1999 is the best age for Rabbit to get married. What is the best age for a Rabbit girl to get married in 1999?

1999 Rabbit is the best age to get married

Xixi is abolished

The issue of rural bachelors has once again aroused heated discussion. Ten years ago, people were concerned about the problems caused by rural singles as a factor of instability, from women to violence; 10 years later, people finally realized that rural singles were also victims, but they began to engage in absurd activities due to concerns about the continued decline in fertility rates. Wrong, wrong person to blame. It is not women who should warm the bed for marriageable men in rural areas, but rural revitalization.

According to the results of the seventh national census, the male population is 723.34 million and the female population is 688.44 million. There are 34.9 million more men than women. After 2005, there were significantly more men than women in the new population of marriageable and childbearing age, and the problem of marriage squeeze became prominent, making it difficult for low-income people to get married. On the one hand, the sex ratio imbalance in the population continues to increase. On the other hand, young rural women migrate to cities to work, which further widens the rural sex ratio, making it difficult for "Ting men" at the end of the marriage ladder to choose a spouse.

By analyzing different economies and mainstream discourses in different eras, this article concludes that the expanding urban-rural gap is the fundamental crux behind this problem.

Stills of "The Bachelor".

1. Behind the gender of the rural-born population: The value of girls is not as good as that of boys

An important reason for the problem of rural bachelors is the uneven ratio of men to women in the rural-born population. Young people now aged 20 to 35 were born between 1986 and 2001. According to demographic data, in 1982, the sex ratio of my country's rural population was 107.7, that is, for every 100 females born, there were 107.7 males. In 2010, this number reached 122.1, which is much higher than the recognized normal ratio of 103-107. According to the first four national census data from 1953 to 1990, the sex ratio of the country's total population has always been controlled below 107. It is a recognized fact that the rural population has grown significantly by gender in the past thirty years.

Why does this happen? The direct cause is the family planning policy implemented in 1979. Before this, rural families could obtain boys through continuous reproduction, but after family planning, gender could only be controlled through artificial means. From the sex ratio data of the population by birth order, we can clearly see the increase in the sex ratio of second and third births. For example, the figures in 2010 were 130.3 and 158.4 respectively. Control of the total population has resulted in rural gender imbalance.

However, we should further think about why rural families prefer boys? Most people understand this as the role of the residual traditional preference for sons over daughters and the idea of ????carrying on the family line. The mainstream explanation also focuses on this aspect. In rural areas, you can see the slogan "Boys and girls are the same" everywhere. However, there is a deeper meaning behind this. Economic and conceptual reasons.

In China, it is an obvious fact that the status of rural women is not as good as that of men, and the economic benefits of women are not as good as those of men. China has a patriarchal family economy based on the small-scale peasant economy. The ideal family is based on gender and generational hierarchies, that is, men are superior to women, and the elderly are respected and provided for. The era of collective economy has experienced "women", including mobilizing women to participate in production, granting women the same rights, freedom of marriage, protection and support of women, etc., which has greatly improved the status of women. However, patriarchy itself has not been broken, which is reflected in the unequal work-point system, unequal job opportunities, the gender division of housework, and the failure to take into account the special rights and interests of women in labor distribution.

Generally speaking, the promotion of equality between men and women at that time was more meaningful than economic, that is, women had the same labor rights as men and the right to participate in public affairs to a certain extent ( right). But objectively speaking, women have fully moved into and participated in labor, laying the foundation for women's economic and ideological independence. For rural women, they have become an indispensable labor force in agricultural production.

However, from the perspective of rural families, even at that time, the value of giving birth to a girl was still not as good as that of a boy. When women take on the heavy farm chores, men are often sent by cooperatives to work outside the village, and their income is much higher than that of women. For example, working on a reservoir can earn more than 20 work points a day, while working as a manager in a neighboring town can earn a salary to support the family's expenses. (Hershatter2011)

With the times, the status of women has undergone new changes. Yan Hairong pointed out that "women" were considered to have lost their gender nature in the context of the 1980s. The mainstream discourse required women to return to the family and restore their "femininity", and the relationship between women and housework was completely rationalized. The situation in rural areas is even worse. Due to the decollectivization of agriculture and the implementation of the household responsibility system, men have restored their absolute dominance in the family, while women have withdrawn from the public space and returned to the narrow family space.

