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I came across this article in the NYTimes about the Chinese tradition of 'bride prices':
"The 30 women sat in wooden chairs, facing each other in a rectangular formation. At the front of the room was the ruling Communist Party’s hammer and sickle logo, with a sign declaring the meeting’s purpose: “Symposium of unmarried young women of the right age.”
Officials in Daijiapu, a town in southeast China, had gathered the women to sign a public pledge to reject high “bride prices,” referring to a wedding custom in which the man gives money to his future wife’s family as a condition of engagement. The local government, describing the event earlier this year in a notice on its website, said it hoped people would abandon such backward customs and do their part to “start a new civilized trend.”
As China faces a shrinking population, officials are cracking down on an ancient tradition of betrothal gifts to try to promote marriages, which have been on the decline. Known in Mandarin as caili, the payments have skyrocketed across the country in recent years — averaging $20,000 in some provinces — making marriage increasingly unaffordable. The payments are typically paid by the groom’s parents.
To curb the practice, local governments have rolled out propaganda campaigns such as the Daijiapu event, instructing unmarried women not to compete with one another in demanding the highest prices. Some town officials have imposed caps on caili or even directly intervened in private negotiations between families.
The tradition has been met with growing public resistance as attitudes have shifted. Among more educated Chinese, particularly in cities, many are likely to see it as a patriarchal relic that treats women as property being sold to another household. In the rural areas where the custom tends to be more common, it has also fallen out of favor among poor farmers who must save several years of income or go into debt to get married.
Even so, the government’s campaign has drawn criticism as reinforcing sexist stereotypes of women. Chinese media outlets, in describing the problem of rising marriage payments, have often depicted women who seek big sums as being greedy.
After the Daijiapu event went viral on social media, a flurry of commenters questioned why the burden of solving the problem fell on women. Some commenters urged officials to convene similar meetings for men to teach them how to be more equal partners in marriage.
In China, “as with most state policies regarding marriage, women are the central target,” said Gonçalo Santos, an anthropology professor who studies rural China at the University of Coimbra, in Portugal. “It’s a paternalistic appeal to women to maintain social order and harmony, to fulfill their roles as wives and mothers.”
By targeting women, official campaigns like the Daijiapu event sidestep the fact that the problem is partly of the government’s own making. During the four decades of the one-child policy, parents often preferred sons, resulting in a lopsided gender ratio that has intensified competition for wives."
What are your thoughts?
Growing up and hearing about bride prices, I thought this was a good thing because the men would treasure the girl more given how much he had to go through to not only court the girl, but be financially stable. Of course, this is the same culture that labels me as 'discarded'/'leftover' woman for being single past a certain age.
So laughably transparent to try and disguise pressuring women to demand less as "abandoning backward customs" and to try and frame it as some sort of fake fight against "treating women like property" when the entire premise is flawed - the price is not to buy her, it's for a man to even enter the competition for her attention.
it's just another example of how libfem ideas of "equality" are used to take away any tangible benefits for women.
From their own devaluation of women they have created this issue and now that women have decided that they are going to use their leverage, they whine and try to twist the situation as if it's for women's own good. Scrote behaviour as always.
whoa.
so my first thoughts are: haven’t we been here before? when women/slaves were auctioned off like property for a price?
the more things change, the more they stay the same.
i was thinking about this this morning: how my younger brother was invested into, went into club soccer, played all kinds of sports, got a full scholarship (through basketball) to college, went to the most prestigious graduate school in our state, etc. he was verbally advised by my father at his games, but then again, my father verbally abused us all. he has a house, no school loans, is in a engineers’ union, gets to enjoy paid vacations to international locations.
my parents stay connected to him, while i could probably be murdered and no one would find out until 3 weeks later.
i’m not sure if my point is that if daughters were better invested into, maybe the governments would not have this issue…. or that maybe this is the great circlejerk, because now parents will pay thousands for their sons to own a woman, hope that she bears sons, money circulates and the cycle just continues. i guess it depends on how much “power” the woman retains in the marriage.
sincerely,
another “Leftover Woman”
So let's get this straight, in China, the woman leaves her family to bear children, do the majority of the work caring for them and her husband, and then care for her husband's parents in their old age. And they are saying that the inequity is on the part of the men having to pay anything for all of this work? This is already a paltry sum. Why should a woman care for her husband's parents and not her own, for nothing at all?
