberation as a means to national liberation.
The Chinese Communist Party drew upon Marxist theories and equated Chinese
women’s liberation with women’s economic empowerment and participation in public
roles. Between the early 1940s and the late 1970s, the Maoist state adopted a top-down
approach to mobilize and engage Chinese women in socialist production and nation-
building. This mobilization strategy took for granted the superiority of masculinity and
used it as a standard to which Chinese women were encouraged to match up. During the
Maoist period, Chinese women and men wore essentially the same clothes (Yang 1999).
Cultural representations of Chinese women featured them as strong socialist workers who
engaged in difficult physical labor such as oil drilling, construction, coal mining and
driving a tractor. The masculinization of Chinese women reached its height during the
Cultural Revolution (1966-76) when young Chinese girls in middle schools participated
in violent beating of teachers (Honig 2002). Witnesses of such female violence felt
compelled to explain it as a rebellion against gender norms about female behavior (Honig
2002). Chinese men felt uneasy about female violence and sought to contain it (Brownell
45

2000). In post-Mao retrospective accounts, Chinese men felt emasculated by the Maoist
socialist state (Brownell 2000). The cultural valorization of strong Chinese women
continued well into the 1980s when the Chinese national female volleyball team won
international championships and were praised for their self-sacrificing and eating
“bitterness” to bring honor to the nation (Brownell 1998-99; Brownell 2000). The
representation of strong Chinese women was a state strategy to shore up the weakness of
dominated Chinese men in its struggle to dominate competing regimes of power (Yue
1993).
However, when the patriarchal family structure was necessary for the
revolutionary and socialist nation-state construction, the party-state postponed the
liberation of Chinese women and conceded to Chinese men’s desires for power and
authority. For instance, from the 1920s to the 1950s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
carried out a series of radical land revolutions and new family reforms in their rural base
areas to redistribute land, houses, wealth and Chinese women from traditional village
elites to peasants and therefore equalized access to the foundation of patriarchal authority
in the family (Stacey 1983). Instead of restoring the old Confucian peasant family
economy, the CCP created a new democratic patriarchy as revolutionary and communist
strategies to mobilize and ally with the vast majority of Chinese peasants who had been
deprived of land and wives at that time (Stacey 1983). The establishment of this new
democratic patriarchy was a product of the CCP’s conscious concessions to the
“patriarchal sentiment” of Chinese male peasants (Stacey 1983:156).
46

Since the 1990s, the state-initiated market-oriented economy has intensified
gender differences and the old official discourse of strong women has lost its grip on the
popular nationalist ethos. Due to new economic opportunities and the withdrawal of the
socialist state from people’s private lives, Chinese masculinity has regained some
potency. Business elite men became the model of heroic masculinity. They obtain social
respect and honor not only by accumulating wealth, but also by displaying it through
conspicuous consumption (Hinsch 2013). Their economic resources enable them to
engage with mistresses to enact sexual virility and win face for themselves. The
performance of masculinity through the consumption of sexual services of female
hostesses has become a strategy Chinese business men and local governmental officials
use to develop trust and alliance among themselves (Zheng 2006). Chinese men’s
economic triumphs on the international arena elevate the status of the Chinese nation and
alleviate the collective feeling of national humiliation since the Opium War (1939-1942)
(Hinsch 2013). Popular dramas have fantasized Chinese business men getting involved in
relationships with foreign women as an act of nationalist pride and duty (Barmé 1996) or
as a way to assimilate foreign cultures and affirm global respect and love for Chinese
culture (Erwin 1998). Corresponding to the hegemony of moneyed and sexualized
masculinity is a complementary concept of femininity anchored on women’s domesticity,
youth and beauty.
Nonetheless, this entrepreneurial masculinity premised on economic resources is
an idealized subject position the vast majority of Chinese men are unable to occupy.
Since the mid-1990s, male violence and protests have increased among urban working-
47

class Chinese men in their angry resistance against the economic restructuring that
dismantled the socialist permanent employment (“iron rice bowl”) and created massive
layoffs (Yang 2010). The urban economic reform marginalizes urban working-class men
who were celebrated as subjects of socialist construction in the Maoist era, and as a
result, eroded their patriarchal power as the breadwinner for their families. In their
negotiations over labor disputes, both state enterprises and unemployed men address the
issue of unemployment in terms of gender and family (Yang 2010).
Like urban working-class men, rural Chinese men who migrate to work in cities
also experience challenges to their manhood, as they navigate discriminatory and
marginalizing urban environments. While migration opens up opportunities for them to
explore and experience romance and love, rural-to-urban migrant men find out that, with
their meager earnings, they cannot satisfy their girlfriends’ materialistic aspirations for
modern consumption or compete with other men in the dating game (Choi and Peng
2016). The migratory nature of their jobs also factors in to make their love relationships
short-lived. Torn between modern values of love and sex, and traditional filial obligations
for their patrilineage, some rural Chinese migrant workers make concessions to their
parents’ selection of a local rural girl as a marriage partner for them (Choi and Peng
2016). Keenly aware of their inability to achieve the ideals of moneyed masculinity and
professional masculinity, some rural migrant male workers play an active role in sharing
the housework with their wives, and enact respectable manhood that emphasizes men’s
dedication to and care for the family (Choi and Peng 2016). This family-oriented
manhood makes rural migrant workers morally superior and distinguishes them from
48

business men who use their wealth to engage with mistresses and ruin their marriage and
families.
Moreover, due to the highly skewed sex ratio at birth in mainland China during
the past few decades, many Chinese men, especially peasants from poor and remote
areas, have been squeezed out of the domestic marriage market and become involuntary
“bare sticks” (guanggun) (Greenhalgh 2012). Since the implementation of the one-child
family planning policy in the late 1970s, the sex ratio at birth has risen from 108.5 boys
per 100 girls in 1982 to 118 in 2011 (Greenhalgh 2012). The persistent cultural parental
preference for sons over daughters may also partly explain this gender imbalance at birth
in the Chinese population (Greenhalgh 2012; Loh and Remick 2015). It has been
estimated that for the cohort born between 1980 and 2000, and expected to marry
between 2005 and 2025, there will be 10.4 percent of Chinese men who won’t be able to
get married in a conventional way (Greenhalgh 2012). Ethnographic research and media
reports have documented that poor Chinese single men from China’s border areas of the
northeast and the southwest deal with the local bride shortage by importing and marrying
women from North Korea, Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Mongolia
(Greenhalgh 2012).
To sum up, historically, Chinese masculinity and femininity are formed in relation
to each other and their construction is embedded in the family system and nationalist
projects. In contemporary China, the hegemony of Chinese masculinity, increasingly tied
to possession of wealth, modern consumption and sexual potency, is becoming more
assertive. It creates and deploys desires in Chinese men to approximate it by controlling
49

and othering Chinese femininity. Nonetheless, widening socioeconomic gaps among
Chinese men render urban working-class Chinese men and rural male migrant workers
peripheral to this hegemonic ideal of manhood. The highly skewed sex ratio at birth in
recent years also squeezes many poor Chinese men from the domestic marriage market.
These involuntary bachelors are unable to achieve manhood anchored in domestic roles
as husbands and fathers. Subordinate Chinese men cope with their masculine anxieties
through waging public protests or constructing alternative manhood. It is out of these
masculinist desires and anxieties that popular narratives about “leftover women,”
“foreign f women,” and “second wives” have emerged.

“Deviant” Chinese Femininities as National Problems
“Leftover Women”: Accomplished Aging Women as Undesirable on the Domestic
Marriage Market
At the beginning of the new millennium, the sex ratio between men and women is
highly unbalanced in China. For people who are born between 1980 and 2000 and
expected to get married between 2005 and 2025, there is an excess of 22 million men
(Greenhalgh 2012). People might think that given their scarcity, Chinese women are in
high demand on the marriage market. Yet surprisingly, there are wide-spread concerns
about single Chinese women in their late 20s and beyond. Social news in newspapers and
on websites, popular television dramas, women’s magazines and cyber public forums
frequently discuss the protracted singlehood of Chinese women as a social problem that
50

needs to be addressed. News articles often alert the public to the urgency of this problem
by citing the big numbers of “leftover women” in China’s megacities. It has been
reported that there were over 0.5 million of “leftover women” in Beijing in 2009,
1
at least
0.3 million of “leftover women” in Nanjing in 2014,
2
and 0.6 million of “leftover
women” in Guangzhou in 2012.
3

Stories about “leftover women” depict them as high-achieving urban women with
distinguished educational records, high income and high-status jobs. Unlike the
representations of strong women in the Maoist era that praised their contributions to the
nation, stories about “leftover women” use their accomplishments to explain why they
are unable to find husbands. For example, one news article narrates the stories of the
daughter from a Wang family in Nanjing.
4
As the only child in her family, Ms. Wang was
taught to study hard and forbidden to engage in love relationships. As a result of her
parents’ strict teaching, Ms. Wang focused on her school performance and seldom talked
to boys. After she graduated from high school, she was accepted into an engineering

1
“Diaocha cheng Zhongguo 1.8 yiren danshen Beijing ‘shengnü’ chao 50 wan.” Zhongguo jingji
zhoukan. February 15, 2011. Retrieved on August 11, 2016
(http://news.163.com/11/0215/01/6ST7SD0V00011229.html).
2
“Nanjing ‘shengn’ you 30 wan zhang zhangmuniang zuiai keyansuo ligongnan.” Jinling
wanbao. December 2, 2012. Retrieved on August 9, 2016 (http://www.js.xinhuanet.com/2014-
12/02/c_1113481985.htm).
3
“Tongjicheng guangdong daling ‘shengnü’ chao 200 wan qizhong guangzhou 60 wan.” June 25,
2012. Retrieved on August 11, 2016 (http://news.qq.com/a/20120625/000057.htm).
4
“Nanjing ‘chengshi shengnü‘ xianxiang riyi yanzhong jishengwei zhunbei ganyu.” Jinling
wanbao. December 2, 2008. Retrieved on August 10, 2016
(http://news.sohu.com/20081202/n260972304.shtml).
51

program in a key university in the City of Nanjing. Despite her popularity in a boy-
dominated university, she refused to get involved with anyone. By the age of 24, Ms.
Wang secured a job at a governmental institution. Her mother believed that her excellent
daughter would be able to find a good husband. Both Ms. Wang and her mother were
picky and always found something undesirable in potential marriage partners. By the age
of 29, Ms. Wang still did not have a boyfriend. This news article continued to cite a
professional marriage introduction agent as saying that it was difficult for excellent urban
girls to get married, because they would like to find urban boyfriends of a similar age
who had greater accomplishments than themselves, while men preferred to find younger
girlfriends. The story concluded by citing an official from the local family planning
bureau. He believed that excellent urban girls’ accomplishments and standards for
marriage partners awed and scared away excellent urban boys who would rather choose
girlfriends with lesser accomplishments. He advised single women to change their dating
attitudes and look for husbands from working-class backgrounds.
Feature articles in popular women’s magazines tell stories about single Chinese
female Ph.D. holders and single national athletes who have won championships
internationally. In one story, a 32-year-old woman named Du Mingyue obtained her
doctorate degree in English and was teaching at a university in Chengdu, Sichuan.
5
The
story focuses on her dilemma between aspiring for true love and fulfilling her filial
obligation to get married. At the beginning of the narrative, Dr. Du carefully sifted

5
Yezhiliao. 2010. “Gaozhi ‘shengn’ baoguang xiangqin riji: 62 ge nanren PK xun zhenai.” Jiating
5 (299):8-10.
52

through potential boyfriends and always found fault with them. After her mother was
diagnosed of cancer and urged her to get married, she was determined to find someone
and make her mother’s last wish come true. She started a public blog to market herself,
dated men who contacted her, posted her dating experiences, and used web users’
opinions to sift her dates. In the process, she turned down a few men including a
charming television host, a securities analyst, and a jeweler who presented her trendy
clothes from Paris and a diamond ring as gifts at their first meeting. Finally, Dr. Du chose
to be with an earthquake relief volunteer who limped slightly because of an ankle injury
during the rescue of earthquake survivors. He impressed her by taking good care of her
bed-ridden mother while she was away. The mother gestured her approval of him as son-
in-law before she passed away. This feature article changes its overtone from sarcastic
disapproval of Dr. Du’s ambitions for quality men in the beginning to enthusiastic praise
of her filial act and her choice of true love over wealth in the end. The messages are
clear: “leftover women” should prioritize their filial obligations to get married over their
individualistic aspirations for romance, and they should choose morally superior men
who care about other people and the greater good of society, regardless of their economic
resources. In contrast to representations of strong women in the Maoist era that
highlighted their socialist productive work identity, popular narratives about “leftover
women” obliterate the hard work they invest in education and professional development.
Instead, they foreground filial and feminine virtues aging single Chinese women are
expected to identify with.
53

Besides effacing single Chinese women’s time and efforts to establish themselves
intellectually and professionally, popular narratives about “leftover women” tend to
essentialize and pathologize their emotional and mental state. On the popular Chinese
cyber forum tianya, one posting under the category of “unmarried at 30,” an author lists
12 personality defects in “leftover women.”
6
These defects are over-dependence on
parents, mistrust of men, excessive shyness, childishness, perfectionism, narrow-
mindedness, stubbornness, dominance, lack of a sense of domestic responsibilities and
feminine virtues, selfishness, shrewdness, and paranoia. The popular perception about the
bad personality of “leftover women” has been projected onto single female politicians to
justify their disqualification for their jobs. After the first female president of Taiwan, Cai
Yingwen, was elected in 2016, International Pioneer Guide (guoji xianqu daobao) under
the purview of the Party-led Xinhua news agency published an article by Wang Weixing,
a Taiwan specialist and the director of the research institute at the People’s Liberation
Army’s Academy of Military Sciences.
7
In this article, Wang criticizes President Cai as
an emotionally unstable single woman. He said,
From the perspective of human nature, as a single female politician, she doesn’t
have the emotional burden of love, the restraints of “family” or concerns of
children. In political styles and strategies, she is often emotional, individualistic,
and extreme. In military stratagems, she focuses little on the direction, but a lot on

6
“Shengnü de xingge quexian (daquanban).” November 21, 2012. Retrieved on August 10, 2016
(http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-oldgirl-85904-1.shtml).
7
“Qidi Cai Yingwen.” Quoji Xianqu Daobao. May 20, 2016. Retrieved on August 11, 2016
(http://dailynews.sina.com/gb/chn/chnpolitics/xinhuanet/20160524/01577339936.html).
54

the details. She pays too much attention to short-term goals, but gives insufficient
consideration to long-term goals.
8

The assumption about old single Chinese women’s emotional state has also been
projected onto average Chinese female job applicants and frames how companies and
organizations recruit employees. A recruiting specialist at a pharmaceutical company
said, “we won’t consider single women over the age of 30 when we are reviewing
applicants’ resume, because something must be wrong with their personality and
psychology.”
9
A male professor and director from a top-tier Chinese university also told
me that they asked fresh female Ph.Ds the question of whether they were married in
interviews for faculty positions. He said, “if a woman is single, we won’t consider her
because she must have some psychological problems.”
To solve the urgent problem of aging Chinese women’s singlehood, popular
narratives often advise “leftover women” to transform themselves in order to become
more attractive and likable to men. An article on the popular magazine Rensheng yu
Banlü offers a list of undesirable traits of “leftover women” from the standpoints of men
and urges them to change these traits.
10
It says that men feel insecure and lose self-esteem
in relationships with ambitious, smart, eloquent, sexy, and flirtatious “leftover women.” It
admonishes “leftover women” not to be too fat or too skinny, to look beautiful but not

8
I translated this paragraph.
9
“Baogao cheng nanguanggun bi nüguanggun duo dushi shengnü yuanchao shengnan.” April 1,
2014. Retrieved on August 11, 2016 (http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2014-01-
19/041929284413.shtml).
10
Li, Fuchun. 2010. “‘Shengnü’ shi zenyang lianchengde.” Rensheng yu Banlü 32:41.
55

flirtatious, not to show intelligence and eloquence in front of men, not to pry into men’s
personal space, not to eye men’s wallet, and to perform a gentle little woman (xiaonü ren)
to let men feel great and enact masculine self-esteem. On the tianya public forum, a
posting under the category of “unmarried at 30” provides five reasons why Chinese
women become “leftover” and offers them corresponding practical advice.
11
First and
foremost, this posting assumes that “leftover women” are economically independent and
can take care of themselves, but men don’t like independent women. It asks “leftover
women” to learn to have the mentality of dependent little women as opposed to
independent, strong women, despite their economic independence. Other tips this posting
offer include changing their lifestyles and making themselves more interesting and
attractive, lowering their standards for marriage prospects, taking initiatives in meeting
and getting to know men, and adjusting their self-positioning and becoming more
realistic and clear about who they will be able to date. Popular stories characterize some
“leftover women” as masculine and call them “female men” (nü hanzi) and advise
“female men” to feminize themselves. For example, one news article describes “female
men” as girls who don’t dress up for the opposite sex, are too strong-minded to give in,
and have become the least favorite on the dating market.
12
It cites a single man as saying
that it is men’s nature to protect the weak, but “female men” are too independent to give
men an opportunity to perform heroic masculinity. Most of the strategies popular

11
“Fexnxi shengnü shengxia de yuanyin, yiji gei shengnü de zhonggao.” February 7, 2014.
Retrieved on August 13, 2016 (http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-oldgirl-110431-1.shtml).
12
“Nanjing beibao shengnü chao 30wan ‘nühanzi’ bushou weihunnan daijian.” December 4,
2014. Retrieved on August 14, 2016 (http://news.sohu.com/20141202/n406586552.shtml).
56

narratives offer are articulated from masculinist standpoints and revolve around the
feminization of Chinese women’s looks, personality and social skills.
I suggest that while popular stories of “leftover women” focus on aging single
Chinese women, they are really about Chinese men’s feelings of masculine insecurity and
anxieties in the context of China’s modernization. High-achieving “leftover women”
represent assertive femininity that is based on individualistic aspirations for personal
accomplishments, romantic love and quality men. These neoliberal feminine desires are
created and deployed by economic reforms, and are at odds with the collectivist and
patriarchal family culture in China. The rise of assertive femininity presents challenges
and threats to Chinese men, whose manhood was traditionally constructed against
Chinese womanhood as an inferior complementary opposite and embedded in the family
structure. The stigmatized category of “leftover women” emerges as a masculinist
strategy to contain and control the desiring neoliberal female subject within the institution
of marriage and family, and ultimately to maintain and enhance the hegemonic status of
Chinese masculinity. As a normalizing technique, popular stories identify Chinese
women’s personal accomplishments as undesirable feminine traits and even as a form of
female masculinization, and urge Chinese women to transform themselves into objects of
soft and virtuous femininity against which Chinese men can enact their masculine subject
position. While defining Chinese single women’s individualistic pursuits as immoral,
popular narratives sing praise to Chinese women who give up their individualistic
aspirations for romantic love and high-status husbands, and instead choose to fulfill their
filial responsibilities by marrying men from working-class backgrounds. In a word,
57

popular narratives about “leftover women” are moral admonitions that blame Chinese
single women for prioritizing their individualistic desires over their filial obligations to
get married.
In addition, representations of “leftover women” are also masculinist articulation
of class-based uncertainties about and resistance against China’s modernization.
“Leftover women” as ambitious elite women become a metonym for those empowered by
the economic restructuring. By defining and criticizing their personal achievements as a
sign of female dominance and as a reason why they become “leftover” on the dating
market, popular narratives implicitly express social hatred for the newly rich. This class-
inflected understanding of the economic reform and the resulting concentration of wealth
is intertwined with masculine identity. While business elite men are able to use their
economic resources to engage with mistresses and acquire social status through
consumption, urban working-class Chinese men are confronted with massive layoffs and
the erosion of their patriarchal authority as the breadwinner of their families (Yang 2010).
Rural male migrant workers are marginal to both the cities they work in and the villages
they leave behind, and have to negotiate the discrepancy between their modern
aspirations for love and the reality of their economic inferiority (Choi and Peng 2016).
Given the imbalance in sex ratio, excess Chinese men will find it difficult to get married
(Greenhalgh 2012). This is especially true for poor urban working-class men and rural
men, because Chinese men and their families are commonly responsible for the expenses
on new couples’ housing, wedding banquets, and bride prices. At the current birth rate,
15 percent of marriageable Chinese men will fail to get married in a conventional way by
58

the middle of the twenty-first century (Ebenstein and Jennings 2009). Popular narratives
about “leftover women” are expressions of this class-based masculine crisis. Yet instead
of offering a political account of how some Chinese men are structurally disadvantaged,
popular stories attribute this masculine crisis of forced bachelorhood to Chinese women’s
exclusive focus on personal developments, individualistic desires for quality men, and
even pathological mental state. By urging “leftover women” to lower their standards in
marriage prospects and marry men with lesser accomplishments, popular stories offer a
masculinist solution to democratize access to women and marriage, and alleviate the
masculine pains many Chinese men have been feeling under the conditions of economic
reforms.
Furthermore, high-achieving, desiring “leftover women” are stigmatized in a
popular nationalist yearning for a tough masculinity to represent mainland China on the
global stage. Historically under Western colonialism, Chinese men were perceived to be
“sick men of East Asia” and China was represented as feminine relative to masculine
colonizing Western nations. As mainland China further integrates into the global
capitalist system, it not only seeks to gain power in the international economy and
politics, but also longs for respect, recognition and love from other nations (Callahan
2010). On the other hand, among some Western academics and elite politicians, China’s
economic rise has been interpreted as a threat to the existing world order. US-led Western
countries rely on a Cold-War rhetoric to demonize China, and create and spread racist
China-phobia (Chow 1998). In this context, there has been a surge of popular nationalist
sentiments that demand the Chinese government take a tough position on international
59

politics and assert mainland China as a masculine nation. For example, in the wake of the
South Sea Ruling on July 12, 2016, which invalidated China’s claims to sovereignty over
the waters within the nine dash-lines, many Chinese people believed that the United
States was behind the tribunal’s decision, and celebrated Beijing’s declared rejection of
the Ruling. Some web users posted messages online, praising the Chinese government for
playing hooliganism. In Chinese culture, the image of rebellious social outlaws like
hooligans and bandits carries the positive meaning of masculine resistance against social
injustice, and has been variously appropriated to redefine and revitalize hegemonic
Chinese masculinity in the nationalist ideologies of the Communist Party and the
Nationalist Party at the turn of the twentieth century as well as in popular cinematic
works in the 1980s (Brownell 2000; Brownell and Wasserstrom 2002). The projection of
“leftover women” characteristics onto the newly elected Taiwan president is another
instance of asserting a superior masculine mainland Chinese identity and objectifying
Taiwan into an inferior femininity. It is in this nationalist yearning for a tough
masculinity that the stigmatized category of “leftover women” has emerged to contain the
rise of assertive femininity which Chinese men, especially subordinated Chinese men,
don’t feel comfortable with.
The Chinese state recognizes and responds to popular masculine anxieties and
yearnings. In August, 2007, the Ministry of Education of People’s Republic of China
validates the stigmatized category of “leftover women” as 1 of 171 new Chinese words.
Local branches of All China Women’s Federation have taken a leading role in organizing
social and match-making events for Chines singles in major cities across the country. In
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2011, the Supreme People’s Court issued “The Judicial Interpretation of the Application
of the Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China to Several Issues,” which
stipulates that where real estate property is purchased by the parents of one party of a
conjugal couple and registered under this party’s name, such real estate property shall be
considered as a gift from the parents to the registered party and the party’s personal
property, and that where real estate property is purchased by one party of a conjugal
couple and the mortgage is paid off before the marriage, such real state property shall be
considered as the party’s personal property.
13
In cases of marriage dissolution, Chinese
men benefit from this Judicial Interpretation, because their parents commonly buy or co-
buy real estate property for them before they get married. I believe that this Judicial
Interpretation functions to deter Chinese women from considering only established men
as marriage prospects and to encourage them to marry down to men without prenuptial
property. Moreover, the Chinese state finally phased out the one-child family policy in
2015 and allowed Chinese couples to have two children. This measure, I believe, tackles
the disparity in sex ratio directly and addresses Chinese men’s concerns about becoming
excess men who are unable to find wives. In a word, I suggest that the Chinese state has
taken a series of steps and measures to ensure that “leftover women” have social venues
to meet men, to deter them from marrying only established men, and to reproduce more
Chinese women for excess Chinese men. These recent state interventions into Chinese
people’s intimate lives represent official concessions to masculine anxieties about the

13
“Zuigaofa: hunhou yifang fumu wei ziü maifang weiqi geren caichan.” August 12, 2011.
Retrieved on August 19, 2016 (http://news.qq.com/a/20110812/001034.htm).
61

dissipation of the patriarchal, patrilineal family structure and the rise of assertive, desiring
female subjects. The Chinese party-state has a high stake in democratizing access to
women and marriage to the majority of Chinese men, and defusing a potential massive
masculine unrest, especially when many Chines have lost faith in the party’s declared
representation of a unified nation and the interests of the Chinese people.
The match-making industry and the television industry also benefit from the
emergence of “leftover women” narratives and in turn contribute to their circulation.
Since 2005, large-scale online match-making companies have mushroomed and
prospered to provide services to people of Chinese heritage globally. Their unprecedented
successful rise is a response to and an appropriation of the wide-spread popular anxieties
about aging Chinese singles. With their sponsorship and collaboration, Chinese television
stations started to air dating competition shows. The pioneer and most popular one of this
kind is If You Are the One (“Fei Cheng Wu Rao”), which was first broadcast on Jiangsu
Satellite Television in 2010, and soon became the highest-ranking entertainment program
in mainland China. Shortly, more than 10 Chinese television channels have followed suit
and expanded the share of televised dating shows in all entertainment programs. Despite
severe competition among them and between them and the more established television
genre of soap operas, dating shows have remained atop the list of highest-ranking
television programs.
14
Recently, If You are the One has branched out to overseas Chinese

14
Fang, Fang. 2011. “Guonei Xiangqin Jiemu Yunzuo Neimu Jiemi: Dianshi Hongniang Ershi
Nian.” Fazhi Wanbao. June 6. Retrieved on August 20, 2016
(http://yule.sohu.com/20110606/n309401136.shtml).
62

singles and filmed special dating shows outside of China. Online match-making service
companies provide female contestants to participate in televised dating shows from the
pool of their registered members. They gain extensive publicity for their business in front
of the large population of Chinese television viewers. Ordinary Chinese people shape the
production of dating shows by offering and exchanging their opinions about the values
and ambitions of the participants on well-known cyber public forums. I argue that the
match-making industry and the television industry conspire to tap, exploit and, in turn,
intensify the nationwide anxieties and desires about gender, dating and marriage.
“Foreign F Women”: Racist Xenophiles and National Traitors
Since China opened its door to the world, there has been an increase in popular
nationalist resentments against Chinese women who are intimately involved with foreign
men. These nationalist sentiments are enmeshed with Chinese masculine self-definitions
and self-worth. During her ethnographic research in China in the 1980s and 1990s, for
instance, Brownell (2000) observes that the possessiveness and protectiveness of Chinese
men towards Chinese women was manifested in their anger with African male students
who studied in China and formed relationships with Chinese women. This anger burst
out, contributing to an anti-African riot in Nanjing in late 1988. As the number of
mainland Chinese women marrying foreign men, especially whites, increased, urban
Chinese men were keenly aware that they were losing the game in the international
marriage market (Brownell 2000). Seeing a 25-year-old fashion model marrying a white
American, a Chinese man, who was a mutual friend of Brownell and this model,
constantly complained to Brownell in private that with her intelligence and beauty, this
63

model was one of China's first-class women and that China was losing her to an
American man who would be considered as of a lesser class in the United States, but was
preferred over fine young Chinese men like himself. Even a Chinese man who emigrated
to the United States was seen as a less desirable marriage partner than a white American
man (Brownell 2000). This Chinese young man appropriated the categories of race, class
and nationality to make sense of international dating relationships and define men’s
worthiness. For him, Chinese women gravitate towards men of first-world status,
regardless of their class and race; within the first world, race is a deciding factor in men’s
access to Chinese women. His remark reveals a sense of righteous judgment against
Chinese women’s racist preference for first-world white men. In his story, nationality and
race are more salient than class in defining men’s desirability and popularity for Chinese
women with respect to international dating, despite the fact that hegemonic Chinese
masculinity increasingly tied to possession of wealth is rising and is becoming more
assertive in mainland China. Like many other popular stories about international relations
between Chinese women and foreign men, this Chinese young man’s anecdote includes
multi-level comparisons between Chinese men and foreign men along the lines of race,
nationality, and class. It is in this context of Chinese men’s anxious feelings about their
positions relative to foreign men that popular narratives about Chinese women dating
foreign men have emerged and circulated.
Masculinist popular representations of Chinese women intimately involved with
foreign men objectify Chinese women and treat them as property, for which Chinese men
place themselves in competition with foreign men. At the heart of Chinese men’s
64

anxieties about losing their women is the urgency to defend Chinese women’s sexuality.
Chinese women’s sexual purity symbolizes the moral superiority of Chinese civilization
and the integrity of the Chinese nation, and therefore should be securely guarded. On the
other hand, a penetration of this sexual/national boundary signals Chinese men’s
impotency to protect their women, and cuts deep into their self-esteem. By stigmatizing
Chinese women who transgress this national symbolic boundary, Chinese men gain some
psychological relief. But more importantly, through invoking society-wide shaming on
Chinese women involved with foreign men, masculinist popular stories are created and
circulated to contain and discipline Chinese women’s sexual desires and orient them
towards normative traditional intra-racial marriage.
In 2009, international and interracial romantic relationships between Chinese women
and foreign men were put in the national limelight, as a Shanghai-born dark-skinned girl
named Lou Jing participated in a television talent show and became one of the top 5
finalists for Shanghai. Widespread popular curiosity about this girl’s dark skin color soon
escalated into voyeuristic speculation about and fiercely venomous criticism of her
mother’s extra-marital affair with an African American and her betrayal of her Chinese
husband. On the popular cyber public forum tianya, a posting entitled “Lou Jing’s Black
American Father and Shanghainese Mother” was visited by Chinese web users for more
than 40 thousand times before it was removed.
15
Many people showered Lou Jing and her
mother virulent castigation. One said,

15
“Lou Jing’s Black American Father and Shanghainese Mother.” Retrieved on November 18,
65

Lou Jing’s mother didn’t have an easy time. She had thought that she could go
abroad by hooking up with a black. But the result is that she hasn’t really gained
any advantage except that she is now having another little black ghost (heigui). Yet
her [Lou Jing’s] mother can have gone out, boasting that “look, I have given birth
to a child of foreign descent.”
16

Another web user left a message,
It turns out that brain damage can be inherited. Out of vanity, her mother was
played with by a black and gave birth to a child. Now this daughter even has the
face to come out and lose face and become visible to the public (diuren xianyan).
They are really not a decent family.
17

I believe that Chines people criticize Lou Jing’s mother on at least three grounds. First,
she is depicted as a desiring woman who prefers foreign men over Chinese men and
expresses such desires through an illicit out-of-wedlock liaison with a foreign man. This
desirous, assertive female sexuality challenges the traditional feminine ideal of a demure,
pure and sexually passive Chinese woman, against whom Chinese men enact their potent
masculine selves. Secondly, there has been a lot of speculation about whether Lou Jing’s
mother had a romantic encounter with an African American man on her honeymoon with
her Chinese husband. Some web users believed that Lou Jing’s mother betrayed her
Chinese husband and expressed pity for him. One online posting even imagined vividly
how this Chinese husband’s organs burst out when he saw his wife give birth to a dark-
skinned baby girl. Inter-racial relationships between Chinese women and foreign men

