Japanese women have led the way. As early as the noughties, women in China’s trendy neighbor began to forego marriage. The majority of them are well-educated and would rather have a career and enjoy life than do the dishes and look after the children – because that’s what their husbands would have expected of them. The same thing is happening in China now, as Marcel Grzanna reports. Here, as there, government planners are looking at the trend with concern. Because even today, fewer marriages go hand in hand with a lower birth rate.
China’s greatest foreign policy crux may be the distrust of all its neighbors (except Pakistan) of the new world power’s intentions. Joe Biden is now taking advantage of this by reviving an almost forgotten format and taking it to a new level: the US “quad exchange” with Japan, India and Australia. Together these countries are geopolitically encircling China. Biden is thus demonstrating once again that he wants to continue the confrontational course against China. All this is causing considerable unease in Beijing, as Michael Radunski analyses.
Anyone living in China or just traveling around the country for a longer period sometimes notices characters on the banknotes that look as if they have been stamped on. Often these are political messages from the Falun Gong sect. Our columnist Johnny Erling got to the bottom of the phenomenon: It’s professional printers turning currency into leaflets.
Li Jiming’s threat was clear: If Bangladesh joins the Quad, it will fundamentally damage relations between Beijing and Dhaka. China’s ambassador to Bangladesh wanted to leave no doubt about his warning and followed up. “History has shown it again and again, such partnerships harm the economic and social development of our neighbors and the welfare of its people,” Li said in Dhaka in early May.
Beijing’s anger is directed at the so-called Quad, the “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue”, an informal forum for talks between the US, Japan, Australia and India. According to its self-description, the Quad advocates a “free and open Indo-Pacific”. Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe calls the alliance a “security diamond” and praises it as a champion of democracy in Asia. And that is precisely what enrages Beijing. While the Quad avoids explicitly mentioning China in its statements, it is clear to all what it is basically about: building a counterweight to China.
The origins of the “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue” date back to 2004. In the months following the devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Australia, India, Japan and the US joined forces to help: They gathered troops and humanitarian workers, helicopters, ships, and transport planes in the “Tsunami Core Group.” Three years later, as China pursued its claims in the South China Sea ever more vigorously, then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe drew on that Tsunami Group of Four and initiated the “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.”
But the alliance was not particularly stable, and to some, the Quad quickly appeared stillborn: Australia withdrew under China-friendly Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and Abe’s successor in Tokyo did not want to further antagonize China. The dialogue only gained real significance ten years later when China took over the Paracel and Spratly Islands, accelerated its fleet expansion, and skirmishes broke out on the Sino-Indian border. Initially, however, the format did not go beyond isolated Quad meetings of the respective foreign ministers.
Now the new US President Joe Biden, in particular, seems determined to breathe life into the Quad. In mid-March, he organized the first Quad summit of the four heads of state. India’s Narendra Modi, Australia’s Scott Morrison, Japan’s Yoshihide Suga, and Biden himself took part, albeit only virtually for Covid’s sake. The heads of government immediately decided on a concrete initiative: The four countries want to launch a Covid vaccine offensive in the Indo-Pacific region by providing India with financial, technical and logistical support for vaccine production.
Afterward, only positive things were heard from the participants. India’s Prime Minister Modi said that the group had “come of age” and would “now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.” Australia’s head of government Morrison is convinced that the Quad is experiencing a new dawn.
But this euphoria should not obscure the true state of the informal alliance. It is not the desire for cooperation that brings the participants together, but rather that they all have problems with the most powerful player in the region. And all of these difficulties are very different, moreover: The US is locked in a technology and trade conflict with China, Japan is primarily concerned with the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, the dispute between Canberra and Beijing is about geostrategic interests, punitive tariffs, and 5G technology (China Table reported), while India and China regularly engage in military skirmishes on their border, which repeatedly result in fatalities (China Table reported).
As different as the respective problems are, the interests of the individual Quad members also diverge: For Japan and Australia, the focus is on the disputes in the South China Sea, India’s attention, on the other hand, is on border disputes and the Indian Ocean, while the USA sees itself in a global system conflict with rising China. In America, it is thus emphasized that the Quad reflects the strength of democracies in the region. Especially with regard to China’s progress in the fight against Covid or its successful industrial policy, this value rivalry in public discourse should not be underestimated.
