1 Research Methods

This chapter is based on a longitudinal mixed methods project, drawing on surveys of 406 respondents in 1999, 2012–13, and 2014–15, on interviews and surveys conducted with a representative sample of 48 of the respondents between 2012 and 2019, and on participant observation that Fong conducted with the respondents and others in their neighborhoods in Dalian, between 1997 and 2019 (for more details about our survey and interview research methods and sample, see Kim, Brown, and Fong 2017, 2018; Kim, Brown, Kim, and Fong 2018). Our survey respondents (n = 406) were on average 30 years old in 2014, and 96 percent of them had no siblings.

From 1998 to 2000, Fong carried out participant observation among the survey respondents in this study (who were then in either eighth or ninth grade), among students at a nearby vocational high school and a nearby college-prep high school, and among the friends, families, and neighbors of these students and survey respondents. Fong also visited some of them in China almost every summer between 2002 and 2019 and visited some of them outside of China between 2003 and 2019 (Fong 2011). In addition, each summer between 2008 and 2014, Fong organized homeroom reunions in Dalian for all survey respondents who were willing to attend, and encouraged them to bring their girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses, and children. The reunions were organized not only for the survey respondents this chapter focuses on, but also for alumni of the vocational high school and the college-prep high school who had also been part of Fong’s longitudinal study since 1998. Fong lived with research participants’ families and participated in many of their social activitiesm including weddings, parties, meals, and even a few first dates to which some of the couple’s friends, including Fong, were invited so as to reduce the awkwardness of the date. Our surveys and interviews are drawn only from the middle school alumni because they had the highest response rates and because they had the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics most similar to those of the overall same-age population of Dalian. However, the study also draws on Fong’s participant observation among the much larger community.

The first wave of surveys was collected in 1999 when Fong taught English and conducted participant observation between 1998 and 2000 at our respondents’ middle school as well as at a vocational high school and a college-prep high school in the same city, and in the homes and at social gatherings of some of the survey respondents and their families, friends, neighbors, and classmates from 1998 to 2000, during the summers of 1997, 2002, 2014, and 2018, and every summer between 2004 and 2012 (Fong 2004, 2011; Kim, Brown, and Fong 2017, 2018). The middle school from which our respondents were originally recruited was purposively selected because it included proportions of various groups defined by socioeconomic status, demographics, and levels of academic achievement that were similar to those of the middle-school population of Dalian City at that time. This chapter draws on the surveys of the 406 who responded to the 1999 survey when they were in eighth or ninth grade, and to the 2012–13 survey as well as to the 2014–15 survey and were living in Dalian and had not spent more than one month outside of China when they responded to the 2012–13 survey. Our survey data analyses exclude those who at the time they completed the 2012–13 survey were living elsewhere in China instead of Dalian or were living in other countries, had spent more than a month abroad, and/or had not responded to questions about where they were living or how much time they had spent abroad, because the diversity of experiences and expectations they may have had in other Chinese cities or in other countries (Fong 2011) could skew the findings about the 406 of the former classmates who at the time they completed the 2012–13 survey were living in Dalian and had not left China for more than one month. Although Fong designed and conducted the 1999 survey on her own, Fong, Zhang, and Kim worked together on the research design beginning in 2012 and Fong, Ko, Kim, and Zhang collaborated on the data analysis, writing, and revision process for this chapter.

2 Remaining Unmarried through the Age of 27

Among respondents to our 2014–15 survey, 56 percent of men (n=202) and 52 percent of women (n=204) were divorced, married when they were 28 years old or older, or had never married (see Figures 3.1 and 3.2), and the mean age at which those who were married reported the year in which they first legally married was 27 for both men and women. The actual percentage of those who had remained unmarried through the age of 27 is probably even higher, as 5 percent of married women and 14 percent of married men did not indicate what year their current marriage had started. Even though we know that they were married by age 28–33 (their age range when completing the survey), we do not know how old they were when they first entered into their marriages. The mean age at the first marriage will probably be even later for our entire survey sample by the end of their lifetime, given that, at age 28–33, 26 percent of women and 28 percent of men had never married, and some of them are likely to eventually marry. Our respondents remained unmarried much later than the average for the representative sample of the Chinese population that Ji and Yeung (2014) found, based on the 2005 Population Survey Data, in which the singulate mean age at marriage was 25.7 for men and 23.5 for women. This is probably because, unlike most respondents in representative national surveys of China, our respondents live in a coastal city, were born between 1982 and 1986, and were surveyed in 2014–15, 9–10 years after the last national-level survey on marriage rates was conducted; urban residence and eastern coastal residence are associated with later marriages, even in previous studies, and the rise of individualism and neo-familism among the generation born after China’s one-child policy began in 1979 has made this generation even more likely to marry later than previous generations.