This system is the reason why parents wanted boys instead of girls. So that they would have a servant woman around to care for them when their son married. And they are upset that they should have to give her anything. So entitled.
My friend had a female acquaintance whose parents demanded a bride price of $10k from the husband-to-be. He had not known about the bride price expectation, but he paid willingly before the wedding. On the wedding day, as part of the ceremony, the parents handed the money to the married couple (essentially, back to the groom).
In this case, the parents were not after the money for themselves. The $10k was a gatekeeping mechanism for the groom to demonstrate his commitment to the bride's welfare.
This is the only anecdote I know from my personal life, and it's not even really from my personal life.
They say that women should “reject backwards customs that refer to them as property”, but can they guarantee that you won’t still be treated like property, even if you don't ask for a high bride price? What does the government intend to do about that? Do they have plans to uproot the whole system to make marriage more fair for women, or are they just going to stop at making things easier for men? and who set up the cultural systems thst allow women to be treated as property to begin with? Who instituted the one-child policy that resulted in the abortion, murder, abandonment, and neglect of millions of baby girls? The Chinese government made its bed, but doesn't want to lie in it.
The same concept as the US and UK trying to punish women for not having children, (and make it increasingly difficult for women to decide to remain child free, by banning abortion and limiting birth control), but refusing to fix the economic issues that caused the falling birth rate in the first place.
That mass wedding - very Moonies of them. I see government officials are taking a page from a cult's playbook, even though they frown upon cults. Not because they care about people falling victim to cults. It's because somebody else having influence over people would threaten their power.
There's been widely publicized crackdowns on corruption - not because they care about how it affects people's lives. Officials have a reputation for hoarding wealth and having mistresses (basically hoarding women). They could have a new rebellion on their hands if people pay too much attention to the fact that Communist Party officials has ironically become the aristocracy. Can't have that.
Similar thing here with their interference in bride prices. They don't care whether women are treated like property. They're worried millions of disgruntled men with no wife and kids will get together and overthrow them. They can't make these men obedient by threatening their wife and kids - not if they don't have any.
That part with officials getting a father to lower the price a guy has to pay for his daughter's hand in marriage? I bet they threatened his family. "Great efforts on all sides" is euphemism for "we'll kill or imprison all of you if you don't shut up and do what we say".
Because there is a paywall, this is the rest of the article:
The imbalance is most pronounced in rural areas, where there are now 19 million more men than women. Many rural women prefer to marry men in cities to obtain an urban household registration permit, or hukou, which provides access to better schools, housing and health care.
Poorer men in rural areas must pay more to marry because the women’s families want a stronger guarantee that they can provide for their daughters, a move that instead could plunge them deeper into poverty.
“This has broken many families,” said Yuying Tong, a sociology professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “The parents spend all their money and go financially bankrupt just to find a wife for their son.”
Officials have acknowledged their limited ability to eliminate a custom that many families see as a marker of social status. In rural areas, neighbors may gossip about women who command low prices, questioning whether something is wrong with them, according to researchers who study the custom. The tradition is also linked to entrenched attitudes about the role of women as caregivers in families. In parts of rural China, the payment is still seen as a purchase of the bride’s labor and fertility from her parents, researchers say. Once married, the woman has typically been expected to move in with her husband’s family, get pregnant and be responsible for housework, child raising and the care of her in-laws.