It was believed at that time that under the household responsibility system, women could freely arrange their time at home to do housework and work on by-products, instead of having to go to the fields to work as in the past, even if they were not strong. In fact, the results of fieldwork conducted 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 o'clock in the morning or earlier and engage in by-product production for 10-12 hours... At the same time, they have to cook, do laundry, take care of children, and empty urinals... Men never share housework... but the income from production transactions is In the hands of men...women have no control or decision-making power over family and production.”

In addition, the system of responsibility itself also strengthens men’s authority. After the work-point system declined, farmers adhered to the principle that the more they produced, the more they earned. However, the gender inequality in the work-point system (men earned 10 work points a day, while women earned 8 work points) was retained. "An able-bodied woman can only contract 1.6 acres of land, while a man can contract 2 acres of land." (Kelka 1983) Discrimination against women has been institutionalized. Conceptually, rural women's participation in public affairs has dropped to almost zero. In the past, women actively participated in meetings to raise rural women's awareness and fight for their rights, but under the new economy these meetings have been discontinued. "Women have no time to participate from morning to night." In 1983, the All-China Women's Federation admitted that the family responsibility system (and the family planning policy promoted together) ignored women's work, and the concept of male authority was revived. (Kelka1983) In this context, the reason why rural families prefer to have boys is obvious. Men make greater contributions to the family than women in terms of status or economic gains.

In addition, when the rural security system is imperfect, "raising children for old age" is also the reason why rural families prefer boys. In the era of collective economy, with the expansion of agricultural co-operation, it was proposed that rural collectives should solve the pension problem of poor farmers: "All cooperatives have the responsibility to help members who are widowed, lonely and lacking labor force (they should be absorbed into the cooperative) and members who have labor force but are very difficult in life. , to solve their difficulties." The "Model Charter of Advanced Agricultural Cooperatives" promulgated in 1956 established the "Five Guarantees" system so that the elderly, weak, orphaned and widowed members who have lost their labor force and support will have no worries (Song Shiyun). It should be admitted that the rural security and cooperative security systems at that time had many shortcomings. The security that the collective economy could provide was very limited when its own strength was weak, especially when compared with the retirement and other insurance that urban residents could enjoy. But farmers can at least enjoy collective security. After the dissolution of the collective system, farmers have to rely on family security again, and "raising children for old age" has become a last resort for rural families.

In "The Story of Lincun", when someone learned that the collective system was going to be disbanded, someone brought her teenage daughter to see Ye, "She said that under the collective, She and her daughter can earn work points and make a living. But what if the brigade is disbanded? There is no man in her family, and she cannot plow the farmland. How will she and her daughter survive?" (Huang Shumin 2002) Yan Hairong wrote in "The Countryside, Empty Subject" that the former production responsibility fields have been transformed into "welfare fields" since 1990 to absorb the disabled and sick. In fact, even if the rural labor force returns to the countryside, they will face the problem of abandoning the land. Agricultural land and an imperfect social security system have no “welfare” to speak of.

2. Marriage expenses in rural areas are catching up with those in cities, and double price increases have created a vicious cycle

More men than women, more monks and less money are the objective reasons for the formation of the bachelor group. But we should examine further, who are those bachelors that no one cares about? Why can't they get wives? Although mainstream discourse is filled with romanticized expressions of marriage, emphasizing love, fate, appearance, etc., in rural China, men's financial foundation is still the primary condition for determining marriage.

Among the rural single groups reported by the media, most of them are cases in impoverished mountainous areas. For example, in Paifang Village in Guizhou reported by Southern Weekend in 2007, there were 282 bachelors in the village, accounting for 1/5 of the men. The village was almost entirely mountainous, with less than 2% of the land being farmed. In 2006, the per capita net income was only more than 800 yuan. Most of the villages in Mizhi County, Yulin, Shaanxi Province reported by "Ban Yue Tan" are key poverty alleviation villages. "A family cannot earn less than two to three thousand yuan a year, and it costs at least twenty to thirty thousand yuan to find a daughter-in-law. Many families I can’t even find it.”