For married male respondents (n = 102) to our survey, the mean year of birth is 1984, and the mean year of birth for their spouses is 1985; male respondents thus married women who were on average only one year younger. While the average year of birth for women (n = 136) is 1984, their husbands’ average year of birth is 1982, which means that female respondents on average married men two years their senior. Mu and Xie, whose study is drawn from the China 2005 1% Population Inter-census Survey that includes data about marriages that occurred between 1960 to 2005, observed the return of the trend toward greater age hypergamy and a decrease in age homogamy among the post-1990 reform era generation in China (Mu and Xie 2014). The age hypergamy that Mu and Xie found among the youngest generation in their study was not as apparent among our respondents, however, most likely because all our respondents were urban residents, while the nationally representative survey Mu and Xie used included both rural and urban residents and because our survey only captured our respondents’ marriages by age 28 to 33, when age hypergamy is not as necessary as it may be when the respondents grow older and have fewer potential marriage partners.

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Marital status of male survey respondents (n=202) in 2014–15

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Marital status of female survey respondents (n=204) in 2014–15

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3 Adolescent and Young Adult Fears of Marriage and Childbearing

When the respondents were in eighth or ninth grade, 22 percent of our female respondents (n=190) and 14 percent of our male respondents (n=180) indicated in our 1999 survey that they wanted to remain unmarried their entire lives. Even as teenagers, some were skeptical of the value of marriage, given the marital unhappiness and divorce rate that many of them observed among some of their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and family friends. Even more were skeptical of the value of childbearing: 39 percent of the female respondents (n=186) and 15 percent of the male respondents (n = 176) indicated that they wanted to remain childless their entire lives. Female respondents were especially likely to be averse to marriage and childbearing because they saw that their parents had to make tremendous personal sacrifices in terms of time, effort, money, and deferral of one’s personal dreams and aspirations in order to provide the intensive parenting considered necessary to insure that their singleton children develop the outstanding skills, academic credentials, and physical and psychological health that will propel them toward upward mobility (Fong 2004). Female students in particular saw that this burden fell disproportionately on the shoulders of mothers (Fong 2004; Kim and Fong 2013; Kim and Fong 2014). As teenagers, some research participants told Fong that they hoped to not have to sacrifice as much as their parents had to in the process of raising them.

Throughout their twenties, many male and even more female research participants frequently expressed skepticism and fears about the prospects of marrying and having children. They worried about experiencing divorces or unhappy marriages if they were to settle for a spouse with whom they were not completely satisfied, both in terms of personal rapport and in terms of attributes such as health, family wealth, earning potential, educational attainment, and physical appearance. Some worried that, even though they loved their partners, their parents disapproved of them for not having enough education, wealth, good health, earning potential, attractiveness, acceptable moral character, and/or polite and filial attitudes; many also wondered whether they should “settle” for their current partners or wait to find someone better with regard to all of the above criteria.

Some men, and more women, worried about marrying spouses who would cheat on them and break their hearts. Many who already had romantic partners were worried that their partners would not be able to remain faithful to them throughout their lives, especially if their partners were currently attracted to others, just generally flirtatious, or working in fields that required working closely with many members of the opposite gender. Worries about the faithfulness of a current partner was a particularly significant concern among those who knew that their partners had previously had sex with multiple partners or had histories of divorce or of breaking up with previous partners, all of which are situations that are common among their generation. Many were also worried because they sometimes had fights with their partners, felt annoyed by their partners, felt their partners were annoyed with them, or felt that their partners did not love them enough or that they did not love their partners enough; they worried that these problems would grow worse after marriage, after the excitement of a new romance wears off and they have to deal with the stresses of shared finances, parenting, and chores, and with each other’s diminishing physical attractiveness as they age and encounter health problems. As one such single, childless Dalian woman, age 31, told Fong, “Many of my friends were too anxious to marry. They married too quickly and later they had problems in their marriages. So, I want to wait until I can find someone who is really suitable.”

Meanwhile, premarital sex was increasingly considered acceptable by the research participants’ generation, and grudgingly was even considered acceptable by some of their parents’ generation as long as it was in the context of a long-term relationship likely to lead to marriage. Our research participants therefore could remain single and still have the sex, romance, and companionship that among previous generations had been mainly reserved for married couples, and thus had served as an incentive for young people to marry. Remaining single while dating, and in some cases having premarital sex, allowed them to have many of the advantages of marriage, without the long-term legal and social commitments and the pressures to bear and raise children that frightened many of them.

