The fate of the male dragon in 2000, the dragon is born in a few months is a true dragon

The fate of the male dragon in 2000

Sisi Waste

The issue of rural bachelors has once again aroused heated debate. 10 years ago, people To the rural bachelors as a destabilizing factor brought about by the problems from women to violence; 10 years later, people finally realized that rural bachelors are also the victims, but in the fertility rate continues to go down in the worry of the absurdly open the wrong blame the wrong person. It should not be women who warm the nest for rural marriageable men, but rural revitalization.

According to the results of the seventh national census, the male population was 723.34 million, and the female population was 688.44 million, with men outnumbering women by 34.9 million. After 2005, there were significantly more males than females in the new population of marriageable age, and the issue of marriage squeeze came to the forefront, making it difficult for low-income earners to get married. On the one hand, the sex ratio imbalance in the population is worsening, and on the other hand, the rural female youth migrating to work in the city has further widened the sex ratio in the countryside, making it difficult for the "small men" at the end of the marriage ladder to choose a spouse.

This article analyzes the different economic and mainstream discourses of different eras and concludes that the widening urban-rural divide is the root cause of this problem.

Stills from The Bachelors.

I. Behind the gender of the rural birth population: the value of having a woman is not as good as that of a man

An important reason for the formation of the problem of rural bachelors is the unequal ratio of men to women in the rural birth population. Nowadays, young people between the ages of 20 and 35 were born between 1986 and 2001. According to the demographic data, in 1982, the sex ratio of the rural population in China was 107.7, i.e., for every 100 females born, there were 107.7 males. In 2010, this figure reached 122.1, which is much higher than the recognized normal ratio of 103-107. According to the data from the four previous national censuses from 1953 to 1990, the sex ratio of the country's total population has always been kept below 107. It is a recognized fact that the sex ratio of the rural population has increased significantly in the last three decades.

Why has this happened? The direct cause is the implementation of family planning since 1979. Before that, rural families could get boys by having children continuously, but after the family planning, the gender can only be controlled by artificial means. The sex ratio by births shows a significant increase in the number of second and third or more births, with figures for 2010 being 130.3 and 158.4 respectively. The control of the total population has resulted in a gender imbalance in the countryside.

However, we should think further, why do rural families prefer boys? Most people understand this to be a remnant of traditional patriarchal thinking, and the mainstream explanation also focuses on this aspect, with slogans such as "boys and girls are all the same" found everywhere in the countryside, but there are deeper economic and conceptual reasons behind this.

In China, it is clear that women in rural areas are not as well off as men, and that women are not as economically productive as men. The collective economy has experienced a "women's" era, including the mobilization of women in production, the granting of the same rights to women, the freedom of marriage, the protection and upbringing of women, and so on, which has greatly improved the status of women. However, patriarchal power itself has not been broken down, as reflected in the unequal work-point system, unequal work opportunities, unbroken gender division of domestic work, distribution of labor that does not take into account the special rights and interests of women, and so on.

Overall, the promotion of gender equality at that time was more in the sense that women had the same labor rights as men and the right to participate to a certain extent in public **** affairs (right). Objectively, however, women's full access to, and participation in, labor laid the foundation for women's economic and intellectual independence. For rural women, they have become an indispensable labor force for agricultural production.

However, if In the perspective of the rural family, even at that time, the birth of a girl is still less valuable than a boy. While women took on the heavy burden of farming, men were often sent by cooperatives to work outside the village, earning far more than women. For example, work on a reservoir could earn more than 20 labor points a day, while a management job in a neighboring town could earn a salary to cover the family's expenses. (Hershatter 2011)

By the time of the era, the status of women had changed in new ways. Yan Hairong points out that in the context of the 1980s, "women" were considered to have lost their gender identity, and the dominant discourse called for women to return to the home, to be "feminized", and for the relationship between women and housework to be completely rationalized. The situation in rural areas was even worse. As a result of the de-collectivization of agriculture and the introduction of the household contract responsibility system, men regained absolute dominance of the family, while women withdrew from the public space and returned to the narrow domestic space.

At that time, it was believed that under the household responsibility system, women were free to organize their time at home for household chores and by-product work, instead of having to work in the fields, as in the past, even for women who were not strong enough to do so. And in fact, the results of a field survey done by scholar Kelkar in Wuxi in 1983 showed that women were exhausted under the double burden of heavy housework and by-products or handicrafts. "Women have to get up at 4:00 a.m. or earlier and engage in by-product production for 10-12 hours ...... while also cooking, washing clothes, bringing up children, and emptying the urinal ...... Men never share the household chores ...... while the production exchange gains are in the hands of men ...... Women have no control or decision-making power over the household and production."