2010 (http://www.tianya.cn/publicforum/content/funinfo/1/1599473.shtml).
16
“Shanghai heinühai Lou Jing zouhong wangluo kangyi zhongzu qishi.” Retrieved on November
18, 2010 (http://club.bandao.cn/showthread.asp?boardid=101&id=1202922).
17
“Shanghai heinühai Lou Jing zouhong wangluo kangyi zhongzu qishi.” Retrieved on November
18, 2010 (http://club.bandao.cn/showthread.asp?boardid=101&id=1202922).
66

pose threats of emasculation to Chinese men, because such relationships not only
question Chinese men’s sexual potency, but also entail possible births of children to
whom they are not fathers. After all, in the Chinese familial culture, it is in the fulfillment
of filial obligations of getting married, having biological children and perpetrating
patrilineage that Chinese men become real men. In this sense, Chinese women’s intimate
involvement with foreign men intensifies Chinese men’s anxieties and uncertainties about
whether they are the fathers of their wives’ children. Thirdly, Chinese web users
speculate about the nationality of Lou Jing’s father. Although Lou Jing’s mother
explicitly said in public on a few occasions that Lou Jing’s father was an African
American, some postings asserted that Lou Jing’s father was from an African country.
These postings proceeded to ridicule Lou Jing’s mother for acting like a whore in front of
a black man from Africa, who was perceived as lesser than mainland Chinese men, as
well as fantasizing and faking his nationality as American to elevate her own status.
These stories position Chinese masculinity/nation as superior to African
masculinity/nation, but inferior to American masculinity/the United States.
Chinese masculinist resentments against Chinese women dating foreign men
culminate in the creation of the stigmatized category of “foreign f women” (wai f nü ) on
mitbbs.com, a Chinese bulletin board system which claims itself to be the most popular
online Chinese community with several thousand registered Chinese web users. Although
it serves people of Chinese heritage globally, this website is mostly well-known to
Chinese students, scholars and professionals in the United States. According to a report in
67

the Wall Street Journal,
18
every month, about 300,000 web users visit this website most
of whom are college-educated Chinese in the United States.
A survey of postings about “foreign f women” on mitbbs reveal three major
storylines. First, Chinese women dating foreign men are said to use double standards of
self-representation when dating Chinese men and foreign men. As these stories go,
Chinese women dress themselves up revealingly to attract foreign men, but wear
conservative gender-neutral clothes in front of Chinese men. For instance, one posting
said,
[To “foreign f women”] It is not a shame to try to adapt to American society. But it
is a shame to wear a low-neck shirt and a mini-skirt at a party with Americans, but
wear a high-collar shirt and jeans at a party with Chinese.
Dating white men itself is not shameful. But it is a shame to perform a reserved
princess in front of Chinese men, but sleep with white men after three meals and
claim that you are adapting to American culture.
19

Messages like this abound on mitbbs.com. They lament that Chinese women sexualize
themselves and give foreign men easy access to their bodies, but deny such access to
Chinese men.
Secondly, many messages also narrate the different ways Chinese women interact
with foreign men and Chinese men. While Chinese women are portrayed as a slave who

18
Li Yuan. 2004. "Web Site helps Chinese in U.S. Navigate Life," the Wall Street Journal,
October 26, B1.
19
“Nüxing wai F benshen bu diuren.” Retrieved on August 31, 2016
(http://www.mitbbs.com/bbsann2/entertainment.faq/WaterWorld/D13360298992A0/D136910332
72U0/M.1336722684_2.F0/%5B%E5%90%88%E9%9B%86%5D+%E5%A5%B3%E6%80%A7
%E5%A4%96F%E6%9C%AC%E8%BA%AB%E4%B8%8D%E4%B8%A2%E4%BA%BA).
68

responds to every need of foreign men, but never demand anything from them, they are
said to act like spoiled princesses who are very dependent and demanding when dating
Chinese men. The same posting cited above remarked,
[To “foreign f women”] It is not a shame to go shopping with your white husband
at a Chinese store. But it is a shame to carry four shopping bags yourselves, and
let your husband leave without carrying anything in his hands.
20

What this message implies in contrast is that Chinese husbands will carry all grocery, and
Chinese wives don’t have to do anything. Many other postings tell similar stories about
how Chinese women depend on Chinese men in daily life, expecting them to make
money, do housework as well as help with shopping, driving and moving, but they are
independent from their foreign dates or husbands, do not give them demands or
commands, and try every means to please them. These stories narrate how Chinese
women disregard excellent Chinese men who genuinely care about and take care of them,
but throw themselves into the arms of foreign men of lesser morality and class
backgrounds who don’t really cherish them. By invoking the images of attentive and
reliable Chinese family men as well as individualistic and nonchalant foreign men, these
stories depict Chinese women as unscrupulous whores who use racist standards towards
men in interactions. Some postings even describe in anecdotal details how mainland
Chinese women marry Chinese men who have American visa or immigration status to

20
“Nüxing wai F benshen bu diuren.” Retrieved on August 31, 2016
(http://www.mitbbs.com/bbsann2/entertainment.faq/WaterWorld/D13360298992A0/D136910332
72U0/M.1336722684_2.F0/%5B%E5%90%88%E9%9B%86%5D+%E5%A5%B3%E6%80%A7
%E5%A4%96F%E6%9C%AC%E8%BA%AB%E4%B8%8D%E4%B8%A2%E4%BA%BA).

69

come to the United States, dump their Chinese husbands, and date and marry American
men. In these stories, “foreign f women” stand as a powerful evil force whose romantic
relationships with foreign men betray, defeat, and emasculate Chinese men who fail to
control their women’s sexuality, guard it against foreign men, and, by symbolic
association, defend the national boundary.
The third storyline in popular postings on mitbbs.com involves a process of
essentializing racial and national differences in cultural terms. Online messages about
“foreign f women” assume that there is an essential Chinese culture that covers a wide
range of traits, including eating habits, sexual restraints and virtues, and the sharing of the
Chinese language. Postings on mitbbs satirize “foreign f women” for alienating
themselves from the Chinese culture and orienting themselves towards the cultures of
their foreign boyfriends and husbands. For instance, some postings provide anecdotes
where foreign men serve unwashed, raw vegetables to their ill Chinese wives, or where ill
Chinese wives eat fatty burgers when they should have had rice porridge as comfort food.
What is in the subtext of these postings is that “foreign f women” deserve such
unappetizing, unhealthy food options because they choose foreign men/foreign cultures
over Chinese men/Chinese culture. Other messages ridicule “foreign f women” because
they speak English in daily interactions, even when they order food at Chinese
restaurants. In these stories, speaking English in a context involving other Chinese people
becomes a symbol of prejudice against Chinese culture and compatriots. There are still
other messages that deride “foreign f women” who complain and criticize Chinese culture
in front of their foreign boyfriends or husbands. Chinese women’s sexual morality
70

constitutes the ultimate symbolic boundary between Chinese culture and foreign cultures.
Most postings on mitbbs, to a greater or lesser degree, perceive Western cultures to be
hypersexualized, and portray “foreign f women” as licentious whores who desire
masculine virility white men and African American men embody, and throw away the
Chinese moral heritage of feminine virtues that emphasize sexual passivity. In a word,
postings on mitbbs essentialize Chinese culture and criticize Chinese women dating
foreign men for betraying it.
I argue that masculinist feelings about losing Chinese women to foreign men are
intimately enmeshed with nationalist sentiments, as is evidenced in online messages that
directly attack “foreign f women” and call them national traitors who contaminate the
genetic and cultural purity of the Chinese nation. These uneasy and anxious feelings
about the violation of the symbolic boundary of Chinese nation surge as China further
integrates itself into the world, allowing an influx of Western cultural symbols, frequent
intercultural encounters and interactions, and an increase in interracial marriage between
Chinese women and foreign men, all of which pose threats to the security of Chinese
national identity. Stories about “foreign f women” are articulations of popular resistance
against the challenges to nationalist security. They are reflexive criticisms of these
globalizing processes many Chinese understand as Westernization, or the imposition of
Western cultural hegemony on an essentialized Chinese culture. Popular imaginings of
“foreign f women” as desiring and sexually active female subject represent unsettling
contrasts to the ideal of sexually passive, virtuous Chinese women as the biological and
cultural (re)producer of the Chinese nation. By engaging romantically with foreign men
71

and foreign cultures, “foreign f women” stand as a formidable symbolic disturbance to
the Chinese racial, national, and cultural boundaries. Their real or perceived assimilation
into Western cultures evokes the discursively structured bitter memory of national
humiliation under colonialist Western and Japanese powers in the past century, and reify
the deeply feared status of being penetrated/colonized. Through stigmatizing “foreign f
women” as an opposition to ideal Chinese womanhood and castigating their cultural
betrayal, popular narratives are boundary strategies that distinguish an essential Chinese
culture, and discursively counter the Westernizing effects of globalization. Some popular
postings even fantasize the reversal of the relative status between China and the West by
suggesting that Chinese men should engage romantically with foreign women, especially
white women, to bring honor to the nation. By stigmatizing Chinese women dating
foreign men and praising Chinese men getting involved with foreign women, popular
Chinese anti-foreign narratives invoke and perpetuate the symbolic hierarchical
dichotomy of feminine/penetrated/colonized vs. masculine/penetrator/colonizer. I believe
that popular Chinese nationalist desires to occupy the latter have partly risen from
masculinist anxiety and insecurity about China’s integration to the world and perceived
loss of resources, including Chinese women in the form of their sexed bodies and
reproductive value, to foreign men.
I would also like to suggest that popular nationalist narratives about “foreign f
women” intertwine anti-foreign resentments with public discontent towards the reformist
Party-state. Some online postings on mitbbs blame the Party-state regimes for initiating
open-door policies, inviting the penetration of other cultures into the Chinese culture, and
72

losing Chinese women out to foreign men. They articulate outright harsh anti-foreign
anger and direct such anger at what they perceive to be a soft Party-state regime that
fantasizes about a modernizing China, its culture, and Chinese women as the embodiment
of the culture being desired, pursued and loved by foreigners. Official nationalist
discourses create, deploy and circulate images of a glorious, peacefully rising China that
is expanding its cultural influence in the world. In comparison, popular anti-foreign
nationalism makes sense of globalization as state-initiated colonization and
Westernization, blames the Party-state for draining resources to foreigners, and demands
the government take an assertive masculine position in international politics. The tension
between these two Chinese nationalisms is evidenced in debates on Chinese women
included in the first Chinese national publicity film to be played on the big screen over
the New York Times Square in 2011. The 1-minute-long film featuring Chinese people
was produced by the State Council of the P.R.C. for American audiences. It begins with
an image of five Chinese women, three of whom are actresses, one super model and one
dancer, captioned “Stunning Chinese Beauty.” They pose with reserved smiles, dressed in
modified Chinese gowns, symbolizing both modernity and tradition. These women are
faces of official China. They showcase China’s rise as a soft power that seeks love,
respect and recognition in the world. Some postings on popular public forums like tianya
and mitbbs criticize the Party-state for using images of Chinese women to represent the
attractiveness of Chinese culture and encouraging romantic involvement between
Chinese women and foreign men. As these postings go, such images reinforce the
feminine/inferior status of China as a nation relative to the West, and invite Western
73

sexual/cultural penetration/colonization. Some other postings on mitbbs even go further
to compare the post-Mao Party-state regimes to the Maoist regime. They express
nostalgia for what they perceive to be the Maoist masculine isolationist policies and
articulate discontent towards the soft open-door position of the post-Maoist regimes, even
if some of them grow up in the reform era. For many web users, the reformist state
regimes not only invite the influx of foreign ideas and foreign men, but also use tax
revenues on expensive “face” projects, such as hosting the Olympic Opening Ceremony
in 2008, just to make them look good in front of foreigners. They criticize the
government for paying slavish attention to foreign audiences and ignoring more urgent
domestic issues.
I argue that although popular anti-foreign nationalism positions itself as different
from official nationalism, the state plays a key role in intensifying popular anti-foreign
sentiments among the public through its patriotic education. Since 1989, the state has
written the narrative of “China’s century of national humiliation” into history textbooks
and instructed Chinese people not to forget about its modern history of territorial,
economic and cultural penetration by Western and Japanese imperialist powers. This
narrative and its resulting victim mentality have significantly shaped how international
relations are reported, interpreted and felt in mainland China. For example, after
Beijing’s close loss to Sydney in its bidding to host the 2000 summer Olympic games in
1993, the official media reported this defeat as a Western conspiracy against China. This
narrative has been evoked and reinforced in both official and popular nationalisms in
response to Western rhetoric and propaganda that demonizes China, spreads China-
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phobia, and creates institutional barriers for China to enter the global political economy.
While the state largely keeps popular anti-foreign sentiments at bay and prevents them
from escalating into social uprisings, it allows these feelings to manifest themselves in
ways that don’t challenge the political structure and social stability in China. In fact, at
times of national crises, the state appropriates these popular sentiments to legitimate its
foreign policies. For examples, Chinese people organized anti-US-led NATO
demonstrations in the wake of its bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999.
There were organized protests against Japan across mainland China when China and
Japan argued over sovereign claims to Diaoyu Island in 2012. These popular protests
gave public moral support to the central government’s positions on foreign policies.
Chinese men constituted 90 percent of the demonstrators in these protests (Brownell
2000:201). The anti-foreign sentiments are necessarily masculinist because Chinese men
are positioned as the agents of Chinese history in popular and official nationalisms and
they experience Western imperialism against China as Chinese masculine failure to
defend the nation and elevate its international status. Such intimately entangled
nationalist and masculinist anxieties express themselves through defining and
stigmatizing “foreign f women’s” cultural and sexual engagements with foreign men as a
betrayal of the Chinese nation. Ultimately, stories about “foreign f women” are gendered
articulations of Chinese people’s structured memory about Western colonization that
cannot be forgotten and has been refreshed and experienced in the current vicious cycle
of Western hegemonization and China’s resistance/hegemonization.
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Nationalist sentiments against romantic encounters between China and foreign
cultures have also emerged from experiences with racism among mainland Chinese
people who reside in Western countries. Postings about “foreign f women” on mitbbs
articulate a strong sense of feelings of inferiority about Chinese masculine sexual virility
relative to white and black masculinities in the United states. There are messages that
imagine the small penis size of Chinese men, and such perceptions, I argue, result from
Chinese internalization of the racialized stereotypes of Chinese American men as
intellectual, nerdy, unathletic and sexually unattractive. In popular stories about “foreign
f women,” Chinese social imaginings of Western men’s large penis size and the
accompanying bestialization of their sexual potency and desires are counter narratives
that de-valorize Western hegemonic masculinity that emphasizes physical prowess. On
the other hand, narratives about “foreign f women” praise Chinese men as being readily
willing to help and take care of Chinese women on a daily basis and fulfill their role as
the family patriarch, as is evident in the above-cited posts. These narratives shore up and
re-valorize subordinated Chinese masculinity anchored on obligations to the patrilineal
family.
Living at the intersection of racism, nationalism and imperialism, Chinese men in
the United States not only experience cultural prejudice against Chinese masculinity, but
also deal with discrimination against them at the workplace. An abundance of messages
circulate on mitbbs expressing outrage at how Chinese professionals are marginalized
and excluded in American corporate cultures. Many messages note that Chinese
engineers are excluded from top managerial positions which are mostly occupied by
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white men. There are other messages that position Indian men from Asia as major
competitors for technical jobs with Chinese men in the United States. As these messages
go, Indian culture was colonized by the British and therefore, Indian men can fit into
Western corporate environments better. The networks among white men and among
Indian men inside and between companies constitute enormous institutional barriers for
Chinese men that deny them access to engineering jobs and promotion opportunities.
When juxtaposed with these messages about racism, I argue, popular narratives of
“foreign f women” are a venue through which overseas Chinese people articulate their
righteous responses to what they perceive to be anti-Chinese racism in their everyday
lives. “Foreign f women” are imagined and depicted as assimilated into Western cultures
and biased against Chinese men and Chinese culture in the above-cited postings on
mitbbs. They also symbolize the resources (e.g. women, jobs, etc.) exclusively accessible
to first-world men who have the right type of racial, cultural and social capital (or
Westernized non-first-world men as in the case of Asian Indians in the U.S.).
To sum up, popular representations of Chinese women dating foreign men have
risen and circulated as symbols of the consequences of China’s integration into the world,
which many Chinese web users make sense of as draining resources (including Chinese
women) to foreigners, and the imposition of Western values on an essential Chinese
culture. These narratives are articulated from a masculinist perspective that treats Chinese
women as Chinese men’s property. Chinese men feel emasculated when they lose their
women to foreign men. These gendered anxieties are intertwined with nationalist
insecurity. The arguably increased anti-foreign sentiments among Chinese people in
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recent years are, to a certain degree, Chinese men’s resistance against their own
emasculation under their experienced Western hegemony. By representing and criticizing
racist, Westernized “foreign f women,” Chinese men define and essentialize a morally
superior Chinese culture, and symbolically reverse the relative status imbalance between
them and first-world men. Their feelings about masculine inferiority are mixed with
Chinese culturalist pride. Such boundary and status struggles are even more tense for
Chinese men living in the West who perceive their women and jobs to be taken away by
foreign men on a daily basis.
“Second Wives”: Trophies, Victims and Whores
Polygamy is not new to China. In its imperial history, elite Chinese men took in
concubines. Since the economic reforms and opening up in the late 1970s, many business
men from Taiwain and Hong Kong have engaged in long-term out-of-wed liaisons with
mainland Chinese women. Newly rich mainland Chinese business men and political elites
have also long since copied their practices. Nonetheless, in recent years, there has been a
surge of popular narrations about Chinese women in long-term relationships with married
men. Public criticisms against them have intensified.
There are three common themes in popular narratives about “second wives.” First,
“second wives” are depicted as trophies business and political elite men purchase,
consume, and show off in competition for status with each other. A relative of mine from
mainland China sent me a satire widely-circulated on the internet, after he heard that I
was researching on “second wives.” This satire goes as follows:
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The results of the 2009 Second Wives Contest, sponsored by the Commission for
Discipline Inspection of the Central Committee, were announced. The 9
championships are:
1. Quantity Award: Xu Qiyao, Director of the Department of Construction of
Jiangsu Province. He had 146 mistresses in total.
2. Quality Award: Zhang Zonghai, Director of the Department of Publicity of
Chongqing City. He was involved with 17 beautiful single female undergraduate
students and often took them to hotels.
3. Academic Award: Li Qingshan, Director of the Bureau of Textiles of Hainan
Province. He kept 95 sex diary and 236 specimen.
4. Youth Award: Li Yushu, Mayor of Leshan City, Sichuan. He had 20 mistresses
aged between 16 and 18.
5. Management Award: Yang Feng, Secretary of Xuancheng City, Anhui. He used
knowledge to effectively manage 77 mistresses.
6. Squandering Award: Deng Baoju, Director of Shajing Bank of Shengzhen City.
He spent 18.4 million RMB on his fifth wife, Xiao Qing, alone, with an average
of 230 thousand RMB per day and 10 thousand RMB per hour.
7. Unity Award: Lin Longfei, Secretary of Zhouning County, Fujian. He invited all
his 22 mistresses altogether to his parties and conferred beauty awards among
them.
8. Harmony Award: Deng Shanhong, Director of the Department of Urban
Planning and Management of Lingao city, Hainan. His wife couldn’t be convinced
that he had 6 mistresses who bore 6 children for him.
9. Energy Award: Zeng Guohua, Director of the Bureau of Communication of
Hunan Province. He vowed to his 5 mistresses that he would have sex with each of
them for at least 3 times a week until he turned 60.
With a humorously sarcastic overtone, this satire identifies and ridicules pandemic
corruption among party-affiliated officials who embezzle public funds, squander them on
mistresses, indulge in exquisite feasts, surrender to insatiable sexual desires and engage
in illicit romantic relationships. In this satire, “second wives” are treated as objects, the
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ownership of which becomes a status symbol for male Chinese officials at all levels.
Similarly, there are also plenty of stories circulating on popular Chinese cyber public
forums and wechat networks about relationships between “second wives” and business
men as of sex-money exchange in nature and “second wives” as commodity and trophies
of business men.
The second common theme in popular narratives about “second wives” is that
deceptive wealthy business men hoax morally weak young Chinese women into romantic
and material traps. In popular women’s magazines, cyber social news as well as postings
on popular online public forums, there are an abundance of stories about young beautiful
Chinese girls being misled and seduced into relationships with married business men. In
many stories, “second wives” are Chinese girls who migrate from poor inland provinces
to work in more developed Chinese coastal cities and struggle with factory drudgery or
Chinese girls who migrate to a Western country and juggle between low-paying, labor
intensive jobs and school work. Their married business men are usually wealthy middle-
aged patrons of the products or services they provide on their job. These men take young
Chinese women to high-end restaurants and concerts, and present them with expensive
gifts such as luxurious cars, jewelry, and houses. Young Chinese girls, who have already
been frustrated by the reality of a harsh world, are mesmerized by rich men’s romance
and generosity, and start to get involved quickly. They move to live in the
apartments/houses their married boyfriends purchase or rent for them. But shortly, these
Chinese girls find out that the men they engage with are married and they have been
deceived. They battle with their moral conscience and stay in the relationships with
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ambivalent feelings until their boyfriends’ wives chase them down and demand they
leave or they realize they want more than what money can buy. Such stories have a clear
moral message: young women should resist the temptation of money, avoid the danger of
being objectified and commodified, and develop self-love and self-respect.
The third common theme in cultural representations of “second wives” is that they
are shrewd manipulative whores who are able to coax elite business and political men
into spending money on them. In many stories, “second wives” employ techniques to
manage men. They are represented as invested heavily in their bodies: they visit
exclusive beauty salons and spa services, and receive cosmetic treatment and surgery in
beauty clinics. They are also said to have high emotional intelligence and use soft social
skills to manipulate men. For example, postings on the popular forum tianya tell stories
about young Chinese women who have a sweet tongue and know how to compromise in
front of men. As these postings go, these women are able to get involved with one rich
man after another and amass wealth, despite that they represent the opposites of ideal
Chinese feminine virtues. Follow-up postings lament that many virgin Chinese women
who work really hard and live their lives earnestly have difficulty marrying themselves
out. Some other responses even question how Chinese society has changed to such a
point that morality has given way to money and honesty to manipulation.
I argue that the rise of popular narratives about “second wives” has to do with
four strands of social sentiments. The first recent trend in China is that people have
developed a resentment against privileged individual officials. As the Chinese political
system moved away from Maoist totalitarianism, but is not yet democratized, people have
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lost faith in the ideology of socialism and the Party that relies on it for legitimacy. Not
only do many Chinese people feel that the Party-state has withdrawn itself from their
private lives and doesn’t take care of them any more (Y. Yan 2003), but they also
attribute the widening economic gaps between rich and poor to the exclusive access of
Party-affiliated officials (esp. those working for the public sector) to certain economic
and social resources (e.g. subsidized medical care, housing funds, competitive retirement
pensions, business-political alliances, high social status, etc.) and their misuse of political
power for personal gains (e.g. embezzlement of public funds, nepotism, bribery, etc.).
During my ethnography in China, I often heard complaints from Chinese people that
officials are corrupt and they are responsible for social inequalities. Stories about “second
wives” are popular narratives along the same line of argument. They are a venue through
which Chinese people express their discontent and resentment against the privileges of
Party-governmental officials. Nonetheless, such articulations tend to understand unequal
distributions of wealth, political power, women and social status as consequences of
individual Chinese officials’ lack of morality, insatiable desires and abuse of political
power and authority. This explains why the state doesn’t censor popular narratives about
“second wives.” As a matter of fact, soap operas featuring “second wives’” relations with
officials, for example, Dwelling Narrowness (Woju), are abundant on major Chinese
television channels which are closely controlled and monitored by the central and local
governments. The Chinese state is not a unified entity. In the past few years, the current
central state regime has launched nation-wide campaigns to detect, identify, and
prosecute individual officials who embezzle public funds and accept bribery. The
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Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Central Committee have issued notices to
proscribe officials’ use of public funds for gifting, feasting and traveling. I believe that
such top-down attempts have the effects of curbing the expansion of individual officials’
power and recovering the image of the Party-state as the legitimate vanguard of the
Chinese people and nation. This nation-wide social criticism of corruption among Party
cadres has nourished the emergence of cultural representations of “second wives” as
political trophies.
The second social trend is that Chinese people have developed a moral criticism
of business people and their dishonest, exploitative, profit-seeking marketized economic
activities. During my ethnography in China, what struck me is that many Chinese talked
pessimistically about products made in China and would spend much more money on
similar products made in other countries. They were concerned about harmful chemicals
contained in consumer products, especially food. These concerns are reactions to recent
nation-wide incidents of food contamination such as domestic brands of milk and baby
formula adulterated by melamine that made the protein content appear higher, but caused
infant deaths and serious kidney damages. In casual conversations, some Chinese even
commented that manufacturers and business people used intelligence to make profits by
undermining the health of Chinese compatriots and later generations. Not only do many
Chinese people question the morality of business people, but they are also critical of the
ways business people bribe corrupt individual political officials into facilitating the
production, inspection, sale, and circulation of shoddy or harmful products. Such
widespread disbelief in self-interested market-oriented economic activities mediated
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through business-political connections is, I suggest, a doubtful, cynical reflection on the
emergence of China’s state-initiated bureaucratic capitalism characterized by the
continuing influence of political capital on economic decisions and processes as well as a
lack of well-established regulatory mechanisms in restraining the unscrupulous pursuit of
economic interests and an entrenched culture of personalism in social interactions of all
levels to bypass existing formal laws, regulations and policies. Occasionally, this general
popular sense of social injustice has demonstrated itself through angry public displays of
a hatred for the newly rich. For instance, there have been reported incidents of luxury
cars getting smashed on streets as an outlet for such social resentments. Another more
popular way of expressing this sentiment is through questioning business men’s scruples
with respect to their illicit romantic encounters and liaisons. I argue that popular
representations of “second wives” as trophies and victims of deceptive, rich business men
have risen from and are entangled in this larger social criticism of the latter’s expanded
desires for wealth and status, and the immoral means through which they pursue personal
interests at the expense of the public.
Thirdly, gender is central to both the popular resentment against corrupt officials
and dishonest business men. As I have noticed in my ethnography, Chinese men from
various socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to complain about the political
system and market economic activities than Chinese women. I suggest that their general
sense of social inequalities resulting from China’s gradual economic reforms is enmeshed
with their masculine anxieties about the unequal distributions of resources, the possession
and control of which define, anchor and empower their traditional role as the family
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patriarch. In the context of China’s powerful political system (tizhi) that includes the
Party-state, its administrative agencies and enterprises, as well as the wider public sector,
accesses to economic and social resources are to a large extent determined by
memberships in this male-dominated system (Goodman 2014). Individual Chinese male
officials, especially civil servants, enjoy the benefits of greater employment security,
subsidized health care and housing, and high social status. On the Chinese dating market
including those informal parental gatherings in public parks and formal commercial ones
I visited during my research, employment in this political system has become the most
sought-after trait in potential marriage partners, especially for husbands, besides
ownership of housing. Nonetheless, only approximately 74 million Chinese people are
employed in the public sector and they constitute less than 10 percent of the working
population (Wang 2012). Newly wealthy entrepreneurs also benefit from China’s
economic restructuring and open-up. Albeit politically weak, they stage performances of
social status via conspicuous consumption of cosmopolitan goods and international
travels. With their economic resources, they purchase and consume feminized and
sexualized services in the entertainment industry and engage in out-of-wedlock liaisons
with mistresses to enact virile masculinity. The manners in which they conduct
themselves in romantic and sexual encounters with women have become a gauge of their
trustworthiness and potency in front of potential business and political male allies (Zheng
2006). By contrast, downgraded urban working-class Chinese men are confronted with
massive layoffs and underemployment. Those who are laid off by state-owned enterprises
make sense of their disadvantaged and decentered positions as well as negotiate labor
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disputes against management in terms of family concerns and masculine crises (Yang
2010). For them, being unable to match up with normative masculinity associated with
permanent employment was an emasculating bitter experience. Rural-to-urban migrant
male workers are also unable to approximate the dominant urban types of monied
manhood and quality manhood (Choi and Peng 2016). Some of them fail to maintain
romantic relationships with the girls of their choice due to their economic conditions and
have to compromise to their parents’ arrangement of marriage partners who are usually
local girls from their native villages. Some other rural men from poverty-ridden regions
have started to look for wives from a lower-status country such as Vietnam. In a word,
the increase in social stratifications among Chinese men under economic reforms have
led to their differential accesses to resources. The inequality among Chinese men is
especially pronounced on the domestic dating market where female hypergamy is
culturally prevalent. I argue that popular narratives about “second wives” have emerged
and circulated in this context as a discursive outlet for Chinese men to articulate their
frustration and anxieties about increasing inequalities among them. In these stories,
“second wives” represent the concentration of resources and social status among officials
and business men, shoring up the cultural hegemony of masculinity they embody.
Nonetheless, instead of offering a counter discourse and political agenda to democratize
power among Chinese men, these popular narratives are Chinese men’s sour grape
stories. If life circumstances permit, subordinated Chinese men will be likely to copy the
sexual practices of officials and business men to enact virile masculinity.
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Last but most importantly, these gendered feelings about social injustices are
entangled in the larger current of pessimistic Chinese nationalist sentiments. Despite
China’s fabulous economic growth and critical role in the world, many Chinese people
have associated “Chineseness” with negativity. During my research in China, I often
encountered self-disparaging remarks from Chinese people of all walks (a larger
disproportion of men than women) about the failed Chinese race. Chinese people have
identified a long list of pandemic social problems and heralded a highly divided Chinese
nation with no social trust but endless competition and infighting among themselves.
These problems include, but are not limited to, social worships of money, unregulated
market competition, corruption among Party-governmental officials, unscrupulous
manufacturers, businessmen, and contractors, consumer goods that are shoddy,
contaminated or imitations of designer brands, common practices of out-of-wedlock
sexual relationships among powerful and rich men, and environmental pollution and
misuse of unsustainable resources (e.g. export non-renewable clay to other countries). For
many Chinese, the nation is doomed: the fast economic growth has rested upon excessive
appropriation of resources that should have been reserved for young generations; it has
undermined Chinese people’s health due to food contamination and environmental
pollution; contemporary Chinese society is unsettled and troubled by cultural
faithlessness, social unruliness and a lack of moral conscience. I argue that narratives
about “second wives” are part of these Chinese pessimistic talks. “Second wives” have
become a symbol of moral depravity. Not only are they represented as straying away
from traditional virtuous femininity, but they are also depicted as products of and
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participants in unscrupulous commercialized sex-money relationships and self-interested
Chinese men’s competition for status. Ultimately, they stand as social evils that make
China lesser than a great nation and that have haunted many Chinese men’s nationalist
ego.