But as the soaring cost of living has exposed gaps in China’s social safety net, securing a high marriage payment can be a way for lower-income families with daughters to build savings for unexpected medical bills or other emergencies. And with parents living longer, some women are demanding higher prices as reimbursement for being the primary caregivers of the older generation, researchers say.
Sociologists say a more effective way for the government to curb the tradition would be to put more funding toward child care and into health care for seniors.
As more young Chinese delay or shun marriage altogether, their parents’ expectations around marriage payments are shifting, said Liu Guoying, 58, a matchmaker in Nanchang, the capital city of Jiangxi Province, which is notorious for bride prices that can exceed $50,000.
Parents eager to facilitate a smooth start to the marriage are increasingly passing the payment to the newlyweds as a gift, she said. Some parents so desperately want their daughters to be married, she said, that they are willing to settle for less cash as long as the prospective sons-in-law treat their children well.
“Pity the hearts of the parents of the world,” Ms. Liu said.
A new generation of women, more educated than their parents, may also be playing a role in changing attitudes around the issue. A 2020 survey of around 2,000 people in China found that highly educated couples were less likely to pay bride prices, believing that loving each other was enough.
But even for women like Luki Chan, 27, who went to college, an opportunity her mother never had, escaping the pressure of hometown traditions can be difficult.
Ms. Chan grew up in a mountainous region of Fujian, a province in southeast China where marriage payments are often high. Her mother expects to receive at least $14,000 from the groom when Ms. Chan gets married, she said, as repayment for the money she spent on her schooling.
Now, Ms. Chan is building her own career in Shanghai as a theater producer and is in the process of registering for marriage documents with her Taiwanese boyfriend. Ms. Chan fears that when her parents find out, their demands for a bride price will ultimately prevail. Ms. Chan rejects the tradition, regarding it as tantamount to being sold.
“When I see the patriarchal system that exploits women, and the misogynistic marriage customs, I am very scared to discuss marriage with my family,” she said.
Officials see the lavish payments as an urgent problem that could hinder economic development and trigger social instability.
Across the country, cities are trying to popularize the idea of getting engaged without exchanging money. This month, local officials in Nanchang hosted a free mass wedding for 100 couples who got married simultaneously inside a huge sports stadium, touting the slogan “We Want Happiness, Not Bride Price.”
The couples wore red and gold traditional Chinese wedding outfits, performing the ceremony in a synchronized choreography. Their relatives watched from the bleachers, with local government officials getting the prime seats.
But in a sign of how much the custom still persists, dozens of residents across China in the past year have complained to local officials in online message boards about exorbitant marriage payments. In one post last summer, a resident said he was “begging” his local government to regulate marriage payments in his rural village of Baixiang in southwest China, where many farmers live in poverty.
Three weeks later, county officials replied that they had sent a team of investigators to interrogate the resident’s girlfriend at her home. She told investigators that her parents agreed to marry her off for about $40,000 and refused her pleas to lower the price. The boyfriend’s family had paid only half of it so far.
After “great efforts on all sides,” officials said, the girlfriend’s father agreed to a payment of about $9,000 and returned the rest to the boyfriend’s family. The refund took place at the local Communist Party bureau, with party officials as witnesses.
The officials concluded their report with a message for the couple: “Wishing you a happy life!”
Misogyny has consequences.
I mean isn't this just basic supply and demand? I don't know much about bride prices but seems ridiculous to try and put a cap on them ...
But when the shoe is on the other foot, when a skewed situation is benefitting men, the government won't do a thing to solve it. Then it's seen as natural, the way things are, because men are "superior" or that's how market economics work yada yada. Why would women help men when they never do the same for us. Not even just that, but they make things actively worse for us. The unequalness is deliberate. I legit DGAF. I hope Chinese women will collectively leave Chinese men in the dust and get the best bargain they can get. After all that's just what men would do in such a position, show zero sympathy and capitalize on it. Chinese women deserve this for all the crap they have to put up with.