The challenges of buying neolocal housing, given the high price of housing, also caused many research participants to postpone marriage, and in many cases to postpone looking for a spouse. As in many other Chinese cities (Sito and Liu 2019), housing in Dalian became increasingly unaffordable after the marketization of housing in the 1990s. Men and their families were expected to pay for most or all of the costs of neolocal housing before women would be willing to marry them, though in practice this condition could be waived or modified by women who really wanted to marry them; in those cases, the bride and her family might pay for some, most, or all of the neolocal housing; the bride and groom would each pay about half of the down payment and then each pay about half of the monthly mortgage from their incomes; the young couple would rent an apartment drawing on both their incomes (the cost of rent was far less than the cost of a mortgage); the young couple would live with the bride’s parents or the groom’s parents while saving up for neolocal housing; or the bride would live with her parents while the groom would live with his parents most of the time, with conjugal visits to each other’s homes on weekends and holidays. Still, the lack of an ability to buy neolocal housing appliances, furnishings, and a car to start the newlywed couple off in terms of wealth and comfort meant that a man would be disadvantaged in the marriage market, and the lack of an ability to at least help with the purchase of these things meant that a woman could also be disadvantaged in the marriage market. Because the ability to pay for neolocal housing would potentially enable men to attract higher-quality wives, many male research participants postponed looking for wives until they had at least enough money to pay the down payment on a mortgage for neolocal housing. Even in some cases where a woman was willing to marry a man who did not have the ability to buy neolocal housing, her parents would still insisted that they wait. Waiting to marry would also give women more time to save money to contribute, if necessary, to neolocal housing, furnishings, appliances, and cars, and to avoid having to live with her in-laws or having their husbands live with his in-laws or having the wife live with her parents and the husband live with his parents and having only occasionally conjugal visits, all of which were considered undesirable conditions for the newlyweds. Because parents were expected to draw on their own savings to help buy neolocal housing, appliances, home furnishings, and cars for their newlywed children’s new household, especially in the case of sons, many parents were also reluctant to encourage their children to commit to a marriage with someone less than ideal, and they had significant incentives to allow or even to encourage their adult children to postpone marriage until the adult children and their potential spouses earned more and saved more so they could contribute to the purchase of their own neolocal housing, appliances, home furnishings, and cars. As a single, childless 28-year-old Dalian man told Fong, “I have to work hard for a while longer before I can buy housing, and only then can I consider marrying. My parents are anxious for me to marry, of course, but they cannot afford to buy housing for me, so there’s nothing they can do.”

Childbearing and childrearing caused even more fear than marriage among our research participants, especially the women. Most men and women shared the widespread Chinese cultural assumption that childbearing and childrearing are the main reasons for marriage, and therefore childbearing and childrearing should very likely take place very soon after the wedding. This made them fear marriage even more because they knew, based on what they observed of their parents’ lives, that raising a child would require them to devote most of their time, money, and emotional energy to their child.

Women were also worried about what pregnancy and childbearing would do to their bodies, both aesthetically, in terms of causing stretch marks, caesarian section scars, and weight gain, and in terms of health problems that could result from difficult pregnancies and births. The research participants also worried about the high medical costs that could ensue from pregnancies and childbearing, especially if they had complications or children born prematurely or with birth defects or disabilities. Even in the best-case scenario of an easy, low-cost pregnancy and birth, the high costs of having a child begins as soon as the infant is born and the parents and grandparents must be taught how to care for the infant during the traditionally required maternal postpartum confinement period of 30–40 days, which most research participants believed were necessary to protect the mothers from serious long-term illnesses and disabilities. Most of our research participants could not afford to hire full-time nannies, but many had to hire people part-time to help with the tutoring, babysitting, or household chores. Competitive social pressures also encouraged parents to pay for educational and enrichment classes for infants, and toddlers, and to pay for their caregivers. Almost all of our respondents who had children sent their children to preschool starting at age 3; some sent their children to nurseries even earlier due to lack of child-care resources at home. While there were some affordable private schools, they were often of such low quality that they were considered dangerous to the physical, psychological, and intellectual well-being of the child. Higher-quality private schools often cost a large proportion of the parents’ salaries, and in some cases cost even more than the parents’ salaries. While public preschools had affordable tuitions, the waitlist to get into them was so long that parents often had to pay bribes for admission, making them cost the same as the high-quality private preschools. While public school education was free and universally available for children between first grade and ninth grade, different school districts varied greatly in terms of the quality of the teachers, facilities, and peer groups, and it was extremely expensive to buy or even rent an apartment that would qualify one’s child to attend a top-quality public school. While top students could test into public college-prep high schools and could attend them for free, the majority of students could not, and their parents would have to pay bribes or extra fees to get them into public college-prep high schools, or, failing that, they would have to pay high tuitions for private schools, study abroad, or even technical or vocational high schools (which almost all students could get into, even though they were charged tuition). Most college programs charged tuition, and many research participants also wanted to send their children abroad, which would cost even more.

