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Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China
After China's Communist revolution of 1949, Chairman Mao famously proclaimed that "women hold up half the sky." In the early years of the People's Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations with expansive initiatives such as assigning urban women jobs in the planned economy. Yet those gains are now being eroded in China's post-socialist era. Contrary to many claims made in the mainstream media, women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of many rights and gains relative to men. "Leftover Women" debunks the popular myth that women have fared well as a result of post-socialist China's economic reforms and breakneck growth.
213 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2014
About the author
Leta Hong Fincher
2 books151 followersPraise for Leftover Women, 10th anniversary edition:
Named one of the best China books of 2023 by China Books Review.
“Leta Hong Fincher's book was not only an instant classic, it was downright clairvoyant: Seeing what others miss, she foresaw a seismic shift in the public mood, which has intensified in the past decade. The revised edition is urgent reading; it holds essential insights into China's economic and political future.”
―Evan Osnos, winner of the National Book Award, author of Age of Ambition
“An eye-opening, groundbreaking book that cast light on critical yet overlooked changes in China - and which seems more timely than ever ten years on.”
―Tania Branigan, author of Red Memory
“The past decade has time and again underlined the prescience of Leta Hong Fincher's Leftover Women. This groundbreaking book made a powerful case for how state propaganda and cultural norms combined to exclude Chinese women from the wealth creation springing from the country's rapid economic development. In this new version, Hong Fincher illustrates how women are beginning to fight back, and the obstacles lined up against them. This book is more relevant than ever to anyone who wants to understand China - read it and rage.”
―Louisa Lim, Author of Indelible City and The People's Republic of Amnesia
Leta Hong Fincher has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Dissent Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar and others. As a long-time TV and radio journalist based in China, she won the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award, the Cowan Award for Humanitarian Reporting and other journalism honors for her reporting.
Leta’s previous book, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, was named Best Book of the year by Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Foreign Policy Interrupted, Bitch Media and Autostraddle; it was also a New York Times “New and Noteworthy” pick. The New York Public Library named Betraying Big Brother one of its “essential reads on feminism” in 2020.
Leta's first book, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (2014), was named one of the top 5 China books of the year by the Asia Society’s ChinaFile and one of the best Asian books of the year by Asia House. It was on the New York Times list of recommended books on China in 2018 and on Book Riot’s list of 21 recommended Chinese history books in 2021.
Named one of the best China books of 2023 by China Books Review.
“Leta Hong Fincher's book was not only an instant classic, it was downright clairvoyant: Seeing what others miss, she foresaw a seismic shift in the public mood, which has intensified in the past decade. The revised edition is urgent reading; it holds essential insights into China's economic and political future.”
―Evan Osnos, winner of the National Book Award, author of Age of Ambition
“An eye-opening, groundbreaking book that cast light on critical yet overlooked changes in China - and which seems more timely than ever ten years on.”
―Tania Branigan, author of Red Memory
“The past decade has time and again underlined the prescience of Leta Hong Fincher's Leftover Women. This groundbreaking book made a powerful case for how state propaganda and cultural norms combined to exclude Chinese women from the wealth creation springing from the country's rapid economic development. In this new version, Hong Fincher illustrates how women are beginning to fight back, and the obstacles lined up against them. This book is more relevant than ever to anyone who wants to understand China - read it and rage.”
―Louisa Lim, Author of Indelible City and The People's Republic of Amnesia
Leta Hong Fincher has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, Dissent Magazine, Ms. Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar and others. As a long-time TV and radio journalist based in China, she won the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award, the Cowan Award for Humanitarian Reporting and other journalism honors for her reporting.
Leta’s previous book, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, was named Best Book of the year by Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Foreign Policy Interrupted, Bitch Media and Autostraddle; it was also a New York Times “New and Noteworthy” pick. The New York Public Library named Betraying Big Brother one of its “essential reads on feminism” in 2020.
Leta's first book, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (2014), was named one of the top 5 China books of the year by the Asia Society’s ChinaFile and one of the best Asian books of the year by Asia House. It was on the New York Times list of recommended books on China in 2018 and on Book Riot’s list of 21 recommended Chinese history books in 2021.
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June 12, 2021
Review to be reinstated or rewritten when a new copy of the book comes.
April 20, 2014
This is a fascinating look at the difference between reality and social control efforts in modern China.
In point of fact, in China there are no "leftover women"; the stats show (depending on area), anything from 110 men to 100 women on up. In some rural districts, as described in this book, unmarried men outnumber unmarried women at over 2:1!
One would think, then, that society and the political machine would realize that women are a relatively scarce and valuable resource, especially since both promote marriage as essential for society. You'd be wrong.
The "leftover women" campaigns are essentially designed to make women feel insecure bout their prospects, and so accept suitors and compromises that are completely opposed to their own self-interests. Let's not try to make men treat women well! Let's just get women to accept increasingly shoddy treatment!
Domestic violence is clearly a problem in China, but it's not illegal. If a guy beat up someone on the street, he could be prosecuted; when he beats up his wife, it's OK- except that if she seeks help, SHE will be shamed and often attacked by society at large.
It doesn't help that even though many women enter a marriage with assets similar to their spouse's- they don't get to keep them. She will put her saving into the down payment on a house or apartment; as will he, and often relatives of both spouses. However, the deed will be ONLY in his name- which legally means it's all his, even when she's paying half or more of the mortgage. The "leftover women" campaigns tell women that they're lucky to have a man at all, so should not complain about anything. And even if they do- there's usually less than no help.
I am deeply interested in the social status and positions of women around the world, and this was an excellent summary of the situation in modern China. It's a bit dry, but has interviews and anecdotes that illustrate and illuminate many of the points, and the footnotes are impressive- I'll be reading more from them.
I am also interested in the ways in which media propaganda- often "counter-factual" (i.e. bald-faced lies)- are used to manipulate people in general. Here's an excellent, detailed example.
Note: I got an ARC of this book through LibraryThing.
In point of fact, in China there are no "leftover women"; the stats show (depending on area), anything from 110 men to 100 women on up. In some rural districts, as described in this book, unmarried men outnumber unmarried women at over 2:1!
One would think, then, that society and the political machine would realize that women are a relatively scarce and valuable resource, especially since both promote marriage as essential for society. You'd be wrong.
The "leftover women" campaigns are essentially designed to make women feel insecure bout their prospects, and so accept suitors and compromises that are completely opposed to their own self-interests. Let's not try to make men treat women well! Let's just get women to accept increasingly shoddy treatment!
Domestic violence is clearly a problem in China, but it's not illegal. If a guy beat up someone on the street, he could be prosecuted; when he beats up his wife, it's OK- except that if she seeks help, SHE will be shamed and often attacked by society at large.
It doesn't help that even though many women enter a marriage with assets similar to their spouse's- they don't get to keep them. She will put her saving into the down payment on a house or apartment; as will he, and often relatives of both spouses. However, the deed will be ONLY in his name- which legally means it's all his, even when she's paying half or more of the mortgage. The "leftover women" campaigns tell women that they're lucky to have a man at all, so should not complain about anything. And even if they do- there's usually less than no help.
I am deeply interested in the social status and positions of women around the world, and this was an excellent summary of the situation in modern China. It's a bit dry, but has interviews and anecdotes that illustrate and illuminate many of the points, and the footnotes are impressive- I'll be reading more from them.
I am also interested in the ways in which media propaganda- often "counter-factual" (i.e. bald-faced lies)- are used to manipulate people in general. Here's an excellent, detailed example.
Note: I got an ARC of this book through LibraryThing.
May 28, 2014
Leta Hong Fincher was a journalist before completing a PhD in Sociology at Beijing’s Tsinghua University. This book is based on her PhD project on the under-researched connections between leftover women, China’s property market, and gender inequality. Fincher has previously written articles discussing similar issues for the New York Times, CNN, and Ms. Magazine, through which these topics have already gained some popularity. With an abundance of interview quotes and contemporaneous media reports, this book is quite readable and has the potential to attract a wide audience.
According to Fincher, the term ‘leftover woman’ in China ‘is widely used to describe an urban, professional female in her late twenties or older who is still single’ (p.2). In Chapter 1, Fincher examines the leftover women discourse mediated through ‘state media news reports, surveys, columns, cartoons and television shows’ (p.15), and argues that two reasons account for the state promoting the leftover women discourse: one is to maintain social stability in the context of the persisting sex ratio imbalance – China has 32million more men aged under 20 than women – that prevents a lot of men from finding wives; the other is to upgrade the ‘quality’ of the populace by urging well-educated women to marry. It is an insightful observation indeed that the state serves as a latent driver, disseminating this stigmatizing ‘leftover’ women discourse, which arguably has a profound impact on unmarried women over the age of 25.
Chapter 2 considers how Chinese women have been ‘shut out of arguably the biggest accumulation of residential real-estate wealth in history’ because the pressure they experience in trying to avoid becoming ‘leftover’ means that they often ‘give up too much bargaining power within the marriage’ (p.12). Chapter 3 further deals with how ‘many parents discriminate against their own daughters by buying expensive homes for their sons only’, leading to a gendered wealth gap in house buying.
The book is written in an accessible style, allowing general readers access to the subject. It also adopts an inclusive approach in that it covers a wide range of issues in relation to women’s property rights, including the rights of LGBT groups in Chapter 3 and Chapter 6, and the relationship between domestic abuse and women’s lack of property rights in Chapter 5. These issues are rarely discussed together when considering gender inequality in China, so the author is to be congratulated for this effort.
However, I did find that in places the evidence provided is insufficient to support the arguments presented. For example, readers are introduced to a female informant who has a university degree but left her job because ‘she wanted to make herself a more attractive marriage candidate, less intimidating to suitors’. She is quoted as saying “my most important duty is to find a good man to marry” (p.39). The author analyses the case by noting that ‘the state media campaign regarding “leftover” women has prompted some highly educated women to quit their jobs even before they get married’ (p.39). Aside from questioning how rare this case is, I find a lack of coherence between the analysis and the quotes as the informant did not explicitly suggest that she was influenced by the ‘leftover’ discourse.
