Changing love in changing China

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By Eric Sommer (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-07-11 07:37

One day five years ago I asked an official in a prestigious Beijing high school if the students in his school could have boy friends or girlfriends. "No, they cannot," he said. "It is forbidden."

Shortly afterward, however, I noticed that his words were sharply contradicted by the actual behavior of the students in the McDonalds restaurant down the street.

Every afternoon rather large numbers of them - still wearing their blue school uniforms - would congregate in the restaurant, openly holding hands, kissing, and cuddling in the corners and sides of the restaurant.

This teenage "restaurant-dating" was my first introduction to the remarkable changes taking place in love, dating, and marriage customs in China.

One of the most important changes is in the area of cohabitation. Twenty years ago couples living together before marriage was almost unknown. It was considered a decadent Western life-style. Today, many people believe there's nothing wrong with the practice.

Living together has, in fact, become so common that a national survey conducted by Beijing Normal University found that only 2 percent of Chinese people disapprove of the practice.

Going even further, 51 percent of those interviewed said they themselves would enter into such a relationship under the right circumstances.

One factor fuelling the "living-together" trend is the currently high price of urban apartments. A common Chinese tradition - derived from traditional village life - is that couples should not marry until they can move into a "home of their own".

In the village a house need not be expensive. But with the move into cities, an apartment can cost hundreds of thousands of RMB. As it can take some years to accumulate the necessary funds, many young people choose to live together for saving the money.

Another major change in Chinese romantic life is the growing economic and social independence of women.

Most Chinese young women still value romance, and ultimately marriage. But many now consider personal fulfillment - and development of their own careers - of equal or greater importance.

I recently dialogued on this subject with three women graduate students at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

"What would you do," I asked. "If you had a boyfriend in Beijing but were offered a good job in Southern China?"

"Oh," they all replied. "We would take the job."

"What," I said. "If you were very close to the boyfriend but had to end your relationship with him if you wanted to take the job?"

Again, all three agreed that they would take the job.

"But what," I finally asked. "If the man were your fiancee?"

To my amazement, all three said they would still take the job - even if it meant ending the engagement.

While perhaps an extreme instance - or maybe not - this reaction of three young Chinese women in their mid-20s is indicative of real changes in many young Chinese women's attitude to the romantic landscape.

In a recent survey, 61 percent of Chinese women ranked self-fulfillment - not love - as their number one priority, Conducted by Yueji Self, a Chinese-language magazine, the study found that only 22.5 percent of the women positioned love as their first priority.

Still another change in Chinese romantic life is the growing difficulty young people encounter in finding suitable romantic partners.

In a traditional village, people naturally can know one another, and one another's families, relatively easily. But modern labor mobility, busy school and work life, and the transition from the stable social patterns of traditional Chinese village life to the accelerating changes and anonymity of big cities can make it much harder to find romantic partners.

"There are boys all around me," a 25-year-old woman math major recently told me. "But I only see them once a week, because there are different students in each class. I knew some boys in my previous school, but now I'm in a completely new environment. In fact, I have never had a boyfriend!"

One indicator of the scope of the problem is the recent arrival of US speed-dating company FastLife in Shanghai.

Aimed at professionals between 23 and 39, the company organizes events at which men and women rotate through a sequence of brief "dates" of just a few minutes each.

At the end of each "date", an organizer rings a bell or makes some other signal indicating that it's time for the participants to move to the next person. At the end of the event, individuals who both indicate interest in one another are both given the others contact information by the organizers.

Justin Parfitt, the CEO of FastLife, says that there is a large population of single people in China, and he expects to expand the company's' operations throughout China.

The author is a Canadian teacher living in Beijing

(China Daily 07/11/2008 page9)