However, the Quad‘s topics of discussion have nothing to do with governance, human rights, or strengthening democratic structures so far. And as much as the Quad’s planned vaccine offensive is to be welcomed, in a system with international institutions, the World Health Organization’s Covax Initiative would be the right place for such an undertaking. An international propaganda campaign in the name of vaccines, merely to strengthen its influence, has already been launched by Beijing (China Table reported).
The real impetus of the Quad comes from the area of security. At the end of 2020, there was a joint military exercise for the first time. The India-led Malabar exercise last November saw the participation of all four Quad nations for the first time in 13 years. The then US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun suggested that such exercises should be held regularly and opened up to other nations – for example, South Korea, New Zealand or even Vietnam. A few weeks ago, a major military power actually joined the next Quad military exercise: France took part in a three-day exercise in the Bay of Bengal in early April in the “Quad+” format.
Biegun’s desire to further formalize the Quad caused additional excitement. It was quickly speculated that the Quad could develop into an Asian NATO. But this aspect, too, seems to be driven mainly by euphoria. For in the formative years of NATO, it was easy to be against the Soviet Union. Economically, the giant empire led by Moscow did not play an important role in any of the participation. The case is different with the Quad and China: As much as Australia, India, Japan or the USA disapprove of Beijing’s policies, economically, they are all closely linked to the People’s Republic, dependent on it, or in some cases even dependent on it.
The renowned political scientist Kishore Mahbubani is convinced that the Quad will not change the course of Asian history. For one thing, the four Quad states have very different interests and vulnerabilities. For another, the great strategic game in Asia is not a military but an economic one. Mahububani points to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the world’s largest free trade area, in which China has brought together fifteen Asia-Pacific nations at the end of 2020. And so the political scientist concludes, “The future of Asia is written in four letters, RCEP, not Quad.”
China, in turn, is a thorn in the side of the Quad. Time and again Chinese diplomats find sharp words against the initiative. For the state-run newspaper Global Times, it is neither an “Asian Nato” nor a “diamond”, but rather a “club of empty talk.”
But Beijing’s rulers do not seem quite convinced of the Quad’s supposed weakness. The latest threat to Bangladesh to stay away from the Quad had no concrete reason. Neither was Dhaka asked to join, nor had the government requested a place in the security dialogue. In any case, Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen forbade any interference from Beijing. Bangladesh is a sovereign state and decides independently on its foreign policy.
Beijing’s trump card is its economic dominance in the region. But Biden’s new interest in partners on China’s doorstep seems to make the leadership uneasy. The Quad is still a loose alliance with very different interests and sensitivities. But intimidating pressure from outside may well create cohesion within.
It’s bad news for Chinese bachelors. It’s not enough that there are far more men of marriageable age in the People’s Republic than women, which is why tens of millions of men are mathematically falling by the wayside. Those ladies who are theoretically on the market are now also increasingly less interested in marriage.
At the end of April, the dating app Tantan published the results of a survey of 3000 people from the Millennial generation. These are women and men who are now between the age of 20 to 40. Two-thirds of the women said they would only enter a marriage based on a “high-quality relationship.” And worse, for 41 percent, it would even be “acceptable” to die unmarried – numbers like a drumbeat against male vanity.
“In plain language, it means many Chinese women no longer feel like filling stereotypical role models. They are looking for partnerships at eye level, not arrangements with yesterday’s men who want to salvage outdated views into the future,” says Berlin-based journalist Qin Liwen, who has been intensively studying feminism in China for years. In China, of all places, the cradle of Confucianism, where for thousands of years the family represented the core of all happiness, young people are increasingly turning away from this concept. Incidentally, this also applies to men; one in five now say they can do without marriage. Their motive, however, is more likely to be resignation because of the huge competition.
What this means for men is illustrated by the example of a mid-thirties man on a home visit to his birthplace: 30 houses, 150 inhabitants, two hours by plane from Beijing. The young man brought friends who raved about his professional success to his mother. They said he was hardworking, intelligent and earned more money per month than the entire village combined. Mother listened patiently and replied, “Yes, but he is not married.” The neighbors would gossip about it for years.
