30 million Chinese men, in 2020, will look for a partner. This will not be reflected in the official statistics of China. Being in a clear minority, women have the opportunity to choose and be fastidious. The vast majority do not want to marry the Chinese man, preferring western husbands.
In China, there is even a special designation for unmarried men who are over 30. “Shengmen”, as they are called, if translated literally, means “needless men”. They try to date Asian women, but all their attempts fail.
The demographic future of China
Allowing the family to have no more than one child was canceled in 2015, China has millions more men than women. This situation is because many parents, who could afford to have only one child, preferred to have a boy. Today, men have to face the consequences of the decision taken by their parents back in the day. This means that in 2020, among those seeking a life partner there will be 30 million more men than women, according to the BBC.
“The Demographic Future” book, written by American analyst Nicholas Eberstadt, suggests that more than one in four Chinese who are over thirty will remain single in 2030. For traditional society, like China, this is a very serious age to remain unmarried.
“A lot of problems arise especially outside large cities. Unlike the West, China still has an incredibly conservative and traditional view on what it is to be a man. A man should have a wife, several children, a house, and be able to provide for his family,” explains Lu Zheng, a sociology professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
“If you cannot live according to what society expects from you, it will not accept you, and as a result, many millions of Chinese men will always feel like losers,” says Zheng. He explains that the problem has made marriage in China a very material matter. Today, your ability to find a wife largely depends on your financial situation. Rich people, in cities, hardly know about it. But poor rural people find it very difficult to fulfill their dream of a family, as women prefer to find those who will better provide for them.
Chinese women seek Western men
In 1983, Li Shuang left Beijing for Paris and married a French diplomat. She became the first Chinese woman who married a man from the West. Since then, such cases have become a trend. As a result, more and more Western men and Chinese women are now getting married.
There are many examples of Chinese men willing to go to extremes to find a wife and become one of those lucky ones who will not end their days alone.
One Chinese, for example, as reported by the BBC, paid the marriage agency in Shanghai nearly seven million crowns, to an ideal wife for him. When it did not succeed, he filed a lawsuit against the agency.
Many men also turn to psychologists and stylists. They want to make noticeable changes inside-out to increase their chances of winning women’s hearts.
There are also those men who use Chinese applications, where they can hire a girlfriend, for a day, to introduce her to their family. And who knows: maybe she’ll fall in love with him – as in the fairy tale film “Pretty Woman”.
In spite of the fact that too many Chinese men are granted to every Chinese woman; in recent years, more and more men from the West have come to the country to “steal” Chinese women mature enough for marriage.
Cougars in China
On the Chinese dating site Taonanw, you can find about 100 profiles of wealthy women. All of them are millionaires who preferred a career in their time. Now, they want to find the ideal man with whom their millions could be shared. These women, however, are just examples of a trend that makes career-oriented women superfluous in the marriage market. This distortion led to the emergence of a new balance of power in China. In this country, traditionally, power belongs to a man; but, women are now invading this sphere. Many Chinese men still dream of a wife who keeps a house, rather than a wife who has a more-than-a-decent bank account.