“Harmonious Family, Harmonious Society”
A few years ago, my extended family in China were peddling a family cycle in a
park. This scene was captured and photographed by a journalist who later posted the
photo in a local leading newspaper with the caption “harmonious family, harmonious
society.” Like in other countries, the family has served as a bedrock for social stability in
China. An ideal family in Confucian philosophies is a harmonious one composed of
multiple generations living under the same roof and complying with hierarchical gender
and generational relations. While the Confucian family was denounced and challenged by
Chinese intellectuals during the May Fourth Movement in the early 20
th
century as well
as by the Chinese Communist Party in its earlier attempts to distinguish itself from
“feudal” regimes, it has a long-lasting influence on how contemporary Chinese families
are organized and managed. In 2004, the 4th Plenum of the 16th Chinese Communist
Party Central Committee brought up the concept of “constructing a harmonious socialist
society based on harmonious families.” Since then, this political framework has remained
a strategic developmental discourse for mainland China. Chinese politicians,
governmental agencies and academics have played a critical role in interpreting and
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promulgating this ideological formulation. Many of them understand a harmonious
society as one where people recognize and accept differences and inequalities. For
instance, Wang Deng-feng and Huang Xi-ting (2007) explore the concept of “harmonious
society” from a psychological standpoint and emphasize the importance of accepting
social differentiations psychologically and developing inner peace while working hard
and improving the self to raise social status. I argue that “harmonious family and
harmonious society” has been revived as a discipline technique to create docile and
submissive Chinese citizen-subjects who believe that social inequalities are normal and
unavoidable and that social mobility is achievable. This ideological framework is all the
more necessary and urgent in the context of increasing social stratifications under the
economic restructuring.
The Chinese family based on marriage and blood relationships is a gendered
concept and institution. The domestic sphere, traditionally termed inner quarters, has
been considered a women’s domain. Not only do Chinese women take primary
responsibilities for housework, child care and elderly care, but their feminine and sexual
virtues also symbolically define the boundary between the domestic sphere and a
dangerous outside world, and, by extension, the differences between Chinese culture and
other national cultures. Contemporary Chinese virtues of femininity and domesticity are
anchored upon women’s submission to the heterosexual political economy and the
intergenerational morals of filial piety. A survey of popular Chinese women’s magazines
shows that women are expected to make themselves subservient to their husbands and
cater to their needs in order to maintain a harmonious marriage. For example, a feature
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article in Rensheng yu Banlü identifies feminine qualities that are associated with Chinese
mistresses (Xiaosan), including beauty, good cooking skills, a gentle personality, and
willingness to compromise and assume an inferior position in front of men. This article
advises Chinese wives to learn these traits in order to keep their husbands.
21
Similar
articles in recent popular women’s magazines differentiate Chinese wives from
mistresses and “second wives.” While mistresses and “second wives” are represented as
playing femininities through making themselves beautiful and putting on a sweet,
supportive persona, Chinese wives are said to have paid little attention to these qualities
and therefore lose their husbands to the former. An ideal wife, according to many articles
in popular Chinese women’s magazine, is one who possesses both inner beauty--
including domestic and sexual virtues as well as personal talents and education-and
outside beauty in order to win over Chinese men and fend off other female rivals.
Moreover, Chinese women are expected to pay filial piety to their parents and parents-in-
law by getting married and bearing offsprings to continue the family patrilineage. The
mandate of getting married is universal for Chinese women at an early age, in part
because there are social uncertainties and worries about the possibility and safety of late
pregnancy and birth. To postpone getting married or not to get married at all is
considered as unfilial acts or even defiance against parents. For many Chinese parents,
their adult children’s marriage is not an individual decision, but a family obligation. This
partly explains why Chinese parents voluntarily gather in public parks to identify

21
Editor. 2010. “Yi Xiaosan Zhidao, Duo Nanren Zhixin.” Rensheng yu Banlü 464:18-20.
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potential marriage partners for their daughters. Like Dr. Du in the above-cited magazine
article, when Chinese women comply with their parents, lower their expectations for
marriage partners and finally get married, they are praised as filial daughters. After all, to
a large extent, the maintenance of a harmonious marriage and family depends on
women’s submission to gendered and generational rules that govern the Chinese family.
More often than not, Chinese women of older generations, especially mothers and
mothers-in-law, serve as gatekeepers to ensure that young women obey these rules. By
complying with prescribed gender and intergenerational relations in the family, Chinese
women enact virtuous femininity, a complementary opposite against which the dominant
Chinese masculine subject position is constructed and a pedestal on which the Chinese
cultural/national boundary is demarcated.
Chinese women who transgress from normative marriage, especially “leftover
women,” “foreign f women,” and “second wives” in this study, have fueled intense public
scrutiny and criticisms. They symbolize assertive and desiring femininities that are not
confined or appropriately expressed within marriage and that many Chinese men are not
comfortable with, although Chinese masculinity has become more assertive domestically
and internationally as well. All of them represent the unequal distribution of material and
symbolic resources among Chinese men under the economic reforms and open-up. High-
achieving “leftover women” who aspire to marry quality men herald a massive size of
“leftover men” who, due to economic restraints, the cultural practice of female
hypergamy and a highly skewed sex ratio, may not be able to find wives in a
conventional way by the middle of the twenty-first century. “Foreign f women” depicted
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as racist against Chinese men but ingratiating to Western men in popular narratives evoke
Chinese men’s bitter memory of China’s modern colonial history and their racialized
masculinity which was and continues to be subordinated by Western cultural imperialism.
China’s recent integration into the global capitalist system provides a context for
increasing intercultural and interracial encounters and interactions, resulting in the
Chinese public’s heightened awareness of cultural and racial differences. For many
Chinese men residing and working in the United States, racial prejudice and
discrimination is a very real and poignantly felt experience on a daily basis. “Second
wives” as trophies and victims of powerful and rich Chinese men represent social and
moral depravity that accompanies competitive, market-oriented economic activities
embedded in a Party-monopolized political system and a culture of personalism and
lawlessness. I suggest that popular narratives about “leftover women,” “foreign f women”
and “second wives” have emerged as masculinist social criticisms of aspects of China’s
grand modernizing and globalizing processes that have led to increasing inequalities
among Chinese men. I argue that the stigmatization of these three groups of Chinese
women is a masculinist psychological strategy to cope with the rise of assertive Chinese
femininity as well as a discipline technique to normalize Chinese women’s dating and
sexual practices and ensure the integrity and sanctity of marriage. Hence the construction
of a harmonious socialist society based on harmonious families.
All these gendered anxieties and resentments about social injustices are entangled
in Chinese people’s pessimistic feelings about the nation. “Leftover women,” “foreign f
women,” and “second wives” symbolize what many Chinese people perceive to be
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pandemic social problems that are engulfing the Chinese moral, cultural and economic
landscapes. Many Chinese have lost confidence in “Chineseness.” For them,
“Chineseness” connotes a range of negative traits including low quality,
untrustworthiness, lawlessness, and lack of social ethics, and has become a humiliating
label and experience. These pessimistic self-loathing sentiments are deeply rooted in
China’s colonial history, but have been given new meanings by market activities. The
perception of China as a victim bullied by Western nations and the resulting feelings of
national humiliation have been discursively evoked and reproduced in the recent state-
orchestrated patriotic education, and reignited in the contemporary battles between China
and the West. On the other hand, “Western” stands as a high status symbol of quality,
credibility and modernity in China. Many mainland Chinese prefer to buy consumer
products made in Western countries, especially when it comes to cosmetics, handbags
and baby formula. This has led to the emergence of a new professional category of
substitute shoppers (daigou) who buy consumer products from Western countries and re-
sell them to mainland Chinese. It has also been reported that some privately-owned
companies hire white people at a high rate of salary to put on a facade of credibility,
internationality and high quality for their products and services.
22
These employed white
people don’t have knowledge or credentials necessary for their jobs, but they are required
to meet Chinese business partners and governmental officials and deliver scripted speech.
Although some of them are able to speak Chinese, they are asked to speak English only

22
“Qiye guyong waiguoren cheng menmian maochong zhijian zhuanjia.” Retrieved on November
20, 2016 (http://news.sina.com.cn/s/sd/2010-09-19/160921134180.shtml).
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when they represent their Chinese companies in the public. I suggest that the (arguable)
surge in Chinese anti-foreign sentiments since the 1990s is in part a response to this
symbolic high status of “Westernness” and the social worship of things associated with it
in mainland China. After knowing that I studied interracial relationships between Chinese
women and foreign men, a few professional Chinese women complained about the
differential and unfair treatment of employees with Chinese citizenships and other
nationalities. One woman said, with a strong rightful resentment, that her co-workers
with Hong Kong, Taiwan, European and American citizenships enjoy better salaries and
higher positions in her company than mainland Chinese, with the same or similar other
credentials. However, Chinese pessimistic nationalist feelings are enmeshed with a
culturalist pride. One Chinese man who complained to me about social problems in China
said proudly that his German business partner just returned from Germany to live in
China because for him, Chinese food was the most tasty food in the world. Some Chinese
assert that many Americans must be learning Chinese nowadays.
Chinese men and Chinese women are differently positioned relative to the
Chinese nation. While Chinese men’s masculine ego is tied with the status of the Chinese
nation, the very meaning of a civilized Chinese nation is inscribed on Chinese women’s
bodies. “Leftover women,” “foreign f women,” and “second wives” are criticized because
they represent a betrayal from an essentialized Chinese culture that valorizes women’s
domestic virtues and sexual purity upon which Chinese men’s domination is defined and
established. Chinese men articulate their anxieties about various social challenges to their
masculine ego by stigmatizing Chinese women’s transgressions. Although they rarely
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speak for themselves, Chinese women have creatively appropriated social and cultural
resources to make sense of their positions in China’s dramatic social transformations and
strategize their dating practices. Based on my ethnographic research and in-depth
interviews, the next three chapters will present their stories.

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CHAPTER 3
THE STRONG WOMAN OR THE LITTLE WOMAN?:
CHINESE SINGLE WOMEN NAVIGATING CULUTRAL CONTRADICTIONS
OF FEMININITY

“Why is it always women’s fault? Why does society call us ‘leftover women’?
Why aren’t single men called ‘leftover’?” Jie raised her usually low calm voice and
hurled her unsettled anger during the interview. At 31, she had established herself as a
college lecturer, owned a car, obtained her urban household registration with the City of
Xiamen through her university, and owned a small condominium she had already paid
off. Nonetheless, despite her socio-economic accomplishments, she was confronted with
intense social criticisms of her prolonged singlehood and felt enormous pressures from
her family, friends, coworkers and society at large to get married. Her feelings towards
dating and marriage were ambivalent. Like many Chinese women of her generation
growing up in the 1980s, Jie had longed for romance, love and marriage, and hoped to
have a child soon. But in the meantime, she felt stressed, anxious and agitated when her
family and friends introduced her potential marriage partners who failed to match up to
her expectations. She said resentfully, “I am at a stage where my mother will ask me to
meet anyone, if he is a man.” To rebel against such blind matchmaking efforts, Jie had
chosen, since she was 27, to live in her own apartment located at the periphery of Xiamen
with a distance of 24 kilometers from where her mother lived. Jie was both hopeful and
hopeless. While she focused on her career advancement and held onto her dream about a
quality man who would appreciate her independence, diligence and sweet personality,
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she was aware that her chance of meeting quality men was diminishing, as she crossed
the age threshold of 30. She was also worrying about possible medical complications and
birth defects if she got pregnant after 35. Jie was torn between her aspiration for true love
and the social and biological urgency to start her own family.
My research reveals stories of aging Chinese single women that are full of
contradictory gendered social expectations and practices, as well as personal dilemmas
and ambivalent feelings with respect to professional ambitions, dating and marriage.
Many of them hope to meet enterprising modern retro men who have professional jobs
and compatible personality. They engage in various acts of “self-love,” including
strategies to improve their own socio-economic status and feminize themselves in order
to make themselves more desirable on the domestic marriage market and/or compensate
for their mixed feelings of feminine inadequacy and lack of love. But on the other hand,
they realize that quality men are practical and desire to marry young, beautiful women
with secure jobs. In light of the increased difficulty of finding ideal men and social
pressures to move themselves out of the stigmatized label of “leftover,” some aging
Chinese single women make compromises to go through introduction meetings their
families, friends and commercial matchmaking agencies arrange for them. Although
many single women in my research have undergraduate or graduate degrees and high-
status professions, all my interviewees identify with the ideal of “virtuous wives and
good mothers” to a varying degree, perceive marriage and motherhood as their final
destiny and meaning in life, and decenter their professional identity as only a necessary
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ambitious means to obtain financial security, fulfill filial obligations, and take care of
their children.
This chapter captures and analyzes the complexity of aging Chinese single
women’s experiences pertaining to dating and marriage, with a focus on the social and
cultural contradictions they live through. I argue against a recent scholarly tendency to
interpret the social stigmatization of “leftover women” as the resurgence of an oppressive
Chinese patriarchal tradition, and Chinese women’s prolonged singlehood as an emergent
modern form of liberal femininity. This dichotomous framework of gender oppression
versus liberation builds upon a temporal linear progress from tradition to modernity
which is geo-politically mapped and projected onto a hierarchy of national cultures.
Moreover, as I have argued in Chapter 2, “tradition” is discursively constructed,
appropriated, and invoked in Chinese masculinist nationalist representations of “deviant”
Chinese women as a discipline technique. Instead of treating “the Chinese patriarchal
tradition” as an essentialized, totalizing reality, I highlight the disjuncture, convergence
and divergence of regimes of gender that produce Chinese women’s subjectivities in
contemporary mainland China. I suggest that the sometimes converging and sometimes
conflicting gender regimes of the Chinese state, the neoliberal market and the family have
created Chinese women’s ambitions for intellectual and professional development, and
desires for and identification with marriage and motherhood. Growing up in the late
1970s and 1980s, Chines single women in my study experienced a transition from the
Maoist socialist state to the reformist state, and the resultant transformations in gender
ideologies, family policies, and economic structures. Living at the intersections and
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interstices of these regimes of gender, Chinese single women negotiate and reconcile
multiple and often conflicting social expectations. In these processes, they have
postponed getting married and unsettled gender relations.
Based on in-depth interviews and ethnography, I identify three common themes
that emerged from aging Chinese single women’s narratives about singlehood, dating and
marriage. These include: the coexistence of social pressures and desires to get married
and become mothers, marriage ideals and marriage pragmatism, as well as growing up in
two gender worlds. I first elaborate on these themes and then proceed to discuss various
strategies of “self-love” single Chinese women have practiced to make themselves
lovable.

External Pressures to Get Married? Desires for Love, Marriage and Motherhood?
Or Both?
Before I started to identify and contact potential single Chinese women for
interviews, I was worrying that there might be very few Chinese women who would be
willing to participate in this research, as my Chinese family and friends had told me that
“leftover women” had weird personalities and were already too miserable to talk about
their singlehood. However, to my surprise, 11 single women initiated contact with me
through phone calls, QQ messages, or wechat, after our mutual friends told them about
my dissertation research. Knowing that I was a single woman working on my doctorate
degree in the United States, they perceived me to be one of them, and told me that the
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interview would be a good chance to share their views about marriage and gender
relations in China and to vent their stress, frustration and anger under enormous social
pressures to get married. Hong, a 30-year-old engineer, told me,
Your dissertation is a very good topic. Everybody talks about “leftover women.” It
is so embarrassing. My family and close friends really care about me. They are
concerned I am not married yet. They introduce me boys and arrange meetings. But
most people gossip about me behind my back with bad intentions. They just think
that I am abnormal. It is good to talk to other single women. It feels good to know I
am not the only one there [who faces such social pressures].
Xiaolin, 28, was a director of the accounting department of a company specializing in e-
commerce. She said,
“Leftover women” is a derogatory term. What does “leftover” mean? Leftover
food? Chinese just like labeling people, especially women. Now people look at
single women with colored lenses, as if something is wrong with them. Everybody
around me talks about this. My parents are pressing me to find someone. In the
company, when I ask my employees to do things or criticize their work, they
gossip that I am a spinster with bad temper. Sometimes, they just don’t listen.
Rong, 29, felt similar formidable pressures to end her single status not only for herself,
but also for the sake of her parents’ face. She remarked:
Society pressures “leftover women” to get married. But the pressures are also on
our parents. Wherever my mother goes, her friends ask her whether I have a
boyfriend and will get married soon. Then she comes home, complaining that I lost
face for her. Sometimes, she told me Aunt Blahblah’s daughter got married and
was expecting a baby, and asked when she could become a grandma. I can’t talk
with her nowadays. She brings up this topic so often.
Chinese single women also experience social pressures to get married indirectly, as
they observe that other Chinese single women are stigmatized, alienated and ostracized.
Jie commented on one of her coworkers:
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People don’t directly say you are abnormal. But I know they think you are weird. I
have a co-worker at university. She lives a low-key life and doesn’t say much
about herself. People thought she was single, and something was wrong with her.
People stayed away from her. Hmmm..it was a feeling. You could sense people
thought she was abnormal. But not a long time ago, she brought her little son to
campus. Now everybody knew that she was actually married. People suddenly
changed their attitude.
Besides verbal prodding, shaming and social alienation, external pressures take
the form of obligated matchmaking meetings. Aging Chinese single women feel
compelled to attend introduction meetings their families and friends arrange for them.
Hong had started to meet boys introduced to her since her junior year at college. Yuan,
25, spent most of her holidays going through similar meetings. Whether Chinese women
agree to attend such matchmaking events their parents arrange has become a gauge of
their filial piety or lack thereof. Xiaolin said:
My mother arranged a meeting almost every day during the last week-long May
Day Holiday. It was like a job. I was even busier than when I was on my regular
job. But she said boys were meeting people on holidays, and what other occasions
would be a better time? I had to go, just to please her and keep my ears quiet.
Otherwise, she would nag: “How old are you? Have you considered your old
mother? I am getting old. I can’t accompany you forever.”
Xiaolin was the only child in her family. Of all the 32 single women I interviewed, 30 of
them were singleton daughters and most of them were born under the one-child family
policy. Many singleton daughters in my study told me that their parents pressured them to
get married because they were concerned about their welfare in old age if they didn’t
have their own families.
During my ethnographic work with the matchmaking agency, I met a few
concerned mothers who brought along their aging single daughters to register for
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professional match-making services. Xiaofang was a 32-year-old director of the human
resources department of a supermarket. I first encountered her and her mother as they
consulted with the staff at the agency. While Xiaofang was sitting quietly at the desk
occasionally responding to the staff’s questions, her mother anxiously asked them about
the services and single men registered with the agency. I interviewed Xiaofang later and
found out that she would not have had come to the agency if not for her mother. She told
me,
I didn’t want to use the agency. Going public on this is embarrassing. They
probably think of me as a spinster who couldn’t find a husband from the men I
know. But my mother dragged me along.
Xiaofang took a disinterested approach towards using professional matchmaking
services, except that she showed up for a few introduction meetings under her mother’s
prodding. At times, her mother contacted the agency staff to get updated on the men her
daughter met and their dating progress.
External pressures have timing. Most single women in my study began to feel the
pressure to meet someone in their early 20s and experience its peak when they were 28 or
29. But as they turned 30, the social pressures became a final hopeless recognition that
they would remain spinsters forever. Jie said during the interview:
When I was 28 or 29, men were still interested in meeting me. But after I turned
30, men just turned away after they heard about my age. My mother was busy
arranging meetings for me before. She asked about their credentials. But now it is
difficult just to find men to meet. She would push me to meet anyone who is
willing to meet, whoever he is.
For Xiaoli, a 36-year-old accountant, 30 years of age was a turning point:
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People think if a woman is not married by 30, her life is over. When I was around
25 or 26, my family and friends introduced me a lot of men. After I turned 30, they
became silent. They probably didn’t want to hurt my feeling.
On the domestic marriage market in China, there is a gendered double standard towards
marriageable age. It is conventionally believed that women will age much faster and their
fertility will decline dramatically after they reach 30. But Chinese men are not subject to
the same social prescription about when to marry. In fact, as Chinese men build their
socio-economic credentials over time, they become more desirable on the dating market.
During the interview, Wenzheng cited a popular Chinese saying to lament about this
gendered social bias in defining desirability for men and women:
Everybody says “a 40-year-old man is a flower, but a 30-year-old woman is soy
bean dregs.” Old men can always find young women to marry. But when women
get old, they don’t have many options. Most men who were willing to meet me are
much older. Many of them are divorced.
At the age of 39, Wenzheng was the manager of a civil engineering company and a
certified appraiser of civil engineering projects. As she aged, she had to lower her
standards for marriage partners, given her declining fertility and the shrinking pool of
men available to her on the marriage market. She had met and dated men who were much
older (50 and above), had lower socio-economic status than her, and were mostly
divorced with adult children. Her compromise was a conscious, but unwilling strategy to
cope with the discriminatory marriage market revolving around a heterosexual political
economy that valorizes women’s feminine beauty, youth and reproductive value in the
service of men. The Chinese practice of hypergamy exacerbates this gendered bias by
punishing aging Chinese women who pursue career advancement and postpone getting
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married beyond the prime fertile ages, but awarding old Chinese men who have
established themselves socially and economically.
The pressure to get married is more compelling for Chinese women growing up in
the reformist era than under the Maoist state regime. Unmarried Chinese women who
came of age in the 1950s and 1960s identified with their worker identity and didn’t face
severe nation-wide social criticisms against their singlehood (Rofel 1999). I argue that
the universality of mandatory marriage for contemporary Chinese women at an early age
has its historical contingency. First, with the decollectivization of agricultural production
in rural areas in the late 1970s and the privatization of the urban economy in the early
1980s, the Chinese family has resurfaced as a primary unit of agricultural production,
individual welfare, child care and elderly care. Secondly, since the demise of the Maoist
state feminism and the emergence of marketed-oriented economy, Chinese women have
been confronted with the termination of lifetime guaranteed employment (“iron rice
bowl”), massive layoffs, early retirement, and workplace discrimination based on their
domestic roles. This economic backlash is a forceful push for Chinese women to go back
to the home. Thirdly, the implementation of the one-child family policy since 1979 has
alleviated the cultural preference for sons over daughters, especially for urban parents.
But in the meantime, it has intensified parents’ anxieties and uncertainties about their
singleton daughters’ welfare in old age. When I visited the informal marriage markets in
public parks, some parents of singleton unmarried adult daughters worried who would
take care of their daughters as they became old, since they didn’t have any siblings to rely
on. I suggest that to ensure their singleton daughters’ well-being, Chinese parents exert
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pressures on them to get married, have children and establish their own families.
Sometimes, Chinese parents express their love by invoking the morals of filial piety to
make marriage a family obligation for their daughters. Fourthly, a naturalized,
dichotomous understanding of gender has become prominent in the post-socialist
rejection of the Maoist gender-erasure ideologies and policies. Femininity based on
domesticity, youth and beauty has become a new ideal that replaces the earlier socialist
exemplar of strong female workers. This soft, virtuous femininity serves as an inferior
complementary opposition against which a rising assertive Chinese masculine subjection
position constructs and defines itself. As I have argued, Chinese men appropriate the
Chinese traditional family as a normative symbol to discipline Chinese women. With
newly accumulated economic resources, Chinese men are not only able to purchase and
consume feminized and sexualized services provided by young, beautiful women, but
also desire to marry beautiful women at fertile ages, pitting Chinese women against each
other in competition for quality men. Popular Chinese women’s magazines publish
advice articles to warn Chinese women about female rivalry and advise them to work on
both inner beauty and outside beauty in order to keep their husbands. For aging Chinese
single women, younger women on the dating market serve as a deterrent against late
marriage. Hong’s comment on men’s persistent desire for young women demonstrates
this point:
After women turn 30, it is difficult to meet men. People say that men are the most
committed animal in the world. It is true. When they are 20, they love 18-year-old
girls. When they are 30, they love 18-year-old girls. When they are 40, they still
love 18-year-old girls.
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All these post-Maoist social and cultural conditions combine to make marriage an
imperative for Chinese women who grew up in the early reform era.
Despite all the external pressures that make single Chinese women feel frustrated,
stressful, alienated and ostracized, all single Chinese women in my study expressed their
desires to get married and have their own children. For Xiaolin, marriage and
motherhood provided ultimate meanings for womanhood. She said,
I can’t imagine that I will never get married. All women will eventually get
married. After all, marriage is women’s final destiny (Guisu). Without marriage
and having given birth, a woman is not a complete woman. I would regret if I
didn’t have my own child.
Hong believed that marriage and motherhood was an integral stage of a woman’s life
course and that women could realize their full personhood only if they make this stage
happen and live through it. As she told me,
People do different things on different stages. Marriage is one critical stage in
women’s lives. After all, women need a final destiny (Guisu). You need to
experience it. Only then is your life complete. You grow up and become a whole
person.
Yuhan, 26, believed that marriage rather than a career was the source of happiness for an
aging woman. She said:
I have a few female bosses in my company. They are successful. But deeply in
their hearts, they must be lonely and unhappy, especially at night when they get
back home after work.
Yanhong was a 29-year-old urban single women. She owned and managed a small
convenient store at the community she lived in. For her, a family based on marriage was a
harbor against the harsh outside world.
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I am the little woman type. I want to get married. When I am sad and want to cry,
my husband should be able to lend me his shoulders and hold up the world for me.
Juan, 28, hoped to realize her dream of meeting her Mr. Right one day. She chose to
work as a kindergarten teacher because there was an overlap between the role as a
nurturing teacher and the role as a good mother. During the interview, she said:
Many men like to pick kindergarten teachers as wives. They [The two roles] are
similar. A kindergarten teacher can accommodate the two [roles]. Both are more
innocent than many other jobs in the outside world.
Yalin, 32, understood having a child was an extension of her life. She projected her life
dreams to her future child, as she told me:
I want to get married and have my own child. My child can have the life I don’t
have. I work really hard, so my child can have a better starting point.
She migrated from the countryside of a poor central inland province to work as a sales
associate for a commercial television channel in a southeast coastal city. Frequently, she
worked overtime, mostly calling and talking to potential and old customers over the
phone. She longed to have her own family in the city, and hoped that her child would
grow up in an urban middle-class environment.
All single women in my study identify with the ideal of “virtuous wives and good
mothers.” Sexual purity is central to their self-presentation as traditional good Chinese
girls and future virtuous wives. During my interactions with Chinese single women, the
mere mention of casual dating usually made these women raise their eyebrows and
question my morality. Virginity remains a cherished feminine virtue for all single women
I interviewed. Xiaolan was a 32-year-old accountant working for a town government. The
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first time we met in a cafe, she was disturbed by the research category of “woman.” She
denied that she was a woman, and insisted that I call her a girl. Underneath her distinction
between a woman and a girl was the paramount importance she attached to virginity.
Similarly, Jie valued virginity and first love. She refused to have a relationship until she
met her true love. She told me that if she dated men before she met her true love, she
would become numb about love over time and lose her ability to love when the right man
came to her life. Hong felt repelled by men who showed signs of interests in sex and
refused to meet them. Identification with traditional virtuous wives not only gives
Chinese single women a high symbolic status and a sense of entitlement to romance and
love, but also enables them to fantasize themselves as hidden treasures waiting to be
discovered by quality men. In her microblog, the Chinese equivalent of twitter, Jie wrote
down a self-encouraging sentence: “Cinderella, be patient! Your prince will come along!”
A few friends responded to this message, confirming her virtue as a traditional Chinese
girl and showering her with support.
All the single women I interviewed anticipated that they would become mothers
one day. For them, marriage is a necessary pathway into motherhood, and pregnancy and
childbirth are only imaginable and desirable within the legitimate bounds of marriage.
Xiaolan who aggressively defended her premarital sexual purity said she would rather get
married, have a child and get a divorce than losing her virginity before she got married or
becoming a single mother. Single motherhood is socially unacceptable in mainland
China. A Chinese single mother is confronted with social stigmatization, a lack of
institutional support and difficulty of getting married. During my ethnographic work with
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the marriage introduction agency, the staff were unable to find potential marriage
partners for a 28-year-old single mother. Single men, aged 28-35, refused to meet her
because they could not accept the fact that she was a single mother. In the end, the staff
tried to convince her to give up her marriage dream and talk her into forming a
relationship with a married man.
Chinese single women looked forward to having their own children and expected
motherhood to be a pleasant, rewarding, but demanding experience. They often articulate
their future role as a mother in terms of preparing their children for competition in
society. Like Yalin, many of them brought up the topic of professional developments
when they discussed motherhood. At the time of interview, Jie was working on her
doctorate degree in order to survive in the increasingly competitive academia in China.
She was saving money and considering buying another condominium in a good school
district in Xiamen. She said:
My job is competitive and stressful. But I need money. Everything is so expensive
nowadays. When I have my own child, the expenses will increase. I am saving
money and planning to buy a condo near the Xiamen No.1 Middle School. Last
year, it was the Top 1 in placing high school graduates in Tsinghua and Peking
University in Fujian Province.
25 out of 32 single women interviewed commented on the high expenses of raising
children in contemporary China and the Chinese competitive educational system. Instead
of identifying themselves with their professions and feeling proud of their socio-
economic achievements, most of the 25 single women reduced their jobs to mere means
of making money. For them, in order to take care of their children, they must be
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economically well-off to keep abreast of the high standards of consumption and
educational achievements in China. Yalin summarized this economy-conscious
mothering:
This society is very realistic. Everything needs money. Today’s kids are money-
shredding machines. They need food, clothes, toys, entertainment, education, etc.
You see other parents send their kids to private tutoring, and you have to do the
same for your kids. Otherwise, they are losing the game at the starting line. I have
to be strong [financially], so I can take care of my child.
I suggest that a new subject position of Chinese motherhood has emerged from the
intersection of the neoliberal market and the Chinese family culture. This new
motherhood combines day-to-day care and nurturing with the more pragmatic aspect of
parenting adapted to the privatized economy that valorizes money, competition,
consumption, and educational credentials. Under conditions of the market-oriented
economy, the Chinese familial emphasis on children’s intellectual achievements has
gravitated towards their consumption of educational resources (e.g. college education,
private tutoring, etc.) and acquisition of formal educational credentials to develop skills-
and knowledge-based competence necessary for the market. Moreover, the Chinese
cultural practice of gaining the “face” for the family has been intensified by the rise of a
booming Chinese consumer culture that creates and mobilizes people’s desires for a
modern middle-class lifestyle. This status competition via conspicuous consumption is
especially severe when it comes to raising children. Contemporary Chinese mothers-to-be
in my study have recognized and adapted to these new rounds of children’s competition
at schools, on the job market, and in lifestyles. They gear up for the neoliberal mothering
by maintaining, if not upgrading, their professional status and paychecks, although they
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relegate their professional identity to the periphery. For them, mothering is hard to do
under China’s market-oriented economic conditions. But it is a desire, an aspiration and a
sweet anticipation many single Chinese women harbor and work hard to realize.