Those men who do make it into the harbor of marriage are apparently increasingly being given a bad report card. The annual China Beautiful Life Survey, a survey conducted under the auspices of the National Bureau of Statistics, looked at how satisfied married couples are. It surveyed 100,000 households across the country. The result: One in five wives regrets their decision to marry. That’s more than twice as many as in 2012. What’s wrong in the second-largest economy?
“Chinese men are not more family-oriented in principle than Chinese women. But they see more advantages in marriage than women and therefore act more pragmatically,” says journalist Qin. Many men in China still interpret a relationship through conservative gender roles: She gives him a progenitor, which many segments of the country’s population continue to value as the crowning achievement of male existence, takes care of the household and later the offspring’s schoolwork and, last but not least, is available as a willing sexual partner. In many Chinese marriages, there is still the threat of violence against women if she does not comply.
There has been stricter legislation to ban domestic violence from families since 2016. But its effect is still small. In 2018, China recorded one case of domestic violence every 7.4 seconds: 4.3 million cases in total. Women were the victims 85 percent of the time. Journalist Qin is sure the number of unreported cases is many times higher. “The vast majority of women do not dare to report such an incident. Moreover, violence usually starts on a psychological level before it comes to palpabilities. These statistics also do not capture such cases of humiliation and degradation.” Marital rape trials would also hardly be allowed by Chinese courts.
Official statistics put the number of unmarried adults in China at 240 million people in 2018. As a result, the birth rate has also plummeted, falling below 1.5 children per woman (China.Table reported).
People in the People’s Republic still speak disparagingly of “remaining women” (剩女) when they are not yet married at 30. But actually, we should have been talking about “residual men” long ago, many of whom live without prospects in their hometowns, with no hope of ever marrying, let alone bringing children into the world. Some Chinese academics have thus already come up with the idea that single women from the big cities should move back to the villages to free these men from their wanton misery. Such proposals are also an expression of a mindset in which the intellectual and professional potential of women plays a lesser role than their fertility.
The one-child policy, which has since been modified, has not only produced the aforementioned million-fold surplus of unmarried men in society. Moreover, because of radical birth control, a generation of girls grew up in the 1980s and 1990s who, as only children, developed an entirely new sense of themselves. Their parents projected desires and hopes into the girls, which were normally reserved for boys. They gained access to education and advancement that their mothers and grandmothers were denied. These daughters are now also more determined to go their own way.
Especially when the gentlemen of creation don’t feel particularly motivated to share the challenges of modern marriage, where both partners have regular jobs, with their wives. “If men don’t change their attitude toward marriage, the trend of low birth rates will intensify, and it will discourage women to marry,” Jiang Yunfei, who studies gender roles in society at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, told the Hong Kong daily South China Morning Post.
This is also reflected in the exploding divorce rate in China. While the authorities registered one divorce for every five marriages in 2009, in 2019, there was one divorce for every two marriages.
The government is trying to keep the demographic disaster in check with new regulations. Since the beginning of this year, a new law has required spouses who want to separate to wait a month before their divorce petition is processed. Perhaps, lawmakers hope, some couples will use the time to reconsider their decision. And indeed, recent statistics seem to confirm the measure’s effectiveness. The Ministry of Civil Affairs noted a drastic drop in divorces in the first quarter of this year, at more than 70 percent. But it is still too early to see a trend from this. The forced afterthought month fights symptoms but not the causes of marital problems.
The banknotes are genuine. They show state founder Mao Zedong on the front in all denominations, from the green ¥1 note (15 cents) to the reddish ¥100 note (15 euros). The explosive messages can be found on the back as political slogans or as self-promotion, such as “Falun Gong is good” for the healing teachings founded in China in 1992. According to its website, it sees itself as a Buddhist-inspired school for spiritual self-cultivation that uses physical meditation exercises to strive for “truthfulness, mercy and forbearance” while promoting health. Beijing has branded it a “criminal cult” since 1999, persecuting its followers with all the resources of its state power. Falun Gong accuses China’s government of mass incarceration with countless deaths and barbaric crimes against its followers.