Research participants of both genders worried about how much time they would have to spend caring for and educating their children. Though most men expected not to have to quit their jobs or take lower-paying jobs to care for their children, they worried about the loss of free time for leisure and social activities, as they would have to spend much of their time after work helping with childcare and household chores. Men also worried about being unable to earn enough for their families, especially given that their wives might have to stop working or be underemployed in order to take care of a child. Women were particularly worried about how much pregnancy, childbearing, and childrearing would harm their careers and earnings. The demanding parenting their generation believed would be necessary to ensure that their children grew to be healthy, happy, and successful required so much time and effort that both parents, as well as both sets of grandparents, would have to devote most of their time outside of work with the child, either tutoring the child or doing chores for the child for at least 18 years. Mothers were expected to do so much of this that many of them had to spend some number of years not working or they would have to transfer to less time-consuming, lower-paying jobs in order to free up more time and flexibility to care for their child. Though employers were legally required to give women paid maternity leave and let them return to their old jobs after the end of their leave, some employers skirted these laws by keeping employees on short-term contracts that they could refuse to renew once a woman became pregnant; this was allowed because employers had no obligation to renew any contracts. Some women felt compelled to voluntarily quit their jobs after their maternity leaves ended because they had to spend more time caring for and breastfeeding their children. Research participants of both genders also worried about the burdens that childcare would place on their aging, increasingly ill, or disabled parents, as child-care responsibilities often fell primarily to the child’s grandparents, given the high earning ability and career ambitions common among both men and women of the generation born after China’s one-child policy. As a single, childless 28-year-old Dalian woman told Fong, “I feel that right now having a child would be a big burden.”

4 Single, Childless Young Adults Living with Their Parents: The Golden Years of Neo Familism

In contrast to all the burdens that would descend upon them as soon as they married and had a child, the lives of our single young adult research participants were relatively fun, comfortable, and full of potential. Most of those who found jobs in Dalian lived with their parents, in the same room they had grown up in. Of the 101 never-married respondents who answered our 2014–15 survey questions about who they were living with, 85 percent lived with one or both parents. Moving out and renting their own apartment when living with one’s parents was still an option would have been considered an embarrassing sign to all who knew them since it would indicate that there was something wrong with their relationship with their parents. Singles whose relationships with their parents were so bad that they wanted to live separately did not perceive of marriage as the only or the best way to escape their parents; on the contrary, they feared that marriage and childrearing would most likely make it even more difficult for them to escape from their parents, given that they would need their parents’ help with childcare and often with the costs of purchasing neolocal housing and paying for the children’s education, and, in a worst-case scenario, they might even need to live with their parents after marriage, either because they could not afford neolocal housing or because they needed their parents’ help with childcare. Moving to another city or abroad for education or work, while remaining single and childless, was a much more effective way to escape their parents, and it was used by a number of our research participants who had particularly strained relationships with their parents. Those who wanted to stay in Dalian but did not want to live with parents also had the option of moving to a separate apartment and accepting the higher financial costs, emotional strains, and social stigma (social stigma which in any case would fall more heavily on the parents than on the children, as bad parent-child relationships are more likely to be blamed on the parents rather than on the children). Fong observed several such cases; however they were relatively rare.

Though most of our research participants had incomes much higher than those of their parents, most parents did not require them to pay rent. Most single young adults who were working while living with their parents chose to help buy groceries for the household, and some who had much higher incomes than their parents ended up paying for most or all of the household’s expenses. Some whose relationships with their parents were especially strong turned their entire paychecks over to their parents, but most of those parents tried to spend as little as possible of their adult children’s money on household expenses and tried to save as much as possible of their children’s earnings for their children’s likely future expenses, such as a car, neolocal housing, and education for their child; in most of these cases, children could ask for money from some or all of their parents’ savings at any time, with only minor complaining from the parents if the children wanted to spend the money on something the parents considered frivolous, such as a vacation in another city or abroad.