The imprecision in analysis can also be identified in Chapter 3. The author reveals that the informant Shang got married because she believed that she was getting older. The author links her anxiety with ‘the “leftover” women age threshold’ (p.107). Again, the informant did not specify the connection between her anxiety and the prescribed age of ‘leftover’ women advocated by the state media. By adopting the ‘leftover’ women discourse in a one-size-fits-all fashion, it can be argued that the author not only exaggerates the influence that the ‘leftover’ discourse imposes on women, but also ignores the intricate complexity of the reasons for their anxiety. It is not difficult to recognise that unmarried women’s anxiety around their increasing age existed before the emergence of the ‘leftover’ women discourse, and furthermore that it is seen in other countries where the ‘leftover’ women discourse does not exist.
The author cites a remarkable amount of online sources to support her argument, showing engagement with a variety of sources. However Fincher doesn’t acknowledge that they may not be completely trustworthy. In Chapter 2, the author cites the 2012 Horizon and iFeng.com Report, noting that women’s names were endorsed on only 30 per cent of marital home deals (p.46). First, there are perhaps questions as to the credibility of the report, as it did not suggest how many informants were involved, nor how the survey was conducted. Furthermore, it is a pity that the author did not mention the trend indicated by the report, of a 10.2% increase in the number of women’s names on home deeds compared to the time prior to 2006, which can be interpreted as women’s rising power in property rights.
Although there are thought-provoking points throughout, I find some of the findings intrinsically contradictory. For instance, in Chapter 3, Fincher reports that a daughter’s parents ‘often decline to help buy a home’ for their daughter (p.78). The author implies that it is because the parents consider buying a home to be man’s responsibility (p.83). However, the author finds out that many women contribute their whole savings to help their partners to buy homes without putting their names on the deeds. The daughters’ behaviour is in contrast to their parents’ perception that men should be the home provider. Considering the author’s finding that a daughter has a sense of filial piety to her parents (p.82), I cannot help but wonder how the parents view their daughters’ behaviour of contributing their savings without being entitled to the property? Does it lead to any intergenerational conflicts? The book unfortunately does not discuss this.
Finally, the use of the word ‘resurgence’ is somewhat problematic in this context. As suggested in the Introduction, ‘this book argues that the state-sponsored media campaign about “leftover” women is part of a broad resurgence of gender inequality in post-socialist China’ (p.3). Resurgence here implies that gender equality was once achieved. I consider gender equality to have never been achieved and indeed that gender inequality has been persistent throughout China’s history (see Liu, Croll and Stacey for further reading). In Chapter 4, Fincher conceptualises ‘resurgence’ by tracing back to the Song dynasty (960-1279), upholding that women at that time ‘had substantial, independent ownership and control of property’ (p.110). She then compares the women in the Song Dynasty to those in contemporary China, claiming that ‘Chinese women’s property rights have steadily eroded in the post-socialist, rural-to-urban transformation’ (p.131). The way in which she compares the women in contemporary China with the women one thousand years ago is problematic; although the author quotes historian Bernhardt, it seems that she disregards Bernhardt’s conclusion that ‘there was no “half-share law” in the Song and indeed could not have been. Instead, the principles of patrilineal succession applied, and women enjoyed inheritance rights only by default, in the absence of brothers and sons.’ (p.8). Chapter 4 leaves itself open to critiques of reductionism by merely discussing property rights without considering the corresponding social economic context.
The dominant discourse among the Chinese media and public currently focuses on how women strategise to add their names to the deeds without paying for or paying very little for property. This book engineers to reverse the abovementioned discourse by discussing how women are disadvantaged in the real estate market. Unfortunately, by intertwining the ‘leftover women’ discourse and real estate market, the author’s intention to create a novel approach to demonstrate how women are disadvantaged in contemporary China fails to meet its purpose due to its reductionist approach, the not well-grounded evidence, and the insufficiently supported arguments.
Above all, this book looks likely to be controversial. Nonetheless it has the potential to be a bestseller due to the timeliness of the topic, Fincher’s eye-catching arguments, and the already established reputation of the author, regardless of how selective the views encapsulated in this book may be. Once again, it is worth saying that the author should be recognised for bringing together the rarely-discussed issues of women’s property rights, the rights of LGBT groups, and domestic abuse.
From LSE Book Review http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofboo...
According to Fincher, the term ‘leftover woman’ in China ‘is widely used to describe an urban, professional female in her late twenties or older who is still single’ (p.2). In Chapter 1, Fincher examines the leftover women discourse mediated through ‘state media news reports, surveys, columns, cartoons and television shows’ (p.15), and argues that two reasons account for the state promoting the leftover women discourse: one is to maintain social stability in the context of the persisting sex ratio imbalance – China has 32million more men aged under 20 than women – that prevents a lot of men from finding wives; the other is to upgrade the ‘quality’ of the populace by urging well-educated women to marry. It is an insightful observation indeed that the state serves as a latent driver, disseminating this stigmatizing ‘leftover’ women discourse, which arguably has a profound impact on unmarried women over the age of 25.
Chapter 2 considers how Chinese women have been ‘shut out of arguably the biggest accumulation of residential real-estate wealth in history’ because the pressure they experience in trying to avoid becoming ‘leftover’ means that they often ‘give up too much bargaining power within the marriage’ (p.12). Chapter 3 further deals with how ‘many parents discriminate against their own daughters by buying expensive homes for their sons only’, leading to a gendered wealth gap in house buying.
The book is written in an accessible style, allowing general readers access to the subject. It also adopts an inclusive approach in that it covers a wide range of issues in relation to women’s property rights, including the rights of LGBT groups in Chapter 3 and Chapter 6, and the relationship between domestic abuse and women’s lack of property rights in Chapter 5. These issues are rarely discussed together when considering gender inequality in China, so the author is to be congratulated for this effort.
However, I did find that in places the evidence provided is insufficient to support the arguments presented. For example, readers are introduced to a female informant who has a university degree but left her job because ‘she wanted to make herself a more attractive marriage candidate, less intimidating to suitors’. She is quoted as saying “my most important duty is to find a good man to marry” (p.39). The author analyses the case by noting that ‘the state media campaign regarding “leftover” women has prompted some highly educated women to quit their jobs even before they get married’ (p.39). Aside from questioning how rare this case is, I find a lack of coherence between the analysis and the quotes as the informant did not explicitly suggest that she was influenced by the ‘leftover’ discourse.
The imprecision in analysis can also be identified in Chapter 3. The author reveals that the informant Shang got married because she believed that she was getting older. The author links her anxiety with ‘the “leftover” women age threshold’ (p.107). Again, the informant did not specify the connection between her anxiety and the prescribed age of ‘leftover’ women advocated by the state media. By adopting the ‘leftover’ women discourse in a one-size-fits-all fashion, it can be argued that the author not only exaggerates the influence that the ‘leftover’ discourse imposes on women, but also ignores the intricate complexity of the reasons for their anxiety. It is not difficult to recognise that unmarried women’s anxiety around their increasing age existed before the emergence of the ‘leftover’ women discourse, and furthermore that it is seen in other countries where the ‘leftover’ women discourse does not exist.
The author cites a remarkable amount of online sources to support her argument, showing engagement with a variety of sources. However Fincher doesn’t acknowledge that they may not be completely trustworthy. In Chapter 2, the author cites the 2012 Horizon and iFeng.com Report, noting that women’s names were endorsed on only 30 per cent of marital home deals (p.46). First, there are perhaps questions as to the credibility of the report, as it did not suggest how many informants were involved, nor how the survey was conducted. Furthermore, it is a pity that the author did not mention the trend indicated by the report, of a 10.2% increase in the number of women’s names on home deeds compared to the time prior to 2006, which can be interpreted as women’s rising power in property rights.
Although there are thought-provoking points throughout, I find some of the findings intrinsically contradictory. For instance, in Chapter 3, Fincher reports that a daughter’s parents ‘often decline to help buy a home’ for their daughter (p.78). The author implies that it is because the parents consider buying a home to be man’s responsibility (p.83). However, the author finds out that many women contribute their whole savings to help their partners to buy homes without putting their names on the deeds. The daughters’ behaviour is in contrast to their parents’ perception that men should be the home provider. Considering the author’s finding that a daughter has a sense of filial piety to her parents (p.82), I cannot help but wonder how the parents view their daughters’ behaviour of contributing their savings without being entitled to the property? Does it lead to any intergenerational conflicts? The book unfortunately does not discuss this.
Finally, the use of the word ‘resurgence’ is somewhat problematic in this context. As suggested in the Introduction, ‘this book argues that the state-sponsored media campaign about “leftover” women is part of a broad resurgence of gender inequality in post-socialist China’ (p.3). Resurgence here implies that gender equality was once achieved. I consider gender equality to have never been achieved and indeed that gender inequality has been persistent throughout China’s history (see Liu, Croll and Stacey for further reading). In Chapter 4, Fincher conceptualises ‘resurgence’ by tracing back to the Song dynasty (960-1279), upholding that women at that time ‘had substantial, independent ownership and control of property’ (p.110). She then compares the women in the Song Dynasty to those in contemporary China, claiming that ‘Chinese women’s property rights have steadily eroded in the post-socialist, rural-to-urban transformation’ (p.131). The way in which she compares the women in contemporary China with the women one thousand years ago is problematic; although the author quotes historian Bernhardt, it seems that she disregards Bernhardt’s conclusion that ‘there was no “half-share law” in the Song and indeed could not have been. Instead, the principles of patrilineal succession applied, and women enjoyed inheritance rights only by default, in the absence of brothers and sons.’ (p.8). Chapter 4 leaves itself open to critiques of reductionism by merely discussing property rights without considering the corresponding social economic context.
The dominant discourse among the Chinese media and public currently focuses on how women strategise to add their names to the deeds without paying for or paying very little for property. This book engineers to reverse the abovementioned discourse by discussing how women are disadvantaged in the real estate market. Unfortunately, by intertwining the ‘leftover women’ discourse and real estate market, the author’s intention to create a novel approach to demonstrate how women are disadvantaged in contemporary China fails to meet its purpose due to its reductionist approach, the not well-grounded evidence, and the insufficiently supported arguments.
Above all, this book looks likely to be controversial. Nonetheless it has the potential to be a bestseller due to the timeliness of the topic, Fincher’s eye-catching arguments, and the already established reputation of the author, regardless of how selective the views encapsulated in this book may be. Once again, it is worth saying that the author should be recognised for bringing together the rarely-discussed issues of women’s property rights, the rights of LGBT groups, and domestic abuse.
From LSE Book Review http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofboo...