Moreover, the responsibility system itself reinforced male authority. After the decline of the work-point system, farmers adhered to the principle that the more they produced, the more they got, but the gender inequality in the work-point system (men could earn 10 work-points a day, women 8) was retained. "An able-bodied female can contract only 1.6 acres of land, while a male can contract 2 acres." (Kelka 1983) Discrimination against women is institutionalized. Perceptually, rural women's participation in matters pertaining to public **** has been reduced to almost zero. Where once women actively participated in meetings to raise awareness and fight for the rights of rural women, these meetings were discontinued in the new economy. "Women attend from morning and evening, and have no time at all." In 1983 the NCWF recognized that the household contract responsibility system (and the family planning that went along with it) had neglected women's work and revived the idea of male authority. (Kelka 1983) Against this background, the reasons for rural families' preference for boys are obvious; men bring more to the family than women, either in terms of status or economic gain.

In addition, under the imperfect security system in rural areas, "raising children for old age" is also a reason for rural families to prefer boys. In the era of collective economy, with the launch of agricultural cooperativization, it was proposed that rural collectives should solve the problem of poor farmers' old age: "All cooperatives have the responsibility to help widows, widowers, orphans and members who lack labor (they should be absorbed into the cooperative) and those who have labor but have great difficulties in their lives, and to solve their difficulties." The Model Statute of Senior Agricultural Cooperatives issued in 1956 established the "Five Guarantees" system, which gave no worries to the old, weak and orphaned members who had lost their labor force and dependence (Song Shiyun). It should be recognized that the rural security and cooperative security system at that time had many shortcomings, and the security that could be provided by the collective economy under its own poor strength was very limited, especially when compared with the retirement and other insurance that urban residents could enjoy. But farmers can at least enjoy the collective security, the collective system is dissolved, farmers have to rely on family security, "raising children to prevent old age" has become the last resort of rural families.

In "The Story of Lin Village," a teenage daughter goes to Ye with the knowledge that the collective system will be disbanded, "She said that under the collective, she and her daughter can earn work points to make ends meet. But what if the brigade is disbanded? There was no man in her family, and if she was given a share of the terraces, she couldn't plow them, so how would she and her daughter survive?" (Huang Shumin 2002) Yan Hairong writes in "The Rural Countryside, the Empty Subject," that the former production responsibility fields have been turned into "welfare fields" since 1990, absorbing the disabled and sick, while in fact, even if the rural laborers return to the countryside, they have no "welfare" to offer in the face of the abandoned farmland and the imperfect social security system. The first is the "Welfare".

Second, the rural marriage expenses to catch up with the city, the double price increase to bring a vicious circle

More men than women, the scarcity of porridge is the formation of bachelor groups of objective reasons. But we should further examine, those unattended bachelors in the end is what people? Why can't they get married? Although the mainstream discourse is full of expressions of romanticization of marriage, emphasizing love, fate, appearance, etc., in rural China, the economic foundation of men is still the primary condition for deciding marriage.

Most of the rural bachelors reported in the media are from poor mountainous areas. For example, in 2007, Southern Weekend reported on the village of Pai Fang in Guizhou, where 282 bachelors accounted for 1/5 of the men, almost all of the village is mountainous, with less than 2% of the fields, and the per capita net income in 2006 was only more than 800 yuan. And "Half Moon Talk" reported several villages in Yulin, Shaanxi Mili county, most of the key villages in poverty alleviation, "a family can not earn two or three thousand dollars a year, and find a daughter-in-law at least two or three million dollars, many people can not afford to find".

On the one hand, although the absolute value of farmers' annual income has increased dramatically over the decades, marriage expenses have increased even faster, and it is surprising to examine the ratio of marriage expenses to farmers' annual income over the decades. Fei Xiaotong estimated the cost of a marriage in Jiangcun in 1936 at about 500 yuan, "a figure equivalent to one year's expenses for a family." In the early 1990s, Li Yinhe examined two villages in China, one poor and one rich: Nanshantou Village in Qin County, Shanxi Province, with an annual per capita income of 332 yuan, where the cost of marriage was about 3,000 yuan, and Nanyang Village in Yuyao, East Zhejiang Province, with an annual per capita income of 2,000 yuan, where the cost of marriage was between 15,000 and 20,000 yuan. Although the absolute amounts vary greatly, the percentages are about the same, both being the income of a farmer for 10 years. And in Sun Shumin's study of Zhao Village in Qin'an, Gansu Province, in early 2000, the average expense of marriage dowry in the late 1990s had reached about 15,000, and as a mountainous village in a poverty-stricken county, the per capita annual income of Zhao villagers at that time was only more than 700 yuan, and the marriage expenses were equivalent to the income of a villager for more than 20 years.

