Latest news with #onechildpolicy
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
China has millions of single men - could dating camp help them find love?
To say China's women are outnumbered would be an understatement. With a staggering 30 million more men than women, one of the world's most populous countries has a deluge of unattached males. The odds are heavily stacked against them finding a date, let alone a wife - something many feel pressured to do. To make matters worse, it's even harder if you're from a lower social class, according to Chinese dating coach Hao, who has over 3,000 clients. "Most of them are working class - they're the least likely to find wives," he says. We see this first-hand in Violet Du Feng's documentary, The Dating Game, where we watch Hao and three of his clients throughout his week-long dating camp. All of them, including Hao, have come from poor, rural backgrounds, and were part of the generation growing up after the 90s in China, when many parents left their toddlers with other family members, to go and work in the cities. That generation are now adults, and are going to the cities themselves to try to find a wife and boost their status. Du Feng, who is based in the US, wants her film to highlight what life is like for younger generations in her home country. "In a time when gender divide is so extreme, particularly in China, it's about how we can bridge a gap and create dialogue," she tells the BBC. Hao's three clients - Li, 24, Wu, 27 and Zhou, 36 - are battling the aftermath of China's one-child policy. Set up by the government in 1980 when the population approached one billion, the policy was introduced amid fears that having too many people would affect the country's economic growth. But a traditional preference for male children led to large numbers of girls being abandoned, placed in orphanages, sex-selective abortions or even cases of female infanticide. The result is today's huge gender imbalance. China is now so concerned about its plummeting birth rate and ageing population that it ended the policy in 2016, and holds regular matchmaking events. Wu, Li and Zhou want Hao to help them find a girlfriend at the very least. He is someone they can aspire to be, having already succeeded in finding a wife, Wen, who is also a dating coach. The men let Hao give them makeovers and haircuts, while he tells them his questionable "techniques" for attracting women - both online and in person. But while everyone tries their best, not everything goes to plan. Hao constructs an online image for each man, but he stretches a few boundaries in how he describes them, and Zhou thinks it feels "fake". "I feel guilty deceiving others," he says, clearly uncomfortable with being portrayed as someone he can't match in reality. Du Feng thinks this is a wider problem. "It's a unique China story, but also it's a universal story of how in this digital landscape, we're all struggling and wrestling with the price of being fake in the digital world, and then the cost that we have to pay to be authentic and honest," she says. Hao may be one of China's "most popular dating coaches", but we see his wife question some of his methods. Undeterred, he sends his proteges out to meet women, spraying their armpits with deodorant, declaring: "It's showtime!" The men have to approach potential dates in a busy night-time shopping centre in Chongqing, one of the world's biggest cities. It's almost painful to watch as they ask women to link up via the messaging app WeChat. But it does teach them to dig into their inner confidence, which, up until now, has been hidden from view. Dr Zheng Mu, from the National University of Singapore's sociology department, tells the BBC how pressure to marry can impact single men. "In China, marriage or the ability, financially and socially, to get married as the primary breadwinner, is still largely expected from men," she says. "As a result, the difficulty of being considered marriageable can be a social stigma, indicating they're not capable and deserving of the role, which leads to great pressures and mental strains." Zhou is despondent about how much dates cost him, including paying for matchmakers, dinner and new clothes. "I only make $600 (£440) a month," he says, noting a date costs about $300. "In the end our fate is determined by society," he adds, deciding that he needs to "build up my status". Du Feng explains: "This is a generation in which a lot of these surplus men are defined as failures because of their economic status. "They're seen as the bottom of society, the working class, and so somehow getting married is another indicator that they can succeed." We learn that one way for men in China to "break social class" is to join the army, and see a big recruitment drive taking place in the film. The film notably does not explore what life is like for gay men in China. Du Feng agrees that Chines society is less accepting of gay men, while Dr Mu adds: "In China, heteronormativity largely rules. "Therefore, men are expected to marry women to fulfill the norms... to support the nuclear family and develop it into bigger families by becoming parents." Technology also features in the documentary, which explores the increasing popularity of virtual boyfriends, saying that over 10 million women in China play online dating games. We even get to see a virtual boyfriend in action - he's understanding, undemanding and undeniably handsome. One woman says real-life dating costs "time, money, emotional energy - it's so exhausting". She adds that "virtual men are different - they have great temperaments, they're just perfect". Dr Mu sees this trend as "indicative of social problems" in China, citing "long work hours, greedy work culture and competitive environment, along with entrenched gender role expectations". "Virtual boyfriends, who can behave better aligned with women's expected ideals, may be a way for them to fulfil their romantic