April 28, 2024
I decided to read Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China as it appeared on a Guardian list of five of the best books to understand modern China. First published in 2014, it's a brutal account of gender inequality in China based on detailed research. Fincher demonstrates unbearable pressures on young women from government propaganda and their own families to marry young, have children young, subordinate their careers to those of men, and give up their financial independence and assets to their husbands. A particularly grim detail is government media blaming women having babies over the age of thirty for a rise in birth defects:
It seems there was greater gender equality during the Mao decades, albeit this included equal shares in oppressive work targets and political persecution. Chapter 4 argues that a legal change in 2011 has left Chinese women with fewer inheritance rights to property than they had a thousand years ago, during the Song dynasty:
The title of chapter two sums it up succinctly: 'How Chinese women were shut out of the biggest accumulation of real-estate wealth in history'. Later chapters also examine the implications of China having no specific laws that protect women and children from domestic violence, as well as the impact of gender inequality on queer people. The final chapter discusses resistance to gender inequality in China, organisation of which is stifled by the authoritarian regime. Fincher posits that the government pressures women to marry young, having children young, and subordinate themselves to men as a means of discouraging social upheaval and deal with the huge demographic gender imbalance created by the one child policy.
Throughout the book, points are argued using a combination of quantitative data where available (e.g. a survey found in 2010 that only one in fifteen single women in China owned their own home) with in-depth interviews undertaken by the author. Fincher skilfully brings out the themes in this qualitative data. I notice that a ten year anniversary edition of the book has been published with a new preface, which I'd be interested to read. My understanding from media reports is that political repression in China has increasingly incorporated surveillance technology in the decade since initial publication. China has also seen the disruption of prolonged and extremely strict covid lockdowns, as well as a continued fall in birth rates. I found Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China eye-opening and insightful, highly accessible yet based on rigorous academic research.
A related report by the official Xinhua News Agency in September 2012 says that more than 900,000 babies are born with birth defects every year, citing Ministry of Health statistics. The Xinhua News report refers to unnamed experts who say that the rise in birth defects is linked to the withdrawal of compulsory premarital health exams in 2003 and rising numbers of women having children 'at an older age'. The state media generally make little or no mention of scientific studies indicating that China's rise in birth defects is related to extreme levels of pollution, especially in areas of the country that are heavily reliant on coal-fired power plants. [...]
The state rhetoric on preventing birth defects through promoting earlier marriage and premarital health screening - as opposed to scientific reporting on the ill effects of pollution - strikes fear into the hearts of Chinese women in their twenties who hope one day to have a child.
It seems there was greater gender equality during the Mao decades, albeit this included equal shares in oppressive work targets and political persecution. Chapter 4 argues that a legal change in 2011 has left Chinese women with fewer inheritance rights to property than they had a thousand years ago, during the Song dynasty:
Whereas daughters in twenty-first century China have no recourse when their parents favour their brothers or male cousins in acquiring property, Song dynasty law a thousand years earlier provided an extraordinary range of state support for women's property rights, including the preservation of assets for underage girls as well as boys. [...]
Moreover, when in the Song dynasty women married, the law allowed them to keep their property indefinitely, including after divorce or widowhood. The speciail legal treatment of women in the Song state 'transmitted unprecedented assets through daughters and gave women unforeseen economic independence and mobility within marriage and beyond,' writes [historian of the period] Birge. [...]
In today's China, when some parents prefer to give money to their nephew rather than to their own daughter to buy a home, they are reverting back to the practice from the Ming dynasty, when, in the absence of sons, daughters had less of a claim to property than nephews.
The title of chapter two sums it up succinctly: 'How Chinese women were shut out of the biggest accumulation of real-estate wealth in history'. Later chapters also examine the implications of China having no specific laws that protect women and children from domestic violence, as well as the impact of gender inequality on queer people. The final chapter discusses resistance to gender inequality in China, organisation of which is stifled by the authoritarian regime. Fincher posits that the government pressures women to marry young, having children young, and subordinate themselves to men as a means of discouraging social upheaval and deal with the huge demographic gender imbalance created by the one child policy.
Throughout the book, points are argued using a combination of quantitative data where available (e.g. a survey found in 2010 that only one in fifteen single women in China owned their own home) with in-depth interviews undertaken by the author. Fincher skilfully brings out the themes in this qualitative data. I notice that a ten year anniversary edition of the book has been published with a new preface, which I'd be interested to read. My understanding from media reports is that political repression in China has increasingly incorporated surveillance technology in the decade since initial publication. China has also seen the disruption of prolonged and extremely strict covid lockdowns, as well as a continued fall in birth rates. I found Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China eye-opening and insightful, highly accessible yet based on rigorous academic research.
October 31, 2014
So angry. A table flipping inducing book.
March 30, 2019
This is a very good book that states the current issue on single women who are under pressure to get married. I believe, this issue is rising among many Asian societies, but not in the West(they must have overcome it already long ago). Asian traditions and cultures tend to incline to patriarchy and gender inequality, and this has led to issues of Asian women having one more big problem in their lives, additional to many others also related to gender inequality, which I dont want to list here. In Mongolia, this is a current issue as well, many young women, in their early 20s already feel pressured from the society the obligation to find someone "good" to marry and start a family. I wonder when will Asian societies overcome this patriarchal societal issue, like the Westerns did.
April 11, 2018
I absolutely loved this book and will never think about gender relations in China the same way. I was skeptical about gender equality there after my own experience, but Hong Fincher shows how much greater that disparity has become in the last decade since the property boom and new laws came into being. The book flowed well and was well organized. It was less about the leftover women themselves than what it would mean to be without a spouse in China or how women go into marriages so they can own property, yet it’s never really theirs. This is a quick read and one you won’t forget. Looking forward to her new book later this year.
Want to read
May 6, 2024Preface to tenth anniversary edition
Almost ten years after Leftover Women: The
Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China was first
published, I am glad to see an explosion in research
about the themes I first wrote about in my book. I feel
very fortunate that Bloomsbury is publishing this new,
tenth anniversary edition. As I finish the revisions to my
book in 2023, many of the trends I foresaw from 2011
to the book’s publication in 2014 have become even
more pronounced in China today, such as the deepening
of gender inequality and women’s growing
disenchantment with marriage. Over the years, many
Chinese women in their twenties and thirties have come
up to me after a talk or written messages to thank me
for writing my book, because they are able to see the
systemic problems behind their parents’ and society’s
intense pressure on them to marry and have a baby.
Ironically, the original edition of Leftover Women would
never have been written if China’s Foreign Ministry had
simply granted me a journalist visa. So I suppose I
should thank the Chinese government above all for
enabling the publication of this tenth anniversary edition.
I had been a long-time TV and radio journalist in
Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, as well as New York
and Washington DC. I loved my journalism career, won
industry awards such as the Sigma Delta Chi Award
from the Society of Professional Journalists for my
reporting on women’s issues in China, and was most
recently working in Washington for Voice of America,
which sponsored me for a second tour as Beijing
Correspondent in 2009. I was married and had two
young children at the time, but my husband, Mike
Forsythe, received his journalist visa first from Bloomberg
News. We waited a few months to see if my journalist
visa would come through, then decided to move to
Beijing on my husband’s visa over the summer, so our
children could start preschool at the beginning of the
2009 school year.
We found an apartment in Beijing’s Dongzhimen district
with the help of an energetic real-estate agent who was
also engaged to be married. She took me to look at
rental apartments and also shared stories with me about
her own search for a marital property to buy. As I
helped our family get settled in Beijing, the months
dragged on in my wait for a journalist visa to come
through from the Foreign Ministry so that I could legally
begin reporting in the country. When my wait
approached six months, I became increasingly anxious
that the Foreign Ministry would never actually give me
that journalist visa and I would be stuck in Beijing with
my husband, two children and no work permit. In 2009,
it was still rare for American journalists to be denied
visas but apparently, I was one of those who might not
get one because I already had a years-long—sometimes
critical—record of reporting in the country.
My mother, Beverly Hong Fincher (Hong Yuebi), came
to visit us over the New Year in Beijing while I was still
waiting for the journalist visa and she suggested that I
apply for a Ph.D. program at a university there. She is
a retired linguistics professor who grew up in the
Chinese community in Saigon, Vietnam; then she
received a BA at National Taiwan University and pursued
graduate studies in the United States, earning a Ph.D. in
Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington. My mother
took me with her on my first trip to Beijing when I was
three years old in 1971, after Henry Kissinger’s secret
talks with Premier Zhou Enlai had paved the way for US
President Richard Nixon’s landmark visit in 1972. She
raised me to speak Mandarin and I continued visiting
China during many childhood summers throughout the
1970s and 1980s. After finishing a BA at Harvard
University and an MA at Stanford University, I became a
journalist and reported in China for several American
news organizations from the late 1990s through to
2003.
At first, I thought my mother’s idea of doing a Ph.D.
at a university in Beijing was a non-starter. I had
thought on and off about doing a Ph.D. before, but it
had never seemed like a good time to disrupt my
journalism career. Now that I was in visa limbo in China,
I looked into Tsinghua University and Peking University’s
offerings and thought that sociology would be a good fit
for me, given my extensive experience as a journalist
writing about Chinese society. I applied and received a
full, four-year scholarship from the China Scholarship
Council to become the first American doctoral candidate
in sociology at Tsinghua University so I thought, why not
give it a try and see where it leads?
During my first semester in 2010, I took a graduate
seminar, “Sociology of Work,” co-taught by visiting UCLA
sociologist Ching Kwan Lee and Tsinghua University
sociology professor, Shen Yuan. For our final project, we
were supposed to write an ethnographic study of
workers. I was already fascinated by the young
real-estate agents gathered on every street corner
around our apartment compound from morning till night,
holding signs advertising deals on apartments, so I chose
to do an ethnography of some Beijing real-estate
agencies. That’s when I first noticed the prevalence of
traditional gender norms in home buying.
In one of my earliest, in-depth interviews with a female
real-estate agent, I was shocked to hear that she had
handed over her life savings to her boyfriend to help
him buy an apartment before their wedding, and that
the apartment was registered solely in his name. This
woman was extremely bright and I could not understand
why she thought it was a good idea to give away all
her hard-earned money before she even married the
boyfriend. Then, as I carried out more and more
interviews with women in their late twenties and early
thirties buying homes in preparation for marriage, the
same kind of story kept popping up. Why were these
college-educated, sharp and ambitious women willing to
give up their life savings just to marry some guy and
live in an apartment without their name on the deed?
Why didn’t they walk away from a blatantly unequal
relationship? Why did they feel that they had to get
married at all, especially if they were not totally happy
with the boyfriend?