Marriage Ideals and Marriage Pragmatism
I accompanied Jie to a socializing and dating event a Chinese leading online
matchmaking company organized. She met roughly 30 single Chinese women who were
mostly professionals and 5 single men who were all rural-to-urban migrant workers.
Shortly, Jie decided to leave the event. She told me, “I would not have come, if I had
known that the men who came to this event had this quality.” By this quality, she meant
dark skin complexion, short stature, and clothing styles suggestive of lower-class or
working-class backgrounds. The men at the event represented the opposite of quality men
whom Jie longed to meet.
Like Jie, 28 out of 32 single women in my study expressed their longings to meet,
date and marry quality men. They desired tall urban men who were at least equally, if not
more, accomplished than themselves and allowed them to enact subordinated femininity.
Hong went through introduction meetings her family and friends arranged only to find
out that the men she met were mediocre and nothing about them impressed her. She
wanted to marry a man who could hold her in awe. She told me,
Now men and women are equal in society. But psychologically, women still rely
on men, and want to be little women. I work up my social status. I am not looking
down. I want to find someone at the same social level or higher…My mother was
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asking me why I wasn’t happy about so many men introduced to me. I told her
that they were all introduced by the same people and how could they be too
different? Birds of a feather flock together. It was a waste of time. Introduction
meetings are different from meeting men on a daily basis. At those meetings,
people judge and criticize each other. I don’t dislike introduction meetings
altogether. But the point is that, first, I need to meet only men with good
conditions. Then I need to act like a reserved classic lady at the first meeting. First
impression is important.
Hong had a bachelor’s degree in electronic engineering. With her friend’s internal
reference, she secured her first job with a private company in the City of Xiamen. She
was soon promoted to the supervisory position of her department. In her spare time, Hong
learned about LED technology and was recently offered a senior engineer job with a
higher salary from a LED lights company in Shenzhen. She said while many people
perceived her to be strong and independent, she was a little woman in the heart and
would like to find a strong man whom she looked up to. For her, a quality man should be
enterprising: he must have a cause in life, was motivated to constantly charge himself
with new knowledge, and was able to endure hardships in life and remain strong for the
family. Only in front of a strong, promising, reliable retro man was Hong willing and able
to perform and enact subordinated femininity as embodied and symbolized by the soft
and dependent “little woman” type.
Most single women in my study aspired to marry men who could inspire and
retain feelings of awe in them (zhendezhu) and enable them to enact subordinated
femininity in their performance of little women, as opposed to the successful,
independent professional “strong women” many people perceived “leftover women” to
be. Oftentimes, this entails that men they wanted to marry had above-average height,
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were socially resourceful, had educational achievements, professional jobs, ownership of
condominium, and/or were of urban origin or residency. In Hong’s words, ‘he must be
stronger than me in at least in one aspect.” Of the 28 single women with at least
bachelor’s degrees, all but two explicitly told me that they wouldn’t consider men with
less than college education. The two exceptions were Yalin (age 32) and Xiuyu (age 36)
whose marriage choices were limited by their age and rural origin on the dating market,
despite that they both migrated to reside and work in cities. The other 4 single women
had high school diplomas. They preferred to marry college-educated men, but were open
to negotiating this preference. All single women in my study expected their marriage
partners to have equal or higher occupational status than themselves. Rong, a 29-year-old
accountant, summarized this marital expectation, as she told me, “a company’s [female]
manager cannot marry a [male] janitor.” 20 out of the 32 single women looked to meet
professional men working in the public sector with occupational security, social
networks, subsidized housing, medical insurance, and retirement insurance. 22 out of the
32 single women interviewed hoped that the husbands-to-be and their families had
purchased and owned residential real estate property before they got married legally and
moved in together. 2 single women owned residential real estate property under their
names and were willing to use it as their post-marital residency. But they hoped that their
marriage partners would make contributions to the purchase of bigger residential real
estate property in the near future. The other 8 single women were open to living with
their husbands’ parents, but hoped that their husbands would work as hard as themselves
in order to buy their own real estate property in a few years. All the 24 urban single
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women associated rural-to-urban migrant workers with low quality. 18 of them preferred
to meet and marry urban professional men. The 8 single women from rural areas in my
study migrated to work in cities. They all hoped to establish themselves and start their
families there. For them, urban men with stable jobs were their top marriage choices.
They also considered rural-to-urban migrant men who had secure jobs in the same cities
where they resided. But none of these single rural-to-urban migrant girls envisioned
returning to their native places and marrying local men.
I argue that Chinese single women’s desires for quality men are socially made by
a multiplicity of social, political and cultural discourses and practices. First, the cultural
ideal and practice of hypergamy both builds on and contributes to the interactive and
mutually constructed dichotomy of hegemonic masculinity and subordinated femininity.
Chinese single women’s structured longings to and identification with domestic
femininity motivate and enable them to fantasize and pursue quality men who embodied
hegemonic masculinity. Many single Chinese women chose to dis-identify with “strong
women” and perform and identify with “little women” partly because traits associated
with “strong women” such as intellectual accomplishments and socio-economic success
are emasculating to Chinese men and rendered them undesirable on the dating market, as
I have argued in Chapter 2. Secondly, the state scientific and pro-health discourse on
population quality that was central to the family planning policy implemented in 1979
has embraced, utilized, and circulated the concept of human quality that is anchored on
the eugenics of the body. During the early 1980s and 1990s, increasing the average height
of the population was a national modernization goal. Chinese single women in my study
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appropriated the official eugenic language to articulate their desires for tall urban men. A
few women I interviewed associated the height of their future husbands with that of their
children. For them, choosing a tall husband was the first step in ensuring that their
children would have an advantage from the start. Thirdly, in the past few decades, the
nation-wide educational reforms stressed the importance of quality education (suzhi
jiaoyu), developed and strengthened pre-college basic learning, and expanded the
enrollment capacity of universities. This has promoted the concept of human quality
based on intellectual achievements, the development of creativity and life-long self-
learning skills as well as social ethics and world views. As a result of these top-down
state campaigns, college education has become a normative expectation for children from
Chinese urban middle-class families. Most single women in my study were at least
college-educated and expected their future spouses to accomplish no less. Fourthly, the
emergence of the Chinese market-oriented economy with its individualistic ideologies
has expanded the notion of human quality to include resourcefulness and competence in
navigating the competitive job market and achieving social mobility. The language of
insecure privatized markets, meritocracy and individualism has enabled some Chinese
single women interviewed to imagine and speak about their desired partners in terms of
occupational security and upward mobility. Moreover, the state campaigns to enhance the
overall economic growth by stimulating the development of the market of residential real
estate property has created and mobilized Chinese people’s aspirations for and anxieties
about owning their own property. For some Chinese single women in my study, buying
and living in a residential property was a taken-for-granted prerequisite for getting
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married, a middle-class lifestyle, and/or an investment in their children’s education, given
that condominiums were expensive in good school districts. They wanted to marry men
who could help realize this dream of owning a property. Last, the post-socialist allegory
re-evaluates things and people associated with the Maoist past as backward and
unproductive (Rofel 1999). This narrative has become an evaluative and interpretive
framework through which Chinese single women defined rural men and urban working-
class men as having low quality and undesirable marriage partners. To sum up, I argue
that contemporary Chinese single women’s longings to marry quality men are structured
by the dichotomous construction of gender and entangled in larger processes of China’s
modernization. Their desires for the characteristics in quality men are the ambitions of
the whole nation.
On the other hand, Chinese single women in my study had realistic outlooks and
experiences about their disadvantages on the dating market due to their age, looks,
intellectual achievements, and socioeconomic status. Jie told me that her academic
accomplishments had marked her as a men repellent:
People say there are three types of people in the world: men, women and female
Ph.D. Having a Ph.D. is like a sin. It scares men away. I was once introduced to a
man. When we met, we had a good conversation. Everything seemed to go well.
But after I told him I was working on my Ph.D., his attitude changed. He was not
as patient and interested to get to know me. It was like he was not feeling
comfortable. After the meeting, he disappeared and didn’t contact me again. Now
my strategy is that I don’t tell them about my Ph.D. at the beginning.
Wenzheng, a 39-year-old director and senior engineer in a privately-owned company,
experienced rejections because men said they couldn’t be dominant in the relationships
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with her (zhendezhu). The combination of her advanced age and professional status was
intimidating to men, as she told me:
There are not many single men around my age. Most of them are married. They
[the agency] introduced me a few single men in 50s and 60s. They were widowed
or divorced. When they heard I was single at 39, they speculated a lot: she must be
picky; she must have a lot of experience with men; she won’t be able to give birth.
They like young inexperienced girls, but not mature established women, no matter
they are 20 or 50. I am a director. Men also worry that I am bossy (qiangshi) and
they have to listen to me at home.
She pointed to the gendered marriage-scape in China. Aging Chinese single women,
especially after they turn 30, face a much shrunken pool of single men and social
prejudice against their age, sexuality, and socio-economic status. In the Chinese context,
not only does an advanced age symbolize declining female fertility, but it also connotes
female professional establishment and sexual experience, both of which present
emasculating threats to Chinese men. In Chinese single women’s stories, female age and
its symbolization put them in a disadvantaged and even dangerous position when they
dated men. Both Jie and Wenzheng had met men who tried to take advantage of them. Jie
explained:
Some men think that young girls look for love, but old women look for sex. One
man introduced to me was like that. He had no moral conscience. When we met, he
took liberties with me. He asked if I loved sex and wanted to have sex with him. I
rejected it. He burst out, “How old are you? Don’t feign purity (zhuang chunjie).”
Jie presented herself as a pure traditional Chinese girl. The experience with this man was
a mortifying insult to her. After this encounter, she became more cautious about men and
dating. Aging Chinese single women were confronted with Chinese men’s ageist and
sexist double standards towards women. The discrepancy between their self-
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representation of and identification with feminine virtues and men’s perceptions of them
as sexually experienced and therefore impure was a painfully felt experience.
Chinese single women are also keenly aware that urban quality men are practical
and looking for women from urban middle-class family backgrounds and with secure
jobs and steady sources of income. To sift true love through the pool of single men, Rong
did an experiment:
I told some men I met that my parents were street vendors (bai ditan de). They
never contacted me again. They are very pragmatic.
Rong’s father was a military governmental cadre and her mother was a certified public
accountant. Yet she made up a story about her lower-class parents as a strategy to test
whether men liked her or her family resources. To her disappointment, Chinese single
men took into consideration potential marriage partners’ resources, including her family’s
socio-economic status. Xiaolan had similar experiences of having men inquire her salary
and family background at the first meetings. She felt repelled and ignored them.
Nonetheless, there is a fine line between female resourcefulness and female domination
Chinese single women have to tiptoe on. In these women’s experiences, Chinese men
considered single women with conventionally feminine jobs such as kindergarten
teachers, accountants, and college lecturers (not professors with Ph.D.) as desirable
partners. But single women with typically masculine jobs such as company directors and
engineers as overpowering and therefore undesirable marriage partners. Jie was careful
about not trespassing this fine line. At introduction meetings, she presented herself as a
college lecturer, but intentionally avoided the fact that she was working on her Ph.D.
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While holding onto their dreams of meeting their right men and getting settled,
some Chinese single women anticipated that their marriage would go sour one day
because of men’s infidelity. Yajuan, a 30-year-old nurse, told me:
They [men] all have women outside marriage. I know that my father has other
women. My mother has been pretending to be blind to this (zheng yizhiyan bi
yizhiyan). She has tolerated a lot and swallowed her bitterness. She doesn’t want to
leave her marriage probably because of me. Now I don’t care much that my future
husband has other women, if he is responsible for the family and doesn’t bring
home diseases, such as AIDS.
Due to the widespread critical cultural representations and common practices of men’s
extramarital love affairs in today’s China, Yajuan took it as a fact that all men would
engage in out-of-wedlock liaison at some point in their marriages. This belief was
reinforced by her observation of her father’s affair and her mother’s suffering, and
projected onto her expectation for her own marital life. She coped with this anticipated
marital distress by devoting herself to professional development. As a nurse of the
emergency department of a local hospital, Yajuan often had to work night shifts and
overtime. She described her current job as a “youth rice bowl” and dismissed it as a
lifetime profession. At the time of interview, she was enrolled and taking classes in a
program about medical administration, with the hope that she would be promoted to a
more stable and better-paid job with regular hours. Nonetheless, she identified herself as
a filial daughter and a good future mother. For her, building her occupational and
financial security was the way to ensure the welfare of her mother and future child,
especially in cases of family crises such as her father’s and husband’s betrayal. Her
strategy was consistent with older Chinese women’s heavy emotional investments in their
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“uterine families” (Wolf 1972) composed of the mothers and their children as a self-
defensive and empowering mechanism in the patriarchal Chinese family that prioritized
patrilineage over conjugal relationships and marginalized Chinese women.

Growing Up in Two Gender Worlds
The first time I met Hong, she impressed me as a sunny, sporty active girl with
her comfortable T-shirt and jean overalls. But during the interview, she rejected this
gender-neutral image of herself as something from the past and something imperfect that
she had been working hard to improve. She said:
The best thing about going through introduction meetings is that I’ve learned
what’s not perfect about myself. I didn’t focus on my looks in the past. (I asked:
“you mean your looks were not perfect?”) Yes. At the beginning, something was
wrong with the way I dressed myself. But I didn’t know that. (I asked: “what do
you mean by “the way you dressed yourself”?) I wore sporty clothes. (I asked:
“how did you know it wasn’t perfect?”) From the reaction of the men I met. (I
asked: “did they say anything?) No, but they disappeared and never contacted me
again. They weren’t attracted to me. Actually, introduction meetings are just like
exams. There are always ways. If you dress yourself nicely like a classic lady, men
will like you. The most important positive influence of going through introduction
meetings on me is that I became interested in dressing myself up and started to pay
attention to my looks. It makes me more likable. I feel better about myself, too.
Hong found college graduation as the beginning of a watershed stage of her life. Before
college, like most Chinese girls of her generation, she focused exclusively on academic
studies in order to enter a good university. Her single mother explicitly told her that a
girl’s looks were not important compared to her intelligence and mental and moral
strength. Hong perceived her mother to be a strong woman who successfully established
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herself as a civil engineer and took good care of her. In her words, “she never missed a
single meal for me.” At school, Hong’s teachers told the class that paying attention to
one’s looks was a distraction from academic studies. She faced strict school policies
forbidding girls from wearing mini-skirts. Girly girls who dressed in feminine clothes
were not considered serious students and at times were the targets of tease. Hong had
experiences of ridiculing and excluding girly girls. She had made friends with boys, but
dating as a concept never occurred to her. Throughout her pre-college and earlier college
years, Hong enjoyed wearing relaxed sporty clothes. Starting in her junior year at college,
her family’s friends arranged meetings for her to socialize with boys. But most meetings
didn’t strike her as different from regular friends’ gathering and she wore her usual
relaxed sporty clothes. For her, staging a feminine self-representation wasn’t a concept
until she graduated from college, started her full-time job, and was rejected by boys she
was attractive to. At the time of interview, she had learned to perform femininity. On her
wechat account, she frequently posted photos in which she wore body-hugging shirts,
skirts, dresses and had her long hair loose.
In my study, many Chinese single women born in the late 1970s and 1980s
experienced a similar disjuncture of their understanding of gender and self-
representation. Some used this disjuncture to explain why it had been difficult for them to
date and find potential marriage partners. Xiaozhen felt confused as to how to present
herself and interact with boys when she entered college because she was strictly raised to
focus on academic performances. Jie remembered that she naturally liked wearing
feminine clothes when she was a child. But her family told that she should focus on inner
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beauty and build her inner strength. She was ridiculed at school because of her noticeably
large breasts under body-hugging clothes. To hide them, she had to wear baggy clothes.
After she started college in 2001, the pressure for her to do well at school suddenly
disappeared. Instead, her mother encouraged her to polish her appearances and look for a
husband. Since then, she had been enjoying shopping for fashionable dresses and wearing
them on most social occasions. But she was frequently rejected by men because of her
maternal looks. Jie experienced double disjunctures in meanings of gender. She first
effaced her femininity in order to fit in the gender-neutral pre-college educational culture.
Then she felt both the pressures and desires to embrace it when she was entering the
dating market. My interviews with these Chinese single women reminded me of my own
femininity-erasing upbringing and schooling as well as the sudden surge in peer pressures
to look feminine at college. I remembered in one morale-boosting session before the high
school entrance exam (zhongkao) in the mid-1990s, the invited Chinese subject teacher
explicitly told the class that girls should have their long hair cut because it took them too
much time off academic studies to take care of it. The next day, a few girls who had kept
long hair wore short bob-style hair to school. But when I was at college in the early 2000,
it was common for college girls to wear feminine clothes and even use light makeup. I
felt marginalized and excluded because I often wore relaxed baggy shirts and jeans.
I call the disjuncture in gender meanings a fault line of gender socialization
Chinese single women in their late 20s and 30s lived through. I argue that this fault line is
a product of the radical transition from the Maoist state regime to the reformist state
regime that has brought about divergent social expectations for Chinese women. On the
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one hand, when they were little girls, Chinese women who came of age in the early
reform era were taught to identify with strong androgynous women, study hard at school
and go to university. First, the termination of lifetime guaranteed employment (“iron rice
bowl”), the gradual rise of the market-oriented economy, and the state withdrawal from
people’s private lives have made educational credentials of paramount importance for the
welfare and social mobility of average Chinese individuals and their families. This
contemporary social emphasis on education is rooted in and in turn has reinforced the
Chinese family culture that values intellectual development due to the historical
association between scholarly achievements and obtainment of powerful political
positions in imperial courts. Secondly, parents of these Chinese girls lived through the
Maoist socialist nation-state building that equated democratic poverty with class equality
and the tumultuous Cultural Revolution that disrupted the higher-educational system and
deprived them of opportunities to attend college. These parents projected their unrealized
dreams and hopes about education and class mobility onto their children. The
implementation of the one-child family planning policy in 1979 also alleviated parents’
preference for sons, and increased their expectations for and investments in singleton-
daughters’ educational success. Some parents of single Chinese women lost their “iron
rice bowl” during the massive layoffs of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s. With
limited economic resources, these parents stressed that their children took care of their
school work, so that they didn’t have to invest extra money in increasingly expensive
educational opportunities for them such as private tutoring and well-reputed schools and
universities. Doing well at school and saving parent’s money became critical to the
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definition of Chinese filial children growing up in the early reform era. Thirdly, despite
the demise of the Maoist feminism as a state ideology, its femininity-erasing rhetoric
continued to structure the ways parents, teachers, and pre-college schools socialized
Chinese girls of the early reform generation into competent serious students for the rigid
and competitive higher-educational system. Like Hong’s mother, many Chinese mothers
of these girls grew up in a context where the ideal of womanhood was strong female
socialist workers who could do whatever men could do. These mothers served as agents
of socializing their daughters into values of moral strength at times of hardships. This
emphasis on female inner strength and discipline and the trivialization of feminine beauty
were reinforced by official nationalist representations of national female volleyball team
players as heroes who endured hardships, ate bitterness, and made personal sacrifices to
win five consecutive championships in major international games for the Chinese nation
during the 1980s.
Nonetheless, on the other hand, social expectations shifted to focus on their roles
as wives and mothers after Chinese girls of the early reform generation went to college
and entered the dating market in the late 1990s and 2000s. This shift correlated with the
urban economic restructuring that resulted in Chinese women’s retirement at an earlier
age and in higher number (Hershatter 2007) and massive layoffs from state-owned
enterprises in the 1990s (Bian et al. 2000). Chinese women made up approximately 40
percent of the urban working population, but constituted over 60 percent of urban laid-off
workers (Bian et al. 2000). In the context of this economic backlash and a lack of
established universal state welfare, Chinese parents relented their pressures on their
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daughters to do well at school and re-directed their attention to their daughters’ romantic
engagement and marriage prospect, especially after their daughters had crossed the
threshold of college entrance exams. This was partly because women’s college education
was a desirable characteristic single quality men looked for in wives, but extended
postgraduate studies (esp. a doctorate degree) disadvantaged Chinese women on the
dating market because of their advanced age and overpowering educational status relative
to men. The rise of ideal womanhood based on youth and beauty also rendered many of
these Chinese single women marginal to the sexualized and feminized dating market due
to their lack of learned practical know-how on gendered performances and interactions
with men. For them, the pathway from androgynous girlhood to feminized womanhood
wasn’t without pains. It involved rejection of the previous self as unfeminine and
imperfect. Yet this transition is not complete. Although all single women in my study
identified with marriage and motherhood, some of them still valued inner discipline and
strength (e.g. eat bitterness, endure hardships) that enabled them to survive in the
competitive job market that requires workers be docile and productive. For Hong, Jie,
Yajuan and many other single women in my study, this means they had to endure
exploitative working conditions (e.g. Yajuan’s long hours and overtime), and constantly
update their knowledge and skills (e.g. Jie’s doctorate degree and Hong’s knowledge of
latest LED technology). This “strong woman” spirit inspired them to engage diligently
with their work and professional jobs for economic security and develop a sense of self-
love.

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“Self-Love” Acts
Yajuan called me and asked if I was available to talk. She brought me a shopping
list of cosmetics, backpacks, handbags and clothes of international brands, and would like
me to buy them in the United States and have them shipped to China. I skimped the list
and asked if they were not available on the Chinese market. Yajuan told me:
These brands are available, but they are designed specifically for Chinese and were
different from the Western versions on the American market. My consumption
philosophy is that I always buy things of the best quality. I think American
products are better. You can say that I have xenophobia (chongyang meiwai). I feel
good about myself when I pamper myself with the best things. I should love
myself. If I don’t love myself, who else will love me?
She brought up another request. She told me some of her friends had access to the
American market and had made a lot of money by reselling American products to
mainland Chinese. She would like me to do the shopping (daigou) for her and help her
make extra money. She said:
I make 7000 yuan a month. But I feel that it constrains me (jieju). I don’t think I
have enough money to spend. Women at our age should have some money.
Otherwise, we can’t love ourselves.
Yajuan believed that women should and could love themselves by purchasing and
consuming the best feminized consumer products as well as making sufficient money,
and that women were loveable to other people only when they loved themselves.
Yajuan’s perception echoed many other Chinese single women in my study. All
aging single women I interviewed engaged in “self-love” acts that involved diligent work
to keep their jobs and maintain economic security, and purchase and consumption of
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global products and services. While all of them identified with marriage and motherhood,
none of them were willing to give up their jobs, stay at home and revolve their lives
solely around children. Yajuan was taking classes in medical administration in order to
get a better-paying job with fewer hours. She believed that economic independence and
security was essential for women, especially in cases where marital relationships go sour.
In order to feel secure and able to afford cosmopolitan products, she would like to take up
the newly emerged profession of substitute shopping (daigou) and make extra money in
addition to her salary from the hospital. Similarly, Hong needed a steady source of
income from her engineering job to feel secure and able to take care of herself, her
children and her single mother in old age. She was devoted to a lifelong learning of new
technology necessary for her job. Jie was pursuing a doctorate degree to keep her faculty
job under the enormous institutional pressures. Wenlin and her family had a flower farm
and a storefront to sell flowers. She spent her spare time learning about horticulture and
hoped to enhance the farming and business. While Lifeng and Xiaoguo were unemployed
at the time of interview, they were actively looking for odd jobs. Most of the single
women perceived their jobs as a difficult, demanding, but necessary means for economic
security and self-love.
Moreover, like Yajuan, Chinese single women defined their loveability in terms
of consuming modern global products and living a cosmopolitan life style. My
interactions with these single women included episodes of going shopping with them in
grand shopping malls with cosmopolitan products from the world. Jie invited me to go to
a Xiamen’s high-end shopping mall where it was common to find designer dresses with a
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price range between 2,000 yuan ($294) and 15,000 yuan ($2,206) as well as international
cosmetics brands such as Estee Lauder and SK-II. In the end, Jie paid approximately
6,000 yuan ($882) to buy two dresses and one cosmetic set. Relative to Jie’s monthly
salary of 8000 yuan ($1,176), the purchases at the mall were a big expense. But she told
me that it felt good to pamper herself once in a while. She went to this mall a few times a
year. For her, women aged much faster after 30 and it was important to use good skin
care products to prevent aging. Some other women in my study saved money by
retrenching daily expenses and used it on luxurious feminized consumer products such as
clothes and cosmetics.
By engaging in social practices that promoted self-worth, economic security,
femininity and loveability, these Chinese single women intentionally and strategically
spoke back to the stigmatizing popular narratives that defined their undesirability and
unloveablity. The obtainment of economic security was not only their means of
performing filial daughters and good mothers, but also their ways of asserting their self-
determination and ensuring their welfare in a social context of economic insecurity,
expansive consumption, and pandemic money worship under the reform conditions.
Nonetheless, I argue that their practices of consumption were mobilized by the state
developmental discourses that encouraged consumption as a strategy to enhance
economic growth.
While identifying with domestic femininity, the strong woman who endured
hardships and made personal sacrifices for a greater cause from the 1980s continued,
albeit not without recent individualistic twists and modern workplace discipline, to
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structure the ways these women made sense of contemporary demanding and exploitative
work conditions, and motivate them to enhance their competence and productivity by
constantly learning new knowledge and skills. To transition into the feminized dating
culture, make themselves more desirable and achieve their marriage aspirations, aging
Chinese single women engaged in the consumption of global feminized products to retain
their youth and beauty. From their standpoint, this engagement was a learning of new
gender meanings and an improvement of their previous unattractive gender-neutral
selves. Nonetheless, their agentic efforts to make themselves self-loving subjects create
feminized objects for Chinese men to consume on the dating market, and reinforce the
marriage normative and the dichotomous construction of masculinity and femininity.

Summary
Based on Chinese single women’s personal narratives, this chapter I have
presented countered the stigmatizing popular narratives about them, with an explanation
focused on the changing meanings of femininity as they grew up. Unlike the stereotypes
about them as prioritizing their individualistic intellectual and socio-economic
establishments over marriage, all the women in my study expressed desires to get married
and become mothers, and relegated occupational identity to the periphery. They
explained their prolonged singlehood in terms of a disjuncture in gender meanings and
self-representations as they transitioned from androgynous girlhood to feminized
womanhood. This transition involved a rejection of the previous unattractive self, and a
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re-learning of femininity based on youth and beauty. Yet this transition was not complete.
The value of inner discipline and strength these women had learned enabled them to
endure the competitive, difficult, and often exploitative working conditions under
economic restructuring. Not all of these women had three highs--high education, high-
status jobs, and high income, as they were stereotypically depicted in the stigmatizing
popular narratives about “leftover women.” But all of them worked hard to establish
themselves economically. Nonetheless, they relegated their worker identity to the
periphery, dis-identified with the strong woman, and identified with the little woman.
In response to the stereotypes of them as undesirable and unloveable, they
engaged in “self-love” acts such as diligent work and consumption of feminized products
to ensure economic security and desirability on the dating market. Nonetheless, their
“self-love” practices through consumption were an effect of state economic mobilization.
Practices of feminized consumption also made them into objects to cater to men’s desires
on the dating market and reinforced the gendered marriage normative that had produced
enormous pressures on and strong desires in them to get married in the first place.
Unlike the recent scholarly studies on “leftover women” that relies on a
dichotomy of a totalizing, essentialized Chinese patriarchy and Chinese women’s agency,
this chapter highlights the two intertwined processes of making gender. On the one hand,
the state(s), the rise of the market and consumer culture, and the Chinese family culture
sometimes converge and sometimes diverge to produce meanings of gender, exert
disciplining power on women, and create their self-understanding, longings, motivation,
and/or pains with respect to femininity, marriage, and work. On the other hand, Chinese
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single women’s desires-full social practices of prolonged singlehood, work and
consumption both disrupt and reinforce the gendered structure of family and femininity.

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CHAPTER 4
GENDERED LONGINGS FOR LOVE UNDER CHINA’S GLOBALIZATION:
CHINESE WOMEN NEGOTIATING RACE, GENDER AND NATION

Liqing, a 38-year-old urban Chinese woman, met her white American husband
when both of them were in the same tourist group visiting the Island of Hainan in South
China. She preferred Western men over Chinese men because she liked the fit, muscular
build she associated with Western men and dismissed Chinese men as slender and non-
sexy. Before she met her husband, she had been divorced with a teenage son, and was
actively looking for Western men as potential marriage partners by engaging in
international cyber chats and using professional services from match-making agencies.
Despite or maybe because of the fact that she was a middle-school drop-out, she was
learning English herself and felt a great degree of awe and admiration for people with
intellectual and academic achievements, especially those who were well-versed in the
English language and foreign cultures. For her, making friends with and dating foreign
men in the real or virtual world provided her an opportunity to learn English and other
cultures.
Prior to her marriage to the American husband, Liqing owned and managed
various small retail businesses, and raised her son without any financial support of her
ex-husband. She and her American husband spent half of the year in the United States
and half of the year in China. At the time of my ethnographic work, the couple lived in
their newly purchased and remodeled suburban condominium in Southeast China. Her
husband had a bachelor’s degree in bio-statistics from an American university and was
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teaching English in a local Chinese university, and offering home-based English classes
to little children with his wife’s networking, nurturing, entertaining and translating
assistance. When I visited the couple in their condominium, Liqing showed me a photo in
which she wore a bikini that revealed her slim body and tanned skin complexion. She
described herself as the type of women Western men liked. She also boasted how
romantic her husband was at the beginning of their courtship and how light-skinned he
was before he got tanned over the summer. Liqing preferred to live in China where she
could live a comfortable, leisure life with a support network of family and friends, a
variety of Chinese restaurants, the convenience of local transportation as well as readily
available consumer services, in contrast to her secluded life as a hard-working and do-it-
all housewife in the United States. While her 17-year-old son lived with her parents and
attended a local senior high school, she anticipated bringing him along to America and
letting him go to an American university in a few years.
Like other Chinese women who engaged with, or looked to engage with, foreign
men, Liqing’s multi-valent desires for global love and practices of transnational marriage
call into question the validity of a binary opposition between romance and practical
considerations that underpins the Chinese stigmatizing popular narratives about “foreign f
women.” Based on her internet ethnography on Chinese women dating American men,
Nicole Constable (2003) has compellingly argued against this binary understanding.
Building on her work and drawing on ethnographic and interview data, this chapter
documents and analyzes Chinese women’s various aspirations and longings as they
actively looked to date foreign men. These women in my study entwine their fantasies
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about global romance and love with their pragmatic aspirations such as wealth,
geographic mobility, educational resources, and gender egalitarianism in their imaginings
of and strategies about dating and marrying foreign men. They also build on and
appropriate social and cultural resources to produce their attraction, desirability and
loveability on the international dating market. Their imaginings, motivations and
aspirations involved in their romantic engagement with foreign men are mobilized by
China’s grand processes of modernization and globalization. This chapter explores these
Chinese women’s intricate and nuanced stories that articulate their subjective experiences
of dating. It locates these women’s narratives and practices in the context of China’s
integration to the global capitalist system and increasing international interactions.