On the one hand, although the absolute value of farmers' annual income has increased significantly over the past few decades, marriage expenses have increased even faster. It is surprising to examine the ratio of marriage expenses to farmers' annual income over the past few decades. Fei Xiaotong estimated the cost of a wedding in Jiangcun in 1936, which was about 500 yuan. "This amount is equivalent to a family's annual expenses." In the early 1990s, Li Yinhe inspected two villages in China, one poor and one rich. The per capita annual income of Nanshantou Village, Qin County, Shanxi Province was 332 yuan, and the marriage cost was about 3,000 yuan. The per capita annual income of Nanyang Village, Yuyao, eastern Zhejiang was 2,000 yuan, and the wedding cost was 2,000 yuan. Between 15,000 and 20,000. Although the absolute amounts are very different, the proportions are similar, and they are both a farmer's income in 10 years. In Sun Shumin's research on Zhao Village in Qin'an, Gansu Province in the early 2000s, the average cost of wedding gifts in the late 1990s had reached about 15,000. As a mountainous village in a poor county, the per capita annual income of Zhao Village at that time was only more than 700 yuan, and the wedding expenses were equivalent to A villager’s income for more than 20 years.

On the other hand, with the frequent population mobility and the expansion of the marriage market, we can see that the poorer the area, the higher the proportion of marriage expenses in farmers' annual income.

A resident of Haojiaping Village, Mizhi Village, told the News, "Our village is close to the roadside and the conditions are pretty good. The conditions in places further away from us are worse. Many of the wives we married here are from those places, and those places It is more difficult for men to marry a wife, and the cost is higher. Marrying a wife is tantamount to buying a wife."

There are two vicious cycles in rural areas. First, poverty leads to bachelorhood. In poorer areas, women are more willing to leave the village, resulting in fewer women in rural areas where the sex ratio is already high. And once women move to wealthier areas, they no longer look down on the men in their original villages because they are so poor. On the other hand, precisely because of poverty, women are more eager to change their poor living conditions through marriage, thus further raising the cost of marriage. Secondly, being single leads to greater poverty. In the absence of family motivation and life goals, some bachelors will become addicted to smoking, drinking, etc., gradually abandoning their farmland, and become more negative and poor. Regrettably, in the interpretations of some scholars and media and the understanding of farmers, the reason why singles cannot find wives is because of their "low cultural level", "ideas" and "lack of fate". This is putting the cart before the horse. Also a classic example of “blaming the victim” (Ryan1971).

The second vicious cycle is that those who cannot afford to get married - singles - must pay more to get married. Fei Xiaotong once mentioned in "Jiangcun Economy" that when rural industry was in recession, late marriage and the "little daughter-in-law" system came into being. And when child brides are taken away and men are unable to borrow money and repay the money for the wedding, infinitely late marriages will create a large number of singles. And once bachelors pass the marriageable age, they have to pay a higher price when they want to marry a wife. Moreover, many singles face not only the problem of old age, but also in many cases low education level, no fixed occupation, physical defects, hobbies, remoteness of hometown, etc. At this time, they can only marry if they pay more money. to the daughter-in-law to compensate for the "loss" suffered by the woman. This has become an unsolvable problem for poor rural bachelors.

We should note that the rise in marriage expenses is not limited to rural areas, nor is it isolated. It is a phenomenon that occurs in the context of decollectivization and comprehensive economic marketization. By analyzing three villages in Henan, Hunan and Guizhou, Liu Yanwu found that the role of economic factors in the formation of singles became prominent from the mid-to-late 1980s. Another scholar, Xu Anqi, analyzed 50-year-olds in Shanghai and Harbin. The changes in mate selection standards over the years have also led to a similar conclusion that economic orientation has become increasingly important after the 1980s.

The era of collective economy is committed to eliminating the differences between urban and rural areas, physical and mental differences, and differences between workers and peasants. Whether it is under the work point system in rural areas or the state-owned enterprise system in cities, the difference between personal income is not large, so there is no big difference between them. The material requirements of marriage are not high, but personal factors are sometimes more important. After decollectivization, under the influence of the market economy's personal interests and material thinking, the gap between the rich and the poor of individuals widened, and the material requirements for marriage continued to rise, and there was even a trend of "commercialization of marriage." This is The deep meaning behind the old saying "Marrying a wife is equivalent to buying a wife". When Yan Yunxiang investigated Xiajia Village in Heilongjiang Province, he found that starting in the mid-1980s, local betrothal gifts gradually changed from physical objects to cash (locally called "ganzhe"), and the requirements for betrothal gifts became more "high-end and modern," and "the list even included items such as Some requirements for urban furniture such as sofas, which have just been introduced in rural areas, such as four sets of high-end bedding, completely exceed the actual needs of newlyweds."