On the other hand, with the frequent movement of people and the expansion of the marriage market, we can see that the poorer the region, the higher the proportion of the annual income of farmers accounted for marriage expenses. Miri village Haojiaping village in the news paper said, "Our village near the roadside, the conditions are still okay, more remote than us in worse conditions, we here to marry a lot of daughter-in-law are those places, and those places of men to marry their wives is even more difficult, spend more, marrying a wife is tantamount to buying a wife".

There are two vicious circles in rural areas. First, poverty leads to bachelorhood. In the poorer areas, women are more willing to leave their villages, leading to the original high sex ratio in rural areas, fewer women. And once women go to more affluent areas, they can no longer look at the men in their original villages because they are too poor. On the other hand, it is precisely because of poverty that women are more eager to change their poor living conditions through marriage, thus further increasing the cost of marriage. Secondly, bachelorhood leads to more poverty. In the absence of family motivation and life goals, some bachelors will indulge in smoking, drinking,, etc., gradually deserting their farms and becoming more negative and poor. Unfortunately, in some scholars' and media's interpretation and farmers' understanding, the reason why bachelors can't find wives is because of their "low cultural level", "thinking" and "lack of destiny", etc. This is the end of the matter.

The second vicious circle is the inability to get married - bachelorhood - having to pay more money to get married. Fei Xiaotong once mentioned in Jiangcun Economy that when the rural industry was in the doldrums, the system of late marriages and "little daughters-in-law" came into being. When child brides were taken away and men could not afford to borrow and pay back the money for the wedding, unlimited late marriages created a large number of bachelors. Once bachelors are past marriageable age, they have to pay a higher price when they want to take a wife. Moreover, many bachelors face not only the problem of old age, but also, in many cases, the problems of low education level, no regular occupation, physical defects, hobbies, remote hometowns, and so on, and then the only way for them to get married is to pay more money to compensate for the woman's "loss". This has become a problem for poor rural bachelors.

We should note that the rise in marriage costs is not confined to rural areas, nor is it isolated, but is a phenomenon that has arisen in the context of overall de-collectivization and full marketization of the economy. By analyzing three villages in Henan, Hunan, and Guizhou, Liu Yanmai found that the role of economic factors in the formation of bachelors began to come to the fore in the mid-to-late 1980s, and another scholar, Xu Anqi, analyzed the change in mate-choice criteria between Shanghai and Harbin over the past 50 years and came to a similar conclusion that economic orientation became more and more important after the 1980s.

During the collective economy era, we were committed to eliminating the differences between urban and rural areas, between workers and peasants, and between workers and peasants. Whether it was under the work-point system in the countryside or under the system of state-owned enterprises in the urban areas, there was not a big difference between individual incomes, and therefore the material requirements for marriage were not high, and the factor of individual composition was sometimes more important. And after the de-collectivization, in the market economy, driven by personal interests and materialistic ideas, the individual gap between rich and poor, the material requirements of marriage is rising, and even the trend of "marriage commodification", which is the hometown of "marrying a wife is equal to buy a wife! This is the hometown "marrying a wife is the same as buying a wife" behind the deep-rooted meaning. Yan Yunxiang in the investigation of Heilongjiang under the cape village found that, starting in the mid-1980s, the local bride price gradually from the physical into cash (locally known as "dry fold"), the bride price requirements have become more "high-grade modern", "the single The bride price requirements became more "high-grade and modern", and "the list even included urban furniture such as sofas, which had just been introduced in the countryside. Some requirements, such as four sets of high-grade bedding, completely exceed the actual needs of the newlyweds.