Deliberately damaging legal tender is against the law worldwide, not to mention turning money into leaflets. Falun followers, mostly middle-aged men and women, have been sentenced to ten years in prison for repeatedly circulating the money. They do not attract attention with it most of the time. The slogans printed on them match the pictorial motifs and basic colors of the banknotes and are not noticed at first glance. The vernacular calls them “money with characters” (带字币). Authorities speak of money with “reactionary inscriptions” (反动标语). Falun Gong calls its resistance action “sincere money” (真相币).
One, five and ten yuan banknotes in particular are in circulation with ever-changing texts and symbols – and have been for many years. When I was looking through my change, I first discovered how common the notes are. I got the highest printed note, worth ¥20 (€3), from a taxi driver. I asked newspaper vendors, market traders, and waiters in restaurants what they do with such money. “We pass it on.” None said they would take it to the bank to exchange or report it to the police. That would only mean unnecessary trouble.
The grotesque phenomenon demonstrates the unbroken resistance of Falun Gong activists despite brutal repression to this day. But it also shows how incomplete China’s gigantic surveillance and control bureaucracy is in everyday life. Leaflets thrown from bridges or skyscrapers, or stuck to walls, would not escape the ubiquitous video cameras. But when it comes to money, no one looks that closely.
Police are trying to track down the modern underground color printing presses. Official anti-sect websites proclaim success. The biggest bust came in 2014 when police seized 34 special printers and computers in three raids in Wuhan alone and arrested 38 people involved. The central bank tried other ways. In January 2016, it had all one-yuan banknotes replaced with coins in five Shandong cities as a pilot project. The People’s Daily online site explained that this was to “stop the spread of reactionary slogans by criminals via banknotes.” In 2019, the central bank renewed all banknotes in China with a new series that looked the same as the old one. But the colors are more vibrant and the paper has a smoother coating. Apparently, the printing should be made more difficult.
Beijing’s fight against Falun Gong began on April 25, 1999, triggered by a demonstration organized three days earlier by Falun Gong adherents in the neighboring city of Tianjin in front of the editorial office of a magazine. The magazine had called for a ban of spiritual teachings as superstition and health risks. The police had some activists arrested. In response, the national leadership of the Falun Gong mobilized its followers to come to Beijing for the large-scale protest, using modern means of communication and e-mail. 10,000 Falun practitioners traveled from four provinces. From morning until night, they silently besieged the entire government quarter with party headquarters in Zhongnanhai in a peaceful sit-in until their leaders received the concessions they demanded.
It was a masterstroke of modern communication and logistics. China’s then party leader Jiang Zemin became aware of the power of spiritual movements for the first time. Falun Gong had been registered with the Ministry of Sports as a meditation group for traditional healing exercises until then with an officially counted 2.1 million followers, many of them members of the Chinese Communist Party.
As late as the evening of April 25, the shocked Jiang wrote a letter to his colleagues on the Politburo Committee, which was published six years later. He began mystically. “What happened today is worth thinking deeply about. Neither man nor devil noticed anything. Suddenly, tens of thousands of people had gathered at the gates of our power center and surrounded it all day.” The action was the largest protest since the 1989 Tiananmen riot, he said, adding that China’s security apparatus had failed. He had only learned from the Internet how efficiently Falun Gong was organized and that they represented a new social trend. What is the point of having state security equipped with computers if they don’t use modern information technology?
In July, Beijing launched a nationwide persecution of the Falun Gong, criminalizing it as a “cult” and a danger to the state. What particularly excited Jiang is in the last sentence of his letter, “Could it be that the Marxist theory of us communists, the materialism and atheism we believe in, cannot defeat this stuff spread by Falun Gong? If it could, wouldn’t it be a joke – as big as heaven?” The fear of failing to reach China’s people spiritually with its hollow ideology continues to drive the Party and its leaders to this day.
Close enough to touch – that’s what the moon looked like in the sky over Shenzhen on Wednesday night. The rare “supermoon”, in which the full moon is at the closest point in its orbit to Earth, could be observed worldwide.