Most of our research participants believed that their upward-mobility trajectory had the potential to continue throughout their twenties and early thirties, as they earned higher academic degrees, received promotions or better jobs, and/or studied abroad. This belief was validated by the outcomes of our survey, as many who were not accepted into college immediately after high school earned associate degrees and bachelor’s degrees in their late twenties and even late thirties, some studied abroad, and the vast majority found better jobs, received promotions, and/or higher salaries over the course of their twenties and early thirties. If they waited to marry, instead of “settling” for a marriage to someone in their current social circle who was willing to marry them, it was likely that they would be able to meet and marry people with a higher socioeconomic status as their own upward mobility trajectories enabled them to move in higher socioeconomic social circles and to be considered acceptable spouses by other singles in those circles. Marriage, childbearing, and childrearing could end the young adults’ upwardly mobile trajectories by preventing them and their parents from investing time and money in their own pursuits of higher education, study abroad, and/or better jobs, and by redirecting the entire family’s time and resources toward concern about their child’s health, happiness, and educational success. Waiting to marry was thus often considered a wise and rational strategy, not only by young adults who believed their upwardly mobile trajectories would take them even higher within a few years but also by their parents, relatives, and friends. As a single, childless 30-year-old Dalian man told Fong, “After a few years, I will be very likely to be promoted and have better conditions, and even better choices, so I’m not anxious to look for a match right now. My parents support me in this decision.”

In most families, single research participants in their twenties and thirties were not responsible for household chores, just as they had not been responsible for such chores while growing up. Their parents did most of the cooking, cleaning, and washing for them, both because the parents believed they were better at it and because the adult children were too busy with work (that brought in much more income than what the parents earned from their pensions or their blue-collar jobs positions) or because the children sometimes continued to pursue their educations. Of the 94 never-married survey respondents who were living with one or both parents and answered our 2014–15 survey question about who did the most housework, only 4 percent indicated that they, rather than one of their parents, did most of the housework. Most single young adults as well as their parents felt that the young adults had “earned” the right to more leisure time after the pressure-cooker years of their childhood and adolescence and they also felt they needed a lot of time to pursue friendships, widen social networks that could help them with work opportunities as well as with finding a suitable partner, and meeting and dating people who might be their future spouses. Many of them pursued higher educations, which they considered essential both for social status and for future earning potential, given that the vast majority of their generation had college degrees. Some pursued graduate education and/or studied abroad (Fong 2011); many more saved their money to visit foreign countries as tourists. Though they were anxious about their marriage and childbearing decisions that increasingly loomed on the horizon as their marriage market and their biological clocks ran out and about whether they would achieve the upward mobility in education and work that they and their parents desired, many research participants considered their lives as single young adults living with their parents to be more rewarding than the more constrained, academically stressful years that preceded this period and also more rewarding than the more burdensome years of marriage, childbearing, and childrearing that lay ahead. They were therefore in no hurry to put an end to this relatively fun, carefree, and potential-filled life stage. As a 29-year-old single, childless woman living with her parents told Fong, “I want to continue to enjoy this beautiful time of my life. I’m not anxious to marry and have a child.”

5 Ambivalence about Parental and Social Pressures, and Personal Desires in Favor of Marriage and Childbearing

Despite their misgivings about marriage and childbearing and their desire to remain in the fun-filled life stage of the single, childless young adult, the vast majority of our research participants did not view this life stage as permanent. Even though many of them had wanted to remain single and childless their entire lives when they were in eighth or ninth grade, almost all had changed their minds by their late twenties or early thirties; only 4 percent of 391 respondents to our 2014–15 survey indicated that they planned never to have children. (They were not asked about whether they wanted to marry, since it could be assumed that those who want children also want to marry; due to strong Chinese legal as well as cultural sanctions against having children outside of marriage, it was extremely rare, and undesirable, for Chinese young adults to give birth out of wedlock.)

Though they feared ending up like the unhappily married or divorced couples they knew, they admired, and hoped to emulate, the happily married couples whom they knew, and they sometimes told Fong how envious they were of those couples who derived happiness from marriage and childbearing. A 33-year-old single, childless Dalian woman told Fong that even passing by a seemingly happy couple with a seemingly happy child in a park was enough make her feel “envious to death.”