On the other hand, in the city into a faster development and rural income levels can not keep up with the situation, with the expansion of population migration and intermarriage circle, developed regions of the marriage expenses even if it is a steady increase in the backward areas is also a surge, the rural wedding expenses and then up is difficult to catch up with the city, as long as there is a difference in the middle of the price, the women have the possibility of further loss, which is a kind of This is a "double price increase". What's more, now in the city, the working class can not afford to get married because there is no room without a car is also very common, not to mention the rural areas. Liu Yanmai in the survey of rural areas around the conclusion: "the southern rural areas are more and more inclined to require the man in the marriage to the town or county or even urban areas to buy commercial housing, while the northern rural areas are strongly inclined to the man in the marriage must be in the village to build a good new house. As for the rising bride price, both north and south are the same."

From 1980, the rural areas to the county, the county to the town, in the city to buy a house, imitating the city of the bride price standard of this marriage of high consumption phenomenon in the rural areas more and more legitimacy. In the highly polarized economic structure, the urban-rural gap is widening, the geometric rise in marriage expenses and the double squeeze of the serious imbalance of marriage is the important reason for the sudden increase in the number of rural bachelor groups.

Third, the urban-rural divide will bring a way out?

Rural women are already scarce and rural men are already poor, and the situation of rural bachelors is likely to continue to worsen against the backdrop of a still-growing number of migrant populations. According to the data, the mobile population in China rose from 6.6 million to 370 million between 1982 and 2022 . Population mobility has led to the expansion of the intermarriage circle, especially for women, who are more likely to find a partner outside the traditional marriage circle in the countryside (around 30%) under the "male-high-female-low" marriages, whereas 80% of men's marriages still rely on the traditional marriage circle in the local area, and such asymmetric marital mobility has left fewer choices of marriages for men in the countryside. (Liu Yanmai 2001) This confirms the gradient theory of the marriage market, where women want to change their fate through marriage, so they tend to look for men with better qualifications than their own, and so in the end, what is left in the marriage market are the "D men" at the bottom and the "A women" at the top. The last ones left in the marriage market are the "D men" at the bottom and the "A women" at the top. (Jiang, Sánchez-Barricarte 2012)

The mainstream view of women's large-scale migration to work and seek marriage used to be that it was an important aspect of their pursuit of self-worth and happiness, and that it was a manifestation of women's courage to break through the confines of a narrow geographic area. But now there is a group of "big picture" men who ask women to stay in the countryside as "sex" to solve the problem or even to serve men.

In fact, in the previous analysis, we can already see that women's status in rural areas is not high, and their income is not high; compared to urban areas, rural areas are facing a huge urban-rural divide, and they are Yan Hairong's "double-cheap labor". It is precisely for this reason that rural women have begun to move to the cities, "behind the monopolization of modernity by the cities and the ruralization of the countryside". But this choice, based on the gender gap and the urban-rural gap, has been misinterpreted as a "good-for-nothing" and "gold-digging" choice.

From an economic point of view, the rural economy has gone through a historical development process in which collective production has been dissolved, agricultural inputs have declined, and the rural economy has given way to urban development. In the era of collective economy, the development of industrialization is to reduce the gap between urban and rural areas and the gap between workers and peasants, and in the late 1970s, the five small industries and agricultural machinery industry has begun to feed the agriculture; one-third of the food purchased and sold under the unified purchasing and marketing of food to help the rural areas in need of food. Throughout the late 1950s and into 1980, investment in agriculture consistently accounted for more than 10 percent of total investment, once reaching 17.6 percent (Yan Hairong 2005). Later, the "three major differences" disappeared from the mainstream discourse, replaced by words like "GDP", "modernization", "globalization", and so on. The words "GDP," "modernization," and "globalization" were replaced by the words "economic transformation" (Yan 2008). Cities became the focus of the new economic deployment; attracting foreign investment became the mainstay of economic growth (Punand Chan 2012); rural inputs not only plummeted to 3.3% in the late 1980s, but were also administratively constrained by the prioritization of urban development (municipal management of counties); the welfare and education guarantees that used to be provided by the collective economy disappeared (Yan Hairong 2005); and the urban The shift from heavy industry to light industry has led to a rising demand for migrant workers (Punand Chan 2012). With the huge urban-rural divide between the rural economy in the doldrums and the urban development in the cities, the urban capitalists can attract a large number of peasants to the cities by providing them with a meager wage and a small amount of money, thus further exploiting them.