In April 2011, I read a New York Times article, “For
Many Chinese Men, No Deed Means No Dates,” based
on a 2010 survey carried out by the All-China Women’s
Federation and other government groups of more than
30,000 people in thirty-one provinces. The New York
Times article said “more than 70 percent of single
women in a recent survey said they would tie the knot
only with a prospective husband who owned a home.”
The article provided a link to the survey (which has
since been removed from China’s internet) but it made
no mention of the survey’s descriptions of the
phenomenon of “leftover” women or shengnü (剩女);
and did not question the origins of
the survey, the sexist nature of its terminology, or the
motivations of the government in conducting and
publicizing the survey. Rather, the Times detailed how
Chinese women will supposedly stop at nothing to coerce
a man to give her a home before she agrees to marry.
“With such women on the prowl, even men who do not
have their own homes have come up with techniques to
weed out the covetous and the inordinately materialistic,”
said the article.
As I read through the government survey on “leftover”
women, I was filled with anger and a light bulb turned
on in my head: so this was why so many women
were anxious to marry. I decided to expand my
ethnography of real-estate agents into my final Ph.D.
dissertation and in November 2011, I wrote an op-ed
for Ms. Magazine, “China’s ‘Leftover’ Women,” about
my initial findings, including my own translations of the
Chinese government’s write-up of the survey, mocking
young, single women in “See What Category of
‘Leftover’ You Belong To.” I pointed to one Xinhua News
article about the survey, “China’s ‘leftover women’ unite
this Singles Day,” which said, “More than 90 percent of
men surveyed said women should marry before 27 to
avoid becoming unwanted.” The message to women: If
you want to stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ever
getting married in this country, don’t demand too much
from your man. My article went viral on the internet
and unleashed a torrent of English-language articles
about the phenomenon.
Li Yuan, who was Managing Editor of the Chinese
edition of the Wall Street Journal in Beijing at the time,
asked if she could publish a Chinese translation of my
Ms. Magazine op-ed and I said yes. The Wall Street
Journal’s Chinese edition was freely available to the
mainland Chinese public in 2011 (the Chinese
government blocked it in 2013). The Chinese translation
of my article, Zhongguo de shengnü chuanshuo
(中国的剩女传���), was published November 28, 2011,
and became the number one story on the Wall Street
Journal Chinese website, reaching tens of thousands of
readers through retweets and comments on Weibo. The
publication of my article for the mainland Chinese
audience dramatically broadened my Weibo dialogue with
women and men across China. Looking back now, it’s
incredible to think of how much more open society was
then. I had unfettered access as a Ph.D. candidate at
Tsinghua University to hundreds of young people for my
research, both face-to-face and through long dialogues
on Weibo’s private messages (before the group
messaging app WeChat took off). And my ideas were
able to be widely disseminated in
Chinese—uncensored—to the Chinese public.
As my Ph.D. research progressed, I wrote a new
op-ed on October 11, 2012, for the New York Times,
“China’s ‘Leftover’ Women,” which criticized the All-China
Women’s Federation for conducting a scaremongering
campaign against single, educated women. That, too,
was translated into Chinese on the New York Times
Chinese website, which was also still accessible to
Chinese netizens until the government blocked it on
October 25, 2012. In that article, I put forward for the
first time my argument that the “leftover” women
propaganda campaign was designed to upgrade China’s
“population quality” (
renkou suzhi) by frightening
educated women into marrying and having a baby for
the good of the nation.
The Chinese translation of my article was circulated on
Weibo and in December 2012, one woman retweeted it
on Weibo with the comment: “More and more, I believe
in the saying, ‘the Women’s Federation is an evil
organization’.” Her tweet (attached to my article) tagged
the Weibo handle of the All-China Women’s Federation
and was retweeted many hundreds of times, until the
Women’s Federation website suddenly—with no
explanation—deleted all of the columns I had criticized
because they promoted the “leftover” women term and
stigmatized single women.
At the time that I was doing interviews for my Ph.D.
from 2011 to 2013, I was often demoralized by how
many young women simply accepted unequal
relationships in marriage without a fight and I wished I
could urge them to walk away. In hindsight, I believe
that period marked a profound shift in women’s
consciousness, when college-educated, Han Chinese
women en masse were beginning to seriously question
their role in a deeply patriarchal society and whether
they wanted to marry or have children at all.
It seems extraordinary that just as I finished doing
interviews for the first edition in 2013, marriage
registrations also peaked in China and by 2022, the
marriage rate had fallen for eight consecutive years. The
birth rate has also plummeted and led to the Chinese
government’s announcement that the population shrank
in 2022 for the first time since the famine in the early
1960s under Mao Zedong’s catastrophic “Great Leap
Forward” campaign.
Most of what you need to understand why this seismic
demographic transformation has happened in China is
here in this thoroughly updated book: women vowing
never to marry; women saying they were miserable in
their relationships but feeling like they had to marry
anyway; young people increasingly identifying as
LGBTQ+.
I changed some of the language from the first edition,
which I described at the time as a possible outcome to
now documenting a proven, demographic trend. For
example, in the introduction to my book’s first edition, I
originally wrote this about Zhang Yu, a woman who was
twenty-six when I interviewed her in 2013:
“Zhang’s vow never to marry is rare in a country
where educated women are constantly told by their
families, friends and the state media that they will be
ostracized if they do not find a husband quickly. Yet if
women’s rights do not improve in China, more and
more women, like Zhang, may reject marriage
altogether.”
In this new edition, after telling Zhang Yu’s story, I
write:
Sure enough, in 2023, it has become increasingly
common for college-educated women to turn their backs
on marriage and child-rearing.
In Chapter 1 of the first edition, I originally wrote:
If Chinese women were to follow their sisters in
neighboring regions and reject marriage as well, it would
deal a devastating blow to the Chinese government’s
population planning goals.
In this new edition, I write:
As Chinese women increasingly follow their sisters in
neighboring countries and delay or reject marriage, they
are dealing a devastating blow to the Chinese
government’s population-planning goals.
In 2016, the Chinese publisher Lujiang came out with a
slightly censored version of my book for the mainland
Chinese audience. At the time, I was upset that the
publisher did not give me a chance to approve the
translated manuscript before publication, but it now
seems almost miraculous that the book—
beautifully translated by Li Xueshun—was published with
such light censorship in the mainland. It’s impossible to
imagine this book being published in China today, more
than a decade into Xi Jinping’s tenure as the Communist
Party’s general secretary.
Meanwhile, I worked on a follow-up book, which was
published by Verso in 2018: Betraying Big Brother: The
Feminist Awakening in China
, about the rise of feminist
activism and the government’s anti-feminist crackdown.
Both books focus on educated young women, just like
the many who were at the forefront of widespread
protests at the end of 2022 against the government’s
draconian “zero-covid” policies, which many people called
the “white-paper movement” for protesters’ use of blank
sheets of paper as a symbol of censorship and
repression.
I revised my book with the help of two wonderful
research assistants, Yi Liu and Yini He. Most of the
people interviewed here are referred to by pseudonyms,
a condition of the original research I carried out for my
Ph.D. thesis, and when I refer to a person’s age, it is
how old the person was at the time that I interviewed
them.
I hope you will find this tenth anniversary edition of
Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality
to be very enlightening about the state of women in
China today.
Leta Hong Fincher
January 29, 2023
Almost ten years after Leftover Women: The
Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China was first
published, I am glad to see an explosion in research
about the themes I first wrote about in my book. I feel
very fortunate that Bloomsbury is publishing this new,
tenth anniversary edition. As I finish the revisions to my
book in 2023, many of the trends I foresaw from 2011
to the book’s publication in 2014 have become even
more pronounced in China today, such as the deepening
of gender inequality and women’s growing
disenchantment with marriage. Over the years, many
Chinese women in their twenties and thirties have come
up to me after a talk or written messages to thank me
for writing my book, because they are able to see the
systemic problems behind their parents’ and society’s
intense pressure on them to marry and have a baby.
Ironically, the original edition of Leftover Women would
never have been written if China’s Foreign Ministry had
simply granted me a journalist visa. So I suppose I
should thank the Chinese government above all for
enabling the publication of this tenth anniversary edition.
I had been a long-time TV and radio journalist in
Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, as well as New York
and Washington DC. I loved my journalism career, won
industry awards such as the Sigma Delta Chi Award
from the Society of Professional Journalists for my
reporting on women’s issues in China, and was most
recently working in Washington for Voice of America,
which sponsored me for a second tour as Beijing
Correspondent in 2009. I was married and had two
young children at the time, but my husband, Mike
Forsythe, received his journalist visa first from Bloomberg
News. We waited a few months to see if my journalist
visa would come through, then decided to move to
Beijing on my husband’s visa over the summer, so our
children could start preschool at the beginning of the
2009 school year.
We found an apartment in Beijing’s Dongzhimen district
with the help of an energetic real-estate agent who was
also engaged to be married. She took me to look at
rental apartments and also shared stories with me about
her own search for a marital property to buy. As I
helped our family get settled in Beijing, the months
dragged on in my wait for a journalist visa to come
through from the Foreign Ministry so that I could legally
begin reporting in the country. When my wait
approached six months, I became increasingly anxious
that the Foreign Ministry would never actually give me
that journalist visa and I would be stuck in Beijing with
my husband, two children and no work permit. In 2009,
it was still rare for American journalists to be denied
visas but apparently, I was one of those who might not
get one because I already had a years-long—sometimes
critical—record of reporting in the country.
My mother, Beverly Hong Fincher (Hong Yuebi), came
to visit us over the New Year in Beijing while I was still
waiting for the journalist visa and she suggested that I
apply for a Ph.D. program at a university there. She is
a retired linguistics professor who grew up in the
Chinese community in Saigon, Vietnam; then she
received a BA at National Taiwan University and pursued
graduate studies in the United States, earning a Ph.D. in
Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington. My mother
took me with her on my first trip to Beijing when I was
three years old in 1971, after Henry Kissinger’s secret
talks with Premier Zhou Enlai had paved the way for US
President Richard Nixon’s landmark visit in 1972. She
raised me to speak Mandarin and I continued visiting
China during many childhood summers throughout the
1970s and 1980s. After finishing a BA at Harvard
University and an MA at Stanford University, I became a
journalist and reported in China for several American
news organizations from the late 1990s through to
2003.