Compared to their parents’ generation, our research participants had higher incomes and savings and better old-age insurance policies, as well as stronger desires to encourage their own future children to pursue their personal interests and happiness and not to be burdened by filial obligations to provide nursing care and financial support to aging parents (Kim, Brown, and Fong 2018; Yan 2016, 2009). Nevertheless, they still hoped that a spouse and an adult child would provide socioemotional support and companionship in their old age and they feared growing old alone. They also recognized that it was possible that their plans for relying on retirement income and paid nursing care would be inadequate in their old age. While this recognition was only theoretical for most in their early twenties, it was increasingly based on empirical experience due to the inadequacy of insurance and paid help for caring for their own parents as the research participants and their parents grew older. When discussing their desire for a child, many referred to the Chinese aphorism yang er fang lao (a phrase that historically meant to “raise a son for old age,” but it was re-interpreted by our research participants as to “raise a child for old age” (Kim and Fong 2014b).

Like their parents, many of our research participants were atheists or agnostics, though many were practicing Buddhism to varying degrees, and a few practicing Christianity to varying degrees. Even many of their parents’ generation were skeptical of traditional beliefs about the dead needing elaborate funerary rituals or offerings of food and burnt paper money and commodities to ensure a pleasant afterlife, especially given that such beliefs had been reviled during their own youth during the Cultural Revolution, and were still discouraged by the state. Having grown up with such skeptical parents, aunts, uncles, and teachers, our research participants were even more likely to dismiss such beliefs as “superstitions,” or respect and practice them as traditions without believing that they actually had an effect on an afterlife, or even that an afterlife exists. Nevertheless, some of our research participants were saddened and somewhat fearful at the thought of having no spouse or children to organize their funerary rituals or to offer them food or burnt offerings after they died. They were also fearful of loneliness in the present, as more of their friends married and had children and could spend less time with them, and even more of loneliness in their old age. Some told Fong that, even though they enjoyed the fun they had with friends and the achievements they had at work, they would feel like something is missing if they do not have a spouse and child. Some who disliked their work, social circles, and/or parents eagerly looked forward to having a spouse and child who would make their lives more worth living. As a 31-year-old single, childless Dalian man told Fong, “Life is too boring without a family.”

In addition to their personal desires for an ideal neo-familistic family that would give their lives meaning, the research participants also recognized that they would be stigmatized if they remained single and childless throughout their lives. They feared that others would believe that they were physically, personally, and/or socioeconomically unattractive to find a spouse or that they were gay or lesbian. As in most of China, lgbtq identities were heavily stigmatized in Dalian (Zheng 2015). Of the thousands of research participants Fong met in Dalian, none admitted to her that they were lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or gender queer, and only one had ever told her that he was gay, and even he asked her to keep this a secret from all of their mutual friends and acquaintances.

When asked in 1999 how old they hoped to be when they married, female respondents (n = 166) stated a mean age of 27, and male respondents (n = 158) stated a mean age of 26. When asked in 1999 how old they hoped to be when they had a child, female respondents (n = 135) and male respondents (n = 142) both stated a mean age of 29. By 2014–15, the mean age of a first marriage was 27 for both men and women, and the mean age for when their first child was born was 28. Thus, if all of our respondents who had not married or had a child by 2014–15 stayed unmarried and childless throughout their lives, our respondents would have proven able to time their marriage and childbearing to match the timing they envisaged even when they were in eighth or ninth grade. It is likely that, eventually, at least some of the 29 percent of the respondents (n = 406) who were unmarried in 2014–15 will marry, and that at least some of the 63 percent of the respondents (n = 406) who were childless in 2014–15 will have children, given that almost all of them want children, thus driving up the mean age at which respondents first marry and have a child. Still, it is clear that the high rate of being single past age 27, which previous generations had defined as the final deadline for women’s marriageability (and close to the final deadline for men’s marriageability, given the high rate of age homogamy among the respondents), for both male and female research participants is very much in keeping with their long-held life goals and understandings of cultural norms. Based on what they told Fong about their continuing desire to marry, their single status was not due to a determination to remain single throughout their lives.

