In China, white man loses mojo

Apr 18, 2009

In China, white man loses mojo
By Kent Ewing

HONG KONG - As if formerly high-flying Western bankers and financiers haven't suffered enough, now there is an additional indignity: Chinese women have lost interest in them.

According to two recent nationwide surveys by the matchmaking website hongniang.com, mainland women keen on finding a foreign partner plunged from 42% to 16% over the past year.

For that dramatic decline, you can blame the financial crisis, which has made Western society - especially its male avatars - look unstable to Chinese women considering their romantic (which tends to be intimately linked to their financial) future.

The decline of the white man's mojo had been evident in Hong Kong since the handover from British rule in 1997, with dating services reporting that it is rare these days for Chinese women in the city to seek a Western partner. While the British ruled and ensconced themselves in posh homes on Victoria Peak and other exclusive areas in Hong Kong, there was often a cachet attached to dating a Westerner, especially an Englishman.

But that era has passed, as has any sense of Chinese inferiority. Economically, Hong Kong, a city of seven million people, caught up with its Western counterparts well before the handover. Using the Atlas method of calculation, Hong Kong's per capita income as of 2007 was US$31,610, according to the World Bank.

By contrast, despite 30 years of scintillating economic growth, most of the 1.3 billion people living on the mainland, where per capita income stands at US$2,360, are still waiting for their pot of gold. Still, per capita income figures can be misleading in a country as big and rapidly developing as China. Poverty abounds in the countryside, but China's club of millionaires is growing faster than in any other country in the world. Its cities, especially in the east, are booming and creating a huge urban-rural income gap.

Urban women, the same ones who used to hanker after Western men, are sharing in this boom. As their economic boats rise with the general tide, they are also becoming much pickier about the mates they choose.

Mixed marriages, which reached 400,000 last year, had been on a steady rise in China until the US subprime mortgage crisis started a global financial meltdown that has turned a Western partner into a poor prospect in the eyes of many Chinese women. Not only do the hongniang.com surveys show the number of women seeking a foreign mate has dropped significantly, but approval of such unions has also fallen by 20%.

While all this should be good news for Chinese men, their prospects also don't look terribly bright. China's one-child policy, coupled with a traditional preference for male children, has created a gender imbalance that will leave already choosy Chinese women even choosier. And, no matter what choices those women make, 32 million Chinese men face a future without any hope of marriage, according to a study published online last week by the British Medical Journal.

An army of scholars is busy contemplating the possible social consequences of this prodigious lonely hearts club of mostly only-child males - and so far their collective conclusion is that none of them are good.

Meanwhile, the sudden jilting of foreigners tends to confirm a long-held Western stereotype of Chinese women as gold-diggers who would not recognize love if it hit them in the face. If you take a broader perspective, however, there are clear reasons for this cold-hearted materialism that go straight to the heart of the big social challenges that China faces in the 21st century.

With no viable health care or social security system in place, there is little room for love when women are planning a future. Indeed, while they may well recognize the emotion, they would be foolish to act on it.

Life, marriage included, is all about earning and saving in country where a serious illness or accident could leave you and your family penniless. Moreover, while Chinese women have made great advances in education, they still face commonplace discrimination in employment. A rich husband often remains their best option for financial security.

Of course, a woman would have to be an urbanite to even start thinking like this, or to care about surveys launched by the likes of hongniang.com. More than 50% of Chinese continue to live in the impoverished countryside - but they dream of the good life in the city and, as China's relentless urban migration continues, many of their children and most of their grandchildren will be city dwellers.

Will future generations be as materialistic as their forbears in matters of the heart? Of course, they will - until, that is, people no longer have to worry about squirreling away most of their income to pay for education, health care and retirement. This propensity to save rather than spend has become a headache for economic planners now that increased domestic consumption is needed to compensate for shrinking Chinese exports in the global economic downturn.

Despite government prodding to act more like their profligate consumer counterparts in the West, the Chinese are unlikely to relinquish their status as the world's biggest savers until they feel more secure about the future. And Chinese women show no signs of dropping their view of well-heeled men as the best possible insurance policy for that future. Love is a luxury they can ill afford.
Certainly, there are also many in the West (both men and women) who size up their prospective partner's wallet before they consult their hearts. In the 19th century most Western women were even more pecuniary in their marital outlook than Chinese women are today. Read just about any European novel of the time to confirm this view, with the work of English writers Jane Austen and George Eliot (the pen name for Mary Ann Evans), among others, standing out.

Ultimately, what everyone in China needs is a system that offers some assurance of financial security. Then they can feel free to wax romantic.

Beijing's long-awaited release last week of a 13,000-word government blueprint on health care reform should help to ease this collective sense of insecurity, but it is also a reminder of how dicey medical care is in China today. Even public hospitals are routinely guilty of price-gouging in the runaway capitalism that has infected the country's medical sector, leaving basic health care services unaffordable for the poor and a reach for the middle class.
The new scheme aims to make basic health care and medical insurance available to every Chinese citizen by 2020. How such an expensive and ambitious plan will be implemented, however, remains a huge question mark.

Until that and many other questions are answered, the Chinese will continue their cautionary habit of saving for an uncertain future, and personal relationships will be grounded more in economic reality than emotional attachment.

In the end, the Chinese economic experiment may also be an experiment in love - yet another reason to hope that it succeeds.

Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at kewing@hkis.edu.hk.

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