Transnationality, Nationalist Sentiments and Romantic Longings
In writing about Hong Kong business men who possessed multiple passports
prior to Hong Kong’s turnover to mainland China, Aihwa Ong (1999:3) offers a
theoretical framework that identifies “the transnational practices and imaginings of the
nomadic subject and the social conditions that enable his flexibility.” She argues,
his very flexibility in geographic and social positioning is itself an effect of novel
articulations between the regimes of the family, the state, and capital, the kinds of
practical-technical adjustments that have implications for our understanding of the
late modern subject (1999:3).
Ong attends to the cultural logics of modernity in Asia and points out that the emergence
of this modern, transnational subject is shaped by historically and culturally specific
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visions and definitions of what modernity means to emerging Asian economic-political
powers. This theoretical paradigm conceptualizes modernity as evolving processes
whereby existing ideologies of culture and race are deployed and mobilized in the
production of knowledge and desires. Ong (1999:55-56) foregrounds the two competing
discursive constructions of Chineseness as “a territorially bounded moral entity” and “a
deterritorialized moral economic force.”
Ong’s theory of modern transnational subject formation as embedded in political
economy and cultural formations is particularly useful for analyzing the desires and
practices of contemporary Chinese women who variously envision and engage in cross-
border, often interracial, romantic relations, and transnational geographic-social mobility
and positioning. These women are situated in China’s new economic marketization with
increasing global flows of capital, people and cultural symbols, and between the West and
China in their competition over territorial sovereignty, international trade, as well as
hegemonic production and control of signifiers of modernity. This situatedness makes
cross-border romantic engagements imaginable, desirable and practiceable.
Nonetheless, Chinese women are not mere effects of the disciplining powers of
China’s political economy and the contradictory processes of economic globalization and
cultural/political nationalization. In their negotiations over foreign men’s and their own
desirability and terms of romantic interactions, Chinese women are active agents who
make meanings of race, gender and culture. Their structurally deployed longings and
intentions for transnational and interracial romantic relationships propel them to engage
in various projects of racialization, feminization, and acculturation that are consistent
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with their definitions of their own desirability and assumed desires of Western men.
These agentic practices both perpetuate and reinforce certain geographic, racial, cultural
and gender boundaries.
Emotions-feelings of love, happiness, sadness, satisfaction, pride and humiliation-
are essential elements of Chinese women’s agency. They play a critical role in Chinese
women’s imaginings and experiences of romantic engagements with foreign men. Like
Chinese women who dated and/or married American men in Constable’s research (2003),
Chinese women in my study looked for love, intimacy, and mutual understanding in their
relationships with foreign men. In their narratives, their feelings articulate with their
practical considerations and specific life circumstances to shape how they envision and
negotiate relationships with foreign men. Some of these women faced a bleak marriage
prospect on the domestic dating market, and had to look internationally for love,
challenging the social assumption about their marriage for migration and pointing to a
possible trend of migration for marriage. The Chinese double-sided feelings of pride and
humiliation about Chineseness also enable and constrain these Chinese women’s self-
positioning and self-representations relative to Western men, Western women and other
mainland Chinese women.

Gendered Longings
Unlike the stigmatizing popular narratives about “foreign f women” as greedy for
sex and/or a ticket out of China, Chinese women in my study expressed a multiplicity of
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desires when they looked to engage with foreign men. Liqing’s story demonstrates that
Chinese women’s longings for foreign men are complex and cannot be reduced to erotic
desires or pragmatic consideration of geographic mobility.
After a decade-long marriage with a local Chinese man that painfully ended in
divorce, Liqing had lost confidence in Chinese men. She described her ex-husband as
petty-minded, suspicious, and non-enterprising. She and her son lived with her parents
until she bought a condominium with her parents’ contributions and her savings from
various small retail businesses. She said her ex-husband rarely visited their son or
provided any physical or financial assistance in raising him. She dated a few Chinese
men without a serious intention of settling down with any of them because she didn’t
think they had big hearts and would treat her son as their own. Nor did those Chinese
men consider marrying her and forming a new family. Her age and divorced status with a
son made it difficult, if not impossible, for her to find local decent Chinese men who
preferred to marry young single women without any experiences of childbirth.
Liqing loved watching Western movies and was drawn to Western male
protagonists. She perceived them to be romantic, muscular, family-oriented and
respectful to women. Liqing chatted with a few Western men online, but none of these
virtual romantic encounters led to real-world relationships. One American man would
like to fly over and visit her, but she refused because she was cautious that she had talked
to him online for only a month and didn’t know him well yet. A man from Great Britain
was also interested in meeting her in person, but she suspected that he had some
psychological problems. She met her American husband when both of them were visiting
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Hainan in the same tourist group. Her American husband had been working and touring
around China for some years, and had entertained the possibility of having a family and
settling down permanently in China. Liqing fell in love at first sight of her husband and
believed that he had the same feeling as well. He took the initiative in the courtship and
sent her a flower every day in the first few months of dating and continued to do so
occasionally after they got married in a year. In retrospect, Liqing enjoyed the sweet,
romantic feelings when she received a flower or a gift from her husband on holidays. She
subcontracted her retail business to other people after her husband accepted a job offer of
teaching English in a local university. They saved money for a down payment and
purchased a suburban condominium where they offered English classes to little Chinese
children. Liqing’s husband owned a house in the United States and had to go back to take
care of it every year. Other than that, both of them enjoyed living in the suburb of a small
city in Southeast China with the local friendly, humanistic culture and high living
standards. Liqing’s son didn’t have good grades at school and had no chance to attend a
reputed university in China. He continued to live with his grandparents while his mother
and step-father were in the United States, and came to stay with them for some time when
they were in China. Liqing believed that her son would have a better chance of being
accepted by a good university if he migrated to the United States. Her husband had
agreed to apply for her son’s migration status and supported him throughout his college
years. Although she improved her social and economic standing in her marriage to a well-
educated middle-class white man from the United States, and was able to travel and stay
abroad and live a transnational life, Liqing understood that her life was better-off in
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China and that there was a downgrade in life quality when they were staying in the
United States due to a lack of close-knit family relatives and friends, the individualistic
American culture, her inadequate English skills and lack of practical knowledge of living
a life in the United States, as well as high living expenses. Throughout her narrative,
Liqing was very clear and explicit about her feelings and aspirations. Her longing for a
romantic, loving, and committed relationship articulated with her fantasies about Western
masculinity, her awareness of the difficulty and undesirability of marrying a Chinese
man, her ambition for securing her son a good educational opportunity and her concerns
about where to make a home and live a comfortable life.
Like Liqing, all the other 9 women I interviewed intentionally looked for foreign
men as potential marriage partners. Nonetheless, none of them was desperate enough to
settle for any foreign men they could get in order to migrate to a Western country.
Instead, they insisted on finding good matches. Wang Laoshi, a 56-year-old college
English professor, had been divorced with a married adult son who lived and worked in
New Zealand. She owned and lived in a condominium at the urban center. Although she
passed the retirement age of 55, she managed to extend her employment status with her
university for another five years due to her outstanding publication records and teaching
experiences. She could have retired and migrated to live with her son in New Zealand.
But she enjoyed her job and felt that she would be bored after she retired. Since her son
moved to New Zealand in 2008, Wang Laoshi started to consider finding someone and
getting remarried. For her, men’s social standing and economic resources were not as
important as their world views and values. She hoped to meet a healthy, kind, honest,
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hard-working man who shared her positive outlook about life and her interests in reading
and traveling. Initially, she didn’t start out to look for men with Western nationalities. In
2009, one of Wang Laoshi’s friends introduced her a local 54-year-old divorced Chinese
man who was a civil servant working for a governmental organization. She soon found
out that this man smoked a lot, and liked playing Mahjong in his spare time, but had no
interest in intellectual activities. Later that year, she met another divorced Chinese man
through her friend’s introduction, but he was more interested in her social and economic
resources than her personality and character. She said it was difficult to find good local
matches because Chinese men around her age would like to marry younger women.
With no luck on the domestic dating market, Wang Laoshi shifted her attention to
Western men, partly because she was familiar with the English language and English-
speaking cultures, and partly because she didn’t think that Western men minded her age
and divorced status. She didn’t ask her son to help find potential Western men because
she would feel embarrassed if she “opened her mouth” about this private issue in front of
her son. Instead, she registered herself with the marriage introduction agency I studied in
the hope that they would find her a compatible professional man from a Western country.
In early 2010, the agency invited her to a meeting with a 50-year-old single white
Australian business man who was visiting local factories. Wang Laoshi accompanied him
to meetings with manufacturers and governmental officials, and helped interpret the
conversations and translate some documents for him. She found him to be very easy-
going and open-minded. But he eluded her questions about his dating experiences, which
raised a red flag for Wang Laoshi. During his month-long visit, he sometimes disappeared
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for one or two days and didn’t respond to Wang Laoshi’s phone calls or text messages.
Their mutual acquaintance found out that the Australian man was also seeing a Chinese
female college student in her early 20s. Wang Laoshi decided to cut it off before the
relationship became too serious. In late 2010, Wang Laoshi met a 55-year-old white
Australian scholar when she was coordinating a professional academic conference. Not
only did they share similar intellectual interests, both of them also loved traveling. Wang
Laoshi arranged the logistics of his visit and served as a tourist guide around the city and
nearby towns. After the conference, they maintained contact and communication by
emails, phone calls and skype chats. By the end of 2011, the Australian scholar visited
her and they decided to get married. Because of her continued employment, Wang
Laoshi’s husband accepted the offer of a visiting scholar position with her university and
would work and reside in China for 3 years. At the time of interview in 2012, they had
lived a transnational life, working and residing in China during the school year as well as
visiting and touring in Australia and other countries on winter and summer vacations.
Wang Laoshi expected to move with her husband to Australia after she formally retired.
The in-depth accounts of Liqing and Wang Laoshi pertaining to their life
circumstances, dating experiences and motivations for transnational, interracial romance
support the modernization theory which postulates that the joint family structure in non-
Western societies will be replaced by nuclear families based on companionship and
compatibility under the influence of industrialization and urbanization (Buttenheim and
Nobles 2009; Cherlin 2012; Ruggles 2009). Since the Chinese state initiated market
reforms and withdrew itself from people’s private lives, the nuclear family based on
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romance and love has risen, allowing Chinese women more autonomy in spousal
selection and household decisions (Y . Yan 2003). In my study, Chinese women who
looked to date and marry foreign men stressed the importance of feelings of romance and
love as well as compatibility of personality and interests. The globally circulated Western
hegemonic cultural symbols and increasing intercultural communication and interaction
have enabled and deployed their imaginations and fantasies about Western men as the
embodiment of hegemonic masculinity, liberal modern values and gender egalitarianism.
Nonetheless, these Chinese women exercised their agency in deciding how to meet
foreign men and which foreign men to date and marry.
Like Liqing and Wang Laoshi, the other 8 women who dated or aspired to date
foreign men were all economically and socially independent and resourceful. A Jun, 27,
migrated to West Africa with her single mother when she was 20, and owned a bar in
Togo at the time of interview. She spoke mandarin Chinese, English and French. Before
she met her Lebanese fiancé, she dated a few white men and a local Chinese man. She
met them when they came to buy drinks in her bar or through her network of friends. A
Jun’s mother owned a retail business in Togo. They lived a transnational life. Every year,
they spent some months in Togo , some months in their home city in Southeast China,
and visited wholesale markets in various locations across China in between. A Jun
described the Chinese man she dated as young, handsome, but chauvinist. She said
Chinese men would date women like her who were independent, business-minded, and
socially and sexually experienced, but wouldn’t marry them. Two of the white men she
dated were not ready to settle down for a family. The last white man wanted to get
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married, but A Jun felt that he was fixed to Togo and couldn’t fit into her transnational
lifestyle. She met her Lebanese fiancé in the bar. He owned a small retail business. When
I was conducting my ethnography in China in 2012, both A Jun and her fiancé were
visiting A Jun’s relatives in Southeast China and planning on a business trip to some
wholesale markets in Guangzhou. Although A Yu (62) and A Zheng (60) were
unemployed at the time of interviews, they both had steady sources of income. A Yu
owned and rented out a commercial real estate property. A Zheng was one investor of her
friend’s restaurant, and received a portion of the profits as well as quarterly bonuses and
interests. Like Wang Laoshi, they were looking for foreign men as potential marriage
partners because their advanced age and divorced status put them at a disadvantage on the
domestic dating market. None of these 10 women sought out foreign men simply because
of their wealth or the opportunity to migrate. All of them looked for loving and enduring
relationships with good matches.
Moreover, these Chinese women’s feelings-full accounts of their romantic
aspirations for and experiences with foreign men call into question both the status
exchange theory (Edwards 1969; Lomsky-Feder and Leibovitz 2010; Shoen and Thomas
1989) and the status homogamy theory (Jo-Pei et al. 2008) in explaining international,
interracial marriages. As has been argued above, these women’s decisions to date and
marry foreign men were more than rational calculation of status gains and losses. Instead,
their stories reveal a complex blending of their fantasies and imaginations of love,
romance, and companionship with pragmatic considerations of their specific life
circumstances, local and global dating markets, educational resources as well as lifestyles
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and living standards. To reduce their rich, nuanced experiences of transnational,
interracial relationships to status calculation risks perpetuating the racist stereotype of
Asian women as the cunning “dragon lady” (Espiritu 1997). Moreover, as modern forms
of power have become dispersed and come from everywhere (Foucault 1978), it is
difficult to make an exhaustive qualitative or quantitative argument about status change
upon marriage, especially given the intersection of a multiplicity of social structures and
identity categories. In their relationships with foreign men, Chinese women in my study
simultaneously experienced social upward and downward mobility. For example, while
Liqing gained access to flexible geographic mobility and Western educational resources
in her marriage to a middle-class white American man, she experienced a downgrade in
her living standards and status as a foreigner with limited linguistic, cultural and social
resources during her visits and stays in the United States.
Nonetheless, despite my enthusiastic celebration of these women’s agency, I argue
that their longings for Western men and cross-border romance have been produced,
mobilized, and implicated by the discursive processes of the Chinese identity formation
relative to the West. Chinese people have a long history of constructing a cultural and
national identity through a self-other dichotomy between China and the West at the
official and popular levels (Hughes 2006). The West has figured as an alter ego that
symbolizes what China is not. Since the Opium Wars in the mid-nineteenth century, the
representations of the West in Chinese nationalist discourses have combined or alternated
between the negative images of the West as morally polluting barbarians and bullying
imperialist forces that China should reject/assimilate and defy, and the positive image of
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the West as strong modern industrialized forces empowered by science, technology, and
knowledge that China should emulate to strengthen itself. This double-sided positioning
relative to the West has been reflected in recent official nationalist discourses.
On the one hand, since the 1990s, the reformist state has sponsored and
orchestrated nation-wide campaigns of patriotic education, and narrated China’s modern
history as a century of national humiliation under Western and Japanese imperialist forces
(Callahan 2010). On the other hand, the reformist state has relied on foreign investment,
technology, science and know-how to enhance China’s national power in the global
economy, and promoted the West as a symbol of economic and scientific modernity
(Hughes 2006). As a result of this inferiority-superiority sentiment relative to the West,
official triumphant stories about China’s rise as a soft power in the global political
economy eagerly seek after the validation of Western people, especially high-status
Western men. Western men’s validation is often represented in the form of their love for
the Chinese culture and people. Images of foreign people, especially Western men,
engaging variously with the Chinese culture, for example, learning mandarin Chinese,
singing Chinese songs and operas, enjoying Chinese food, enrolling in Chinese schools,
volunteering to teach academic subjects in remote poor villages, and marrying Chinese
women and settling down in China, abound on television screens and pages of popular
magazines in mainland China. In these culturalist representations, Chinese women serve
as the embodiment of an essentialized Chinese culture and the objects of foreign men’s
love and desires. Popular women’s magazines sometimes include articles featuring
romantic and love stories between high-status Western men (e.g. never-married white
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university professors) and Chinese women who are considered undesirable (e.g. old,
divorced, ugly, poor, etc.) on the domestic marriage market. The official and popular
discourses on Western men’s love for the Chinese culture and Chinese women have
enabled individual Chinese women to imagine and fantasize about themselves as being
desired by Western men, as well as Western men as the modern opposition of chauvinistic
Chinese men and as desirable marriage partners who are not as picky as Chinese men
about their wives’ age, and marital and sexual history.
Yet Chinese women don’t imagine every single Western man as a good match.
Both Liqing and Wang Laoshi were cautious about what kind of Western men they were
dating. The negative image of morally decadent foreign men who are sexually wild,
promiscuous, alcoholic, drug-addicted, and abusive haunts Chinese people’s social
imaginations, and is confirmed and reinforced by Chinese people’s observations of and
encounters with foreign men in contemporary China who appropriate the contemporary
Chinese cult of Westernness and take advantage of local Chinese women.

The English Language as a Condensed Site of Power Negotiations
Desire, sexual or otherwise, is not a constant or a given, but is shaped in crucial
ways by the very manner in which we think and speak about it.
Gregory M. Pflugfelder, Cartographies of Desire, P. 3
All the 10 women I interviewed, except A Yu and A Zheng, had acquired a certain
level of English skills and/or were in the process of learning English. In their narratives,
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the globally hegemonic English language has served as a site where they imagined,
articulated and negotiated their romantic desires, cosmopolitan identity, and female
resourcefulness. Liqing’s engagement with the English language and Western cultures
makes a case that language does not only “construe human experience,” but also enact
social and personal relationships (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004:29).
Liqing had a feeling of admiration and awe for people who were able to speak
English. She identified with them and aspired to become one of them. In her spare time,
she learned English by listening to English audio recordings and repeating what was
being said, watching Western movies, especially original ones in English with Chinese
subtitles, as well as chatting with English native speakers online. Through her repetitive
practices of English learning, Liqing hoped to approximate the authenticity of English as
spoken by native speakers. She was particularly drawn to Western romantic cinematic
genres that narrated love stories between heroic men and beautiful women. The narratives
and visual representations in these movies enabled her to imagine, from a cultural and
geographic distance, what ideal men and women meant in Western contexts, stage her
own gendered performances, define her feminine identity, and negotiate the courtship and
marital relationship in those terms and images. During the interview, she frequently
invoked the categories of “sex” and “fun” as she made sense of the relationship with her
American husband. Instead of translating these terms into mandarin Chinese, she
switched quickly from her mostly Chinese narratives to these categories in English. Her
relation to sex and femininity was complex and contradictory. On the one hand, when she
showed me a photo with her wearing a bikini and leaning against the window of her new
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condominium, she represented herself as a sexually desiring and desirous mature woman
and asserted that she was the type of women Western men were attracted to. On the other
hand, she complained and denounced that her husband had excessive sexual impulses and
enjoyed sex, and defended herself as constrained and committed in sexual expressions.
She switched from Chinese to English when she brought up the topic of “sex,” probably
because the English word “sex” connoted positive meanings of female liberation, but the
Chinese signifying equivalent was associated with moral negativity and therefore was
socially tabooed. The English language enabled Liqing to reconcile the two cultural
evaluative frameworks about female sexuality. Like women who migrated from
conservative cultures to the United States in Oliva Espín’s study (1999), Liqing
articulated transnational sexual relationships in the English language by which she
imagined, learned and experienced them.
The switch between Chinese and English was also common in my interviews with
Yue, Ming, Tianlin, Shuya and Jing, as I suggest, to project a modern cosmopolitan
persona and justify their relationships with foreign men as ones based on love and
companionship. All of these five women variously used English words to signify
geographic locations, people’s names, international brands of consumer products, food
and sex, and politeness in their mostly Chinese narrations. Natalie Schilling-Estes (1998)
argues that a switch between languages is primarily a means by which a speaker changes
his or her self-representation for other people. Carol Myers-Scotton and Agnes Bolonyai
(2001) further argue that a speaker’s language choice reflects his or her negotiations of
persona. Given the high status of the English language as a signifier of modernity and
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cosmopolitanism in contemporary China, I suggest that Chinese women switched back
and forth between Chinese and English as a way to bespeak their transnational
imaginations and experiences, and project a modern self as simultaneously occupying
various social, cultural and geographical locations under the time-space compression of
late modernity. These women’s cosmopolitan self-representation defied the popular
reductionist assumption about the status difference and exchange between non-Western
women and Western men, and justified their claims for pursuing good matches and
enduring love in romantic relationships with foreign men.
Ming’s stories made a compelling case for this argument. When I first met her and
her African American husband over dinner in a restaurant in China, she impressed me by
her native English fluency in interaction with her husband. I would have thought she was
a US-born Chinese, if I had not known that she was raised and educated in China, and
only recently moved to the United States for graduate studies. While Ming ordered food
for herself and her husband mostly in mandarin Chinese, she frequently interwove
English words such as “ok,” “please,” “good” and “great” in her communication with the
waitresses. In the subsequent interview, she adroitly switched between Chinese and
English. Her English fluency and ease with language switches marked her as sharing the
same cultural and social spaces as her African American husband. As she told me, she
and her husband were not as different as many other people believed them to be, because
they shared the same language and had no problems communicating with each other.
Unlike the popular narratives about “foreign f women” that depict Chinese women’s use
of English in interaction with foreign men and Chinese people as a betrayal of an
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essential Chinese culture, I suggest that it is their strategy to create a cosmopolitan self-
representation and make a statement about their relationship with foreign men on an
equal basis. Given that how well one speaks mandarin Chinese has been used as a
signifier for Chinese identity in popular nationalist discourses, especially those that
position mainland China as more authentic than Taiwan and Hong Kong, these women’s
agentic effort to approximate native English fluency challenges the linguistically-
bounded category of Chineseness and re-signifies it with a cosmopolitan outlook. But in
the meantime, it reinforces the global hegemonic status of the English language.
Furthermore, Chinese women’s engagement with the English language and
Western cultures is a form of acculturation, or an acquisition of Western cultural capital
in the context of China’s integration to the global capitalist system. This context has
necessitated and entailed the Chinese embrace of foreign capital and hegemonic Western
cultural symbols of modernity, albeit not without strong social resistance, as has been
argued in Chapter 2. Like many other contemporary Chinese people, the Chinese women
who dated foreign men in my study variously invested in the knowledge of English and
Western cultures. Their acquisition of Western cultural capital gave them access to
foreign men and enabled them to further pursue the relationships. For instance, although
Liqing was a middle-school drop-out, she had been learning English by watching movies,
repeating after audio recordings, and chatting with English native speakers online before
she met her husband during her tour in Hainan. In retrospect, she remembered that she
was the only one in the tourist group who was able to speak to her husband, and mediated
interactions between him and other people in the tourist group. Her English skills, albeit
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limited, enabled her to shorten the cultural spaces between her and her husband, and
made their intimate relationships thinkable and practiceable. If not for her ability to speak
English, she would have missed the chance to get to know the American man who later
became her husband. Wang Laoshi, a college English professor, vividly described her
first meeting with her Australian husband. When she was assisting invited scholars and
professors at the registration table for the conference, she spotted a tall foreign man at a
corner across the room, looking at the map and confused as to where to go. She went up
to him and offered to show him the direction. Their subsequent interactions, to a great
degree, were dependent on Wang Laoshi’s mastery of English skills and familiarity of
Western cultures as well as her mediating roles between two cultures.
Shuya’s English skills also helped her develop a relationship with an American
man. She was a 26-year-old undergraduate student majoring in English Literature at a
Beijing university when she met her American husband in the early 1980s. She
volunteered to do some interpretation for a local governmental organization. Her husband
was an American civil engineering expert invited to work with the organization. At that
time, China had just opened its door to the world and the higher-educational system was
newly re-instituted after the Cultural Revolution. The ability to speak English was a rare
skill few Chinese people had learned. At the age of 24, Shuya chose to take the college
entrance exam and continued her interrupted school education. With her English
proficiency, she not only helped the American man communicate with his co-workers and
navigate a variety of institutions, but also played a mediating role when he was
confronted with anti-foreign sentiments and local people’s provocative verbal attacks.
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Their friendship developed into love and romance, and they got married in a year.
Similarly, Tianlin was also an undergraduate student in English Literature when
she met her white American boyfriend who was an exchange college student enrolled in a
Chinese language program at her university in Southern China. Like Wang Laoshi and
Shuya, Tianlin was able to communicate with and help her white American boyfriend
adapt to his life in China. In their junior year, they both decided to apply for doctoral
programs in the United States. With her knowledge of English and the American
educational system, Tianlin passed the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL)
and GRE general tests with above-90 percentile grades, and was admitted into a
communications program in the United States. She also successfully navigated through
the American visa application system and obtained her student visa. Her American
boyfriend was admitted into a doctoral program 200 miles away from hers. After Tianlin
and her boyfriend moved to the United States for graduate studies, they managed to
continue their relationship. These women’s experiences demonstrate that they took an
active role in learning the English language and Western cultures which were an
important resource that enabled them to act upon their desires for Western men and
provided them access to the international marriage market as well opportunities to
migrate.
Unlike the stigmatizing popular narratives about “foreign f women” that criticize
them for Westernizing themselves and betraying the Chinese race/nation, I argue that
these Chinese women’s various investment in Western cultural capital was a national
endeavor mobilized by the state utilitarian discourse on English education as a strategy to
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learn from the West, promote the nation’s economic competitiveness and allow
individuals’ social mobility on the global market (Guo 2012). This discourse pervades the
development of Chinese school curricula, the commercialization of English training, and
the credentialism of the job market.
In the 1980s, English started to be incorporated into school curricula as a
mandatory academic subject in junior middle schools and upwards as well as on the
national college entrance exams and the graduate student entrance exams. In 2001,
English became mandatory for elementary schools (Grade 3) and upwards (Guo 2012). In
some metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai, kindergartens include English as a subject
(Pan 2015). In 2010, as a result of these top-down educational campaigns, the total
number of Chinese people who had learned some English approximated 400 million (Wei
and Su 2012), a numerical equivalent of the total world population of native English
speakers (Seargeant 2008). This number doesn’t include the large number of Chinese
people from all social walks who were not affiliated with academic institutions, but were
mobilized by the state to learn English in preparation for international events such as
Beijing’s hosting the 2008 summer Olympic Games and Shanghai’s hosting of the 2010
World Expo (Guo 2012; Pan 2015). Since the 1990s, numerous privately-owned English
training centers have mushroomed to provide tutoring, intensive exam-oriented programs,
and oral English-practice sessions. Some of them have become nation-wide in scale. The
emergence of these private English-teaching programs has responded to, benefited from
and in turn intensified the popular cult of English. On the job market, foreign enterprises,
joint ventures, and cooperatively-run enterprises are more likely to hire college graduate
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students with competence in their own disciplines and the English language (Guo 2012).
These students are in a better position to demand a higher starting salary than college
graduates who don’t have similar skills (Guo 2012). English has become a high-status
symbol and an instrument to success (Guo 2012). Despite the recent nationalist criticism
of the overemphasis on English and the relegation of Chinese, English remains a symbol
of modernity and cosmopolitanism and a much valued cultural and professional
competence in China. It is in this context that Chinese women who dated foreign men in
my study variously invested in the English language and Western cultures.
Contrary to the popular narratives about “foreign f women” that blame individual
Chinese women for Westernizing themselves, I argue that their aspirations for Western
cultural capital, such as English, were national ambitions produced and deployed by
discursive and institutional processes of globalized Western cultural hegemonization, the
Chinese state mobilization, and market competition. Therefore, in their learning English
and gaining access to foreign men, these Chinese women are not so different from many
other Chinese who learn English skills to make themselves competitive on the job
market. But their relationships with foreign men marked their Western acculturation more
salient to the public and incurred intensive nationalist scrutiny and criticisms.

