No Deeds No Dates
Peter Wu
15 April 2011
If this is
correctly reported, things haven’t changed much amongst the Chinese - anywhere.
During my uni
years here, I heard of the three Ps – property, Ph.D and permanent residency. These were, and I am sure, are the pre-requisites
before the lady will say yes to your proposal. No wonder my many attempts in asking for the hands of
my lady friends came to nought. Then Mary came along. Instead of three Ps, she asked for three Ds – Dowries,
Dee ds and Deposits (or Down payment). Lucky she didn’t ask for the one P I will never be able to
get – PhD. Phew!
Life was and is
hard for the lovelorn Chinese bachelors.
附文
For
Many Chinese Men, No Deed Means No Dates
By Andrew Jacobs
BEIJING — In the realm of eligible bachelors, Wang Lin has a lot to recommend
him.
A
28-year-old college-educated insurance salesman, Mr. Wang has a flawless set of
white teeth, a tolerable karaoke voice and a three-year-old Nissan with furry
blue seat covers.
“My friends tell me I’m quite
handsome,” he said in confident English one recent evening, fingering his car
keys as if they were a talisman.
But by the exacting standards
of single Chinese women, it seems, Mr. Wang lacks that bankable attribute known
as real property. Given
that even a cramped, two-bedroom apartment on the dusty fringe of the capital
sells for about $150,000, Mr. Wang’s $900-a-month salary means he may forever
be condemned to the ranks of the renting.
Last year, he said, this
deficiency prompted a high-end dating agency to reject his application. In recent months, half a
dozen women have turned down a second meeting after learning that he had no
means to buy a home. “Sometimes I wonder if I will ever find a wife,” said Mr.
Wang, who lives with his parents, retired factory workers who remind him of his
single status with nagging regularity. “I
feel like a loser.”
There have been many
undesirable repercussions of China’s unrelenting real estate boom, which has
driven prices up by 140 percent nationwide since 2007, and by as much as 800
percent in Beijing over the past eight years. Working-class
buyers have been frozen out of the market while an estimated 65 million
apartments across the country bought as speculative investments sit empty.
The frenzy starts with the
local governments that sell off land at steep prices, and is frothed up by
overeager developers who force residents out of old neighborhoods, sometimes
prompting self-immolations among the dispossessed. But largely overlooked is the
collateral damage to urban young professionals, especially men, who
increasingly find themselves lovelorn and despairing as a growing number of
women hold out for a mate with a deed.
The marriage competition is
fierce, and statistically, women hold the cards. Given the nation’s gender
imbalance, an outgrowth of a cultural preference for boys and China’s stringent
family-planning policies, as many as 24 million men could be perpetual
bachelors by 2020, according to a report issued jointly by the Chinese Research
Association of Marriage and Family and the All-China Women’s Federation.
Zhang Yanhong, a matchmaking
consultant at Baihe, one of the country’s most popular dating sites, said many
disheartened men had simply dropped out of the marriage market. “This fixation on real estate
has twisted the popular notion of love and marriage,” she said. “Women are putting economic factors
above everything else when looking for a mate and this is not a good thing for
relationships or for society.”
The nation’s real-estate
obsession is especially noteworthy given China’s relatively recent embrace of
home ownership. The sale
of residential property was not allowed until the late 1980s, and even then
under a leasehold system that gives purchasers 70 years of ownership. Today, about two-thirds of all Chinese
under 40 own their own homes, slightly higher than the average for Americans of
the same age group.
With few other outlets for
investment (those who park their money in a Chinese bank effectively lose
money, given low interest rates and high inflation), many families have been
plowing their savings into apartments, spurring what some economists describe
as a bubble.
Han Han, one of China’s most
widely read bloggers, frequently assails the government policies that he and
many economists say have contributed to rapidly rising prices.
In an interview, he said one
consequence of the single-minded focus on real estate, or on earning the money
to make mortgage payments and repay family loans, is that young people have
little time for anything else. “We’ve
created a generation of young people whose sole ambition is to have a piece of
property under their name,” he said.
Like many anxious bachelors,
Yang Xuning, 29, a sportswriter from Beijing, said much of the pressure comes
from parents who are taunted by the wealth around them. He recalls his first meeting
with his girlfriend’s parents in Shanghai last winter, when he was asked about
his salary and his nesting plans. “I
tried to reason with her mother, explaining that it’s not practical to buy
something at this stage in our lives but she wouldn’t hear it,” he said.
He stood his ground, she
stood hers, and a few months later, on the second anniversary of their
relationship, Mr. Yang’s girlfriend called it quits. “A lot of girls, encouraged
by their parents, see marriage as a way of instantly changing their status
without the hard work,” he said bitterly.
Many women are unapologetic
about their priorities, citing the age-old tradition in which men provided a
home for their brides, even if that home came with a mother-in-law. There are also other
concerns, including the instability of starting a family in rented premises and
the endless badgering of parents. Status
also plays a role, but so, too, do fears that those who put off buying will be
priced out of the market indefinitely.
Gao Yanan, a 27-year-old
accountant with a fondness for Ray Bans and Zara pantsuits, said the matter was
not up for debate. “It’s the
guy’s responsibility to tell a girl right away whether he owns an apartment,”
she said. “It gives her a chance not to
fall in love.”
With such women on the prowl,
even men who do have their own homes have come up with techniques to weed out
the covetous and the inordinately materialistic. Liu Binbin, 30, an editor at
a publishing house in Beijing, said he often arrived at first dates by bus,
even though he owned a car. “If
they ask me questions like ‘Do you live with your parents?’ I know what they’re after,”
he said.
Mr. Liu said he went on 20
unfulfilling blind dates until finding a suitable girlfriend last year. He said he knew she was the one after
passing the three-month mark.
“The whole time she thought I
didn’t own an apartment and she still wanted me,” he said. “Someone like that is rare.”