On the other hand, when cities enter rapid development and rural income levels cannot keep up, with the expansion of population migration and intermarriage circles, even if the marriage expenses in developed areas increase steadily, it will not be enough for those in backward areas. Regionally speaking, marriage fees are also increasing by leaps and bounds. No matter how much the marriage fees in rural areas increase, it will be difficult to catch up with them in cities. As long as there is a price difference, there is a possibility of further loss of women. This is a kind of "double price increase." What's more, it's very common now in cities, let alone rural areas, for working-class people to be unable to get married because they don't have a house or a car. After investigating various rural areas, Liu Yanwu concluded: “Southern rural areas are increasingly inclined to require men to buy commercial housing in towns, counties or even urban areas when they get married, while northern rural areas strongly prefer that men must build a commercial house in the village when they get married. New houses. As for the increase in betrothal gifts, it is the same in both the north and the south. Since 1980, rural areas have been in line with county towns, and counties have been in line with urban areas. When buying a house in the city, the standard of wedding gifts is higher. The consumption phenomenon is becoming more and more legitimate in rural areas. In a situation where the economic structure is highly differentiated and the gap between urban and rural areas continues to expand, the double squeeze of the geometric increase in marriage expenses and the serious imbalance of marriage is an important reason for the sudden increase in the number of rural singles.

3. Will running away under the difference between urban and rural areas bring a way out?

There are already few women in rural areas, and rural men are already poor. With the number of migrant populations still growing, the situation of rural bachelors may continue to worsen. According to data, my country's migrant population increased from 6.6 million to 370 million from 1982 to 2022.

The flow of population has led to the expansion of intermarriage circles. In particular, women are more likely to find partners outside the traditional rural marriage circle (about 30%) in marriages where the male is superior and the woman is inferior. However, 80% of men's marriages still rely on local marriage partners. This asymmetrical marriage flow leaves rural men with fewer marriage options to choose from. (Liu Yanwu 2001) This confirms the gradient theory of the marriage market. Women hope to change their destiny through marriage, so they tend to find men with better conditions than themselves. Therefore, in the end, the only ones left in the marriage market are the "Ding men" at the lower level. ” and the topmost “Arena Girl.” (Jiang, Sánchez-Barricarte 2012)

For women leaving home on a large scale to work and seek marriage, the mainstream concept in the past often believed that this was an important aspect of their pursuit of self-worth and happiness in life, and that it was women who had the courage to break through. The constraint of a narrow geographical area is the embodiment of this. But now there are a group of men who have a "big picture" view and demand that women stay in the countryside as "sexuals" to solve the bachelor problem and even serve men.

In fact, in the previous analysis, we can already see that women do not have a high status in rural areas and their income is not high; compared with cities, rural areas face huge urban-rural differences. They are the characters in Yan Hairong’s works "double cheap labor". Because of this, rural women began to move to cities. "Behind this is the city's monopoly on modernity and the ruralization." However, this kind of helpless choice based on the gender gap and the urban-rural gap has been misinterpreted as "loose work" and "money worship".

From an economic point of view, the rural economy has experienced the historical development process of collective production dissolution, agricultural investment declining, and rural economy giving way to urban development. In the era of collective economy, industrialization was developed to reduce the gap between urban and rural areas and the gap between workers and peasants. In the late 1970s, the five small industries and the agricultural machinery industry had begun to feed agriculture; one-third of the grain purchased and sold under the unified purchasing and marketing system was used to help food shortages. rural area. From the late 1950s to 1980, investment in agriculture always accounted for more than 10% of total investment, once reaching 17.6% (Yan Hairong 2005). Later, the "three major differences" disappeared from mainstream discourse, replaced by words such as "GDP", "modernization" and "globalization", accompanied by "economic transformation" (Yan 2008). Cities have become the focus of new economic deployment; attracting foreign investment has become the main driver of economic growth (Punand Chan 2012); not only did rural investment drop sharply to 3.3% in the late 1980s, but the administrative system was also constrained by the priority of urban development (municipal management County); the welfare and educational security provided by the collective economy in the past have disappeared (Yan Hairong 2005); and the shift from urban heavy industry to light industry has led to an increase in the demand for migrant workers (Punand Chan 2012). Under the huge urban-rural gap between the sluggish rural economy and prosperous urban development, urban capitalists only need to provide meager wages and a small amount of money to attract a large number of farmers to the city, thereby further exploiting them.