Creating Sexualized and Racialized Femininities
The 10 Chinese women who dated or aspired to date foreign men engaged in
various projects of creating sexualized and racialized feminine self-representations to
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make themselves attractive and desirable on the international dating market. Some of
them altered their bodies in compliance with Western sexualized feminine ideals and
racialized aesthestics. In their bodily modifications, representations and significations of
modernity, they enacted femininities in relation to Western men, Western women and
other mainland Chinese women, and reinforced the symbolic high status of Westernness
relative to Chineseness with respect to gender relations. Yet most of these women
identified with “virtuous wives and good mothers” and incorporated this ideal into their
relationships with foreign men. By doing so, they defined the moral boundary of
Chineseness as anchored on Chinese women’s domestic virtues and as more traditional,
more moral and therefore better than Westernness. These women’s nuanced stories reveal
how interlocking structures of race, gender and nation enabled, constrained, and were in
turn reproduced by, their self-positioning and strategies of feminization.
Liqing had a slim petite body build. Despite the birth, she managed to keep her
waistline small and her abdomen flat. She was a member of a local swimming club in her
home city. She went there three times a week while she and her husband were residing in
China. She often visited a spa beauty salon in a suburban resort to receive face lifting and
skin tightening treatments. In her bikini photo she showed me, she impressed me as a
well-tanned, fit lady with a big confident smile and long loose wavy black hair cascading
down her neck and shoulders, leaning seductively against a window. Her photo reminded
me of commercials for fitness centers in the United States. Liqing used this photo as an
icon in her yahoo cyber chat accounts from which she talked to native English speakers
online. She said:
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Men are visual animals (shijue dongwu). They talk to women they are attracted to.
A lot of Western men started to chat with me because of this photo. They thought I
was sexy.
Liqing believed that Western women were more sexually liberal and active than Chinese
women, and that Western men were drawn to sexually desirous, active and expressive
women. These perceptions were largely derived from her readings of American romantic
movies as well as her interactions with some Western men. In reminiscence, she
remembered her husband commented on how slender and sexy she was when they first
met. She differentiated herself from most mainland Chinese women when she said she
was the type of Chinese women Western men liked. By the type, she meant liberal
attitudes towards sex which she associated with Western women and cultures. For her,
many mainland Chinese women didn’t fit into the ideal of Western sexualized femininity.
Liqing’s perception about mainland Chinese women’s wanting shaped how she
interacted with me. When I first met her, I wore a basic T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and
had my glasses on and hair tied up in a pony tail. She read me as one of those sexually
passive and unattractive mainland Chinese women, and gave me a lesson on how to make
myself more attractive in front of Western men. She advised me to get rid of my glasses
and wear contact lenses, to wear dresses instead of jeans and T-shirts as well as to wear
my long hair permed and loose rather than tying it in an old-fashioned pony tail. Liqing
enacted a sexualized femininity through imagining, appropriating and approximating the
Western woman as the embodiment of liberated modern feminine sexuality as well as
rendering, defining and distancing from many mainland Chinese women as a contrastive
internal other lacking in modern liberal values.
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Ming also projected a sexualized and feminized self-representation in social
interactions. The first time I met Ming and her African American husband over dinner,
she visibly wore make-up with her eyes highlighted with eyeliner, eye shadow and
mascara. In the restaurant, she stood out as different because local Chinese women wore
only light foundation or no make-up at all. When I interviewed her in her condominium
in China, she brought me a stack of photos she took recently. In most photos, she wore
heavy makeup, especially on her eyes. I asked if she used make-up before she moved to
the United States for graduate studies, she said:
I didn’t [ use any make-up before]. I didn’t think about this at all. I was more like
having a girl’s looks, trying not to put things on my face. Older generations, like
my mother, thought that makeup damaged one’s skin. But it is different now. I am
in my 30s and no longer a little girl. In America, women use make-up. It is quite
the standard. You might have noticed it, too? (I said, “yes.”) I feel that make-up
makes me look more mature. People see me as an adult. Now I wouldn’t go out of
my door without makeup. Make-up covers my freckles and makes me look better,
too. Men can’t tell whether a woman uses make-up or not. But they can tell which
women are beautiful and which are not. (She laughed.) So I’ve got to do it.
Ming adapted to the Western aesthetics that defined women’s femininity in terms of
sexual attraction in the heterosexual political economy and in consistence with the
Western normative model of independent adult personhood. Her make-up technique
highlighted her eyes because she thought her eyes were small with single eyelids and eye
makeup would make her eyes look deeper, if not bigger. Even at home, she wore light
makeup. She felt amused when African American husband couldn’t tell whether she used
makeup or not, but commented on how beautiful she was when she wore it. For her, using
makeup transformed her body in multiple manners: it made her sexually appealing and
available to Western men and gave her an advantage on the international dating market. It
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also marked a disjunctive representational move from her previous self as an innocent,
inexperienced Chinese girl to a mature, experienced adult woman who deserved and
demanded social respect. Moreover, make-up hid from public views her race-specific
facial features such as her eyes and gave her a more Caucasian look. Ming used makeup
as a multi-valent strategy to raise her social status in the American context. Like Liqing,
she elevated her status as a modern, aspiring woman by appropriating Western symbols
of beauty and femininity, and emulating Western women’s beauty practices, as well as
differentiating herself from older generations of mainland Chinese women and good
innocent Chinese girls.
Like Ming, Jing, a 31-year-old Chinese woman married to a white American
business man, tried to approximate the Caucasian ideals of beauty. She recalled that she
wore cosmetic contact lenses and double-eyelid tapes to her first date with her husband
when he was doing international business in Qingdao, China. Her contact lenses, double-
eyelid tapes and eye makeup made her eyes look bigger and deeper. Her American date
was surprised and told her that she didn’t look like a Chinese woman, but more like a
white woman.
When I interviewed Jing at her home in America, she showed me her wooden
makeup table her husband made for her. It was crowded with bottles of nail polish of
various colors and shades, primers, whitening liquid and cushion foundations, eye
makeup set and makeup tools. Despite her busy schedule with her four young children
aged between 2 and 7, she managed to maintain a polished look on a daily basis. Her
everyday makeup regimen included steps to brighten and lighten her skin tone, cover up
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facial discoloration, create double-eyelids, and highlight her eyes contours. What struck
me was that Jing made a few videos in which she provided detailed reviews on cosmetic
products and step-by-step makeup tutorials, some of which were in Chinese and others in
English. She posted these videos on youtube and her wechat account shared by her family
and friends in mainland China, and published their youtube links on the online public
forum (huaren.us) which was popular among mainland Chinese women in the United
States. In one video, she directly addressed Chinese women and advised them to use
make-up because “it enhances a woman’s vibes (jingqishen) and produces a powerful
aura (qichang).” Her youtube videos had elicited some following responses from Chinese
women.
Building on Louisa Schein’s concepts of “displacing subalternity” (1994) and
“internal Orientalism” (1997b), I argue that these Chinese women have appropriated
Western symbols of liberated sexuality and racialized feminine beauty to make
themselves attractive and desirable to Western men. They also adapt to the Western
Caucasian aesthetics in order to project cosmopolitan self-representations and displace
the native status assigned to Chinese culture in Western orientalist discourses onto other
mainland Chinese women who don’t engage with femininity in similar ways. In their
eagerness to teach other mainland Chinese women about their femininizing and
beautifying techniques, they position themselves as the vanguards of an emergent
liberated Chinese femininity and sexuality, and enact a contrastive cosmopolitan Chinese
femininity in relation to other mainland Chinese. These women are “cultural producers”
who “manufactured an ‘internal other’” (Schein 1994:150) to “cast off” their inferior
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positioning relative to Western men and women. Their inferior status is imposed on them
by increasingly globalized Western racial politics that associate Asian women’s and Asian
American women’s bodily features (e.g. slanty eyes) with behavioral problems (e.g.
passivity and lack of sociability), and position them as mired in tradition and
backwardness. Yet while these women in my study exercise agency in elevating their own
status by altering their bodies, they reinforce the Western ideal of gender modernity as a
linear temporal progress non-Western nations and women should and could move along.
Sometimes, the modification of Chinese women’s bodies to fit with the Western
modern liberated and sexualized femininity is done through the eyes of professional
match-makers. A Yu was a registered member of the marriage introduction agency I
worked with. After she became a member, the staff had a makeover artist help her put on
makeup and a professional studio photographer take photos of her. The staff also used the
photoshop software to edit her photos. With multiple layers of light-tone foundations on
her face and thick eye liners, as well as her eyes digitally enlarged, the base of her nose
shrunken, and her freckles removed from the photos, A Yu looked like a totally different
person on her web page in the agency’s database. The makeover artist, the photographer
and the staff of the agency collectively created her representation as a sexually attractive
modern Chinese woman who they believed would be appealing to the eyes of foreign
men. A Zheng had a similar experience of having her image modified and reproduced by
the marriage introduction agency. Before her arranged meeting with a white American
man, the staff advised her to wear body-hugging short dresses to show off her body
contour and long legs. While she was worrying that she was a little fat on the top, one
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staff member told her that foreign men liked women who had rounded, fully grown and
sexy bodies. In the end, A Zheng compromised to wear a loosely fit blouse and a short
tight pencil skirt for the meeting.
Nonetheless, despite the agentic efforts of some of these women to blur the
boundary between themselves and Western (Caucasian) women in terms of sexual and
feminine aesthetics, most of these 10 women I interviewed identified with the Chinese
ideal of “virtuous wives and good mothers.” Some used this identification to explain why
Western men were attracted to them in the first place and/or to make a difference-and-
status claim in relation to Western women. For instance, Liqing boasted that she took
good care of her husband. She said:
When I just met him, he was very skinny. I have cooked so many things. I always
make stewed soups (duntang) for him. Especially in winter, I made different kinds
of herbal soup. Some soup was for boosting his masculine potency. Now he has
gained some weight. American women wouldn’t have done this. He should feel
lucky to have a Chinese wife.
While Liqing projected a sexualized feminine self-representation, she complained that
her American husband had excessive sexual impulses, and distinguished herself as
sexually constrained and obligated She perceived herself to be a good mother. Not only
was she proud that she was able to raise her son without her ex-husband’s financial
contributions, but she also understood that her marriage to an American would eventually
benefit her son in the future. When I asked how her natal family and friends thought of
her marriage to an American man, she remarked:
People thought I was selfish. Even my parents thought so. My mother had quarrels
with me on this. They thought I abandoned my son and followed an American man
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to go to America. But I am a good mother. I raised my son myself. My ex-husband
never gave us a penny. Now my son still lives with my parents most of the time
and comes to live with me for sometime when I am here. But it is only temporary.
In a few years, I will bring him along. He can go study in America. Then he can
pick where he wants to stay, in China or in the United States. He has more options.
My American husband is a nice person. He treats my son well. He has agreed to
pay for his college tuition. He likes children. The American women he dated before
were not interested in having babies. He chose to marry [me] probably because he
thought I was a good woman and a good mother.
Liqing foregrounded her self-identification and self-representation as a “virtuous wife
and good mother” to debunk the social assumption that she dated and married an
American man in order to obtain a ticket for migration.
Similarly, Yue described herself as a traditional Chinese woman when she made
sense of why her Jewish American husband chose to meet and date her. She said:
The Jewish culture is traditional, more like the Chinese culture. Jewish men like
Chinese women, maybe because we are traditional. My husband’s ex-wife was
American. He said she was self-centered and didn’t have the same family values as
him. He had some Chinese friends living in the United States. He asked them to
help him look for a traditional Chinese woman. One of them was my friend. She
introduced me. She said I was a traditional woman and held conservative views
about marriage and family life. He was interested and sent me an email. We
exchanged photos and emails. Sometimes we talked on the phone. Then he flew
over to China to visit me. At that time, I was a graduate student in Beijing. I met
him at the gate of my university. As soon as he saw me, he said he felt in love.
The Jewish American man spent one week with her in Beijing. Shortly after he left for
America, Yue started to apply to a doctoral program in the U.S. city where he worked as
an accountant. She felt that it would be safer and more socially acceptable if she moved
to the United States first and got to know him better. In a year after she arrived In the
U.S., they got married and she became pregnant. During the interview, Yue confessed that
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her years on the Ph.D. program were probably the most stressful time in her life. She had
to juggle the multiples responsibilities of full-time graduate studies, mothering, and
housework. She complained in fleeting with a playful tone that her husband didn’t help
much with the housework and childcare. But in the meantime, she understood that her
husband worked for 9 hours on a typical workday and were too tired to share housework
and childcare after work. Yue accepted the gendered division of labor and defined
feminine domestic virtues in terms of women’s acceptance of their subordinated position
in the family. For her, being a good mother meant that she must swallow the bitterness
and make compromises with her husband in order for her son to have a happy
environment to grow up in. After she obtained her doctoral degree, Yue decided to stay at
home. She said:
My husband is busy. Our life is much better when I stay at home. I can spend more
time with my son. I can take care of things about him, like taking him to the doctor,
to extra-curriculum activities, etc. When my husband comes home, the food is
ready and the house is clean. There are fewer conflicts and fewer arguments.
Everybody is happy.
Like Yue, Ming chose to stay at home to take care of two young children after she
graduated with a Master’s degree in business administration from a New York university.
At the time of interview, she was expecting another baby. Jing was also a full-time stay-
at-home mother of four young children aged between 2 and 7. When I interviewed her in
her house, I was amazed by how organized and clean things were, despite the presence of
her four young children. Throughout the interview that lasted for two hours, her four
children variously engaged themselves with toys, drawings, and art crafts, and none of
them interrupted her. She attributed their good behavior to her scientific parenting
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methods she learned by reading expert books. For her, a good mother had intelligent
ways to make her children listen. She believed that while her white American husband
was attracted to her because of her looks, but he fell in love with her because she made a
home for him. She said, “it is more than about the looks. It is a whole package (zhengti).”
I argue that these Chinese women’s identification with and practices of domestic
virtues are their feminizing strategies to create their own desirability and attractiveness in
their attempts to win over the hearts of Western men as well as to provide moral
justifications for their interracial, intercultural relationships with Western men. They have
internalized and appropriated the Orientalist controlling image of Asian women as
traditional and docile to interpret Western men’s attraction to Chinese women. Their
perception about Western men’s desires for traditional Chinese women has in turn driven
them to mobilize the newly recuperated Chinese ideal of “virtuous wives and good
mothers” in their self-identification and self-representations. Some of them feel
compelled to perform this ideal on a daily basis in order to foreground the love and care
they give to make their relationships with Western men work. In Jing’s words, “love has a
reason. Nothing should be taken for granted.” Through their investment in domestic
feminine virtues, they hope to gain love from their Western boyfriends/ husbands, to
justify their interracial relationships as loving and moral ones, as well as to alleviate the
stigmatized status assigned to them by the popular Chinese nationalist discourse of
“foreign f women” as manipulative migration-oriented whores. Sometimes, they enact
contrastive virtuous femininity by making Western women into the external depraved
others, therefore reifying and reinforcing the moral boundary of Chineseness. But all in
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all, their efforts to practice domestic feminine virtues to attract and please their Western
husbands perpetuate the interlocking structures of race, gender and nation that have
produced, deployed, enabled and limited their romantic desires, marital aspirations and
love strategies in the first place.

Summary
Jing hurled her anger at the stigmatizing label of “foreign f women” and criticized
Chinese men for treating Chinese women as their own property and controlling whom
they dated and married. She also remarked, “Chinese men can’t eat the grapes, so they
say the grapes are sour. They are just jealous. They like white women, but they can’t get
them.” Liqing, Ming, and Tianlin shared Jing’s perceptions of Chinese men’s anxiety
about losing their women to foreign men and their unfulfilled longings for first-world
status. Indeed, as I have argued, the popular narratives about “foreign f women” are more
about Chinese men’s anxious self-defenses against global challenges to their masculine
power than about the experiences of these Chinese women. These nationalist narratives of
masculine and national humiliation are local resistances against the sweeping forces of
globalization that have blurred the dyadic relationship between China and the West as
China is moving towards economic and technological modernity. These two intertwined
processes of China’s de-territorialization and re-territorialization are structured by and in
turn contribute to the Chinese double-sided feelings of national pride and national
humiliation. All this constitutes the context where Chinese women fantasize about, aspire
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for and strive for transnational romantic engagements with foreign men.
The West has become a symbol of economic modernity for mainland Chinese in
the post-Mao reformist era, mobilizing Chinese women’s longings for romantic
engagements with foreign men. The state-initiated economic reforms rely on access to
foreign capital, science, technology and practical know-how (Hughes 2006). Since the
Thirteenth Congress in the 1980s, the state has shifted from its ideological denunciation
of total Westernization to a utilitarian recognition of the importance of learning from the
West in order to enhance national power in the global economy (Hughes 2006). It has
launched nation-wide educational campaigns to promote English skills as a national
economic competency and individuals’ mobility strategy (Guo 2012). Moreover, as I
have argued, to legitimate its power in leading China’s modernization, the official stories
about China’s rise in the world, structured by the complex sentiments of national pride
and national humiliation, eagerly seek after the validation of Western people. In these
stories, foreign people, especially Western men, appear to love Chinese people and
engage variously with an essentialized Chinese culture. Popular Chinese women’s
magazines add a gender twist to these narratives by representing romantic stories between
high-status, humanitarian Western men and Chinese women who are deemed undesirable
on the domestic dating market. The post-Mao welcoming embrace of Western economic
and cultural capital enables Chinese women to fantasize about themselves as objects of
Western men’s desires and love, and imagine Western men as the modern opposite of
Chinese men. Their desires for transnational, interracial romance are effects of China’s
integration into the global capitalist world. Chinese women in my study have
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appropriated Western symbols of modernity, such as the ability to speak English,
liberated sexuality, and beauty aesthetics, to enter and access the international dating
market as well as make themselves desirable and attractive to Western men.
Moreover, the binary category of Chineseness, configured in a dyadic relationship
between China and the West as well as through producing internal others, frames these
Chinese women’s self-positioning and feminizing strategies. Chinese women in my study
imagine from an Orientalist lens that Western men desire mainland Chinese women
because they are more traditional and docile than Western women. Based on this
perception, they identify with and practice domestic feminine virtues as a strategy to win
the love of Western men, and provide moral justifications for their interracial,
intercultural relationships. In their representations and practices of domestic virtues as
distinctively Chinese familial relationships, they reinforce the cultural boundary of
Chineseness and give it a higher moral ground relative to Westernness. While some of
these Chinese women adapt to Western concepts of liberated sexuality and Caucasian
beauty aesthetics, and project cosmopolitan self-representations, they distinguish
themselves from mainland Chinese women who don’t engage with femininity in similar
ways, and displace the low status of native Chineseness consigned to mainland Chinese
people under conditions of globalized Western cultural imperialism. These women’s
creative and flexible appropriation of Chineseness and cosmopolitanism perpetuate the
dynamic, interactive cycles of Western hegemonization and Chinese resistance, and the
Sino-West superiority-inferiority complex and the Chinese double-sided sentiments of
national pride and national humiliation.
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CHAPTER 5
SEX, MONEY, AND SENTIMENTS:
CHINESE WOMEN OPTING FOR NON-MARITAL RELATIONSHIPS

I first met Chen Yan, a 26-year-old woman when she visited the marriage
introduction agency I studied in the hope that the owner and the staff would help her find
some rich men to date. She just ended a relationship with a married governmental official
that had lasted for two years until he found a younger woman recently. Chen Yan was
looking for economically resourceful married men who were willing to pay to sleep with
her, for one night or on a long-term basis. She had been using the marriage introduction
agency as middle men to identify dating candidates and negotiate terms of sexual services
and financial benefits. The owner of the agency had called her an old friend and asked me
to entertain her in the office while she was waiting for him to arrive.
Chen Yan impressed me as a tall, fashionable, attractive modern Chinese woman
with her rounded big eyes, light make-up, medium-long wavy hair loosely sitting on her
shoulders, and her black leather tights. Unlike many other rural Chinese women in my
study whose romantic, sexual relationships with married men took place in urban centers,
a geographic and social distance from their families and friends back in their home towns
and villages, Chen Yan was a local urbanite who lived with her natal family at the hub of
the city, only a few kilometers away from the marriage introduction agency. While I was
boiling water to make tea for her in the open office, she said in her usual loud volume that
she ran out of money and needed to find some rich men soon.
What also surprised me was that Chen Yan was accompanied by her mother to the
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marriage introduction agency. Her mother wore a black v-neck blouse, a red mini-skirt,
and high-heeled sandals. I complimented her on her pendant. She quickly responded,
“this is rose gold. It is expensive.” She pulled the pendant out to show it closer to me.
After I said the pendant looked nice, she read me as being envious, opened her eyes
wider, and said, “there are always ways to get things you want. You need to be flexible.”
In their subsequent visits to the marriage introduction agency, Chen Yan and her mother
were surprised to know that I spent many years on my doctoral degree and worked for the
marriage agency on my research without getting paid. They were eager to teach me about
the real money-oriented world. Chen Yan offered to bring me along to the night clubs and
bars she frequented with her girlfriends.
Like Chen Yan and her mother, most Chinese women in my study who were involved
with married men attached great importance to being flexible under China’s liberation
and privatization of the market. They not only laughed off the social stigmatized status of
“second wives” assigned to them, but also took great pride in their flexible manipulation
of their bodies and men to amass financial resources and acquire social status through
conspicuous consumption, as well as their practical, money-oriented engagements with
life in general.
Based on ethnography and in-depth interviews with 14 Chinese women, this chapter
documents and analyzes the complex life circumstances that channel these Chinese
women into long-term sexual relationships with married men. They creatively appropriate
multiple cultural resources to interpret, articulate and justify their participation in such
relationships as a down-to-earth, practical, and therefore better option than marriage.
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Moreover, this chapter highlights these women’s varied strategies to make themselves
desirable, negotiate terms of sex-money exchange, and provide moral justifications for
their transgression of the appropriate boundary of feminine sexual virtues. These
women’s personal narratives and strategies are all framed by and embedded in China’s
contemporary processes of economic reforms, family formation, and configurations of
gender relations.

