Marriage customs and preparation
Faced with plummeting marriage rates, flagging births and a rapidly aging population, Chinese President Xi Jinping wants the country's women to step up and embody "the traditional virtues" of marriage and raising children in a bid to "rejuvenate" the nation.
The number of Chinese couples tying the knot for the first time has plummeted by nearly 56% over the past nine years, the financial magazine Yicai quoted the 2023 China Statistical Yearbook as saying, with such marriages numbering less than 11 million in 2022.
Young people are increasingly avoiding marriage, having children and buying a home amid a tanking economy and rampant youth unemployment, part of an emerging social phenomenon known as the “young refuseniks” – people who reject the traditional four-fold path to adulthood: finding a mate, marriage, mortgages and raising a family.
A 2023 poll on the social media platform Weibo found that while most of the 44,000 respondents said 25-28 is the best age to marry, nearly 60% said they were delaying marriage due to work pressures, education or the need to buy property.
Xi, whose 24-member Politburo is the first in decades not to include a single woman, called for the political mobilization of women like Yao to step up and compensate. Backing away from his party's time-honored rhetoric on gender equality that was once a mainstay of its claim to legitimacy, Xi told a meeting that women have a "unique" role to play in the nation's return to family life.
"We need to ... guide women to play their unique role in carrying forward the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation, establish a good family tradition, and create a new trend of family civilization," Xi told a meeting with leaders of the party's All China Women's Federation in comments reported by state news agency Xinhua.
"Only with harmonious families, good family education, and correct family traditions can children be raised and society develop in a healthy manner," Xi said. "We need to actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing," he said, including "guiding young people's views on marriage and childbearing" in a bid to reverse the rapidly aging population. Chinese women should be mobilized "to contribute to China's modernization," Xi told All-China Women's Federation leaders. "The role of women in the ... great cause of national rejuvenation ... is irreplaceable."
Meanwhile, Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang's speech to the five-yearly Chinese Women's National Congress also broke with the party's usual lip-service to gender equality – by not mentioning it at all. The lack of enthusiasm for women's rights has had a real-world impact, too. When Xi Jinping took power in 2012, China ranked 69th in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, which measures policies and suggests measures to address gender inequality. By 2023, the country had fallen to 107th place.
While few women have ever risen to the highest ranks of the Communist Party, Xi's insistence on a domestic role for women is a departure even from the luke-warm, Mao-era rhetoric about gender equality, and the depiction of the party in propaganda films as liberating working class and rural women from the shackles of traditional gender roles, including forced marriage and prostitution.
In May 2021, Beijing unveiled new plans to boost flagging birth rates and reverse population aging, raising the official limit on the number of children per couple from two to three. But Chinese women haven't been stepping up to solve the government's population problems as readily as Xi had hoped. And the current emphasis on traditional Confucian culture appears to have exacerbated gender inequality under Xi, who has also offered little in the way of practical assistance.
Chinese women face major barriers to finding work in the graduate labor market and fear getting pregnant if they do manage to get a job, out of concern their employer will fire them, a common practice despite protection on paper offered by China's labor laws. And the authorities have cracked down hard on women's rights groups and #MeToo activists, detaining five feminists as they planned a campaign against sexual harassment on public transport ahead of International Women's Day 2015 and recently jailing feminist journalist and #MeToo researcher Sophia Huang for "incitement to subvert state power."
Despite being stymied by strict censorship and the fear of political persecution at home, Chinese women are finding allies in the international feminist movement, as well as standing with Uyghur women activists overseas. Xi's administration has effectively downgraded the status of women, yet resistance continues.
In a culture where the perpetuation of family ancestral lineage and the family as a social institution are central, marriage is an important institution and has many intricate customs associated with it. In the Chinese family system the wife lives with the husband’s family and is deemed as no longer part of her own family, but the 'property' of the husband’s family.