At first, I thought my mother’s idea of doing a Ph.D.
at a university in Beijing was a non-starter. I had
thought on and off about doing a Ph.D. before, but it
had never seemed like a good time to disrupt my
journalism career. Now that I was in visa limbo in China,
I looked into Tsinghua University and Peking University’s
offerings and thought that sociology would be a good fit
for me, given my extensive experience as a journalist
writing about Chinese society. I applied and received a
full, four-year scholarship from the China Scholarship
Council to become the first American doctoral candidate
in sociology at Tsinghua University so I thought, why not
give it a try and see where it leads?
During my first semester in 2010, I took a graduate
seminar, “Sociology of Work,” co-taught by visiting UCLA
sociologist Ching Kwan Lee and Tsinghua University
sociology professor, Shen Yuan. For our final project, we
were supposed to write an ethnographic study of
workers. I was already fascinated by the young
real-estate agents gathered on every street corner
around our apartment compound from morning till night,
holding signs advertising deals on apartments, so I chose
to do an ethnography of some Beijing real-estate
agencies. That’s when I first noticed the prevalence of
traditional gender norms in home buying.
In one of my earliest, in-depth interviews with a female
real-estate agent, I was shocked to hear that she had
handed over her life savings to her boyfriend to help
him buy an apartment before their wedding, and that
the apartment was registered solely in his name. This
woman was extremely bright and I could not understand
why she thought it was a good idea to give away all
her hard-earned money before she even married the
boyfriend. Then, as I carried out more and more
interviews with women in their late twenties and early
thirties buying homes in preparation for marriage, the
same kind of story kept popping up. Why were these
college-educated, sharp and ambitious women willing to
give up their life savings just to marry some guy and
live in an apartment without their name on the deed?
Why didn’t they walk away from a blatantly unequal
relationship? Why did they feel that they had to get
married at all, especially if they were not totally happy
with the boyfriend?
In April 2011, I read a New York Times article, “For
Many Chinese Men, No Deed Means No Dates,” based
on a 2010 survey carried out by the All-China Women’s
Federation and other government groups of more than
30,000 people in thirty-one provinces. The New York
Times article said “more than 70 percent of single
women in a recent survey said they would tie the knot
only with a prospective husband who owned a home.”
The article provided a link to the survey (which has
since been removed from China’s internet) but it made
no mention of the survey’s descriptions of the
phenomenon of “leftover” women or shengnü (剩女);
and did not question the origins of
the survey, the sexist nature of its terminology, or the
motivations of the government in conducting and
publicizing the survey. Rather, the Times detailed how
Chinese women will supposedly stop at nothing to coerce
a man to give her a home before she agrees to marry.
“With such women on the prowl, even men who do not
have their own homes have come up with techniques to
weed out the covetous and the inordinately materialistic,”
said the article.
As I read through the government survey on “leftover”
women, I was filled with anger and a light bulb turned
on in my head: so this was why so many women
were anxious to marry. I decided to expand my
ethnography of real-estate agents into my final Ph.D.
dissertation and in November 2011, I wrote an op-ed
for Ms. Magazine, “China’s ‘Leftover’ Women,” about
my initial findings, including my own translations of the
Chinese government’s write-up of the survey, mocking
young, single women in “See What Category of
‘Leftover’ You Belong To.” I pointed to one Xinhua News
article about the survey, “China’s ‘leftover women’ unite
this Singles Day,” which said, “More than 90 percent of
men surveyed said women should marry before 27 to
avoid becoming unwanted.” The message to women: If
you want to stand a snowball’s chance in hell of ever
getting married in this country, don’t demand too much
from your man. My article went viral on the internet
and unleashed a torrent of English-language articles
about the phenomenon.
Li Yuan, who was Managing Editor of the Chinese
edition of the Wall Street Journal in Beijing at the time,
asked if she could publish a Chinese translation of my
Ms. Magazine op-ed and I said yes. The Wall Street
Journal’s Chinese edition was freely available to the
mainland Chinese public in 2011 (the Chinese
government blocked it in 2013). The Chinese translation
of my article, Zhongguo de shengnü chuanshuo
(中国的剩女传���), was published November 28, 2011,
and became the number one story on the Wall Street
Journal Chinese website, reaching tens of thousands of
readers through retweets and comments on Weibo. The
publication of my article for the mainland Chinese
audience dramatically broadened my Weibo dialogue with
women and men across China. Looking back now, it’s
incredible to think of how much more open society was
then. I had unfettered access as a Ph.D. candidate at
Tsinghua University to hundreds of young people for my
research, both face-to-face and through long dialogues
on Weibo’s private messages (before the group
messaging app WeChat took off). And my ideas were
able to be widely disseminated in
Chinese—uncensored—to the Chinese public.
As my Ph.D. research progressed, I wrote a new
op-ed on October 11, 2012, for the New York Times,
“China’s ‘Leftover’ Women,” which criticized the All-China
Women’s Federation for conducting a scaremongering
campaign against single, educated women. That, too,
was translated into Chinese on the New York Times
Chinese website, which was also still accessible to
Chinese netizens until the government blocked it on
October 25, 2012. In that article, I put forward for the
first time my argument that the “leftover” women
propaganda campaign was designed to upgrade China’s
“population quality” (
renkou suzhi) by frightening
educated women into marrying and having a baby for
the good of the nation.
The Chinese translation of my article was circulated on
Weibo and in December 2012, one woman retweeted it
on Weibo with the comment: “More and more, I believe
in the saying, ‘the Women’s Federation is an evil
organization’.” Her tweet (attached to my article) tagged
the Weibo handle of the All-China Women’s Federation
and was retweeted many hundreds of times, until the
Women’s Federation website suddenly—with no
explanation—deleted all of the columns I had criticized
because they promoted the “leftover” women term and
stigmatized single women.
At the time that I was doing interviews for my Ph.D.
from 2011 to 2013, I was often demoralized by how
many young women simply accepted unequal
relationships in marriage without a fight and I wished I
could urge them to walk away. In hindsight, I believe
that period marked a profound shift in women’s
consciousness, when college-educated, Han Chinese
women en masse were beginning to seriously question
their role in a deeply patriarchal society and whether
they wanted to marry or have children at all.
It seems extraordinary that just as I finished doing
interviews for the first edition in 2013, marriage
registrations also peaked in China and by 2022, the
marriage rate had fallen for eight consecutive years. The
birth rate has also plummeted and led to the Chinese
government’s announcement that the population shrank
in 2022 for the first time since the famine in the early
1960s under Mao Zedong’s catastrophic “Great Leap
Forward” campaign.
Most of what you need to understand why this seismic
demographic transformation has happened in China is
here in this thoroughly updated book: women vowing
never to marry; women saying they were miserable in
their relationships but feeling like they had to marry
anyway; young people increasingly identifying as
LGBTQ+.
I changed some of the language from the first edition,
which I described at the time as a possible outcome to
now documenting a proven, demographic trend. For
example, in the introduction to my book’s first edition, I
originally wrote this about Zhang Yu, a woman who was
twenty-six when I interviewed her in 2013:
“Zhang’s vow never to marry is rare in a country
where educated women are constantly told by their
families, friends and the state media that they will be
ostracized if they do not find a husband quickly. Yet if
women’s rights do not improve in China, more and
more women, like Zhang, may reject marriage
altogether.”
In this new edition, after telling Zhang Yu’s story, I
write:
Sure enough, in 2023, it has become increasingly
common for college-educated women to turn their backs
on marriage and child-rearing.
In Chapter 1 of the first edition, I originally wrote:
If Chinese women were to follow their sisters in
neighboring regions and reject marriage as well, it would
deal a devastating blow to the Chinese government’s
population planning goals.
In this new edition, I write:
As Chinese women increasingly follow their sisters in
neighboring countries and delay or reject marriage, they
are dealing a devastating blow to the Chinese
government’s population-planning goals.
In 2016, the Chinese publisher Lujiang came out with a
slightly censored version of my book for the mainland
Chinese audience. At the time, I was upset that the
publisher did not give me a chance to approve the
translated manuscript before publication, but it now
seems almost miraculous that the book—
beautifully translated by Li Xueshun—was published with
such light censorship in the mainland. It’s impossible to
imagine this book being published in China today, more
than a decade into Xi Jinping’s tenure as the Communist
Party’s general secretary.
Meanwhile, I worked on a follow-up book, which was
published by Verso in 2018: Betraying Big Brother: The
Feminist Awakening in China
, about the rise of feminist
activism and the government’s anti-feminist crackdown.
Both books focus on educated young women, just like
the many who were at the forefront of widespread
protests at the end of 2022 against the government’s
draconian “zero-covid” policies, which many people called
the “white-paper movement” for protesters’ use of blank
sheets of paper as a symbol of censorship and
repression.
I revised my book with the help of two wonderful
research assistants, Yi Liu and Yini He. Most of the
people interviewed here are referred to by pseudonyms,
a condition of the original research I carried out for my
Ph.D. thesis, and when I refer to a person’s age, it is
how old the person was at the time that I interviewed
them.
I hope you will find this tenth anniversary edition of
Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality
to be very enlightening about the state of women in
China today.
Leta Hong Fincher
January 29, 2023
Read
November 4, 2020Een tijd terug las ik Eileen Changs De Liefde van een Half Leven, een prachtig boek waar ik tegelijk woedend van werd. Centraal in het boek stond de spanningen tussen traditionele en moderne waarden, en met name de positie van de vrouw. Ik kon mijn woede verlichten door mezelf te vertellen dat het een schets was van een wereld die niet meer bestaat, dat het nu beter gaat.
En in de maoïstische periode zijn er wel degelijk stappen gezet naar meer gendergelijkheid, maar helaas blijken de traditionele (mogelijk Confucianistische?) waarden toch vast verankerd, en leven ze op in recente jaren.
Volgens Hong Fincher heeft dit allemaal te maken met geld en vastgoed: wie het geld verdient, maar veel belangrijker nog, wie het huis bezit, heeft de macht in het gezin. Haar betoog gaat lang niet over alle vrouwen: het zijn de rijke, hoogopgeleide vrouwen, degenen waarvan je zou verwachten dat ze de winnaars zijn in de samenleving. Maar zelfs zij kunnen niet op tegen een wereld waarin er verwacht wordt dat vrouwen voor hun 27e trouwen, dat ze gehoorzame echtgenotes zijn, dat het huis op naam van de man staat, ook al betaalt de vrouw of dier familie het meeste geld.