Why Chinese Women Enter Relationships of Sex-Money Exchange with Married
Men
Sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin (2004) has used “the deinstitutionalization of
marriage” to refer to processes of weakening social norms that govern people’s intimate
relations such as marriage partner choices in the United States during the twentieth
century. He points out that the American institutional marriage has first transitioned to
companionship-based marriage in the early and middle of the twentieth century. Since the
1960s, companionship-based marriage has transitioned into individualized marriage,
allowing the rise of diverse forms of intimate relationships such as cohabitation and
same-sex marriage. China has been undergoing the deinstitutionalization of marriage in
the past few decades. With state-sponsored land reforms and marriage reforms as well as
the rise of individualism, there is a new social emphasis on personal autonomy in
marriage partner choices, and sex and affections have become important to courtship (Y .
Yan 2003). The crude divorce rate (number of divorces per 1, 000 population) has
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increased from 0.33 in 1979 to 1.59 in 2007 (Wang and Zhou 2010). Young people have
increasingly accepted premarital sex (Parish, Laumann, and Mojola 2007). In a national
survey of unmarried people aged 25 through 29, 32.6 percent of the respondents admitted
to having premarital sex in 2000, but this number increased to 61.7 percent in 2006
(Farrer 2014:65). Extra-marital sexual relations have also risen, especially for urban men
(Parish et al. 2007). Sex has also been widely commercialized to cater to the demands of
a growing number of wealthy business men (Jeffreys 204). Nonetheless, despite the
diversification of forms of intimate relations, marriage remains nearly universal for
Chinese men and women (Jones 2007) and non-marital fertility rates remain low
(Banister 1987; Jones 2007; Wang and Yang 1996). As I have demonstrated in Chapter 3,
Chinese women growing up in the early reform era feel both the pressures and desires to
get married.
Deborah Davis and Sara Friedman (2014:4) argue that despite the increasing social
importance attached to marriage as a private space of emotional fulfillment and sexual
intimacy, marriage remains a public institution that organizes and legitimates the
allocation of economic and social resources, rights, and obligations in China. They
emphasize that the deinstitutionalization of marriage in China is embedded in the larger
Chinese family system which is in turn embedded in China’s specific social, economic
and political structures. This contextual analytical framework is especially useful for an
understanding of why some Chinese women opt for sexual engagements with married
men as a better alternative to marriage.
This chapter examines one widely practiced non-marital relationship in
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contemporary mainland China---sexual engagements between Chinese women and rich,
powerful married Chinese men--from the perspective of these Chinese women to unpack
the complicated, intertwined processes of economic restructuring, family formation and
configurations of gender relations. I argue that Chinese women’s perceptions and
practices of long-term relationships with married men as a more attractive option than
marriage is shaped by their practical worldviews about life that gravitate towards making
money. They develop these practical worldviews as they negotiate the gendered
organization of marriage, family and heterosexual relationships, as well as the stratified
labor market. The state neoliberal development discourse, the importance of consumption
for social status, and the rise of virile Chinese masculinity further enable Chinese women
to conceive relationships with married men as a viable route to the accumulation of
economic capital. All these grand social, economic and cultural transformations as well as
individual Chinese women’s local practices of dating implicate and herald China’s
changing moral landscapes.
The Gendered Organization of Marriage and Family
12 of the 14 Chinese women I interviewed had been divorced prior to their
intentional and strategic entry into sexual engagements with married men. They variously
articulated their experiences with the patrilineal, patrilocal Chinese family structure.
These experiences made them reject a romanticized conceptualization of love and
marriage, and opt for sexual relations with married men to accumulate economic
resources as a more desirable option of intimacy. They also invoked the conflicts between
themselves and their ex-husbands/their ex-mothers-in-law as a moral discourse to justify
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their decisions to avoid remarriage. I argue that gender principles structure both the
institutional organization and the discursive construction of the Chinese family which
have in turned shaped Chinese women’s perceptions and practices of conventional
marriage as a undesirable form of intimate relations.
The Confucianism-inspired Chinese family prioritizes father-son ties over conjugal
relationships, marginalizes Chinese women, and reduces them into productive and
reproductive values (Andors 1983; Johnson 1983; Stacey 1983; Wolf 1985; Zang 2003).
This male-centered familial system renders Chinese women dispensable and replaceable.
Chen Yan’s story made a compelling case that this patrilineal institutional structure
persists, despite the fact that conjugality and individual autonomy have become more
important to Chinese family relations in the past few decades (Y . Yan 2003). Chen Yan
had been married to a local urban Chinese man for two years. She moved to live with him
and his parents immediately after the wedding. During that marriage, she had an ectopic
pregnancy which led to fallopian tube disruption and permanent infertility. Following her
surgical removal of the ectopic growth, her mother-in-law frequently cursed her and
found faults with everything she did. Her mother-in-law called her “broom star”
(saobaxing), a Chinese derogatory term referring to someone who brings bad luck. Her
husband stayed out late after work, and seldom talked to her. She swallowed the
bitterness and hoped to keep her marriage. But her husband wanted to have his own child.
His family also insisted that he should remarry a fertile woman and continue the
patrilineage. Finally, her husband divorced her and married a younger woman. After this
experience, Chen Yan developed a practical approach towards marriage and dating. She
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said:
Marriage is nothing. People get married today, and get divorced tomorrow. Men are
selfish and unreliable. I should have known this earlier. When I just met my ex, he
was my first [boyfriend]. He was honey-lipped (tianyan miyu). I trusted him. I was
naive then, and believed in love. When I look back, I feel I was a fool. In a
relationship, whoever puts in real love and really cares loses the game. Marriage
itself is a relationship of resource sharing and exchange. You have to make yourself
valuable [to keep marriage.] I lost my value, so my husband abandoned me. It is
not different from my relationships with married men. I sleep with them. They give
me money. [In such sex-money exchange,] I have freedom. I can choose whom to
sleep with and make money from. I don’t have to serve on my husband or look at
my mother-in-law’s face. I’ve got to treat myself well. I am happy every day. I am
healthy; I have a lot of free time; when I have money, I can spend it the way I like.
Chen Yan’s prior experiences of her subordination and marginalization to the male-
centered Chinese family structure disillusioned her of romanticized love. The emergent
market economy and its neoliberal ideologies further enabled her to conceptualize both
marriage and her relationships with married men as economic operations of resource
sharing and exchange. Within this conceptual framework, she understood that
relationships of sex-money exchange with married men were not different from
legitimate, contractually bound marriage. But for her, the former was a more appealing
option because the latter, embedded in the patrilineal family system, reduced her to
reproductive value and prescribed her enslavement for her husband’s family, while the
former enabled her to opt in and out and accumulate financial resources. Chen Yan had
been working as a cashier with a meager salary in a local supermarket. Shortly after her
divorce, a married governmental official she met at a friend’s wedding banquet offered to
give her 4,000 RMB ($588) every month, provided that she slept with him twice a week.
Chen Yan accepted the offer and quit her job. The governmental official broke up with
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her for another woman in half a year. Chen Yan moved on to date another governmental
official for two years. In that relationship, the official gave her 5,000 RMB ($735) a
month and paid off the debts her father incurred from his gambling.
Moreover, the intersecting structures of gender and filial piety that govern the daily
organization of Chinese family lives prescribe newly married young women’s
subordination and concessions when intra-familial conflicts arise. Some of the women in
my study were not willing to completely submit themselves to these gendered and
intergenerational rules of the family. As a result, their marriages dissolved in divorces. 12
of the 14 Chinese women I interviewed had been divorced before they chose to engage
sexually with married men for financial returns. A Yan, Wang Xiao, Yu Fang, Hua, Hui,
Xingyan and Shiqi all recalled that their conflicts with their mothers-in-law escalated
after they gave birth. These conflicts covered a wide range of issues including how to
feed, dress and medicate new-born babies, division of household work, everyday
expenditures, the affection and loyalty of their husbands towards wives versus mothers,
and the gender of the children they bore. These experiences made them realize that they
were married not only to their ex-husbands, but also to their ex-husbands’ families. I
argue that the embeddedness of conjugal relations in the patrilineal Chinese family
system served as a deterrent to remarriage.
For instance, Shiqi was married for three years and had a daughter with her ex-
husband. Her marriage dissolved because her husband, the only son of his family, was
under enormous pressures from his parents to bear a son to continue the familial
patrilineage. Shiqi called her ex-husband a mommy’s boy and recalled poignantly
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multiple episodes of her conflicts with the mother-in-law following the birth of her
daughter. In one episode, Shiqi organized an elaborate birthday banquet for her mother-
in-law in a high-end restaurant. But her mother-in-law put on an angry face and refused
to talk to her during the banquet because she thought Shiqi was squandering away her
son’s hard-earned money on the banquet. Shiqi said,
My mother-in-law just didn’t like me (kan wo bu shunyan). She was unhappy that I
had a daughter. She had been hoping to have a grandson. After my daughter was
born, she often showed her anger at me on the face. She was picky about my
cooking. She said to my face that the food I cooked was tasteless and she couldn’t
swallow it. She said I didn’t know how to sweep the floor because the floor was
still dirty after I swept it. I was upset. I tried to keep it to myself. But I wasn’t a
saint. Sometimes, I argued back. Then we stopped talking to each other for days.
What irritated me was my ex-husband was a mommy’s boy (mabao). He thought I
should give in, so there wouldn’t be conflicts.
The birth of Shiqi’s daughter amplified her conflicts with the mother-in-law to whose
authority her husband submitted. Shiqi and her husband didn’t try to have another baby
partly because the one-child family planning policy was still effective and partly because
Shiqi didn’t want to go through another pregnancy. Her husband was torn between his
affection towards his wife and his filial responsibility to his mother who asked him to
divorce his wife. At the age of 30, Shiqi filed for a divorce because she felt that her
husband was indecisive and cowardly in front of his mother. After the divorce, Shiqi and
her daughter lived with Shiqi’s parents. Her husband got remarried within half a year of
the divorce. With her ex-husband’s limited contribution of 1,000 RMB ($147) per month
to raising their daughter, Shiqi had to keep her job as a sales girl in a retail store selling
cosmetics and body care products. At the same time, she relied on her parents on a daily
basis to take care of her daughter. A few men pursued her, but she turned them down
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because she was not interested in any sexual intimacy unless she could find a rich man
who was willing to support her and her daughter. Reflecting on the years immediately
following her divorce, she said:
I didn’t want to get married again. I didn’t want to deal with another picky mother-
in-law. I was living my life for the sake of living a life [instead of enjoying it]. I
didn’t need the abstract good reputation from getting married. But I needed a rich
boyfriend who could support me financially and make my life better.
By the time of interview, Shiqi had been involved with a married business man. She left
her job and received a payment of 5,000 RMB ($735) per month from him. She and her
daughter moved to live in a condominium he purchased under her name. For her, a
relationship with a rich married man was a better alternative to marriage because the
former gave her financial benefits and avoided conflict-laden familial interactions.
Although they poignantly recounted their conflicts with their ex-mothers-in-law
and their subordination to the patrilineal family structure, none of these Chinese women
positioned themselves as victims. Instead, they represented themselves as sophisticated,
seasoned women who developed critical views about marital and familial relations in
their daily negotiations therewith, and used these practical views to guide themselves into
future non-marital relations with married men. I argue that these women managed to cast
off their victimized status and exert their agency by participating in the narrative of
“speaking bitterness” (Hershatter 2011:34). In the early 1950s, Party-state cadres
mobilized poor peasants and women to speak in public forums about their pre-liberation
oppression, and denounce particular oppressors and “the old society” in general
(Hershatter 2011:34). Party-state cadres encouraged this public practice of “speaking
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bitterness” to transform the speaker from “one who accepted a bitter fate to one who
moved beyond it into a happier future” (Hershatter 2011:34). While “speaking bitterness”
has lost its historically contingent instrumental functions of legitimating Party-state
power and creating liberated socialist subjects, its narrative conventions are still present
in Chinese social life (Hershatter 2011:34). As I have observed in my study, this narrative
tradition has been passed down to contemporary Chinese women who grew up in the
1960s and beyond. I have witnessed that Chinese women who came of age in the earlier
socialist era and the earlier reform period commonly discussed with their girlfriends in
the public the difficult and ugly side of their marital and familial lives--conflicts,
arguments and fights among family members, with strong bitter and indignant
sentiments. Their listeners often acknowledged the hardships they went through and
confirmed their moral integrity. In the interviews, many Chinese women who dated
married men spoke bitterly about their previous intra-familial conflicts that led to
marriage dissolution. I suggest that this is their strategy to give moral justifications for
their subsequent avoidance of conventional marriage. These narratives gave meaning to
marriage and the family as a space of Chinese women’s subordination. I argue that these
bitter narrations about marriage and family made Chinese women into modern Chinese
female subjects who define and practice sexual relationships with married men for
financial benefits as a more desirable form of intimacy than marriage.
The Gendered Double Standard of Heterosexuality and the Rise of Virile Chinese
Masculinity
Some Chinese women in my study experienced the gendered double standard of
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sexuality that governs heterosexual relationships and marriage in contemporary China.
This standard prescribes Chinese women’s sexual virtues--their pre-marital virginity and
post-marital loyalty to their husbands, but allows Chinese men to enact virile masculinity
through pre-marital and extra-marital sexual engagements. Hua, Yawen, Wang Xiao, A
Yan, Yu Fang, Xingyan and Xiaowu all experienced the betrayal of their husbands or
boyfriends. Jingyi felt a deep sense of shame after she lost virginity to her first boyfriend
who reneged his promise to marry her. Such experiences compelled them to develop a
pragmatic, money-oriented approach towards heterosexual intimacy, marriage, love and
life as a self-liberation strategy.
For example, Hua had been married to her first boyfriend for over 5 years. She
described herself as a traditional, inexperienced girl when she first met her ex-husband in
the book store where she worked as a sales girl. At that time, her boyfriend worked at odd
jobs. In retrospect, Hua felt she was too naive to consider his socio-economic
backgrounds before he successfully coaxed her into marrying him. After they got
married, Hua moved to live with her husband and his parents, and gave birth to a baby
boy in a year. She continued to work in the book store and maintained a frugal lifestyle in
order to save money for the future. But her husband stopped looking for odd jobs, and
became addicted to alcohol and gambling. Hua also found out that her husband had an
affair with a woman working in a local restaurant during her pregnancy, and squandered
away the money she had saved on visits to the restaurant as well as gifts and banquets he
presented to please his mistress. During the interview, Hua said,
I regret that I didn’t use the money I had earned on myself. I was a good woman. I
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kept my virginity before I met my ex. I worked hard and bore them [my ex-
husband’s family] a son. I tried to save money and didn’t spend much on clothes or
cosmetics. I did everything for the family. But what was the result? My ex didn’t
appreciate me. He slept with a fox spirit [huli jing], and used the money I earned to
please her… Men use their lower bodies to think. Women sleep with men to get
money and have comfortable lives. Everybody is doing this. Love? Who cares? A
man loves this woman today and loves that woman tomorrow. What’s the use of
getting married? All I care about now is making money, a lot of it.
Hua’s husband filed for a divorce after he found out that his mistress was pregnant. Hua
used her savings to pay for a breast-enhancement cosmetic surgery in a private beauty
clinic, in her words, “to snare men.” Through a friend’s introduction, she met a married
man who specialized in the business of iron. He offered a monthly payment of 4,000
RMB ($588) in exchange for her sexual services a few times a week. Hua accepted it and
moved to live in one of the condominiums he owned. By the time of interview, Hua had
dated a number of married men, who were business men or governmental officials.
Throughout the interview, Hua repeatedly announced her life philosophy: “People live
their lives for sex and money.” She explained:
When men have money, they use it to get women. When women have ways with
men, they get money. I have had slept with many married men, and made a lot of
money. I don’t care if they have other women. All I care about is that they give
me money...Now I have money. I have a few condominiums. People look up to me
when they see me driving my car and carrying a LV bag. Who cares about where
my money is from?
Hua’s experiences with the betrayal of her ex-husband made her reject feminine sexual
virtues as useless. She turned her sexuality into an instrument for making money that
enabled her to purchase and consume luxury goods for social status.
Jingyi had a similar experience of being betrayed by her first boyfriend. She was
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originally from a town and migrated to a city for work at the age of 19. At her first job as
a waitress in a restaurant, she met a local urban business man who often came to host
banquets for business associates and governmental officials. In Jingyi’s narrations, this
business man pursued her, promised to marry her, took her virginity, and finally
abandoned her. It took some years for her feelings of shame over loss of premarital sexual
purity to dissipate. At the interview, she said:
Immediately after that [loss of virginity], I felt very bad about myself. When I was
little, my family told me that a girl needed to protect her purity to have a good
future. I kept my purity and gave it to a man I loved, but he deceived me. I couldn’t
stop feeling dirty for a while. Then I gradually realized that the teachings (jiaotiao)
about women’s purity were wrong. Innocent girls get tricked (pian). Manipulative
women have their ways with men and become rich quickly. People say when
women become bad, they get rich. It’s true.
Jingyi met a 56-year-old married governmental official through her friend. She accepted
his offer of a payment of 6,000 RMB ($882) per month under the condition that she
would sleep with him at his request. Jingyi quit her job and lived in an apartment he
rented for her. This relationship lasted for one year until the governmental official dated a
female college student and broke up with her.
None of these 8 Chinese women who articulated their various experiences with the
gendered double standard perceived themselves to be victims. Instead, they made sense
of these experiences as processes of disillusionment and awakening of their gendered and
sexual subjectivity. Like Hua and Jingyi, Wang Xiao, A Yan and Xiaowu all explicitly
rejected their previous inexperienced, passive virtuous selves as misled and stupid, and
embraced the power of active female sexuality to manipulate men for financial benefits
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and other less quantifiable resources (e.g. governmental officials’ social networks). For
them, to engage with married men for financial benefits was their defiance against the
institution of heterosexuality that prescribed Chinese women’s sexual and feminine
virtues and turned them into passive objects for men’s sexual prey. In Jingyi’s words, “the
teachings (jiaotiao) about women’s purity were wrong.” She resisted these teachings by
embracing active female sexuality and transgressing the boundary of appropriate female
sexuality as confined only to marriage.
Nonetheless, I argue that these Chinese women’s perceptions and practices of female
sexuality as self-liberation and -empowerment are embedded in the context of continuing
Chinese male dominance and contribute to its perpetuation. First, these women
participated in the Chinese masculinist dichotomous representations of female sexuality
as docile and passive or manipulative and predatory. They made sense of their gendered
and sexual awakening as a transformation from the former to the latter. Moreover, all
Hua, Jingyi, and Xiaowu appropriated the cultural symbol of “fox spirits” to refer to the
Chinese women with whom their ex-boyfriends/husbands had liaisons. By doing so, they
reinforced the discourse about the temptations and dangers of beautiful women and their
sexuality which elite Chinese men used to explain away their indulgence in sex and
political, economic corruption (Osburg 2013:177-179). I argue that the image of
manipulative beautiful Chinese women is a discursive instrument of masculine power to
produce and deploy social imaginings of female dominance to disguise its own operation.
Secondly but more importantly, these Chinese women’s practices of sexual
engagements with married men have emerged as a new form of non-marital intimacy in
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the reform era to serve and service newly rich business men and powerful male
governmental officials. In the demise of earlier radical gender flattening state ideologies
and policies, virile masculinity has resurrected since the 1980s (Brownell 2000). The
economic marketization has created and expanded the population of entrepreneurs of
large-scale private-and foreign-invested enterprises and managers of state-owned
enterprises who work closely with leading Party-state and governmental cadres in their
joint and mutual interests (Goodman 2014). There has been a proliferation of the sex
industry to cater to their sexual demands (Jeffreys 2004). Both the political and business
elite men engage in the consumption of commercialized female sexual services not only
to enact their virile masculinity, but also to demonstrate their own trustworthiness and
evaluate potential business/political partners’ moral quality (Zheng 2006), as well as to
create mutual trust and form homosocial sentimental bondings in their
social/business/political alliances (Osburg 2013; Zheng 2006). The youth and beauty of
elite Chinese men’s mistresses and “second wives” have become a symbol of their power
and wealth (Osburg 2013). It is in this context that Chinese women are able to imagine
and practice sex-money exchange relations with married men as a strategy to utilize their
female sexual power to manipulate men for financial benefits. I argue that their
perceptions and practices of liberated female sexuality in their non-marital engagements
with married men are produced and mobilized by as well as perpetuate the post-Mao
gender regimes of hegemonic Chinese masculinity and heterosexuality.
The Moral Economy of Filial Daughters and Good Mothers
Some of the 14 Chinese women I interviewed indicated that they entered long-term
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relationships with married men for steady financial gains because they needed money to
take care of their parents, siblings and/or children. Chen Yan, for instance, decided to
accept the first governmental official’s offer of financial compensations for sleeping with
her, partly because she thought it would be a quicker way to solve the financial problem
of her natal family. Chen Yan’s father was laid off by a state-owned enterprise in the
1990s. After his layoff, he set up a stand on a popular local open night market and sold
clothes on the street. With the intention of obtaining extra money for the family, he
started to gamble in various ways only to incur gigantic debts. Under institutional
pressures in the early 2000s, Chen Yan’s mother terminated her employment with a state-
owned factory some years before her retirement age. Since then, she had helped with
miscellaneous work in a restaurant one of her friends owned. When Chen Yan was
working as a cashier in a supermarket, she contributed part of her salary to her natal
family. Before she got married, Chen Yan and her parents lived in a condominium that
was assigned to them by her father’s work unit. The condominium building was subject
to a commercial reconstruction plan after the state implemented a policy to marketize
urban housing in the late 1990s. Chen Yan’s family needed to pay for a new
condominium at a cost lower than its market value. During the interview, she said,
They [My parents] would like me to pay part of it. I had some savings, but not
much. I talked to my ex-husband. He didn’t want to pay. Finally, we had to borrow
money from some relatives. When the first married man offered to keep me [as a
“second wife”] (bao wo), I thought I could make money and pay off the debts
quicker.
Since Chen Yan started to get involved with married men for financial compensations,
she had been able to help with her parents’ daily expenses and occasional big
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expenditures such as buying home appliances, furniture, and condominium remodeling.
When asked the question of what her parents thought of her relationships with married
men, Chen Yan said:
Initially, my father didn’t agree. He didn’t think it was moral. But later, he gave his
tacit consent. My mother has been open-minded about this. She met my [married]
boyfriends. We ate together in restaurants. She doesn’t have to work any more. I
often give her money and ask her to buy things for herself. She showed them [the
things I bought] to her friends. They said she was blessed (you fuqi) to have such a
filial daughter like me. That [what they said] gave her a lot face in front of her
friends.
Chen Yan’s narrative reminded me of my first interaction with her mother in the episode
presented at the beginning of this chapter where she boasted her pendant made of rose
gold. For Chen Yan, being a filial daughter meant making contributions to the family
finance, buying them consumer goods, and giving them face in front of their friends.
After her second relationship with a governmental official, she was able to help pay off
the family debts. Money and consumer goods were the currency of her filial practices.
Like Chen Yan, Jingyi also made sense of her filial responsibility in terms of
financial contributions to her parents. She was an adopted daughter of a peasant couple
from a town in hinterland China. When she was 6, her parents settled their case of
divorce and her father was granted her custody. In a few years, her father remarried and
had two biological daughters. Jingyi dropped out of high school and worked in a town
and village enterprise (TVE). In 2009, she and another girlfriend from the enterprise quit
their jobs and migrated to a coastal city to work. On her first job as a waitress, she wasn’t
able to save money and send home remittances because the pay (2,500 RMB per month, a
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rough equivalent of $368) was low and the living expenses in the city were high. After
she became involved with the first married governmental official, she managed to save
more money and regularly send home remittances. Her father used her remittances to
cover daily expenses and pay the tuition for the two younger daughters. I asked what her
family thought of her relationships with married men, she said,
They don’t know. I told them I worked in a restaurant. When I went back to visit
them, all they saw was that I became more fashionable. They said my taste had
changed and I looked more like a city girl. Last year, I bought an Ipad for my
father, dried red mushrooms for my step-mother, and some dresses and toys for my
younger sisters. Other villagers saw my father use Ipad, they said I became
successful (you chuxi) and knew to pay filial piety (xiaojing) to my father. My
father was especially happy.
In Jingyi’s hometown in the hinterland, the consumer goods she bought for her family
served as a symbol of her success in the city and her filial piety to her father. Both urban
modernity and filial piety villagers perceived her to embody gave her high moral status.
Some Chinese women in my study chose to get involved with married men for
financial benefits as a strategy to provide a materially comfortable life for their children.
Xiao Su was a 27-year-old single mother. She had been working in a print store in a city.
Through the marriage introduction agency, she was able to date a few married men, for
one-night relations and on a long-term basis. She said she was doing this for her daughter.
In the interview, Xiao Su remarked:
There is a popular saying, “girls should be raised in rich ways (nühaizi yao
fuyang).” There is some truth to it. When a girl is raised as if she were born into a
rich family, she will be able to resist small temptations men offer. She will be able
to tell men with good conditions over men with bad conditions.
Xiao Su was from an urban working-class family. Her father was laid off from a state-
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owned enterprise in the late 1990s and later found a low-paying job as a gate keeper for a
governmental bureau. Her mother had been selling local delicacies in a food market. Xiao
Su didn’t have good grades on the national college entrance exams and had no chance to
attend a four-year college. Instead, she went to attend a local tertiary specialized school
(dazhuan) where she met her first boyfriend. Right before her graduation, she found she
was pregnant. Her boyfriend was not ready to get married and asked her to have an
abortion. Knowing of her pregnancy, Xiao Su’s parents were devastated. They urged her
to have an abortion as well. But Xiao Su decided to keep the baby. She left her boyfriend
because she thought he was an irresponsible “dreg man” (zha nan). Her status as a single
mother made it difficult for her to find a good match for marriage locally. During the
interview, she told me that she dated a low-quality man like her ex-boyfriend because she
had been raised up in a poor family and was easily coaxed by his sweet talks. She
intentionally sought after rich married men to date for money because she wanted to raise
her daughter as if she were born into a rich family. In Xiao Su’s words, “so she will have
a different life trajectory than me.” She identified herself as a good mother because she
understood her relations with married men would give a better life for her daughter.
Like Xiao Su, many women who dated married men perceived themselves to be
good mothers. During the interviews, Xiao Su, A Yan, Wang Xiao, Yu Fang, Hua, Hui,
Xingyan and Shiqi all mentioned, in fleeting or elaboration, that with the money they
accumulated through sexually engaging with rich men, they were able to give a
comfortable life for their children and/or reduce the efforts their children would have to
make in order to succeed. For instance, after her divorce, Shiqi and her daughter lived
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with her parents in an old small urban condominium. Her job as a sales girl in a privately-
owned retail store barely allowed her to make ends meet every month. Shiqi relied a lot
on her parents’ financial assistance and time to look after her daughter. She willingly
accepted the offer of a married business man to buy a condominium in her name, besides
a monthly payment, under the condition that she slept with him a few times a week. Shiqi
struck this deal through the marriage introduction agency I studied. Some of her friends
cautioned that this offer was too good to be true and that the business man might
withdraw his promise to pay the mortgage, even after he already paid the down payment.
Even the staff of the marriage introduction agency said she was playing with fire. But
Shiqi was very determined to secure herself and her daughter a private real estate
property which had become increasingly expensive and unobtainable to working-class
Chinese families or even middle-class families. She told me:
I don’t want to permanently live with my parents. I want my own condo. The real
estate prices have been skyrocketing. I can’t afford one. If I accept the offer, in a
few years, the condo will increase in value. Then I can choose to keep it or sell it
and buy a different one. I can transfer it to my daughter when I am old. She won’t
have to worry about buying one herself.
Wang Xiao was also a divorced mother with a girl. She was driven to date married men
for money because she wanted to give her daughter a better starting point in the
increasingly competitive Chinese society. During the interview, she said,
The younger generations face more competition than previous ones. The original
families they are born into (yuansheg jiating) matter a lot. It is a time when
people’s success depends on who their fathers are (pin die shidai). I wasn’t able to
marry a rich husband and give my daughter a good starting point. But I can find
ways to make money, as much as I can. I can use the money from rich men to send
my daughter to good schools, enroll her in talent classes (tiancai ban), and maybe
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send her abroad to study later. She will have a comfortable life.
Wang Xiao believed that children’s competitiveness to a large extent depended on
parents’ wealth because economic resources would open up access to educational
resources and opportunities. She anchored the meaning of a good mother in her ability to
make money and ensure her daughter’s future success.
Unlike most other mothers who dated married men, Xiuru became the “second wife”
of a rich business man under the condition that she would bear him a son. The business
man offered to pay the down payment for a condominium in the City of Xiamen under
her name. Xiuru accepted this offer. During the interview, she explained her decision:
I am already 27. My parents urge me to get married. My boyfriend is not ready to
settle. I don’t want to wait to have a baby until I am too old. With my conditions,
there are not many good matches for me [to marry]. A rich man probably won’t
consider me [as a potential marriage partner]. Being a rich man’s second wife will
give me everything I could get from marriage, except the formal title of wife. I
don’t really care about the wife status. I will have my own condominium. He [the
business man] will give money every month...It’s like getting married without
going to register...With the money and the condominium, my child will have a
comfortable life and won’t have to work so hard (shao fendou ji nian).
In her views, a non-marital relationship with married men was similar to marriage
because both assumed men’s providing power as the basis of the relationship. Xiuru
opted for the former because the threshold of marriage to a rich man was higher than a
non-marital relationship, given her age limit and socio-economic backgrounds. Xiuru was
from an urban working-class family. Her father was a mechanic of a local utility
company. Her mother was laid off by a state-owned factory in the 1990s, and had since
variously worked on jobs such as hourly domestic cleaning and student pickups. Xiuru
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had been working as a modern dance teacher at a privately-owed school on a contractual
basis. For her, engaging with rich married men would earn her a condominium and
economic resources and enable her to ensure that her future child would grow up
comfortably and competitively. At the time of interview, she and the business man were
looking into options of sex-selective in vitro fertilization and entertaining the possibility
of having both a boy and a girl. For her, good motherhood was a goal she hoped to
achieve by exchanging her reproductive value with the married man as a way to
accumulate economic resources and ultimately ensure her children’s future success.
To sum up, Chinese women in my study perceived and practiced non-marital
relationships with rich married men as an economic strategy to fulfill their filial
responsibilities and perform the role of good mothers. In doing so, they transformed the
meaning of filial piety and motherhood in accordance with the neoliberalism-inspired
cultural valorization of money, consumption for comfort and status, and market
competitiveness. For many of them, money was central to being a filial daughter because
money could contribute to the family finance, and give parents access to much-valued
consumer products. Chinese mothers (or a mother-to-be in the case of Xiuru) framed the
role of a good mother in terms of their ability to give their children a comfortable life and
ensure their competitiveness and resourcefulness in the increasingly competitive Chinese
society. To enhance their mothering capacity, these Chinese women intentionally and
strategically sought out rich men to date as a way to accumulate their own economic
resources which they believed would translate into their children’s future success.
I argue that these Chinese women’s participation in non-marital relations with
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married men as an economic strategy is embedded in the changing economic structure in
post-Mao China. All the 14 Chinese women who dated married men were either from
urban working-class families or of rural origin. For urban women in this study (e.g. Chen
Yan, Xiao Su, Xiuru), their parents were former state-owned factory workers or
permanent employees of state-owned enterprises before the implementation of urban
economic restructuring in the early 1980s. As has been shown above, some of them were
laid off or compelled to retire earlier in the late 1990s and the early 2000s. For other
women who were originally from towns and villages (e.g. Jingyi), the decollectivization
of the agriculture in the late 1970s made the family a primary unit of elderly care. The
contemporary massive rural-to-urban migration also meant that it became difficult for
young migrant workers to take care of their left-behind parents physically on a daily
basis. For instance, Jingyi felt shameful about not being around her father when he was
hospitalized two years ago. But she said she brought him a lot of expensive nutritional
food (bupin), and gave her step-mother some money and asked her to cook nice food for
her father. In this context, being able to make money and support their parents
economically is important to the meaning of filial piety for both urban and rural families.
Moreover, a consumer culture has emerged and boomed as an effect of the state
developmental discourse that encourages consumption to enhance economic growth. This
consumer culture has created and mobilized a desire in the population to buy consumer
goods and services, and live a materially comfortable life. The increasing social emphasis
on modern consumption has enabled Chinese women to frame their filial responsibilities
in terms of buying consumer products for their parents and catering to their consuming
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needs.
Furthermore, the Chinese women coming of age at the late twentieth century and the
beginning of the new century experienced the stratified organization of the neoliberal
labor market in mainland China. These experiences made them opt for non-marital
relations with rich men as a more desirable way to make money. The urban Chinese
women I interviewed had less than college education and held working-class jobs such as
cashiers and sales girls in retail businesses before they started to use their relationships
with married men to accumulate economic resources. During the interviews, Xiao Su,
Chen Yan, Shiqi and Xiuru all explicitly said that their earnings from the jobs were
meager and they could barely make ends meet in the increasingly expensive city life.
Some of them said they had to rely on their parents for financial support when they
worked on their jobs, and felt bad about being part of the generation that “bites the old
generation” (ken lao). Many of the rural women I interviewed were migrant workers
variously occupying jobs in factories and the service sector. Jingyi complained that as a
waitress, she had to work long hours (11 am-11pm) and her pay was low (2,500 RMB per
month, a rough equivalent of $368). Shaoyun, a 26-year-old rural woman, was working
as a hostess in an urban nightclub at the time of interview. She was actively looking for a
rich married man to date on a long-term basis. For her, a long-term engagement with a
rich married man was a much easier and safer way to make money than providing escort
services to different men on a daily basis. These women’s difficult experiences with the
labor market propelled them to engage with rich married men as an economic strategy for
themselves and their families. Some of these women hoped that their own economic
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resources would enhance their children’s competitiveness and ease their ways into
society.
Becoming Wealthy is a National Ambition
Many of the 14 Chinese women I interviewed made sense of their non-marital
engagements with married men as a means to accumulate economic capital which they in
turn variously invested in real estate property and/or small businesses. 9 of them owned
private or commercial real estate property. 7 women had small businesses that covered a
wide range of activities, such as selling antiques, running convenient stores and small
supermarkets, selling tea and liquor, owning and managing beauty and spa salons, buying
harvested fruits from local peasants and reselling them to supermarkets, as well as selling
bags and suitcases.
Hua had two condominiums and a commercial property under her name at the urban
center. She had rented her commercial property for a small family restaurant, lived in one
of the condominiums, and remodeled the other into an income property. I visited her
condominium she rented to domestic migrant workers. It was located on a vibrant street
where street vendors gathered to sell on an open market at night. Hua’s condominium,
approximately 125 square meters, was divided into five small bedrooms, each of which
measured about 20 square meters, with a shared kitchen. Hua purchased this
condominium for 0.6 million RMB ($88,235) in cash in 2009 and rented the bedrooms
for 600-650 RMB each per month. Hua understood that she had been eating her “youth
rice bowl” by engaging with married men for economic benefits. For her, these sites of
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real estate property were her retirement security. By the time of interview, Hua was
already 43 years old and was still actively looking for married men to date through the
marriage introduction agency. But she didn’t expect that she would be able to find
married men easily in the next few years. Besides the real estate property, Hua also
owned a small supermarket in her own village and her father was managing it.
Among the staff of the marriage introduction agency, Hua had a reputation of being
sexually bold and ambitious for making money. When the staff told me about her as a
potential interviewee, they cited her “famous” life philosophy--“people live their lives for
sex and money”--as an amusement. They called her “landlady” (dizhu po) because of her
ownership of multiple real estate property. Sometimes the owner and staff of the agency
didn’t take her seriously because, in their words, “she doesn’t have culture (wenhua).”
For the college-educated staff, most of whom were urbanites, Hua had no educational or
cultural capital: she was originally from a village; she didn’t speak mandarin Chinese, but
only the local dialect; she didn’t finish the mandatory elementary education. But they
maintained a friendly partnership with her--sometimes calling her for updates and
sometimes inviting her to come to the office for tea. The agency had successfully
identified some married men for Hua to date and negotiated terms of sexual services and
financial compensations between her and married men. For each deal they struck, they
were able to obtain some commissions and/or bonuses from Hua, the married men or
both. Hua didn’t mind the staff’s playful attitudes towards her. Making money, and, in her
words, making “a lot of it,” was her gold principle. She said, “I don’t have much
education. But I have my ways with men. I can make them give me money willingly
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(xingan qingyuan).” Hua framed her ways with men as a kind of ability (benshi) that
educated women with refined cultural tastes didn’t necessarily possess.
Similarly, Chen Yan also adopted a practical money-oriented approach to life. For
her, becoming wealthy was the end and being flexible was the means to achieve it. Chen
Yan understood that her attraction to married men relied on her youth and beauty, and
wouldn’t last permanently as an economic strategy to ensure the welfare of herself and
her family. While she didn’t own real estate property, she managed to rent a small space
in an urban shopping district to sell handbags and suitcases. Chen Yan hired another
woman to manage and maintain the daily operation of the store. She said:
Being rich men’s second wife is just temporary. It is a youth rice bowl. But it
allows me to accumulate some capital. I can use it to invest in my own business
and become rich myself. Right now, I don’t have a lot yet. I will still look for
married men to keep me [as a second wife] for some years. Maybe, or hopefully
(she laughed.), by 35, I will have my own condominium and some profitable
businesses. Then I will stop looking for rich men.
Chen Yan stressed the importance of being flexible as a means to getting rich. She
elaborated on its meanings:
In this society, you need to have a flexible mind. You can’t strictly follow set rules.
You need to have your own judgment of what works for you. If this way doesn’t
work, try another way. Switch quick, so you won’t waste time. There are always
ways that work. Being flexible also means that you know your strength and you
know how to use it to your advantage. In my experience, my divorce opened door
to other opportunities. There are so many rich men out there. I never let myself get
stuck with one man. I am only in my 20s. I can use my prime time to make money.
Chen Yan also believed that people who didn’t aspire to become wealthy were out of pace
with society. My interactions with her included episodes of her and her mother teaching
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me about the importance of making money and being flexible. For them, aspiring to get
rich was a synonym of being enterprising which they regarded as a symbol of moral
personhood in contemporary China.
Like Chen Yan, some other women I interviewed also framed their relations with
married men as a flexible way to accumulate economic capital. For example, Xingyan
understood “flexibility” in terms of transcending social moral principles, especially those
pertaining to sexual boundaries. She cited a popular saying that summarized flexible
connections among gender, wealth, sex and morality in contemporary China. She said,
To get rich, you need to be flexible and changeable (linghuo biantong). There is a
saying, “when a man becomes rich, he gets bad; when a woman becomes bad, she
gets rich (nanren youqian jiu bian huai, nüren bian hua jiu youqian).” Rich men
have fun outside [their families]. Their colorful flags [meaning women outside
marriage] are fluttering outside, but their red flags [meaning their wives] at home
are still holding up (waimian caiqi piaopiao, limian hongqi budao). For women
like me, we know how to navigate our ways with men. We get rich this way. It’s
our ability.
In citing and interpreting this popular saying, Xingyan conceptualized women’s
transgressions of the moral boundary of appropriate feminine sexuality (that is, “a woman
becomes bad.”) as a flexible means to getting rich. While she was aware that people
blamed “second wives” for disrupting marriages and families, she believed that women
like her had the ability (benshi) to make men give them money willingly and that it was
the rich men’s wives who should be blamed for their inability (mei benshi) to keep their
husbands to themselves. The neoliberal values of ability and market competitiveness have
enabled Xingyan to make sense of women’s manipulation of sex and men as a
demonstration of their ability and merit. By invoking “ability,” Xingyan made a
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meritocratic and moral claim to her active use of feminine sexuality as a justifiable means
to accumulating wealth.
I argue that these Chinese women’s aspirations for wealth are produced and
deployed by the early state neoliberal developmental discourse that promoted getting rich
as an individual and national economic goal. In the 1980s, the reformist state encouraged
individual Chinese to participate in economic restructuring with the then resounding
exhortation of “to get rich is glorious” (Schell 1984). Without a blueprint for or much
experience with reforms, the state adopted a “trial and error” approach that supported and
promoted qualified places or individuals to make experiments and become rich first, as a
progressive strategy to the overall economic growth of the nation (Zhang and Chang
2016). This gradual economic developmental discourse, as I argue, led to and justified a
dramatic increase in social stratification and inequality. To break away from the previous
Mao-dominated ideology of class struggles, the reformist state appropriated Deng
Xiaoping’s earlier saying--“not matter whether it is a black cat or a it is a white cat, it is a
good cat if it catches a rat”--to legitimate the introduction of market economy into the
socialist system in order to achieve the goal of economic prosperity. Despite the recent
ideological shift from “getting rich first” to “common prosperity” (Fan 2006), the early
state developmental discourse has created and mobilized a desire among Chinese people
to become wealthy through participating in market competition. It is in this context that
the Chinese women I interviewed strategically entered sexual relationships with married
men as an economic strategy to accumulate capital which they in turn invested in
businesses and/or real estate property in the hope that they would become one of the
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“getting rich first” people in the nation. For some of them, their flexible use of their
female sexual power--their cats--was a justifiable means to this end. I argue that getting
rich through flexible manipulation of resources is a national ambition under China’s
conditions of economic restructuring. These women were not so different from the owner
and staff of the marriage introduction agency who had to rely on “second wives’”
relationships with married men to make profits. But these women’s transgressions of
appropriate gender and sexual boundaries made their sex-money exchange with married
men stand out for social moral scrutiny.