Japanese women have led the way. As early as the noughties, women in China’s trendy neighbor began to forego marriage. The majority of them are well-educated and would rather have a career and enjoy life than do the dishes and look after the children – because that’s what their husbands would have expected of them. The same thing is happening in China now, as Marcel Grzanna reports. Here, as there, government planners are looking at the trend with concern. Because even today, fewer marriages go hand in hand with a lower birth rate.
China’s greatest foreign policy crux may be the distrust of all its neighbors (except Pakistan) of the new world power’s intentions. Joe Biden is now taking advantage of this by reviving an almost forgotten format and taking it to a new level: the US “quad exchange” with Japan, India and Australia. Together these countries are geopolitically encircling China. Biden is thus demonstrating once again that he wants to continue the confrontational course against China. All this is causing considerable unease in Beijing, as Michael Radunski analyses.
Anyone living in China or just traveling around the country for a longer period sometimes notices characters on the banknotes that look as if they have been stamped on. Often these are political messages from the Falun Gong sect. Our columnist Johnny Erling got to the bottom of the phenomenon: It’s professional printers turning currency into leaflets.
Li Jiming’s threat was clear: If Bangladesh joins the Quad, it will fundamentally damage relations between Beijing and Dhaka. China’s ambassador to Bangladesh wanted to leave no doubt about his warning and followed up. “History has shown it again and again, such partnerships harm the economic and social development of our neighbors and the welfare of its people,” Li said in Dhaka in early May.
Beijing’s anger is directed at the so-called Quad, the “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue”, an informal forum for talks between the US, Japan, Australia and India. According to its self-description, the Quad advocates a “free and open Indo-Pacific”. Japan’s former prime minister Shinzo Abe calls the alliance a “security diamond” and praises it as a champion of democracy in Asia. And that is precisely what enrages Beijing. While the Quad avoids explicitly mentioning China in its statements, it is clear to all what it is basically about: building a counterweight to China.
The origins of the “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue” date back to 2004. In the months following the devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean, Australia, India, Japan and the US joined forces to help: They gathered troops and humanitarian workers, helicopters, ships, and transport planes in the “Tsunami Core Group.” Three years later, as China pursued its claims in the South China Sea ever more vigorously, then-Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe drew on that Tsunami Group of Four and initiated the “Quadrilateral Security Dialogue.”
But the alliance was not particularly stable, and to some, the Quad quickly appeared stillborn: Australia withdrew under China-friendly Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and Abe’s successor in Tokyo did not want to further antagonize China. The dialogue only gained real significance ten years later when China took over the Paracel and Spratly Islands, accelerated its fleet expansion, and skirmishes broke out on the Sino-Indian border. Initially, however, the format did not go beyond isolated Quad meetings of the respective foreign ministers.
Now the new US President Joe Biden, in particular, seems determined to breathe life into the Quad. In mid-March, he organized the first Quad summit of the four heads of state. India’s Narendra Modi, Australia’s Scott Morrison, Japan’s Yoshihide Suga, and Biden himself took part, albeit only virtually for Covid’s sake. The heads of government immediately decided on a concrete initiative: The four countries want to launch a Covid vaccine offensive in the Indo-Pacific region by providing India with financial, technical and logistical support for vaccine production.
Afterward, only positive things were heard from the participants. India’s Prime Minister Modi said that the group had “come of age” and would “now remain an important pillar of stability in the region.” Australia’s head of government Morrison is convinced that the Quad is experiencing a new dawn.
But this euphoria should not obscure the true state of the informal alliance. It is not the desire for cooperation that brings the participants together, but rather that they all have problems with the most powerful player in the region. And all of these difficulties are very different, moreover: The US is locked in a technology and trade conflict with China, Japan is primarily concerned with the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, the dispute between Canberra and Beijing is about geostrategic interests, punitive tariffs, and 5G technology (China Table reported), while India and China regularly engage in military skirmishes on their border, which repeatedly result in fatalities (China Table reported).
As different as the respective problems are, the interests of the individual Quad members also diverge: For Japan and Australia, the focus is on the disputes in the South China Sea, India’s attention, on the other hand, is on border disputes and the Indian Ocean, while the USA sees itself in a global system conflict with rising China. In America, it is thus emphasized that the Quad reflects the strength of democracies in the region. Especially with regard to China’s progress in the fight against Covid or its successful industrial policy, this value rivalry in public discourse should not be underestimated.