Arranged marriages, where the marriage match is arranged by the parents or relatives of the bride and groom were once common in Chinese society but are now rare and viewed as old-fashioned. Marriage is usually now based on the two people involved’s own choices. However, once the couple have chosen each other, the arrangements are usually taken over by the parents (or older relatives), thus observing traditional customs and superstitions.
Chinese men tend to marry fairly late in life, as they need to save up for the expense of the wedding: a Chinese wedding can be very expensive, especially where the involved families are of high social status. Two important components of Chinese culture - the need to avoid embarassment ('saving face') and to conspicuously display wealth and prosperity - come heavily to the fore in marriage, especially where the marriage is of the eldest son. Failure to provide a lavish wedding is likely to lower the status of the family, bring shame upon them and bring criticism from relatives raining down upon them.
There are several stages to a Chinese wedding (described under), usually under the overseeing of the groom’s parents (or older relatives). Weddings are micro-planned and planning is highly time consuming. The process begins when the parents are informed of their son/daughter’s intentions and, if they are in agreement, a meeting between the two families is arranged.
Information gathering
In Chinese culture, a marriage is not simply a love match between two people, but an establishing of a relationship between two families as well. If the parents are not happy with the lineage and status of the other family, a wedding will not occur.
The ‘information gathering’ stage of a wedding involves the groom’s family ascertaining the reputation and lineage of the bride’s family, and the character and behaviour of the bride. This is of great importance as the reputation of the groom’s family is at stake. Before a meeting takes place, the groom’s family will have already made surreptitious enquiries through friends and acquaintances. A meeting will be arranged for the two families to meet- usually without the bride and groom present- and a frank and open discussion will ensue. Some prefer the initial meeting to be held over a meal in a restaurant with members of the extended families such as aunts and uncles present. Sharing a meal will help to break the ice and strengthen the bonds between parties soon to be in-laws. Conversation is likely to revolve around family backgrounds and origins- though not with a serious tones as this may lead to arguments which will lead to a cancellation of the wedding- and serves to allow the two families to become acquainted and establish a rapport. The family of the bride will use the opportunity to investigate the status and wealth of the groom’s family and ensure that their daughter is not likely to be maltreated: as noted before, after marriage the bride will become part of the groom’s family.
Negotiation period
If both families are satisfied with each other, the groom’s parents will send their representative- always female and chosen from among his aunts or elderly relatives- to ask for the bride’s hand in marriage. A time and date is set for this meeting. The representative will discuss a suitable date, the amount of the dowry and the number of tables allocated to the bride’s family at the wedding banquet. The bride’s family will always delay agreement on these matters so as not to appear too eager, even if they have already decided the matters. This is expected, and a second meeting is set, with a period in between to allow any problems to be worked out. However, on her second visit to the bride’s house, the groom’s representative expects a decision. A relevant proverb is used to signal acceptance. The bride’s family will request that the wedding is conducted with due felicity and grandeur, and the amount of dowry and number of required banquet tables will be stated. The groom’s representative will not bargain, as this is considered unseemly: she will only ask the bride’s name and date of birth in order to determine a suitable date for the wedding by reference to a fortune teller. The groom’s family will now be able to estimate the costs of the wedding and start to make preparations. If a relative of either the bride or groom dies before the wedding day, the wedding will be postponed for a period, traditionally a year but now usually reduced to a hundred days, as it is considered inappropriate to hold a wedding during a period of mourning.
Engagement
If preparations for the wedding can not be made within the specified time period or the couple do not wish to ‘rush into’ marriage, an engagement will occur first, but only with the bride’s parents’ consent. The engagement is usually a simple affair, with an exchange of rings (worn on the third finger of the left hand), and the engagement is of an unspecified time period. Chinese engagements are not a binding commitment to marriage, but an indication that the couple intends to marry. Engaged couples may sometimes live together as man and wife (if their parents consent), but formal marriage is always preferred because of its (relative) permanency.
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