Chinese Women’s Strategies to Negotiate their Relationships with Married Men
Producing the Physical Capital
Most of the 14 Chinese women I interviewed variously invested in their bodies
through receiving cosmetic surgery, eating particular diets, and/ or attending to sex-
related hygiene to look young and sexually attractive and healthy. The youthful, beautiful
and healthy looks they obtained enabled them to reach good deals with married
governmental officials and business men. Their investments in their bodies are their
strategy to create their desirability and enhance their exchange value on the dating market
that increasingly defines and anchors the meaning of women’s femininity on their sexual
attractiveness to men.
Hua was known as the “queen of medical aesthetics (yimei huanghou)” among the
staff of the marriage introduction agency. Over a course of ten years, she went through a
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succession of more than 20 cosmetic surgical operations. In her words, “no parts of my
body are not artificially created.” These operations included a series of breast
enhancement procedures, face lifting, vaginal tightening, double-eye lid surgery and
sculptra injections. Hua estimated that she had invested between 80,000 RMB and 90,000
RMB ($11,765-$13,235) in these procedures. Some of these procedures were repetitive.
Hua received sculptra injections to reduce facial wrinkles every few years. She flew to
Taiwan and South Korea for some of these procedures because she believed they had
much more advanced technology of cosmetic surgery. She said married men had
obsession with different parts of a woman’s body and they looked for their desired
feminine bodily features when they decided whether to keep a woman as a “second
wife.” During the interview, she recounted an episode where she met a business man for
the first time,
He asked my age. I asked him to guess. He put his face closer to mine, and touched
my skin and gently pinched my cheek. Then he said, “your skin is full of collagen
protein. You are 20 something?” I laughed and didn’t say anything. He didn’t know
I just had a sculptra injection not a long time ago.
This business man was pleased by Hua’s youthful and elastic skin, and offered to keep
her as his “second wife.”
Like Hua, Xiaowu, Xingyan, Shaoyun, and Wang Xiao variously went through
cosmetic surgery such as breast enhancement, double eyelid surgery, and laser freckle
removal to look young and beautiful. Through these procedures, they modified their
bodies into fragmented parts to fulfill men’s sexual desires. Shaoyun made sense of these
procedures as necessary because other “second wives” used these procedures to make
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themselves attractive, improve the likelihood of finding rich men, and maximize the
financial returns they were able to obtain from men. She recalled when she first started to
date a married business man:
He fixed his eyes on my breasts for a while. Then he said they were small and
asked what size they were. I was feeling like eating flies, and didn’t know how to
respond...having big breasts is a standard thing when a woman is looking to be
kept [as a “second wife”]. I had to do it. It was painful. I worried about its risks.
But men like big breasts. I think the older they are, the more they like big breasts.
Big breasts are what makes them interested in the first place.
To stay in the competitive dating game, Shaoyun chose to receive the painful and risky
breast enhancement. She transformed her natural breasts to a sexual object of married
men’s desires, and used it as a commodity for sale on the dating market.
Besides cosmetic surgery, some of the women I interviewed practiced dietary
regimens. For example, Hua adhered to a low-calorie diet to maintain her slender body
build and at the same time enhance her stamina. When I was sitting in a banquet a
married man hosted for her and the staff of the marriage introduction agency, Hua didn’t
eat any starch-based food. She limited the amount of starch such as rice because she
thought it would increase her weight and risks of diabetes. Hua liked to make stew soup
with a variety of Chinese herbs that were conventionally believed to have medicinal
effects on the body. She had only a little meat that was cooked in the soup, but drank all
the broth which local people perceived to be the concentration of all nutrients. Hua
selectively used different herbs based on their medicinal functions in correlation with the
changes in seasons. She thought that stew soup would improve her stamina and postpone
the arrival of menopause. Hua followed this diet strictly in the hope that it would enable
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her to stay on the dating market for a longer time. Chen Yan took cleansing supplements
that helped move the bowels to remove toxins from her body. She thought toxins caused
skin defects such as discoloration, rash, and lacking in luster. Xiaowu also used cleansing
supplements to keep her abdomen flat.
In addition, some women paid special attention to feminine sex-related hygiene. Hua
insisted on using condom when she had sex with married men to keep herself from
getting pregnant or contracting sexually transmitted diseases. She attributed her
continuing success on the dating market to her ability to protect herself and stay sexually
active and energetic. Yawen used condom in her relationships with married men not only
as a self-protection strategy, but also as a symbol of her sexual cleanness, a desirable trait
married men looked for. She said,
The first married man I dated asked me whether I had any vaginal infections or
sexually transmitted diseases. He was cautious and insisted on using condom. I
think that married men are concerned about health. They don’t want to bring home
any diseases. So now I always keep a condom in my purse and offer to use it before
I go to bed with them. I also keep a small bottle of feminine wash in the purse and
intentionally let them see it. I want them to know that I keep myself clean of
diseases, so they will be more relaxed and more likely to get hooked. Men enjoy
themselves more when they know that I am not in pains because of bacteria
infections or diseases.
In using condom and showing feminine wash, Yawen sold feminine sexual health as a
commodity and a performance to married men.
I argue that these Chinese women exercise agency in transforming their bodies
into feminized and sexualized fragments (e.g. large breasts, young, elastic skin, slender
figure, flat abdomen, clean vagina, etc.) to cater to men’s sexual desires. In so doing, they
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participate in what Pierre Bourdieu calls “the production of physical capital,” a process
that develops the material body “in ways recognized as possessing value in social fields,”
as well as the conversion of the physical capital into other resources (Shilling 2012:135).
Nonetheless, their agentic practices of creating their sexualized bodies are structured by
and embedded in relations of gender inequality in contemporary China. While these
women’s physical capital enable them to accumulate economic capital, it makes
themselves into feminine and sexual objects against whom Chinese men enact their
masculine subject positions. Ultimately, these women’s engagements with their bodies
reproduce the hierarchy of hegemonic Chinese masculinity and subordinated Chinese
femininity.
Emotional Work
Unlike the popular narratives that depict relationships between “second wives” and
married men as merely commercial and pragmatic, some Chinese women in my study
revealed a lot of emotional work they did to maintain intimate connections with married
men. For them, conventional marriage is only perfunctory, and married men are
emotionally detached from their wives, but close to them.
Xiaowu recounted an episode in which she performed the role of confidant to a
married business man she was dating,
He came to me, telling me that his business was in trouble...I listened with all my
attention. He said he didn’t want to go back home and face his wife because she
never understood anything about his business and never tried to listen. I asked him
to stay. Then I went down [the apartment building], bought a few beers and roast
duck, and came up to drink with him.
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Yawen had similar experiences of playing the role of listener to one of her married
boyfriends. She remarked:
His wife didn’t understand why he always had to stay out and entertain his friends.
He sometimes went home really drunk. His wife was complaining and nagging
about this for a while. One night he went home and found that his wife locked the
door from inside. He tried to call her, but she didn’t pick up the phone... He came
to my condominium. I served him some soup I had made for the night. Then he
started to pour his bitter water [meaning his sad stories] about his marriage. I
listened. I told him I understood how difficult to be a man nowadays. He was
silenced for a while and became happier and more relaxed.
Like Xiaowu, Yawen also made a claim of difference between herself and the married
man’s wife. Yawen believed that married men looked to date “second wives” not only for
sex, but also as a temporary exit from their burdensome familial responsibilities as a
son/husband/father. She said,
Some married men are sad deep in their hearts. They are powerful and rich. But
they are high up there and feel lonely. They have multiple roles, too. They can’t
talk to other people about the stress of life...having relations [with “second
wives”] is a way for them to express their feelings. They pay to have freedom and
understanding...many people think that our relations are just about exchange of
money and sex (quan se jiaoyi). But I know they [married me] have feelings for
me.
Yawen’s strategy to serve the emotional needs of married men was to listen and agree,
and show empathy towards their feelings.
Besides listening, Chen Yan, Hua, Xiuru and Hui all indicated that they had to
respect their married boyfriends’ personal boundaries and not to inquire their
whereabouts or show jealousy over their wives and/or other girlfriends they were dating.
This strategy made them companions for married men, in contrast to their nosy, jealous
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and possessive wives. Chen Yan described her first relationship with a married
governmental official:
He was very comfortable when we were together. I knew that he had other
girlfriends. But I never asked. I have a cool personality (shuangkuai). I didn’t want
to act like his wife. Maybe that’s why he liked me and stayed in the relation. We
are like friends. He felt safe to talk to me. Sometimes, she [the married man’s wife]
called him when I was right next to him. He picked up the phone, telling her he
was busy with work. I think that she wanted to know if he was with another
woman. She tried to hang onto her husband. But she actually gave him pressures.
That’s stupid.
Hui went out of her way to show respect for one of her married boyfriends by taking care
of a younger woman he was dating. She said:
My principle is that I wouldn’t let men feel taken advantaged in a relationship (chi
kui). She [his other girlfriend] was pregnant. He asked me if I had personal
connections in local hospitals and could arrange an abortion right away. I had a
friend working in the XXX hospital. So I called him and arranged everything.
After the surgery, I cooked some stew soup and brought it over to her...He didn’t
tell his wife about all this. His wife was known for her bad temper [locally] (Hui
laughed.). If she had known, she would probably have rushed to the hospital and
cursed at her…I had been with him for a while. People have sentiments (ganqing).
He treated me well. I had to do the same. Otherwise, who would be willing to be
my friend?
For Hui, offering generous friendship to married men and even their mistresses was her
way to pay back her married boyfriend and maintain the relationship of sex-money
exchange.
I argue that these Chinese women invested in emotional connections between them
and their married boyfriends as a social, economic and discursive strategy. First, these
women’s practices of creating emotional bonds are embedded in the Chinese cultural-
economic system of social interactions (guanxi) Mayfair Yang (1994) summarizes as a
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gift economy. This Chinese mode of social interactions prescribes reciprocity between the
givers of favors (e.g. assistance, money, banquets, etc.) and the recipients. The givers
sacrifice wealth and labor, which was embodied in the favors they provide, and make the
recipients indebted. The ownership of favors is only transferred from the givers to the
recipients when the latter pay back the value of the favors. The payment for their due
social debts can take various forms, such as a material object, or assistance in
accomplishing a task or navigating the bureaucratic system. Chinese social interactions to
a large extent depend on highly obligated and reciprocal give-and-return rituals. I argue
that the Chinese women in my study offered married men emotional intimacy and
companionship (e.g. listening, showing empathy, serving comfort soup, drinking beer
together, and being generous towards married men’s mistresses, etc.) both as their
repayment for married men’s financial investments in them and as forms of favors that
made married men obligated to stay in the relationships.
Moreover, these Chinese women invested in emotional bondings as a discursive
strategy to provide moral justification for their non-conventional sexual relationships
with married men. James Farrer and Zhongxing Sun (2003) argue that emotions and
sentiments have risen as a moral counter-discourse to the social worship of money in
post-Mao China. During the interviews, many women claimed that they and their married
boyfriends developed sentiments over time. They often contrasted their companionship
with married men to their (perceived) emotional distance between married men and their
wives, as has been demonstrated above. I argue that these Chinese women gained moral
status by investing in emotional closeness and invoking it as they made sense of their
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relationships with married men. Through narrating their non-marital relationships with
married men in terms of emotional bonds, these women elevated themselves from their
socially assigned stigmatized status as greedy, manipulative whores.
The Use of Middle Men in Negotiations of Sex-Money Exchange
All the 14 Chinese women I interviewed were actively looking for married men to
date through the marriage introduction agency. 5 of these women were registered
members of the agency. In their profile, they indicated they wanted to find successful
men as partners. But none of them specified that they were looking for married men. The
other 9 women were from the owner’s and staff’s informal networks of friends and
acquaintances. All the women informally requested that the agency provide assistance in
finding potential rich married men to date.
The agency played the role of middle men. Based on a woman’s request, the owner
and staff identified potential married men from their informal networks of friends. Then
they called married men on the phones to introduce the woman’s physical conditions
(height, breast size, body build, etc.) as well as their expectations for financial
compensations. This initial phone introduction, to a large extent, relied on the staff’s art
of persuasion and their relations with the targeted married man. Following the phone
introduction, the staff would arrange an introduction meeting which was usually a
banquet in a restaurant. The woman and the married man didn’t meet until the arranged
meeting.
I was invited to some of the introduction banquets the agency organized. These
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meetings didn’t strike me as different from regular Chinese banquets for families and
friends. The married man and the woman interacted as if they were introduced to each
other as new friends. For example, in a meeting organized for Hua and a business man,
Hua and the married business man discussed their home towns, local news, the economy,
and restaurants. Later the staff told me that introduction meetings were meant for men to
decide whether the women introduced to them were sufficiently attractive. The married
men usually paid the bills of introduction banquets.
After the meeting, the owner or the staff called both the married man and the woman.
If they agreed to proceed, the owner or the staff would start a process of negotiating the
frequency of sexual intercourse, monthly payment, and other forms of compensation.
Depending on the deals the agency struck, they were able to secure a commission and/or
a bonus from the married man, the woman and/or both. Sometimes, the staff managed to
obtain more bonuses after the couple had already slept together.
During the interviews, I asked the 14 Chinese women why they used the agency to
find married men. Some of them indicated that they didn’t know rich men in their
immediate contexts, and they needed well-connected middle men to gain access to rich
men. Some other women believed that middle men could resolve the tension between the
practical money-oriented aspects of their relationships with married men, and the
sentiments they tried to cultivate in such relationships. Xiaowu explained:
Talking about money is too blunt. That is the practical part of a relationship. If I
directly tell them [married men] how many times we can sleep together or ask
them [married men] how much money they are going to pay me, it sounds like
conducting a business. It hurts the sentiments. The agency can deal with the
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realistic aspect of it.
I argue that these Chinese women’s practices of using the marriage introduction
agency to secure rich married boyfriends and negotiate deals of sex-money exchange are
embedded in the larger context of sexual commodification and sexual consumption in the
post-Mao China (Jeffreys 2004; Zheng 2006). As has been demonstrated, these women
variously engaged with body regimens to transform their bodies into sexualized,
fragmented commodity to cater to the demands of governmental officials and business
men. But they didn’t have access to the sex market. The marriage introduction agency
served as middle men between the two parties by offering a network of potential dates,
and opening access to the market of sex-money exchange, as well as producing verbal
representations of the commodity--women’s sexual attractiveness--and marketing it to
married men.
More importantly, I argue that the emerging sex market is embedded in the Chinese
cultural-economic system of social relationships, or the gift economy. Yang (1994)
distinguishes a gift economy from a commodity economy. A commodity economy
establishes objective relationships between commodity exchangers based on use value
and exchange value. It prioritizes commodity exchange over personal relationships. In
contrast, a gift economy relies on highly obligated give-and-return inter-personal rituals.
It prioritizes personal relationships over commodity exchange. In my research, I argue
that the owner and staff of the marriage introduction agency were able to act as middle
men in sex-money transactions because they maintained good relationships with married
male governmental officials and business men. During my ethnography, the owner and
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staff frequently brought along their friends-governmental officials and business men-to
banquets, massage parlors, and karaoke night clubs--sites of sexual consumption and the
creation of homosocial bonding among Chinese men (Zheng 2006). Through these
entertaining activities, the marriage agency managed to cultivate friendly sentiments, and
maintain good relationships with a circle of governmental officials and business men. The
staff and the owner of the agency were able to successfully introduce and market Chinese
women to their married friends partly because they had created social and emotional
indebtedness in these friends. In the owner’s words, “we have sentiments. If I ask them
out to meet a woman, they will.”
Moreover, the Chinese women’s use of the agency as middle men was also their
strategy to navigate the Chinese system of social inter-personal relationships. They
intentionally avoided direct negotiations of the practical aspects of sex-money exchange
because they didn’t want to preempt the cultivation of sentiments in their relationships
with married men. As Xiaowu put it explicitly, talking about money “hurts the
sentiments.” Instead, they let the staff of the agency handle the negotiations of sex and
money transactions.

Summary
This chapter examines the rise of a non-marital form of sexual intimate relationships
between women and married men in post-Mao China. Such relationships typically entail
that women offer sex regularly to married men and that married men provide women with
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financial compensations. Oftentimes, the extramarital couple set up a second household
in a condominium the man owns or purchases for the woman.
Based on ethnography and in-depth interviews with 14 Chinese women who got
involved with married men on a long-term basis, I argue that their decisions to enter into
sexual engagements with rich married men were shaped by their practical, money-
oriented worldviews. They developed the practical worldviews as they negotiated the
gendered organization of marriage, family and heterosexuality in China. Their
experiences with the patrilineal Chinese familial organization and the gendered double
sexual standard pertaining to dating and marriage compelled them to reject conventional
marriage and opt for non-marital engagements with rich married me as a more desirable
option of intimate relations. Under conditions of economic restructuring, contributing to
the family finance and catering to the consumption needs of their parents and children
have become critical to these Chinese women’s filial and mothering responsibilities. Prior
to their entry into long-term sexual engagements with married men, all these 14 Chinese
women held low-paying working-class jobs. Some of these women migrated from towns
and villages to work in cities. The jobs available to them were concentrated in factories
and the service sector. These women’s experiences with the stratified labor market
propelled them to enter into long-term sexual relationships with governmental officials
and business men for financial compensations as an economic strategy to make money
for themselves and their families.
Moreover, I argue that these women’s various life circumstances that channeled them
into relationships with married men are embedded in the larger processes of economic
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reforms. First, the early state developmental discourse has created and deployed a desire
to get rich in Chinese people. The Chinese women in my study engaged with rich married
men as an economic strategy to accumulate financial capital which they in turn invested
in real estate property and/or small businesses, in the hope that they would become one of
the “getting rich first” people. Secondly, as an effect of the state economic mobilization, a
consumer culture has risen and boomed. It has produced a national desire for modern
consumption. For many of the Chinese women in this study, a good life for themselves
and their families was one with material comfort. Through engaging with rich married
men and investing in income property or businesses, the Chinese women in my study
endeavored to amass economic resources in order to ensure a comfortable life for their
parents and children. Some of them were mothers or mothers-to-be. They hoped that their
own economic resources would translate into their children’s competitiveness in society.
Thirdly, the rapid economic growth in mainland China during the past few decades has
resulted in the emergence of a dominant class--rich businessmen and governmental
officials who enact virile masculinity through sexual consumption. There has been a
proliferation of the sex industry to cater to their sexual demands. This context enabled the
Chinese women in my study to perceive and practice relations of sex-money exchange
with married men as a viable economic strategy.
None of the 14 Chinese women positioned themselves as victims of gender
inequality in China. Instead, many of them experienced a disillusionment of romanticized
love and an awakening of their sexual power. They variously transformed their bodies
into sexualized fragments in order to make themselves attractive to married men. Some of
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them engaged with emotional work in their relations with married men in order to
cultivate sentiments in men and make them obligated to give money willingly. They also
invoked emotional closeness between themselves and married men as a discursive
strategy to elevate themselves from their socially stigmatized status as greedy and
manipulative “second wives.” All the 14 women strategically used the marriage
introduction agency I studied as middle men to access the sex market and deal with the
practical aspects of their relations with married men. Nonetheless, these women invested
in their youth, beauty and sexual health, and participated in emotional work to cater to
married men’s sexual demands and emotional needs, reproducing the hierarchy of
hegemonic masculinity and subordinated femininity.

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CHAPTER 6
CONCLUSION

This dissertation examines how Chinese women and Chinese men are variously
positioned and position themselves in the context of China’s economic reforms and
opening-up. In Chapter 2 the dissertation sets out to analyze the widely-circulated
popular narratives that criticize and stigmatize three groups of Chinese women who
deviate from conventional Chinese marriage, namely, “leftover women,” “foreign f
women,” and “second wives,” respectively. My analysis focuses on what these narratives
tell us about how Chinese people, especially Chinese men, make sense of China’s grand
social, economic and cultural transformations in the post-Mao era. The following
chapters of the dissertation rely on ethnographic and interview data to explore how these
three stigmatized categories of Chinese women position themselves and how they
interpret and practice dating, marriage, and family. This concluding chapter summarizes
my contributions and findings, discusses its limitations, and suggests directions for future
research.

Theoretical Contributions
My dissertation examines the interlocking construction of gender, family and
Chinese nation in post-Mao China, and adds a timely, albeit very limited, addition to the
existing scholarship on gender and Chinese nationalism (Brownell 2000; Hershatter
1997). Moreover, I expand this literature by going beyond a textual analysis to explore
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how the stigmatized groups of Chinese women position themselves and practice dating.
My research also builds upon and corroborates Sherry Ortner’s (1996) theory of the
double meaning of making gender that emphasizes the two intertwined processes of how
structural forces create subjects and how subjects in turn (re)make the world they live in.
Throughout my dissertation, I highlight that the state-initiated economic reforms, and the
resulting social and cultural transformations both enable and constrain how these Chinese
women make sense of dating, marriage and family, and how they strategize dating
practices. In their localized practices, they variously challenged and reproduced the
structures of gender, family, and Chinese nation. I hope that my empirical research on the
three groups of Chinese women provides compelling evidence against a binary
understanding of structure and agency in the fields of gender relations in contemporary
China.
Additionally, I would like to argue against an understanding of Chinese patriarchy as
an essential and totalizing structure. Instead, I stress that multiple regimes of gender,
including the state(s), the emerging market economy, and the changing family structure,
intersect to shape the meanings of Chinese femininities and masculinities.

The Interlocking Construction of Gender, Family and Chinese Nation
In Chapter 2, I argue that the stigmatizing popular narratives about the three groups
of Chinese women are more about Chinese men’s anxious self-defenses against domestic
and global challenges to their masculine power than about the real life experiences of
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these women. First, I contend that these women have incurred intense popular criticisms
because they represent liberated and assertive femininities. These women variously
deviate from conventional marriage by holding off their first marriage, dating and/or
marrying non-Chinese men, and engaging with married men. They have challenged the
structure of gender and the institutional power of marriage and family. Given the binary
construction of the category of gender, the rise of liberated and desiring femininities
outside conventional Chinese marriage poses challenges to Chinese men’s masculine
power and authority. I argue that the stigmatizing masculinist narratives about the three
groups of Chinese women are Chinese men’s strategy to assert their symbolic dominance
over Chinese women, and discipline Chinese women about appropriate gender and sexual
boundaries.
Secondly, I situate these popular narratives about “leftover women,” “foreign f
women,” and “second wives” in China’s macro processes of economic restructuring and
increasing integration to the global capitalism. I argue that the figures of “leftover
women,” “foreign f women,” and “second wives” symbolize increasing class inequalities,
globalized Western cultural imperialism and racism, and unscrupulous market
competition for profits, all of which led to difference and inequality among Chinese men,
and between Chinese men and Western men. The stigmatizing popular narratives about
the three groups of Chinese women are masculinist criticisms of social inequalities
among men.
More importantly, building on the scholarship on gender and Chinese nationalism
(Brownell 2000; Hershatter 1997), I argue that all these gendered anxieties and
215

resentments about social injustices are entangled in Chinese people’s pessimistic feelings
about the nation. “Leftover women,” “foreign f women,” and “second wives” symbolize
the transgression of the moral boundary of appropriate feminine sexuality and
domesticity and, by symbolic association, the boundary of the Chinese nation/culture.
They also symbolize what many Chinese people perceive to be pandemic social problems
(e.g. the social worship of money, self-interested pursuit of profits, etc.) that have resulted
from China’s economic reforms and opening-up. Narratives about the three groups of
Chinese women are nationalist criticisms of the negative consequences of China’s recent
transformations. These nationalist sentiments are enmeshed with Chinese men’s senses of
their masculine selves.

Chinese Women Navigating Structures of Gender, Family and Chinese Nation
In my study, none of the Chinese women who fell into the categories of “leftover
women,” “foreign f women,” and “second wives” positioned themselves as passive
victims of interlocking structures of gender, family and Chinese nation. All of them
appropriated a variety of social, economic and cultural resources to make sense of dating,
marriage and family, and strategize their femininizing and dating practices.
Chinese Women Who Remain Unmarried in Their Mid 20s and Beyond
Chinese women who remained unmarried in their mid 20s and beyond felt both the
pressures and desires to get married and become mothers. These women came of age in
the early economic reform period and experienced a transition from the Mao-dominated
216

state regime to the reformist state regime. This transition resulted in changes in gender
ideologies, family policies, and economic structures. These women lived through what I
call a fault line of gender socialization. When they were little girls, they were socialized
to identify with the strong woman and believe that inner discipline and strength were
much more important than feminine beauty. But as they entered the dating market in the
2000s, they were re-socialized into the ideal of beauty and femininity. Because of this
disjuncture in their lives, many of them experienced confusion and a lack of practical
know-how about feminine performances and interactions with boys. They used this
experience to explain their protracted singlehood. By the time of interviews, many of
these women had adapted to the feminizing dating market and identified with marriage
and motherhood.
Nonetheless, the transition from androgynous girlhood to feminized womanhood was
not complete. The value of inner discipline and strength these women had learned
enabled them to endure the competitive, difficult, and often exploitative labor market.
Not all these women had college education, high-status occupations, and high income, as
they were stereotypically depicted in the stigmatizing popular narratives about them. But
many of them worked hard to establish themselves economically as their strategy to
fulfill their filial duties and become good mothers. Yet despite the fact that they were hard
workers, they relegated their worker identity to the periphery, dis-identified with the
strong woman, and identified themselves as little women who embraced feminine and
domestic virtues, and were willing to submit to hegemonic masculinity.
Most of these single women aspired to meet and marry quality men who could
217

inspire and maintain a feeling of awe in them. For them, a quality man was a tall retro
urban man with at least college education, a stable professional job, and/or ownership of
a condominium. I contend that their aspirations for quality men were produced and
mobilized by post-Mao state discourses on economic development, population quality,
and quality education. These characteristics in quality men didn’t just signal the men’s
socio-economic resourcefulnesss, but also symbolized their spirit of being enterprising
and capable of upward social mobility. I argue that single Chinese women also looked to
marry quality men because they needed their embodied hegemonic masculinity to enact
their own identity as little women.
Although all the women aspired to get married and cast off the “leftover” status,
many of the women were disadvantaged on the domestic dating market because of their
age. As they passed the socially acceptable time for first marriage (25 for women), their
age symbolized diminishing feminine beauty, declining female fertility, and expanding
sexual experiences, all of which made them undesirable marriage partners on the dating
market that valorized feminine youth, beauty, reproductive value, and sexual purity. To
achieve their aspirations for marriage and motherhood, these single women engaged
diligently with work to become economically resourceful, a characteristic quality men
looked for in potential marriage partners. They also actively participated in the booming
hegemonic consumer culture as a strategy to make themselves desirable and loveable.
Chinese Women Who Dated or Aspired to Date Foreign Men
In my research, I find that Chinese women dated or aspired to date foreign men for a
218

variety of reasons. None of them looked to date foreign men simply for the purpose of
migration or sex, as they were stereotypically depicted in the stigmatizing popular
narratives about “foreign f women.” Their desires for foreign men included, but were not
limited to, masculine bodies, liberal modern values of gender egalitarianism,
unavailability of Chinese men, disappointment with Chinese men, and opportunities for
their children to have access to other countries. Like the Chinese women in Constable’s
study (2003), all of them in my study looked for good matches and aspired for enduring
love.
I also observe that all these women variously participated in processes of Western
acculturation, feminization and racialization to access the global dating market and make
themselves attractive to foreign men. Most of them had been learning the English
language and Western cultures. I argue that their aspirations for English were an effect of
globalized Western cultural hegemony, state economic mobilization and market
competition. These women’s knowledge of English and Western cultures enabled them to
fantasize about global love, access the international dating market and produce their own
attraction to foreign men. Some Chinese women also appropriated English in their social
interactions to project cosmopolitan self-representations and justify their relationships
with foreign men as ones on an equal basis.
Moreover, I find that some of these women adopted Western, often Caucasian,
beauty aesthetics to modify their bodies to make themselves attractive to foreign men as
well as to create cosmopolitan self-representations. They made a difference claim
between themselves and other mainland Chinese women who didn’t engage with
219

femininity in similar ways. As a result, they displaced the inferior status of native
Chineseness that were assigned to mainland Chinese in Western orientalist discourses.
Nonetheless, most of them incorporated the Chinese ideal of “virtuous wives and good
mothers” in their relationships with married men to create their own loveability. I argue
that their flexible appropriation of Chineseness and cosmopolitanism perpetuates the
interactive cycle of Western hegemonization and Chinese resistance.
Chinese Women Who Opted for Sexual Engagements with Married Men
In my research, I find that Chinese women chose to engage with rich married men
for financial benefits for various reasons. They developed practical, money-oriented
worldviews as they negotiated the gendered organization of marriage, family and
heterosexuality. Early state developmental discourses of getting rich first and their
experiences with the stratified labor market also mobilized them to perceive and practice
sexual engagements with rich married men as a viable economic strategy to accumulate
financial resources which they in turn invested in real estate property and/or small
businesses. For many of them, making money, contributing to the family finance and
providing access to consumer goods became central to the meanings of filial piety and
good motherhood.
To make themselves desirable to married men, most of these women invested heavily
in their bodies through receiving cosmetic surgery, eating particular diets, and/ or
attending to sex-related hygiene. They also engaged with emotional work to cultivate
sentiments as a strategy to pay back men’s financial favors and make them stay in the
220

relationships and give them more money willingly. Additionally, all the women used the
marriage introduction agency as middle men to access the sex market and negotiate the
practical aspect of sex-money transactions with married men.
I argue that these women’s particular life circumstances that channeled them into
relationships with married men and their various dating strategies were all embedded in
larger processes of China’s economic reforms, family formation and the configuration of
gender relations.

Limitations and Future Research
My dissertation relies on a small sample of Chinese women for each of the three
empirical studies. Therefore, my conclusions remain suggestive. Moreover, the women I
interviewed were not representative of the larger Chinese population. For example, for
the study on Chinese women who dated married men, all the women were from urban
working class families or rural families. They had less than college education, and held
working-class jobs prior to their entry into relationships with married men. Their
experiences might not be the same as women who were college educated and/or from
urban middle-class families. Also, I recruited all the women in Southeast China. Their
perspectives and practices of dating might be different than women from other regions of
mainland China. Future research studies might want to study women from different parts
of China or with different socio-economic backgrounds for purposes of comparison.
Additionally, given the limited space of my dissertation, I didn’t compare family
221

formation in contemporary mainland China to other countries in Asia. Gavin W. Jones
(2007) has pointed to the deinstitutionalization of marriage in some Pacific Asian
countries. There has been a trend towards delayed marriage for women in reproductive
ages in some Pacific Asian regions and countries (e.g. Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong,
Thailand, Singapore, the Philippines, etc.). For example, in Hong Kong, 31.2 percent of
women at ages 30-34 and 12.2 percentage of women at ages 40-44 remained single in
2000. But marriage remains nearly universal for men and women at an early age in
mainland China. For the same year of 2000, less than 2 percent of Chinese women at the
age of 30 remained single in mainland China. Future research studies based on qualitative
data might explain this difference from women’s perspectives.

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232

APPENDIX A
Table 1 Demographic characteristics of Chinese single women
Pseudonym Age Education Occupation Rural/Urban
Origin
Jie 31 Ph.D. college lecturer urban
Hong 30 Bachelor’s Degree engineer urban
Xiaolin 28 Bachelor’s Degree director urban
Rong 29 Bachelor’s Degree accountant urban
Yuan 25 Tertiary Specialized School
Diploma (dazhuan)
factory worker urban
Xiaofang 32 Bachelor’s Degree director urban
Xiaoli 36 Bachelor’s Degree accountant urban
Wenzheng 39 Bachelor’s Degree director and
engineer
urban
Yalin 32 Bachelor’s Degree sales associate rural
Juan 28 Bachelor’s Degree kindergarten
teacher
urban
Yuhan 26 Bachelor’s Degree customer service
representative
urban
Yanhong 29 Bachelor’s Degree small business
owner
urban
Xiaolan 32 Bachelor’s Degree accountant urban
Yuli 35 Bachelor’s Degree kindergarten
teacher
rural
Lifeng 31 Bachelor’s Degree unemployed urban
Yajuan 30 Bachelor’s Degree nurse urban
Yibing 28 Bachelor’s Degree Engineer rural
Wenlin 26 Tertiary Specialized School
Diploma (dazhuan)
peasant and
salesgirl
rural
233

Xiaoguo 27 Senior High School Diploma unemployed urban
Xiuyu 36 Secondary Specialized School
Diploma (zhongzhuan)
small business
owner
rural
Xiaozhen 28 Bachelor’s Degree governmental
cadre
urban
Xiaoxu 31 Bachelor’s Degree director urban
Shijing 35 Bachelor’s Degree accountant urban
Yujun 28 Bachelor’s Degree governmental
cadre
urban
Shujie 31 Bachelor’s Degree director urban
Xiaoyun 27 Bachelor’s Degree governmental
cadre
urban
Yan 34 Secondary Specialized School
Diploma (zhongzhuan)
factory worker rural
Wen 36 Bachelor’s Degree kindergarten
manager
rural
Zheng 31 Bachelor’s Degree website editor
and manager
urban
Ling 29 Tertiary Specialized School
Diploma (dazhuang)
factory worker rural
Xuan 36 Bachelor’s Degree accountant urban
Yun 27 Bachelor’s Degree sales associate urban

234

APPENDIX B
Table 2 Demographic characteristics of Chinese women who dated and/or married
foreign men
Pseudonym Age Education Occupation Rural/Urban
Origin
Wang Laoshi 56 Ph.D. college English
professor
urban
Liqing 38 Some Junior Middle
School
assistant to her
husband’s home-based
English classes
urban
A Yu 62 Junior Middle School unemployed urban
A Zheng 60 Junior Middle School unemployed urban
A Jun 27 Senior High School bar owner urban
Yue 34 Ph.D. stay-at-home mother urban
Ming 34 Master’s Degree stay-at-home mother urban
Tianlin 22 Ph.D. doctoral student urban
Shuya 45 Bachelor’s Degree self-employed
(international business)
urban
Jing 31 Bachelor’s Degree stay-at-home mother urban

235

APPENDIX C
Table 3 Demographic characteristics of Chinese women who dated married men
Pseudonym Age Education Occupation
(prior to their
first
relationships)
Rural/Urban
Origin
Shiqi 35 Senior High School Diploma salesgirl urban
Hua 43 Some Elementary School salesgirl rural
Yawen 35 Senior High School Diploma salesgirl rural
Jingyi 22 Some Senior High School waitress rural
Shaoyun 26 Senior High School Diploma hostess rural
Wang Xiao 37 Some Senior High School salesgirl rural
A Yan 38 Some Senior High School factory
worker
rural
Xiuru 27 Tertiary Specialized School
Diploma (dazhuan)
teacher urban
Xiao Su 27 Tertiary Specialized School
Diploma (dazhuan)
salesgirl urban
Hui 44 Some Senior High School governmental
clerk
rural
Chen Yan 26 Senior High School Diploma cashier urban
Yu Fang 40 Some Senior High School factory
worker
rural
Xingyan 37 Tertiary Specialized School
Diploma (dazhuan)
factory
worker
rural
Xiaowu 40 Secondary Specialized
School Diploma
(zhongzhuan)
salesgirl rural

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Creator Zeng, Xiaoxin (author)

Core Title Gender, family, and Chinese nation: ""leftover women,"" ""foreign f women,"" and ""second wives""

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Sociology

Publication Date 04/20/2017

Defense Date 03/10/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag and nation,China's economic reforms and globalization,dating and marriage,deviant femininity,Family,mainland Chinese women,OAI-PMH Harvest,popular Chinese nationalism,Sino-West relations,symbolic construction of gender

Language English

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Advisor Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette (committee chair), Birge, Bettine (committee member), Silverstein, Merril (committee member)

Creator Email zengx@usc.edu,zengxiaoxin2001@gmail.com

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