En de obsessie voor huisbezit onder jonge Chinezen is enorm groot. Het is het bewijs dat je degelijk middenklasse bent. Maar dit betekent dat vrouwen afhankelijk worden van hun partners, die het huis bezitten. Scheiden is gigantisch moeilijk, omdat dat in veel gevallen dakloosheid betekent. Deze afhankelijkheid betekent dat ze veel moeten dulden, ook geweld.
Erger nog is de volledige afzijdige houding die politiek, handhaving en samenleving heeft voor huiselijk geweld; Hong Fincher somt vele anekdotes op van vrouwen die zwaar mishandeld worden, zonder dat politie er iets aan doet, omdat het over een privéaangelegenheid gaat. Verkrachting binnen het huwelijk is eveneens niet illegaal, wat nog kwalijker wordt wanneer je bedenkt dat veel vrouwen door sociale druk gedwongen worden om te trouwen. Deze sociale druk is ook nog via staatsmedia gecreëerd om, volgens de auteur, het mannenoverschot niet uit te laten lopen tot een reden van sociale instabiliteit.
Toch zijn er lichtpuntjes die Hong Fincher aanstippelt, namelijk dat vrouwen vocaler worden in hun verzet. Zelf las ik deze week nog over de opkomende populariteit van vrouwelijke stand-up comedians, die veel kritiek over zich heen kregen wegens hun belachelijk maken van gendernormen.
Een boek dat misschien iets te veel leunt op anekdotes in plaats van statistiek, maar haar premisse lijkt redelijk sterk te staan. Het beschrijft een zorgelijke ontwikkeling wat meer aandacht verdient, zeker onder feministen.
En in de maoïstische periode zijn er wel degelijk stappen gezet naar meer gendergelijkheid, maar helaas blijken de traditionele (mogelijk Confucianistische?) waarden toch vast verankerd, en leven ze op in recente jaren.
Volgens Hong Fincher heeft dit allemaal te maken met geld en vastgoed: wie het geld verdient, maar veel belangrijker nog, wie het huis bezit, heeft de macht in het gezin. Haar betoog gaat lang niet over alle vrouwen: het zijn de rijke, hoogopgeleide vrouwen, degenen waarvan je zou verwachten dat ze de winnaars zijn in de samenleving. Maar zelfs zij kunnen niet op tegen een wereld waarin er verwacht wordt dat vrouwen voor hun 27e trouwen, dat ze gehoorzame echtgenotes zijn, dat het huis op naam van de man staat, ook al betaalt de vrouw of dier familie het meeste geld.
En de obsessie voor huisbezit onder jonge Chinezen is enorm groot. Het is het bewijs dat je degelijk middenklasse bent. Maar dit betekent dat vrouwen afhankelijk worden van hun partners, die het huis bezitten. Scheiden is gigantisch moeilijk, omdat dat in veel gevallen dakloosheid betekent. Deze afhankelijkheid betekent dat ze veel moeten dulden, ook geweld.
Erger nog is de volledige afzijdige houding die politiek, handhaving en samenleving heeft voor huiselijk geweld; Hong Fincher somt vele anekdotes op van vrouwen die zwaar mishandeld worden, zonder dat politie er iets aan doet, omdat het over een privéaangelegenheid gaat. Verkrachting binnen het huwelijk is eveneens niet illegaal, wat nog kwalijker wordt wanneer je bedenkt dat veel vrouwen door sociale druk gedwongen worden om te trouwen. Deze sociale druk is ook nog via staatsmedia gecreëerd om, volgens de auteur, het mannenoverschot niet uit te laten lopen tot een reden van sociale instabiliteit.
Toch zijn er lichtpuntjes die Hong Fincher aanstippelt, namelijk dat vrouwen vocaler worden in hun verzet. Zelf las ik deze week nog over de opkomende populariteit van vrouwelijke stand-up comedians, die veel kritiek over zich heen kregen wegens hun belachelijk maken van gendernormen.
Een boek dat misschien iets te veel leunt op anekdotes in plaats van statistiek, maar haar premisse lijkt redelijk sterk te staan. Het beschrijft een zorgelijke ontwikkeling wat meer aandacht verdient, zeker onder feministen.
April 30, 2014
This is definitely a four star book! Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Equality in China by Leta Hong Fincher makes me think of the 1950s in the United States. That was when women were encouraged to be home and take care of the family, instead of competing with men for a high paying jobs. Even though they had proved their ability by putting together airplanes and ships, they were suddenly relegated to the kitchen, to take care of the children and to keep their husbands happy.
This was a big step backwards for women's equality. But in China, this step backwards is a much bigger step, a more dangerous step.
Leta Hong Flincher proves her point about the "sheng nu" or leftover women in China's current society. There is a tremendous pressure to get married while you are still in your child bearing years. In China, only the man's name is on the bank account and on the registration for the house. There is much more pressure to buy a house than here. That pressure is from family and friends but also by the government campaigns. And those campaigns are not limited to that one area.
The Leftover Women are those unmarried women or in our culture, "old maid". They can be only twenty-five years or older, vibrant and intelligent professional women but they are portrayed as dried up old women. There is tremendous pressure to not be a leftover woman.
What does the extraordinary real estate boom, the consequences of the one child policy and the government non acceptance of lesbians and gays have to do with this backwards slide? The author did two and a half years of care research and found out how this is happening.
The writing style is clear and easy to read although just a bit repetitive. I had visited China back in 1998 and think this is a clear change from the way it was then. I highly recommend this book to all who are interested in China.
I received this advance reading copy as a win from FirstReads but that in no way influenced my thoughts or feelings in my review.
November 24, 2014
A sobering and fascinating look at gender dynamics in present day China. It is absolutely amazing to me how people can be pressured into doing things that blatantly go against their own self interest thanks for governmental, family and media influence. This book reminds me yet again about the major differences between China and the West and makes me doubly appreciate living in the United States. Written in a clear way appropriate for both scholars and non-scholars alike, Leftover Women was a relatively quick and interesting read. Note: I received this book through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers Program.
October 1, 2016
I learned some few things, but this book - which seems to be a PhD dissertation - reads like one.
September 16, 2019
似乎以房产拥有情况讨论性别不平等，中间还掺杂了一位给人按摩还是做什么的女性，犯的问题都是文化旁观者抵不住诱惑，将有趣的见闻都杂糅进有限的主题中。
不过感觉作者同主题的博士毕业论文是国际化剩女研究的开山之作，所以尽管有瑕疵，在婚姻、家庭领域依然有较大的影响力。
不过感觉作者同主题的博士毕业论文是国际化剩女研究的开山之作，所以尽管有瑕疵，在婚姻、家庭领域依然有较大的影响力。
June 22, 2020
I read this after reading Betraying Big Brother also by Leta Hong-Fincher, as it's one of my favourite non fiction books, about an area I previously knew very little about. I don't think it is clear from the blurb, but this book is mostly about real estate in China and how the gender division of this is both a problem in itself and indicative of the larger problem of a resurgence of gender inequality in China. Overall, very accessible and interesting, well worth the read, particularly if this is an area you're just starting to learn about!
May 9, 2019
I had to read this for class (all I read nowadays is for school) and it was clear enough, but it was 100 pages too long.
May 3, 2021
Very interesting and depressing read about the womans rights struggle in china.
July 30, 2024
Concise, eye opening and confronting
February 8, 2018
I really wanted to love this book - in the Venn diagram of women's rights and contemporary China I am firmly in the middle. There were several aspects that held me back, and would have likely deterred someone with less of an aggressive enthusiasm for the subject matter.
The text is not about the resurgence of gender inequality in China as much as it is about specific ways in which a particular subset of women in China are being commodified and denied rights. These are urban, affluent, educated, and assumedly (although this is not mentioned) Han women. Leta Hong Fincher's overarching narrative, albeit unclear at times, is that such women are desired as suitable mothers to future populations by the Party, and as such the furious propaganda efforts that created the concept of 'Leftover Women' causes them to feel intense pressure to marry and have children. She goes on to discuss at length the way in which women often don't include their names on houses purchased with their husbands, and as such are denied legal protection. I couldn't help but feel that this is somewhat of a privileged scenario for many. The book does go into the unique struggle for lesbian and bisexual women, which was great, but where were the minority women, or the rural women, or the women in urban areas who couldn't afford to go to university? They form a critical part of the picture of gender inequality in contemporary China, too. It took quite a specific gaze in a way that was quite repetitive at times, as mentioned in other reviews. The book at times read like a thesis, which is what it was, at one point.
The best part of the book is the smattering of personal testimonies by young Chinese women, although I felt these could have been organised more clearly. I also really enjoyed the way that Hong Fincher examines the way that the Party utilises female bodies through the lens of biopolitics, although I felt this deserved to be fleshed out more, particularly considering how much attention was given to a discussion of housing prices in Chinese first tier cities.
All in all, it's a good not great, which may come down to my interest in the area more than anything.
The text is not about the resurgence of gender inequality in China as much as it is about specific ways in which a particular subset of women in China are being commodified and denied rights. These are urban, affluent, educated, and assumedly (although this is not mentioned) Han women. Leta Hong Fincher's overarching narrative, albeit unclear at times, is that such women are desired as suitable mothers to future populations by the Party, and as such the furious propaganda efforts that created the concept of 'Leftover Women' causes them to feel intense pressure to marry and have children. She goes on to discuss at length the way in which women often don't include their names on houses purchased with their husbands, and as such are denied legal protection. I couldn't help but feel that this is somewhat of a privileged scenario for many. The book does go into the unique struggle for lesbian and bisexual women, which was great, but where were the minority women, or the rural women, or the women in urban areas who couldn't afford to go to university? They form a critical part of the picture of gender inequality in contemporary China, too. It took quite a specific gaze in a way that was quite repetitive at times, as mentioned in other reviews. The book at times read like a thesis, which is what it was, at one point.
The best part of the book is the smattering of personal testimonies by young Chinese women, although I felt these could have been organised more clearly. I also really enjoyed the way that Hong Fincher examines the way that the Party utilises female bodies through the lens of biopolitics, although I felt this deserved to be fleshed out more, particularly considering how much attention was given to a discussion of housing prices in Chinese first tier cities.
All in all, it's a good not great, which may come down to my interest in the area more than anything.