imaginations." Du Feng adds: "The thing universally that's been mentioned is that the women with virtual boyfriends felt men in China are not emotionally stable." Her film digs into the men's backgrounds, including their often fractured relationships with their parents and families. "These men are coming from this, and there's so much negative pressure on them - how could you expect them to be stable emotionally?" Reuters reported last year that "long-term single lifestyles are gradually becoming more widespread in China". "I'm worried about how we connect with each other nowadays, especially the younger generation," Du Feng says. "Dating is just a device for us to talk about this. But I am really worried. "My film is about how we live in this epidemic of loneliness, with all of us trying to find connections with each other." So by the end of the documentary, which has many comical moments, we see it has been something of a realistic journey of self-discovery for all of the men, including Hao. "I think that it's about the warmth as they find each other, knowing that it's a collective crisis that they're all facing, and how they still find hope," Du Feng says. "For them, it's more about finding themselves and finding someone to pat their shoulders, saying, 'I see you, and there's a way you can make it'." Screen Daily's Allan Hunter says the film is "sustained by the humanity that Du Feng finds in each of the individuals we come to know and understand a little better", adding it "ultimately salutes the virtue of being true to yourself". Hao concludes: "Once you like yourself, it's easier to get girls to like you." The Dating Game is out in selected UK cinemas this autumn. Why don't Chinese women want more babies?
BBC News
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The Dating Game: How dating camp could help China's millions of single men
To say China's women are outnumbered would be an understatement. With a staggering 30 million more men than women, one of the world's most populous countries has a deluge of unattached males. The odds are heavily stacked against them finding a date, let alone a wife - something many feel pressured to do. To make matters worse, it's even harder if you're from a lower social class, according to Chinese dating coach Hao, who has over 3,000 clients."Most of them are working class - they're the least likely to find wives," he says. We see this first-hand in Violet Du Feng's documentary, The Dating Game, where we watch Hao and three of his clients throughout his week-long dating camp. All of them, including Hao, have come from poor, rural backgrounds, and were part of the generation growing up after the 90s in China, when many parents left their toddlers with other family members, to go and work in the cities. That generation are now adults, and are going to the cities themselves to try to find a wife and boost their Feng, who is based in the US, wants her film to highlight what life is like for younger generations in her home country. "In a time when gender divide is so extreme, particularly in China, it's about how we can bridge a gap and create dialogue," she tells the BBC. Hao's three clients - Li, 24, Wu, 27 and Zhou, 36 - are battling the aftermath of China's one-child policy. Set up by the government in 1980 when the population approached one billion, the policy was introduced amid fears that having too many people would affect the country's economic a traditional preference for male children led to large numbers of girls being abandoned, placed in orphanages, sex-selective abortions or even cases of female infanticide. The result is today's huge gender imbalance. China is now so concerned about its plummeting birth rate and ageing population that it ended the policy in 2016, and holds regular matchmaking events. Wu, Li and Zhou want Hao to help them find a girlfriend at the very least. He is someone they can aspire to be, having already succeeded in finding a wife, Wen, who is also a dating coach. The men let Hao give them makeovers and haircuts, while he tells them his questionable "techniques" for attracting women - both online and in person. But while everyone tries their best, not everything goes to plan. Hao constructs an online image for each man, but he stretches a few boundaries in how he describes them, and Zhou thinks it feels "fake". "I feel guilty deceiving others," he says, clearly uncomfortable with being portrayed as someone he can't match in reality. Du Feng thinks this is a wider problem. "It's a unique China story, but also it's a universal story of how in this digital landscape, we're all struggling and wrestling with the price of being fake in the digital world, and then the cost that we have to pay to be authentic and honest," she says. Hao may be one of China's "most popular dating coaches", but we see his wife question some of his he sends his proteges out to meet women, spraying their armpits with deodorant, declaring: "It's showtime!"The men have to approach potential dates in a busy night-time shopping centre in Chongqing, one of the world's biggest almost painful to watch as they ask women to link up via the messaging app WeChat. But it does teach them to dig into their inner confidence, which, up until now, has been hidden from view. Dr Zheng Mu, from the National University of Singapore's sociology department, tells the BBC how pressure to marry can impact single men."In China, marriage or the ability, financially and socially, to get married as the primary breadwinner, is still largely expected from men," she says. "As a result, the difficulty of being considered marriageable can be a social stigma, indicating they're not capable and deserving of the role, which leads to great pressures and mental strains."Zhou is despondent about how much dates cost him, including paying for matchmakers, dinner and new clothes. "I only make $600 (£440) a month," he says, noting a date costs about $300. "In the end our