However, the Quad‘s topics of discussion have nothing to do with governance, human rights, or strengthening democratic structures so far. And as much as the Quad’s planned vaccine offensive is to be welcomed, in a system with international institutions, the World Health Organization’s Covax Initiative would be the right place for such an undertaking. An international propaganda campaign in the name of vaccines, merely to strengthen its influence, has already been launched by Beijing (China Table reported).
The real impetus of the Quad comes from the area of security. At the end of 2020, there was a joint military exercise for the first time. The India-led Malabar exercise last November saw the participation of all four Quad nations for the first time in 13 years. The then US Deputy Secretary of State Stephen Biegun suggested that such exercises should be held regularly and opened up to other nations – for example, South Korea, New Zealand or even Vietnam. A few weeks ago, a major military power actually joined the next Quad military exercise: France took part in a three-day exercise in the Bay of Bengal in early April in the “Quad+” format.
Biegun’s desire to further formalize the Quad caused additional excitement. It was quickly speculated that the Quad could develop into an Asian NATO. But this aspect, too, seems to be driven mainly by euphoria. For in the formative years of NATO, it was easy to be against the Soviet Union. Economically, the giant empire led by Moscow did not play an important role in any of the participation. The case is different with the Quad and China: As much as Australia, India, Japan or the USA disapprove of Beijing’s policies, economically, they are all closely linked to the People’s Republic, dependent on it, or in some cases even dependent on it.
The renowned political scientist Kishore Mahbubani is convinced that the Quad will not change the course of Asian history. For one thing, the four Quad states have very different interests and vulnerabilities. For another, the great strategic game in Asia is not a military but an economic one. Mahububani points to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the world’s largest free trade area, in which China has brought together fifteen Asia-Pacific nations at the end of 2020. And so the political scientist concludes, “The future of Asia is written in four letters, RCEP, not Quad.”
China, in turn, is a thorn in the side of the Quad. Time and again Chinese diplomats find sharp words against the initiative. For the state-run newspaper Global Times, it is neither an “Asian Nato” nor a “diamond”, but rather a “club of empty talk.”
But Beijing’s rulers do not seem quite convinced of the Quad’s supposed weakness. The latest threat to Bangladesh to stay away from the Quad had no concrete reason. Neither was Dhaka asked to join, nor had the government requested a place in the security dialogue. In any case, Bangladesh’s Foreign Minister AK Abdul Momen forbade any interference from Beijing. Bangladesh is a sovereign state and decides independently on its foreign policy.
Beijing’s trump card is its economic dominance in the region. But Biden’s new interest in partners on China’s doorstep seems to make the leadership uneasy. The Quad is still a loose alliance with very different interests and sensitivities. But intimidating pressure from outside may well create cohesion within.
It’s bad news for Chinese bachelors. It’s not enough that there are far more men of marriageable age in the People’s Republic than women, which is why tens of millions of men are mathematically falling by the wayside. Those ladies who are theoretically on the market are now also increasingly less interested in marriage.
At the end of April, the dating app Tantan published the results of a survey of 3000 people from the Millennial generation. These are women and men who are now between the age of 20 to 40. Two-thirds of the women said they would only enter a marriage based on a “high-quality relationship.” And worse, for 41 percent, it would even be “acceptable” to die unmarried – numbers like a drumbeat against male vanity.
“In plain language, it means many Chinese women no longer feel like filling stereotypical role models. They are looking for partnerships at eye level, not arrangements with yesterday’s men who want to salvage outdated views into the future,” says Berlin-based journalist Qin Liwen, who has been intensively studying feminism in China for years. In China, of all places, the cradle of Confucianism, where for thousands of years the family represented the core of all happiness, young people are increasingly turning away from this concept. Incidentally, this also applies to men; one in five now say they can do without marriage. Their motive, however, is more likely to be resignation because of the huge competition.