November 10, 2017
Fincher's Leftover Women offers a rare insight into China's perennially overlooked problem of gender inequality, manifested in the most representative phenomenon of shengnv or "leftover women", a derogatory term which, according to Fincher, referred an urban, professional female in her late twenties or older who are still single -- a definition, albeit not perfectly comprehensive, did encompass most of the problems entailed.
The book relies predominantly on interview transcripts, news reports, as well as social media contents that were relevant to the topic. As such, the overall credibility of the book shouldn't be questioned -- this, as a firsthand witness of many of the events described, I can verify that as much as Fincher attempted to dramatize the situation, she didn't fabricate or overly exaggerate any of those listed in the book.
For the past 2 or so decades, it seems that media focus on China's meteoric rise has concentrated primarily on its economic spectrum; and while attentions were paid to many of the social challenges China has been facing, very few regards were put to the growing tension of gender inequality. Fincher demonstrated that, while China's contemporary obsession of persuading women into marriage at all cost and discouraging females from pursuing higher career goals has its root in Chinese traditions and people's mindset, it also corresponds with China's looming demographic disaster as a result of the prolonged One-Child Policy. More significantly, the subjugation of women corresponds to the level of economic freedom they enjoy, which couldn't be better manifested other than their ownership of properties in the ever-booming real estate market of China. This is indeed a quite novel perspective of looking at the problem, although I do find this particular part of discussion, namely Chapter 2, failed to establish concrete causal relationships between Chinese women's attitude towards marriage and their lack of presence in the profit-hunting process of the real estate mania. Fincher seemed to progress towards two different themes, the social phenomenon of shengnv and women's property rights and subsequent consequences, while trying to form some self-evident connections between the two. This at large does sound reasonable, but the book fall short once the reader looks closer into the chapters for details and evidences.
Fincher's observation of contemporary Chinese society was sharp and incisive, she pressed the poignant issue of widespread gender inequality frequently without downgrading to repetitive emotional ramblings or redundant anecdotes. The tone set in the book was amazingly neutral and analytical, which made the otherwise sentimental topic much more readable. The dozens of stories revolving around chapters were truthful and representative; particularly worth mentioning was Fincher's highlight of China's slowly-maturing LGBT movements within the larger context of gender rights, which was seldom covered by western authors and journalists.
Although a fairly short book, the contents were highly relevant to the challenging reality of China's contemporary feminism and various other civil right movements. Fincher deserves the praise she received over the past few years, as the awareness she helped raise has then gained quite some momentum not only in China, but across Asia. Personally, I believe the book could also serve as an awakening call for many Chinese youths whose lives have not yet been disturbed by the dark reality of marriage and gender inequality.
The book relies predominantly on interview transcripts, news reports, as well as social media contents that were relevant to the topic. As such, the overall credibility of the book shouldn't be questioned -- this, as a firsthand witness of many of the events described, I can verify that as much as Fincher attempted to dramatize the situation, she didn't fabricate or overly exaggerate any of those listed in the book.
For the past 2 or so decades, it seems that media focus on China's meteoric rise has concentrated primarily on its economic spectrum; and while attentions were paid to many of the social challenges China has been facing, very few regards were put to the growing tension of gender inequality. Fincher demonstrated that, while China's contemporary obsession of persuading women into marriage at all cost and discouraging females from pursuing higher career goals has its root in Chinese traditions and people's mindset, it also corresponds with China's looming demographic disaster as a result of the prolonged One-Child Policy. More significantly, the subjugation of women corresponds to the level of economic freedom they enjoy, which couldn't be better manifested other than their ownership of properties in the ever-booming real estate market of China. This is indeed a quite novel perspective of looking at the problem, although I do find this particular part of discussion, namely Chapter 2, failed to establish concrete causal relationships between Chinese women's attitude towards marriage and their lack of presence in the profit-hunting process of the real estate mania. Fincher seemed to progress towards two different themes, the social phenomenon of shengnv and women's property rights and subsequent consequences, while trying to form some self-evident connections between the two. This at large does sound reasonable, but the book fall short once the reader looks closer into the chapters for details and evidences.
Fincher's observation of contemporary Chinese society was sharp and incisive, she pressed the poignant issue of widespread gender inequality frequently without downgrading to repetitive emotional ramblings or redundant anecdotes. The tone set in the book was amazingly neutral and analytical, which made the otherwise sentimental topic much more readable. The dozens of stories revolving around chapters were truthful and representative; particularly worth mentioning was Fincher's highlight of China's slowly-maturing LGBT movements within the larger context of gender rights, which was seldom covered by western authors and journalists.
Although a fairly short book, the contents were highly relevant to the challenging reality of China's contemporary feminism and various other civil right movements. Fincher deserves the praise she received over the past few years, as the awareness she helped raise has then gained quite some momentum not only in China, but across Asia. Personally, I believe the book could also serve as an awakening call for many Chinese youths whose lives have not yet been disturbed by the dark reality of marriage and gender inequality.
April 2, 2016
An important book. Offering a close look at the real estate boom and how property rights are practiced, Leta Hong Fincher offers a comprehensive overview of the ways women's rights are undermined today in post-socialist China. It's hard to read without feeling overwhelmed by outrage by the constant discrimination women face. Hong Fincher clearly documents how the forces of the market economy, the authoritarian state, and old-fashioned patriarchy converge to undermine women's autonomy, support male power, and maintain compulsory heterosexuality. She clearly shows the institutional nature of women's oppression, such as in the lack of protections from abuse and in the case of divorce. I appreciated that her discussion touched on the lives of lesbians and gay men, in addition to heterosexuals. Her prose is very readable, and the inclusion of ample real-life examples and direct quotes adds to the urgent and persuasive nature of the narrative. Her writing does, at times, feels slightly repetitive; some sentences that offer glimpses into future chapters crop up later with very similar wording. Overall, it was an excellent read that I would definitely recommend to anyone interested in women's rights.
NOTE: I received a free advance reader's copy of the book through Goodreads' First Reads program.
NOTE: I received a free advance reader's copy of the book through Goodreads' First Reads program.
November 16, 2023
Loved reading this book. It hit close to home as I am also an adoptive mother of a daughter from China. The stereotype of the clueless white mother with a white savior complex was a bit trite. It did however, showcase how naive many Americans were when first adopting. Satisfying themselves with the fact our daughters were abandoned, when now we know so many babies were actually taken and put up and put in orphanages - either by the fathers or grandparents and sometimes the government. The desire for a son was real. The book does a nice job showcasing the sense of loss and abandonment many if not most adoptees feel and the grief of not knowing why. The book does show the power of a mothers love, both the biological and the adoptive mother
August 1, 2018
Very very insightful book. I've learned a lot just going through it and rereading sections at a time to more efficiently consume all of the information within this book. Prior to reading this, I've had a general idea the concept of "Leftover Women" and have gone to art exhibits in the past that have touched on the idea of "Leftover Women" but never to this extent.
I will definitely come back to read this text again and possibly want to dive into more texts revolving the realm of feminism and activism within China and in Asia in general.
I will definitely come back to read this text again and possibly want to dive into more texts revolving the realm of feminism and activism within China and in Asia in general.
July 11, 2016
A lot of interesting ideas, statistics, and stories in here, but it ended up being much more about women's property rights than I had expected. I appreciated the chapter on LGBTQ Chinese, though.
November 8, 2019
4.5
Eye-opening and infuriating.
Eye-opening and infuriating.
June 9, 2019
Through ‘Leftover Women’, Leta Hong Fincher shares an important message and she deserves credit for this, but I have several problems with the book itself.
Firstly — and I say this while I understand that gathering quantitative research data about China is difficult — this book takes cherry-picking to the extreme. This is not so much about the women of China, but rather about the select number of women who replied to the author’s Weibo post — a group of around three hundred.
The author politicize their quotes and leads it all back to society’s stigmatization of leftover women — even when the respondents don’t clearly mention it. One women said she quit her job to become more appealing for marriage — which the author uses to prove that government propaganda causes highly educated women to quit their jobs. There is no question about how rare this case is or not. Women quoted saying they want to marry and have kids are also labelled ‘pressured by society’. I understand that dissecting culture is a messy, if not impossible job — but this is careless.
And it’s this bias that is felt throughout the book: Regulations that changed in women’s favor are questioned or belittled, but the regulations that work against women never get this same treatment — making the whole book feel extremely one-sided from the start.
There’s actually just one chapter about the stigma of leftover women, and it doesn’t run that deep. Two chapters are about home ownership (whereas one would have been enough), and the last two feel like random notes added to push the book to 200 pages.
One chapter consists of history; but what’s the point of comparing China 1,000 years ago to now? Again, the evidence is extremely anecdotal, covering dozens of centuries by a few excerpts from books. The other chapter is about LGBT rights, which feels slightly random and biased too.
A final annoyance for me; if you’re going to parade your Chinese skills and add pinyin words every now and then, at least do it well and add the tones.
It is clear that to be a woman in China comes with many difficulties and reading the book it angers me how unfair women are treated. There’s no doubt on my mind that it is important to share this with the world. But to me the shallowness and bias of the book don’t help. To convince others of the importance, we need strong and realistic evidence that speaks for itself. It is exactly in this where the book ‘Leftover women’ fails.
Firstly — and I say this while I understand that gathering quantitative research data about China is difficult — this book takes cherry-picking to the extreme. This is not so much about the women of China, but rather about the select number of women who replied to the author’s Weibo post — a group of around three hundred.
The author politicize their quotes and leads it all back to society’s stigmatization of leftover women — even when the respondents don’t clearly mention it. One women said she quit her job to become more appealing for marriage — which the author uses to prove that government propaganda causes highly educated women to quit their jobs. There is no question about how rare this case is or not. Women quoted saying they want to marry and have kids are also labelled ‘pressured by society’. I understand that dissecting culture is a messy, if not impossible job — but this is careless.
And it’s this bias that is felt throughout the book: Regulations that changed in women’s favor are questioned or belittled, but the regulations that work against women never get this same treatment — making the whole book feel extremely one-sided from the start.
There’s actually just one chapter about the stigma of leftover women, and it doesn’t run that deep. Two chapters are about home ownership (whereas one would have been enough), and the last two feel like random notes added to push the book to 200 pages.
One chapter consists of history; but what’s the point of comparing China 1,000 years ago to now? Again, the evidence is extremely anecdotal, covering dozens of centuries by a few excerpts from books. The other chapter is about LGBT rights, which feels slightly random and biased too.
A final annoyance for me; if you’re going to parade your Chinese skills and add pinyin words every now and then, at least do it well and add the tones.
