A Freelance copywriter, Chai Wanrou, and many young women in China think marriage is an unfair institution.
Chai Wanrou is a part in a growing movement that envisions a future with no husband and no children.
“Regardless of whether you are extremely successful or just ordinary, women still make the biggest sacrifices at home,” 28-year-old Chai Wanrou said at a cafe in the northwestern city of Xian.
“Many who got married in previous generations, especially women, sacrificed themselves and their career development, and didn’t get the happy life they were promised.
“Living my own life well is difficult enough nowadays,” she added.
Last year President Xi Jinping stressed the need to ‘cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing’ as China’s population fell for a second consecutive year and new births reached historic lows.
Chinese Premier Li Qiang vowed to ‘work towards a birth-friendly society’ and boost childcare services in this year’s government work report.
The Communist Party views nuclear family as the bedrock of social stability, with unmarried mothers stigmatised and largely denied benefits.
However, with a growing number of educated women, unprecedented insecurity amid record youth unemployment and an economic downturn, many Chinese women do not mind singledom.
China’s single population aged over 15 hit a record of 239 million in 2021.
Marriage registrations rebounded slightly last year due to a pandemic backlog, after reaching historic lows in 2022.
A 2021 Communist Youth League survey of some 2,900 unmarried urban young people found that 44 per cent of women do not plan to marry.
Marriage, however, is still regarded as a milestone of adulthood in China, and the proportion of adults who never marry remains low.
But in an other sign of its declining popularity, many Chinese are delaying tying the knot, with the average age of first marriage rising to 28.67 in 2020 from 24.89 in 2010.
In Shanghai, the figure reached 30.6 for men and 29.2 for women last year, according to the city statistics.
‘Feminist activism is basically not allowed (in China)
“Refusing marriage and childbirth can be said to be a form of non-violent disobedience toward the patriarchal state,” said Lü Pin, a Chinese feminist activist based in the U.S.