The anxieties that caused and were promoted by the popular discourses about “leftover women” and “bare branch” men were nevertheless reflected in the nagging that both male and female research participants frequently heard from their parents, relatives, friends, and co-workers with regard to the urgency of finding, dating, and then marrying someone by the age of 27. They were discouraged by parents, teachers, and school administrators from having sex, marrying, or even in some cases from dating while they were still full-time students in high school or college due to fears that a romantic relationships would distract them from their studies and fears about the difficulty of maintaining a relationship after graduation sent them on different socioeconomic and/or geographic trajectories. But social pressures to find a partner to marry began as soon as they were no longer full-time students (part-time adult education college student status did not count as an excuse for not marrying). Such pressures intensified with each passing year between the singles’ late twenties and early thirties. Most of their friends, parents, relatives, and co-workers considered matchmaking a helpful, kind, and generous gesture on behalf of a single person. Anyone who was single was likely to be encouraged to go out on dates with suitable singles in the social circles of those who cared about them (even those who themselves were postponing marriage). Singles who claimed that they wanted to postpone marriage until their thirties, or who claimed that they hoped never to marry or have children, were frequently subjected to matchmaking efforts, on the (often valid) assumption that they secretly were eager to find a spouse but they were claiming that they were not eager simply because they feared the stigma of being perceived as someone who was unable to attract a suitable spouse.

In many cases, even singles determined to postpone marriage for many years were grateful for such matchmaking, as they eventually wanted to marry and felt that they had to go on many dates with other singles who were potential future spouses before they would find an ideal spouse. Many considered dating a fun activity in itself and a valuable opportunity to learn about what kind of partner one might prefer, what kinds of partners might be available and interested, and how one might cultivate social skills that would make one better at attracting a desirable partner. Dating also widened one’s social circles, which was valuable for social networking that might be useful for one’s career or other aspects of one’s future. Chatting on social media, either with friends of friends in one’s social media circles, or with strangers online, was also considered a way to look for a spouse; those who were particularly comfortable with the Internet or eager to find a spouse also frequented matchmaking websites.

While many of their friends of a similar age responded sympathetically to their desire to postpone marriage, childbearing, and childrearing, agreeing with them about the risks and burdens of marriage and childbearing and the fun and opportunities available to those who remained single and childless, our research participants’ parents, older relatives, and older co-workers commonly responded by nagging them about the importance of marrying and having children. Parents and older relatives and co-workers warned our research participants about the social stigma if they were to remain unmarried and childless into their thirties, about the loneliness they would feel without a family, especially after their parents are deceased, and about how no one will provide nursing care or emotional or financial support for them when they are old if they are still single and childless. Fong not only observed such nagging and efforts at matchmaking among her research participants’ friends, parents, relatives, and co-workers but also experienced it herself from those same research participants (including some who were themselves trying to delay or resist marriage) as well as from their friends, parents, relatives, and co-workers. From the time she first started doing research with them at the age of 24, through her twenties, thirties, and early forties, Fong had continuously told them that she intended to remain single and childless throughout her life, both because she shared her research participants’ concerns about the long-term stability of marriages and because the academic career she wanted would most likely require too much time and travel and would allow too little choice about the geographic location of her job to enable her to be the kind of wife and mother she would have wanted to be. Nevertheless, many of Fong’s research participants and their parents, relatives, and friends still assumed that her protests were not a definite decision but merely a rhetorical face-saving strategy, similar to that of her single research participants and they tried to match her with single men whom they knew. Such matchmaking efforts and nagging about the value of marriage and childbearing were especially intense when Fong was between the ages of 24 and 29 but it continued to some extent even when she was in her thirties and forties.

Despite the frequent and widespread nagging and matchmaking attempts the research participants experienced, most single research participants did not find such nagging and matchmaking as painful or compelling as some media portray it to be because they (and most of the naggers and matchmakers) understand that the costs and risks of remaining single are no longer as high as they were for their parents’ generation (Jankowiak and Moore 2016). There was ambivalence even in their parents’ nagging and matchmaking. Many parents nagged their young adult children about the importance of marrying and having children in the abstract but they also expressed disapproval of just about every potential partner their children introduced them to, believing that their children deserved a spouse who was “better,” not only socioeconomically but also in terms of appearance, likeability, and character. As a 31-year-old single, childless Dalian woman told Fong, “My Ma keeps pressuring me to look for a match, but in the past, she always disapproved of my boyfriends. I don’t know what she’s thinking.”