It is clear that to be a woman in China comes with many difficulties and reading the book it angers me how unfair women are treated. There’s no doubt on my mind that it is important to share this with the world. But to me the shallowness and bias of the book don’t help. To convince others of the importance, we need strong and realistic evidence that speaks for itself. It is exactly in this where the book ‘Leftover women’ fails.
November 8, 2022
Leftover Women is an excellent book about the way the government of China restricts women's lives. It was written in 2013 but I suspect that conditions are worse, not better, as they are for most Chinese people. In a retreat from the expressed though not always realized ideal of promoting women's equality with men, the Supreme Court a decade ago ruled that real property belongs only to the person whose name is on the deed. The only name is almost always the man's. That restriction is particularly critical because most wealth in China is in real estate and the value of real property has escalated since 2000, lifting many urban property owners into or above the middle class.
As well as studying government and private statistics, Hong Fincher interviewed many Chinese women and men. She learned that even when the woman's family or the woman herself provides much of the money for a house purchase, only the man's name goes on the deed. Most women accept that as his due, but many women want their name included and are pressured to acquiesce. This leaves them vulnerable to losing all stake in the property in divorce and to therefore submitting to domestic violence. Hong Fincher has a whole chapter on domestic violence. The police and the courts almost never support abused women.
Moreover, as more women got advanced degrees and earned more money, the government, including official women's organizations, began a campaign to stigmatize women over age 27 as "leftover women" who need to rush to enter marriages even with men they don't want or risk being spinsters. Women have been derided for wanting a man who is as educated as they are or wanting to find a man they can love. This tactic unfortunately works. Why is the government doing that? Because there is a surplus of "leftover" men, not women, due to the one child policy that was in effect for many years. And because government officials believe that married people are less likely to care about politics and challenge state policy.
Hong Fincher also looks at how these policies affect lesbians and has a chapter on the few but impressive feminist activists.
Leftover Women is easily readable although it presents a wealth of information.
As well as studying government and private statistics, Hong Fincher interviewed many Chinese women and men. She learned that even when the woman's family or the woman herself provides much of the money for a house purchase, only the man's name goes on the deed. Most women accept that as his due, but many women want their name included and are pressured to acquiesce. This leaves them vulnerable to losing all stake in the property in divorce and to therefore submitting to domestic violence. Hong Fincher has a whole chapter on domestic violence. The police and the courts almost never support abused women.
Moreover, as more women got advanced degrees and earned more money, the government, including official women's organizations, began a campaign to stigmatize women over age 27 as "leftover women" who need to rush to enter marriages even with men they don't want or risk being spinsters. Women have been derided for wanting a man who is as educated as they are or wanting to find a man they can love. This tactic unfortunately works. Why is the government doing that? Because there is a surplus of "leftover" men, not women, due to the one child policy that was in effect for many years. And because government officials believe that married people are less likely to care about politics and challenge state policy.
Hong Fincher also looks at how these policies affect lesbians and has a chapter on the few but impressive feminist activists.
Leftover Women is easily readable although it presents a wealth of information.
January 21, 2024
This is an interesting and rather depressing book on what happens when a society does not provide basic safety nets to its vulnerable population (policies such as social security, pensions, rule of law, legal protections for equality etc that bolster individual autonomy). The result is that women have to succumb to patriarchy and are pressured in all sorts of ways to stay in unequal, unhappy, sometimes even abusive marriages in order to survive. It poses an interesting contrast to the philosophy embraced by Nordic countries The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life.
The book makes an interesting point that the government's efforts to bolster artificially inflated property prices was one way to keep people politically quiescent. When the state propaganda blares about how property ownership is essential for marriage and adulthood, young people are pressured to aspire to home ownership and work tirelessly to pay for it, thereby supporting the economy and sapping them of energy to cause trouble otherwise. And once they have reached that coveted goal, they have a stake in maintaining stability since they have bought into the system. However, that bargain may be reaching its end as the property market is shaking, and young people, facing more dismal job prospects than before, are despairing of ever reaching that kind of middle-class life. We can see similar parallels in the West, where the capitalist-consumerist white-collar lifestyle of working hard so to have disposable income to spend, kept people tethered on a tolerable hamster wheel unhappily. We are careening into an unpredictable future, which is not reassuring at all.
The book makes an interesting point that the government's efforts to bolster artificially inflated property prices was one way to keep people politically quiescent. When the state propaganda blares about how property ownership is essential for marriage and adulthood, young people are pressured to aspire to home ownership and work tirelessly to pay for it, thereby supporting the economy and sapping them of energy to cause trouble otherwise. And once they have reached that coveted goal, they have a stake in maintaining stability since they have bought into the system. However, that bargain may be reaching its end as the property market is shaking, and young people, facing more dismal job prospects than before, are despairing of ever reaching that kind of middle-class life. We can see similar parallels in the West, where the capitalist-consumerist white-collar lifestyle of working hard so to have disposable income to spend, kept people tethered on a tolerable hamster wheel unhappily. We are careening into an unpredictable future, which is not reassuring at all.
December 22, 2023
A fascinating but frustrating and depressing read to understand some of the values/thoughts of the world my parents (and our current relatives) grew up in and feeling incredibly lucky as an asian female to not have been brought up in that environment or with the pressures women have currently in China.
It's horrible to know that the concept of 神女 is really just propaganda to instill a sense of insecurity in women to maintain social security and population control. The level of surveillance and media control is shocking
It's shocking that so many women don't have their names on property deeds when they've contributed money and unpaid labor to their marriages and how husbands and their families can hold that over their heads. I can come to understand the difficulty then of my mum in raising us, especially with the presence of my paternal grandparents.
A frustrating read because as an Australian born Chinese, the heavily ingrained importance of filial piety in Chinese culture always seemed extreme to me, and this book just highlights that? with in-laws having so much say in a marriage/relationship
The fact that there were no domestic violence laws and marital rape laws at the time of writing of this book is also appalling? Especially when women are being rushed into marriages for fear of becoming unwanted, when their giving up their life savings for property they don't have a name to and to enter into potential abusive environments
It's horrible to know that the concept of 神女 is really just propaganda to instill a sense of insecurity in women to maintain social security and population control. The level of surveillance and media control is shocking
It's shocking that so many women don't have their names on property deeds when they've contributed money and unpaid labor to their marriages and how husbands and their families can hold that over their heads. I can come to understand the difficulty then of my mum in raising us, especially with the presence of my paternal grandparents.
A frustrating read because as an Australian born Chinese, the heavily ingrained importance of filial piety in Chinese culture always seemed extreme to me, and this book just highlights that? with in-laws having so much say in a marriage/relationship
The fact that there were no domestic violence laws and marital rape laws at the time of writing of this book is also appalling? Especially when women are being rushed into marriages for fear of becoming unwanted, when their giving up their life savings for property they don't have a name to and to enter into potential abusive environments
July 15, 2021
An interesting and important look on gender inequality in contemporary China. Unfortunately, despite Hong Fincher being a former a journalist, this book reads more like a dissertation.
This is not an overlook at women's rights in China, it looks at a very specific group of women (urban, well-educated), which is stated early on in the book. The great thing about this is that it does give a deeper understanding of the problems facing this group. It focused a lot more on property rights than I expected, which is really interesting to highlight and did learn a lot from this.
Throughtout the book, Hong Fincher collects stories and quotes of women that she has met or chatted to over Weibo; they tell of the pressure that they constantly have to fight off and the sexist behaviours they encounter from family, work, their husbands, and the state - these stories are the stronghold of this entire book and makes the book more compelling to read. Some of Hong Finchers arguments are a bit tenuous and narrow, lacking some sufficient supportive evidence. The chapter on intimate partner violence was a harrowing read and definitely lifted up my rating of this book that was getting close to 2.5 stars.
It was interesting, but in comparison to a lot of nonfiction that I've read on women and gender in China, this didn't deliver fully.
This is not an overlook at women's rights in China, it looks at a very specific group of women (urban, well-educated), which is stated early on in the book. The great thing about this is that it does give a deeper understanding of the problems facing this group. It focused a lot more on property rights than I expected, which is really interesting to highlight and did learn a lot from this.
Throughtout the book, Hong Fincher collects stories and quotes of women that she has met or chatted to over Weibo; they tell of the pressure that they constantly have to fight off and the sexist behaviours they encounter from family, work, their husbands, and the state - these stories are the stronghold of this entire book and makes the book more compelling to read. Some of Hong Finchers arguments are a bit tenuous and narrow, lacking some sufficient supportive evidence. The chapter on intimate partner violence was a harrowing read and definitely lifted up my rating of this book that was getting close to 2.5 stars.
It was interesting, but in comparison to a lot of nonfiction that I've read on women and gender in China, this didn't deliver fully.
May 10, 2021
3.5. I think this is a good introductory book to the topic of Leftover Women and gender inequality in China. The book is divided clearly into 6 different chapters, covering the ideology of Leftover Women, its use by the state media, property rights of women in China, gender wealth gap, the history of women in China, abuse and a conclusion with the women's rights groups in China. Hong-Fincher adopts a journalistic tone in her writing. She has also included the queer community into the topic which is a good start to intersectionality in gender inequality.
The book was published in 2014 with Hong-Fincher conducting her own research like surveys on Weibo and in-person interviews in 2012. I'm not sure if the findings are still relevant today (2021) or if the laws have changed (even a little) but Hong-Fincher mentioned Leftover Women in her 2018 book, Betraying Big Brother, which was how I found out about this book. Having read both books, I see similarities in the books and Leftover Women can get a bit long-winded and repetitive at times, especially the chapter on property rights and the booming property market in China. However, I recommend this book as it's a great introduction to the traditional and longstanding patriarchal system and values in Chinese culture.
(CW: Misogyny & domestic abuse/violence.)
The book was published in 2014 with Hong-Fincher conducting her own research like surveys on Weibo and in-person interviews in 2012. I'm not sure if the findings are still relevant today (2021) or if the laws have changed (even a little) but Hong-Fincher mentioned Leftover Women in her 2018 book, Betraying Big Brother, which was how I found out about this book. Having read both books, I see similarities in the books and Leftover Women can get a bit long-winded and repetitive at times, especially the chapter on property rights and the booming property market in China. However, I recommend this book as it's a great introduction to the traditional and longstanding patriarchal system and values in Chinese culture.
(CW: Misogyny & domestic abuse/violence.)
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