fate is determined by society," he adds, deciding that he needs to "build up my status". Du Feng explains: "This is a generation in which a lot of these surplus men are defined as failures because of their economic status. "They're seen as the bottom of society, the working class, and so somehow getting married is another indicator that they can succeed."We learn that one way for men in China to "break social class" is to join the army, and see a big recruitment drive taking place in the film. The film notably does not explore what life is like for gay men in China. Du Feng agrees that Chines society is less accepting of gay men, while Dr Mu adds: "In China, heteronormativity largely rules. "Therefore, men are expected to marry women to fulfill the norms... to support the nuclear family and develop it into bigger families by becoming parents."Technology also features in the documentary, which explores the increasing popularity of virtual boyfriends, saying that over 10 million women in China play online dating games. We even get to see a virtual boyfriend in action - he's understanding, undemanding and undeniably woman says real-life dating costs "time, money, emotional energy - it's so exhausting". She adds that "virtual men are different - they have great temperaments, they're just perfect". Dr Mu sees this trend as "indicative of social problems" in China, citing "long work hours, greedy work culture and competitive environment, along with entrenched gender role expectations"."Virtual boyfriends, who can behave better aligned with women's expected ideals, may be a way for them to fulfil their romantic imaginations."Du Feng adds: "The thing universally that's been mentioned is that the women with virtual boyfriends felt men in China are not emotionally stable."Her film digs into the men's backgrounds, including their often fractured relationships with their parents and families."These men are coming from this, and there's so much negative pressure on them - how could you expect them to be stable emotionally?" Reuters reported last year that "long-term single lifestyles are gradually becoming more widespread in China". "I'm worried about how we connect with each other nowadays, especially the younger generation," Du Feng says."Dating is just a device for us to talk about this. But I am really worried."My film is about how we live in this epidemic of loneliness, with all of us trying to find connections with each other."So by the end of the documentary, which has many comical moments, we see it has been something of a realistic journey of self-discovery for all of the men, including Hao. "I think that it's about the warmth as they find each other, knowing that it's a collective crisis that they're all facing, and how they still find hope," Du Feng says."For them, it's more about finding themselves and finding someone to pat their shoulders, saying, 'I see you, and there's a way you can make it'."Screen Daily's Allan Hunter says the film is "sustained by the humanity that Du Feng finds in each of the individuals we come to know and understand a little better", adding it "ultimately salutes the virtue of being true to yourself".Hao concludes: "Once you like yourself, it's easier to get girls to like you."The Dating Game is out in selected UK cinemas this autumn.
Wall Street Journal
3 days ago
- Wall Street Journal
‘Daughters of the Bamboo Grove' Review: Twins Torn Apart
'You're not allowed to keep this child,' a Family Planning official informed Xiuhua. Another man held her wailing 21-month-old niece, Fangfang, the toddler reaching out for the only mother she had ever known. The group of men had caught Xiuhua off-guard moments earlier when they burst into the house and restrained her while they grabbed Fangfang. A group of neighbors heard the commotion and came running, attempting to assist Xiuhua as she pursued the departing officials, but they couldn't keep up with the car driving away from the village. On that steamy early spring day in 2002, Fangfang disappeared into China's indomitable child-welfare system. Xiuhua had understood the risk of taking in her niece: Fangfang and her twin sister, Shuangjie, had been born in violation of China's family-planning policy, often called the one-child policy. Their parents, Zanhua and Youdong, were farmers who already had two daughters and couldn't afford the fine that another child—let alone two—would incur. Zanhua had given birth to the twins in secret, then placed Fangfang with her brother and his wife to raise as their own. Shuangjie moved with her parents to Chongqing, where they worked as migrant laborers to save money for the exorbitant fines they anticipated. One day, if they earned enough, Zanhua and Youdong hoped to pay the fines, register the girls' births and reunite their family. But before that day arrived, the local Family Planning office had discovered the ruse and seized Fangfang. Family Planning cadres were not, officially, supposed to take children from their homes as punishment for policy violations. By the early 2000s, however, a thriving overseas adoption industry had become a byproduct of China's planned-birth regime, which the government had created in the late 1970s to help slow population growth while the country focused on economic development. A longstanding preference for sons over daughters led hundreds of thousands of families to abandon female children rather than risk fines or even violence at the hands of powerful Family Planning officials. Orphanages grew crowded, so in 1991 the government passed a new law permitting foreign adoption and watched the program take off. Barbara Demick movingly traces this history of overseas Chinese adoptions and their ripple effects on both sides of the Pacific in 'Daughters of the Bamboo Grove.' Other authors have written about the one-child policy, or the experience of adopting a Chinese daughter; Ms. Demick's skill shines through in her synthesis of the two stories.