What this means for men is illustrated by the example of a mid-thirties man on a home visit to his birthplace: 30 houses, 150 inhabitants, two hours by plane from Beijing. The young man brought friends who raved about his professional success to his mother. They said he was hardworking, intelligent and earned more money per month than the entire village combined. Mother listened patiently and replied, “Yes, but he is not married.” The neighbors would gossip about it for years.
Those men who do make it into the harbor of marriage are apparently increasingly being given a bad report card. The annual China Beautiful Life Survey, a survey conducted under the auspices of the National Bureau of Statistics, looked at how satisfied married couples are. It surveyed 100,000 households across the country. The result: One in five wives regrets their decision to marry. That’s more than twice as many as in 2012. What’s wrong in the second-largest economy?
“Chinese men are not more family-oriented in principle than Chinese women. But they see more advantages in marriage than women and therefore act more pragmatically,” says journalist Qin. Many men in China still interpret a relationship through conservative gender roles: She gives him a progenitor, which many segments of the country’s population continue to value as the crowning achievement of male existence, takes care of the household and later the offspring’s schoolwork and, last but not least, is available as a willing sexual partner. In many Chinese marriages, there is still the threat of violence against women if she does not comply.
There has been stricter legislation to ban domestic violence from families since 2016. But its effect is still small. In 2018, China recorded one case of domestic violence every 7.4 seconds: 4.3 million cases in total. Women were the victims 85 percent of the time. Journalist Qin is sure the number of unreported cases is many times higher. “The vast majority of women do not dare to report such an incident. Moreover, violence usually starts on a psychological level before it comes to palpabilities. These statistics also do not capture such cases of humiliation and degradation.” Marital rape trials would also hardly be allowed by Chinese courts.
Official statistics put the number of unmarried adults in China at 240 million people in 2018. As a result, the birth rate has also plummeted, falling below 1.5 children per woman (China.Table reported).
People in the People’s Republic still speak disparagingly of “remaining women” (剩女) when they are not yet married at 30. But actually, we should have been talking about “residual men” long ago, many of whom live without prospects in their hometowns, with no hope of ever marrying, let alone bringing children into the world. Some Chinese academics have thus already come up with the idea that single women from the big cities should move back to the villages to free these men from their wanton misery. Such proposals are also an expression of a mindset in which the intellectual and professional potential of women plays a lesser role than their fertility.
The one-child policy, which has since been modified, has not only produced the aforementioned million-fold surplus of unmarried men in society. Moreover, because of radical birth control, a generation of girls grew up in the 1980s and 1990s who, as only children, developed an entirely new sense of themselves. Their parents projected desires and hopes into the girls, which were normally reserved for boys. They gained access to education and advancement that their mothers and grandmothers were denied. These daughters are now also more determined to go their own way.
Especially when the gentlemen of creation don’t feel particularly motivated to share the challenges of modern marriage, where both partners have regular jobs, with their wives. “If men don’t change their attitude toward marriage, the trend of low birth rates will intensify, and it will discourage women to marry,” Jiang Yunfei, who studies gender roles in society at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, told the Hong Kong daily South China Morning Post.
This is also reflected in the exploding divorce rate in China. While the authorities registered one divorce for every five marriages in 2009, in 2019, there was one divorce for every two marriages.
The government is trying to keep the demographic disaster in check with new regulations. Since the beginning of this year, a new law has required spouses who want to separate to wait a month before their divorce petition is processed. Perhaps, lawmakers hope, some couples will use the time to reconsider their decision. And indeed, recent statistics seem to confirm the measure’s effectiveness. The Ministry of Civil Affairs noted a drastic drop in divorces in the first quarter of this year, at more than 70 percent. But it is still too early to see a trend from this. The forced afterthought month fights symptoms but not the causes of marital problems.
The banknotes are genuine. They show state founder Mao Zedong on the front in all denominations, from the green ¥1 note (15 cents) to the reddish ¥100 note (15 euros). The explosive messages can be found on the back as political slogans or as self-promotion, such as “Falun Gong is good” for the healing teachings founded in China in 1992. According to its website, it sees itself as a Buddhist-inspired school for spiritual self-cultivation that uses physical meditation exercises to strive for “truthfulness, mercy and forbearance” while promoting health. Beijing has branded it a “criminal cult” since 1999, persecuting its followers with all the resources of its state power. Falun Gong accuses China’s government of mass incarceration with countless deaths and barbaric crimes against its followers.