At the same time, the rural areas have been gradually reduced to the synonym of "backwardness" and "ignorance" from the conceptual highland and the subject of propaganda, while the cities have the synonym of "modernity" and "civilization". "Civilization" (Yan Hairong 2005). The mainstream discourse often uses the term "low quality" to describe migrant workers. Yan Hairong points out that the term "quality" was constructed by the discourse of modernity to portray migrant workers as lacking in "cultural capital" such as education, etiquette, and taste. When it becomes a label for the migrant worker community, it means that the urban-rural dichotomy has been deeply rooted in people's thinking. The article's comment by an engineer that domestic workers "raise their children in the countryside like pigs and dogs" (Yan Hairong 2010b) is a vivid manifestation of this realization. There is no way out of the countryside under both economic and conceptual criteria, which is why young rural laborers leave their homes.

From 1982 to the present, the size of the female migrant population has been on an upward trend, reaching 48.3% in 2022. junior high school (45.08%) and elementary school (24.36%) on average (Duan Chengrong et al. 2009), and on the other hand, urban jobs are more favorable to female workers, with lower wages and easier to manage. This set of data once again validates the previous statement that having a female is less valuable than having a male.

For unmarried women in rural areas, even though they come to the city and remain at the bottom of the ladder, they may still be able to find men who are slightly better qualified than they are to get married.

In a related report mentioned earlier, a young man from Pai Fang village who had been working in Shenzhen for four years returned to his hometown to prepare to marry and have children, because it's more difficult to make girlfriends outside. "'Our conditions are so bad and poor that girls who want to come to Guizhou are too few and far between. It's not a good idea to trick girls into coming here.' As soon as some girls hear it's Guizhou, one of their reactions is, 'It's poor there, isn't it?'" And after three years back in his hometown, he didn't even have a chance to meet a blind date because there were almost no unmarried girls in the village. Even in the city to find the same rural origin out of the working wife, but also faced with the wife to run away, living in different places such a situation.

Some say that the rural bachelor into the city, you can expand the social circle, open up the horizons, improve the chances of marriage. But in fact, many migrant workers in the city after the exploitation of capital and strict control, in addition to work and rest, there is no time and no energy to fall in love; they have access to the social circle is also very narrow. It is conceivable that a construction worker who works during the day and sleeps in a dormitory at night can only come into contact with men who are also at the bottom of the social ladder and who may not be married. As for the migrant workers under transnational capital studied by Punand Chan (Punand Chan 2012), they are treated as machines that cannot even guarantee their basic right to survive, so how can they talk about love?

References:

1. Hershatter, Gail. 2011. The Gender of Memory. Ch 5 Farmer. Berkeley: University of California Press.

2. Jiang, Quanbao, Sa? Sa?nchez-Barricarte, Jesu?s. 2012. "Bride Price in China: the Obstacle to 'Bare Branches' seeking marriage ". The History of the Family. vol. 17. pp. 2-15

3. Kelkar, Govind. 1985. "Impact of Household Contract System on Women in Rural China ". In Economic and Political Weekly. vol. 20. pp. ws39-ws48

4, Pun, Ngai and Jenny Chan. 2012. "Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers: The Foxconn Experience." In Modern China 38(4):383-410.

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7. Fei Xiaotong, 2002 [1939], Jiangcun Economy - The Lives of the Peasants in China,:Commercial Press.

8, Huang Shumin, 2002, The Story of Lin Village: The Transformation of China's Rural Areas after 1949,:Sanlian Bookstore

9, Li Yinhe, 2003, Fertility and Village Culture - A Master's Grandson,:Culture and Arts Publishing House

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11, , 1955, "The The Chinese Rural Countryside: An Empirical Study of Zhao Village in Northwest China"

12. Song Shiyun, "China's Rural Security System, 1949-1978"

13. Sun Shumin, 2005, "Peasants' Choice of Mate: An Empirical Study of Zhao Village in Northwest China", Science Literature Press

14. Yan Shimin, 2005, "The Mate Choice of Peasants: An Empirical Study of Zhao Village in Northwest China", Science Literature Press

15. p>

14, Yan Hairong, 2005, "The Rural, Empty Subjects", Reading 7;74-83

15, Yan Hairong, 2010a, "'Burdens' and Domestic Work --Labor and Labor, Gender and Class One", Time 6:103-120

16, Hairong Yan, 2010b, "Class Speech and Transformation - -Labor and Labor, Gender and Class II‖, Time 6:121-139

17. Yan Yunxiang, 2006, -The Transformation of Private Life: Love, Family, and Intimacy in a Chinese Village 1949-1999,‖ Shanghai: Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House

Editor: Zhu Fan

Proofreader: Xu Yijia

The above is related to the fate of the male dragon in 2000, it is about farmers to share. After reading about how many months a dragon is born is a true dragon, I hope this is helpful!