Daily Mail
6 days ago
- Daily Mail
Daughters Of The Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick: Twins wrenched apart by the Chinese government... with one sold to America
Daughters Of The Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick (Granta £20, 288pp) When Zanhua gave birth to twin girls deep in a bamboo grove, out of earshot of prying officials in a remote village in the Chinese province of Hunan in 2000, she and her husband Zeng Youdong knew they'd be in serious trouble if this latest violation of the one-child policy was discovered. The baby girls, Shuangjie and Fangfang, brought the total of their offspring to four – all of them girls. Zanhua had been praying for a boy to satisfy her parents-in-law, who insisted that a son was necessary to conduct the family's ritual displays of piety. Instead, here were more girls: adorable, but illegal. The couple were still working themselves to the bone in a far-away city to raise money to pay the fines (equivalent of a year's salary) for having their second child. While they were away, officials punched a hole in their roof, as an extra punishment. They decided not to register the twins' births. But they'd need to be careful. Spies from Family Planning (the government department as ruthless as the Stasi) were everywhere. Signs were up in towns and villages: 'If you violate our policy, your family will be destroyed.' Officials snooped round villages listening out for crying newborns. Youdong took Shuangjie with him to work in the city, and Fangfang was sent to lodge with a loving aunt and uncle. Reading Barbara Demick's shocking account of how Fangfang would be brutally abducted by agents of the government, sent to an orphanage and adopted by well-meaning Americans who'd been told she'd been abandoned by her family outside a factory gate, makes one gasp at the cruelty, let alone the economic short-sightedness, of China 's one-child policy, which began in 1979 and officially ended only in 2015. A government slogan went: 'After the first child: insert an IUD. After the second: sterilise. After the third: kill, kill, kill!' Zanhua remembered seeing a pregnant woman being hauled away for a forced abortion, kicking and screaming. No one dared to help her – they'd have been beaten up. A side effect of this situation was that couples across the Western world who wanted to adopt a baby could now hope to find one in China. Many Chinese parents did abandon their second babies, to avoid the fines and punishments. Orphanages were bursting. There was a huge take-up of adoptions, especially in the USA. Chinese adoptees were 'media darlings'. Western families felt virtuous in rescuing the babies, believing they'd been voluntarily abandoned. Thus it was that an evangelical Christian couple from Texas, Marsha and Al, aged 46 and 54, adopted two Chinese girls: first Victoria, and then, in 2002, another girl aged two-and-a-half, whom they named Esther. That little girl was Fangfang. The official documentation from the Shaoyang Orphanage said: 'Found abandoned at the gate of the Qiatou Bamboo Craft Factory… We cannot find her natural parents and other relatives up to now.' Reunited: The moment the sisters meet for the first time That was a blatant lie. What had really happened was that a group of men burst in to her aunt Xiuhua's house, held her down as she struggled, screamed and clung to Fangfang, and took the little girl away. They delivered her to the Civil Affairs Office, who took her on to the orphanage to be put up for adoption. These were not rogue child traffickers. They were a branch of the Chinese government, fixing problems in the global supply chain. Ten per cent of babies put up for adoption were confiscated in that way. The West was greedy for adoptees, and orphanages relied on the $3,000 in cash that adoptive families paid them for each one. Esther's devastated parents were powerless to find her, let alone retrieve her. 'It was your fault for having too many children,' the Family Planning office told them. They had no right even to know where she'd been taken. They had no idea she might have gone overseas. The sleuthing author of this excellent book discovered that those ads put out by Chinese orphanages often lied about the babies' provenance. Among the dozen Chinese parents she interviewed were Zanhua and Youdong, who, seven years later, had no idea of Fangfang's whereabouts. In 2009, Demick's piece for the Los Angeles Times 'Stolen Chinese babies supply adoption demand' shocked the West. Lots of her American friends had adopted Chinese babies. The piece mentioned twins who'd been separated. Marsha received an email from a woman in the adoptees group on Yahoo, who'd read the piece. 