Deliberately damaging legal tender is against the law worldwide, not to mention turning money into leaflets. Falun followers, mostly middle-aged men and women, have been sentenced to ten years in prison for repeatedly circulating the money. They do not attract attention with it most of the time. The slogans printed on them match the pictorial motifs and basic colors of the banknotes and are not noticed at first glance. The vernacular calls them “money with characters” (带字币). Authorities speak of money with “reactionary inscriptions” (反动标语). Falun Gong calls its resistance action “sincere money” (真相币).
One, five and ten yuan banknotes in particular are in circulation with ever-changing texts and symbols – and have been for many years. When I was looking through my change, I first discovered how common the notes are. I got the highest printed note, worth ¥20 (€3), from a taxi driver. I asked newspaper vendors, market traders, and waiters in restaurants what they do with such money. “We pass it on.” None said they would take it to the bank to exchange or report it to the police. That would only mean unnecessary trouble.
The grotesque phenomenon demonstrates the unbroken resistance of Falun Gong activists despite brutal repression to this day. But it also shows how incomplete China’s gigantic surveillance and control bureaucracy is in everyday life. Leaflets thrown from bridges or skyscrapers, or stuck to walls, would not escape the ubiquitous video cameras. But when it comes to money, no one looks that closely.
Police are trying to track down the modern underground color printing presses. Official anti-sect websites proclaim success. The biggest bust came in 2014 when police seized 34 special printers and computers in three raids in Wuhan alone and arrested 38 people involved. The central bank tried other ways. In January 2016, it had all one-yuan banknotes replaced with coins in five Shandong cities as a pilot project. The People’s Daily online site explained that this was to “stop the spread of reactionary slogans by criminals via banknotes.” In 2019, the central bank renewed all banknotes in China with a new series that looked the same as the old one. But the colors are more vibrant and the paper has a smoother coating. Apparently, the printing should be made more difficult.
Beijing’s fight against Falun Gong began on April 25, 1999, triggered by a demonstration organized three days earlier by Falun Gong adherents in the neighboring city of Tianjin in front of the editorial office of a magazine. The magazine had called for a ban of spiritual teachings as superstition and health risks. The police had some activists arrested. In response, the national leadership of the Falun Gong mobilized its followers to come to Beijing for the large-scale protest, using modern means of communication and e-mail. 10,000 Falun practitioners traveled from four provinces. From morning until night, they silently besieged the entire government quarter with party headquarters in Zhongnanhai in a peaceful sit-in until their leaders received the concessions they demanded.
It was a masterstroke of modern communication and logistics. China’s then party leader Jiang Zemin became aware of the power of spiritual movements for the first time. Falun Gong had been registered with the Ministry of Sports as a meditation group for traditional healing exercises until then with an officially counted 2.1 million followers, many of them members of the Chinese Communist Party.
As late as the evening of April 25, the shocked Jiang wrote a letter to his colleagues on the Politburo Committee, which was published six years later. He began mystically. “What happened today is worth thinking deeply about. Neither man nor devil noticed anything. Suddenly, tens of thousands of people had gathered at the gates of our power center and surrounded it all day.” The action was the largest protest since the 1989 Tiananmen riot, he said, adding that China’s security apparatus had failed. He had only learned from the Internet how efficiently Falun Gong was organized and that they represented a new social trend. What is the point of having state security equipped with computers if they don’t use modern information technology?
In July, Beijing launched a nationwide persecution of the Falun Gong, criminalizing it as a “cult” and a danger to the state. What particularly excited Jiang is in the last sentence of his letter, “Could it be that the Marxist theory of us communists, the materialism and atheism we believe in, cannot defeat this stuff spread by Falun Gong? If it could, wouldn’t it be a joke – as big as heaven?” The fear of failing to reach China’s people spiritually with its hollow ideology continues to drive the Party and its leaders to this day.
Close enough to touch – that’s what the moon looked like in the sky over Shenzhen on Wednesday night. The rare “supermoon”, in which the full moon is at the closest point in its orbit to Earth, could be observed worldwide.