At the same time, rural areas have gradually been reduced from the conceptual high ground and the main body of propaganda to synonymous with "backwardness" and "ignorance", while cities have the superior status of "modernity" and "civilization" (Yan Hairong 2005). Mainstream discourse often uses “low quality” to describe migrant workers. Yan Hairong pointed out that the word "quality" was constructed from the discourse of modernity and used to describe migrant workers' lack of "cultural capital" such as education, etiquette, and taste. When it becomes a label for migrant workers, it means that the binary opposition between urban and rural areas has become deeply rooted in people's thinking. The article talks about an engineer critic and political worker who said, "In rural areas, raising children is like raising pigs or dogs" (Yan Hairong 2010b), which is a vivid reflection of this awareness. Under the dual evaluation criteria of economy and concept, there is no way out for rural areas. Therefore, young rural labor force will leave their hometowns.

Since 1982, the size of the female migrant population has been showing an upward trend, reaching 48.3% in 2022. The gender ratio of the migrant population continued to decline after peaking at 111.9 in 2012, and will be 107.2 in 2022. In the working age range of 15-45 years old, the concentration of female migrants is higher, which means that a higher proportion of rural women choose to work in cities. This is partly because women are less likely to continue studying after completing compulsory education than men. This can be seen from the fact that the average education of migrant women is mainly junior high school (45.08%) and primary school (24.36%) (Duan Chengrong et al. 2009). On the other hand, urban jobs prefer female workers, with low wages and easier management. This set of data once again verifies that the value of a female child is not as good as that of a male child as mentioned above.

For unmarried rural women, even if they come to the city and are still at the bottom, it is still possible to find a man with slightly better conditions than themselves to get married. For rural bachelors, who are at the end of the marriage gradient chain, they still have no way out even if they go to the city.

According to the related newspaper mentioned above, a young man from Paifang Village who had worked in Shenzhen for 4 years returned to his hometown to get married and have children, because it was more difficult to have a girlfriend outside. “‘Our conditions are too poor and too poor, and there are too few girls who want to come to Guizhou. It’s not a good idea to trick girls here.

’ When some girls heard that it was Guizhou, one of their reactions was: ‘It’s very poor there, right? '" Three years after returning to his hometown, he didn't even have a chance to go on a blind date, because there were almost no unmarried girls in the village. Even if he found a wife in the city who was from the same rural background and came to work, he would still face the situation of his wife running away and living in a different place.

Some people believe that rural bachelors can expand their social circles, broaden their horizons, and improve their chances of getting married after moving to cities. However, under the exploitation and strict control of capital, many migrant workers have nothing to do but work. They have no time or energy to fall in love; the social circle they can contact is also very narrow. It is conceivable that a construction worker works during the day and sleeps in a dormitory at night, and the people he can contact are also at the bottom, and maybe others. Unmarried men.

As for the migrant workers under transnational capital studied by Pan Yi (Punand Chan 2012), they are treated as machines and cannot even guarantee their basic rights to survive. 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?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.

5. Stacey, Judith. 1983. Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China. pp. 248-267 Berkeley: University of California Press.

6. Yan Hairong. 2008. New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China . Introduction. Durham: Duke University Press.

7. Fei Xiaotong, 2002[1939], "Jiangcun Economy—The Life of Chinese Peasants",: The Commercial Press

8 , Huang Shumin, 2002, "The Story of Lincun: China's Rural Transformation after 1949", : Sanlian Bookstore

9. Li Yinhe, 2003, "Fertility and Village Culture - The Grandson of a Master", : Culture and Art Press

10. Liu Yanwu, 2011, "Research on the Types of Rural Singles - A Demographic Analysis", "Journal of China Agricultural University" Vol. 28. No. 3. 160 -169

11., 1955, "Notes to "China's Rural Affairs""

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

13. Sun Shumin, 2005, "Farmers' Spouse Selection Patterns: An Empirical Study of Zhao Village in Northwest China", :Scientific Literature Press

14. Yan Hairong, 2005, "The Countryside, the Empty Subject", "Dushu" 7;74-83

15. Yan Hairong, 2010a, "'Burden' and housework - labor and labor, one of gender and class", "Times" 6:103-120 < /p>

16. Yan Hairong, 2010b, "The speech and transformation of class - labor and labor, gender and class 2", "Times" 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 Press

Editor: Zhu Fan

Proofreading : Xu Yijia

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