'Could Esther be the missing twin?' Marsha had a sinking feeling of certainty that she was, as the dates the twin went missing matched up with Esther's adoption. Esther, happily living in Texas as an American nine-year-old girl, happened to see a text on her mother's phone: 'It's terrible for twins to be separated.' She'd noticed her mother had been agitated recently, and thought it weird when her mother had pushed her hair aside and taken a snap of the small bump on her left ear (the other twin had a similar bump). Eventually Marsha quietly mentioned to Victoria and Esther that a scandal had erupted in China over confiscated babies, and that one of the babies had a twin sister in China who was looking for her. 'Mum, am I that twin?' Esther asked. Appalled that they'd been unwitting participants in a corrupt lie, Marsha and Al became terrified that Esther would be kidnapped and sent back to China. They put a fence round the house, and lived in a state of 'pervasive, unspoken unease'. It wasn't until Esther was 17 that she suggested to her mother that they contact her possible lost twin sister. Thus it was that Demick went to the city of Changsha to meet Shuangjie, and the twins met, first by video call, and then, a few months later, face to face in the village where Fangfang had been born. A DNA check confirmed that it was 99.999 per cent certain that the girls were identical twins. Demick beautifully describes the initial awkwardness of the two families on meeting each other. Zanhua had made an elaborate lunch, in their freezing, unheated village house. Everyone sat around with their coats on. The first thing Zanhua said to her long-lost daughter was 'Eat, eat, before it gets cold.' No one made conversation. But gradually, over the ten-day stay, they thawed out. Shuangjie braided Esther's hair, and the twins talked about the clothes and music they loved. When they left, Zanhua and Marsha embraced, 'celebrating their collaborative motherhood'. But the fact that the girls didn't even speak the same language brought home the cultural separation that had been inflicted on them. Demick observes (fascinatingly) that, economically speaking, the Chinese family were becoming better off than the Texas family. While American families were struggling with mortgages and health-insurance premiums, earnings per capita for the Chinese had gone up tenfold over the last 18 years. The Zeng family owned nearly two acres of farmland, and were building a brick house the size of a small hotel. 'Esther has been a bright star in my life,' Marsha said to Zanhua. 'But I would never have adopted her if I'd known she'd been stolen from you.'
Irish Times
14-06-2025
- General
- Irish Times
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove by Barbara Demick: Chilling insight into the birth of modern China
Daughters of the Bamboo Grove: China's Stolen Children and a Story of Separated Twins Author : Barbara Demick ISBN-13 : 978-1783787227 Publisher : Granta Guideline Price : £20 Early in Barbara Demick's exposé of child trafficking in the adoption markets of early-2000s China , she lists some of the chilling graffiti that appeared in Chinese towns during the height of the enforcement of the one-child policy: 'Better blood flowing like streams than children born outside the state plan.' The policy was ruthlessly enforced by family planning officers, who acted with impunity and sometimes outside the law – particularly in the period this book covers, when China's increasing wealth meant a sudden shortage of excess children, and fewer lucrative overseas adoptions . Demick's illuminating and often heartbreaking exploration of the processes that led to the snatching of Chinese children and the obfuscation of their true origins is well-researched, allowing the reader to share the writer's frustration and awe at the enormity of an operation carried out both by Chinese state employees and human traffickers. In a country as vast as China, with its strict system of censorship, it was only the coming of the social media age that allowed these stories to leak – a book such as this can only scratch the surface of the misery experienced in the poorer provinces. READ MORE We follow Demick as she pieces together the story of the Zeng family, whose twin daughters were separated in their infancy, with daughter Fangfang/Esther snatched by Chinese authorities and later adopted by American parents. Demick, whose own close friend adopted a Chinese baby in the years before these scandals broke, doesn't shy away from the complexity of the issue – should we blame the American parents who were assured that the children they adopted were abandoned by their parents? Should children raised in middle-class, urban America be returned to rural China? There are no easy answers here, but in tracking the tentative steps taken by both the American and Chinese branches of the family to reunite the twins, Demick demonstrates that the pathway towards some kind of resolution is more likely to be brought about by the kindness and empathy of individuals, rather than state action. The stories here will hit close to home for Irish readers as we deal with our own legacies of forced overseas adoptions. A chilling insight into the birth of modern China, and a gripping read.