The research participants as well as their parents knew that conflicts between parents-in-law and sons/daughters-in-law were common and likely; even though all hoped that a match could be made that would avoid such conflicts, they recognized that such an ideal was extremely rare (Yan 2015; Wolf 1985). The emotional intensity of the bonds between parents and their singleton children were so strong (Shi 2017; Fong 2004; Kuan 2015; Yan 2018) that in practice many parents were actually happy to postpone the “losing” of their child to a spouse. Abstract, general comments about the importance of finding a spouse that were expressed by such parents thus did not pack much of a punch, given how much they seemed to encourage their children to postpone marriage while waiting to find a better match in practice. Many research participants’ parents had experienced divorces or unhappy marriages, and even those who had not were quite aware of how common divorces and unhappy marriages were and they were thus reluctant to push their children into a marriage with a potentially unsuitable partner. Some research participants’ parents even told their children that it would be fine for them to stay single their entire lives if they could not find a suitable partner who would make them happy, and whom they were unlikely to divorce. Many research participants’ parents were also happy that their children wanted to focus on pursuing further education, study abroad, or better jobs—goals that these parents also strongly desired—, often as much as, or more than, they wanted to see their children marry and have children. The research participants’ parents also shared some of their children’s ambivalence about how much time and money everyone in the family (including the research participants’ parents, who were likely to have to contribute a lot to the purchase of neolocal housing, appliances, furnishings, and a car for the newlyweds, as well as take on the brunt of childcare responsibilities at least during early childhood) would have to sacrifice for their children to marry and have children. As a 30-year-old single, childless Dalian man told Fong, “My parents sometimes say I should find a match, but they know marriage is expensive, and we may not be able to afford it now, so they are not too anxious.”

6 Conclusion: Redefining the Value and Proper Age of Marriage for a Neo-Familistic Generation

Our research participants and their parents were highly aware that the divorce rate, as well as the mean age of a first marriage, were rising, based both on their own observations and on reports in the media. This awareness increased their wariness of rushing into a marriage that could end in divorce and it also alleviated some of their fear about being “leftover” after all the more suitable potential spouses had been taken. The new norm of late marriage has actually become so commonly accepted for the research participants’ generation that some women and men who were considering marrying in their early twenties actually faced criticism from their parents as well as friends, relatives, and co-workers for wanting to rush into marriage, and they were encouraged to receive more education, find better jobs, and/or save more money in order to buy or at least to be able to put a down payment on a mortgage for neolocal housing before marriage.

Though most of the parents wanted their adult children to eventually marry, many of our research participants’ parents were ambivalent about the practical implications of pushing their children to marry and have children in the near future. The neo-familistic bonds between parents and children were so strong that many parents and their adult children were reluctant to hasten to bring a disruption to those bonds, which was likely to occur with a marriage. Because the dominant practices of neo-familism required parents to contribute most of their time, energy, and savings to help their adult children for the purchase of neolocal housing and to provide the costs or work of caring for and educating their young children, parents were concerned about the greater burdens that marriage and childbearing would bring to themselves as well as to their adult children. Moreover, the intense emotional and financial investments that parents had made and believed they would have to continue to make meant that parents had much to lose if their children married someone who did not get along with the parents or whom the parents and/or the child considered less than ideal. It was therefore common for parents to be so picky about who their children dated or considered marrying that their objections reduced the likelihood of their children marrying by the age of 27 in practice, even though these same parents believed in theory that they wanted their children to marry by age 27.

At the same time, many of our single research participants greatly enjoyed the comfortable lives they had as single young adults living with their parents and therefore they were in no rush to exchange what they considered to be the best time of their lives for the burdens of marriage and childbearing. As single young working adults, they could enjoy the same love, care, and freedom from household chores that their parents had always provided them but without the intense pressure to succeed academically that their parents had inflicted on them while they were students. Many of them had strong, loving relationships with their parents, and the removal of the academic pressures even improved these relationships. Our research participants also greatly enjoyed being able to use the money they earned while living with their parents (which was often much more than the money their parents received from their pensions) to spend on things they enjoyed, to fulfill their filial duties by improving their parents’ lives, and to increase their savings instead of using their salaries to deal with the stress-inducing expenses of starting their own households. They enjoyed the conditions of their lives as single, working young adults living with their parents and they did not feel strongly motivated to trade their lives for the much more difficult lives they anticipated they would lead as young newlywed working parents.

It is clear, however, that, at least for now, most research participants still want to marry and eventually have children. Unlike in many other countries where single childless people, married childless people, divorced people, single parents, adoptive parents, stepparents, blended families, and lgbtq relationships are becoming increasingly accepted, the heterosexual married couple with a child remains the hegemonic vision of the ideal family in China, even among the youngest generation of adults. It remains to be seen how much the hegemony of this vision will erode, however, as many of the neo-familistic generation of those who want to postpone marriage become so comfortable during their single and childless life stage that they will not want to leave it, as they end up waiting so long to marry that they can no longer find a suitable partner, as the media discourse warns, or as biological constraints on childbearing cause them to rethink the value and purpose of marriage once childbearing becomes more difficult or impossible.