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February 25, 2017

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The high cost of riding the marriage-go-round

THE Beatles famously crooned “all you need is love,” but it’s a bit more complicated than that for men getting married in China.

According to a “betrothal gift map” widely circulating on Chinese social media, the groom and his parents need to cough up between 10,000 yuan (US$1,453) and 200,000 yuan in gifts for the bride and her family, depending on where the nuptials are held in China.

And that’s not all. The groom may also have to provide a house in the countryside or an apartment in the city, or jewelry, or a car.

According to the map, one of the costliest areas for betrothal gifts is the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, where 200,000 yuan in cash, an apartment and a set of jewelry are routinely expected.

Jiangxi and Fujian provinces are second on the list, with gifts averaging 150,000-200,000 yuan. It appears to be cheapest to get married in the Tibet Autonomous Region, while people in the cities of Chongqing and Wuhan aren’t expected to offer cash as betrothal gifts.

In big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, an apartment is a must-have for marriage. Cash is usually not necessary, but gifts of jewelry are highly recommended.

The map, of course, was designed as a bit of humor, but it isn’t always a laughing matter.

Just this week, an 18-year-old bride in Putian, Fujian Province, received a 2.9 million yuan wedding gift from her fiance.

Lucky lady. But she is the exception rather than the rule. Many poorer families exhaust their savings or go into debt to get a son married. Ironically, the poorer the region, the more costly are the expected nuptial gifts.

In the rural countryside, it’s often said, “When a son gets married, his parents get skinned.”

Indeed, a marriage can be ruinous for some families.

“In our village now, it is impossible to get married without being saddled with debt,” said Tao Yuanfeng, a village official in northern Shandong Province. “Some people accrue debts that it takes 10 years to pay off.”

Costly betrothal gifts have led to serious social problems all over the country. There have been cases reported around China where grooms have killed brides or their families because of disputes over nuptial gifts.

The most recent case happened last month in Anyang in the central province of Henan, when a groom bludgeoned his bride with a hammer on their wedding night.

The 27-year-old groom, Chen Bingtao, was the only son of four children in his family. He and the bride, Li Xiaoxiao, were brought together by a professional matchmaker. Li’s family demanded the groom provide the couple with an apartment, which cost 110,000 yuan. Chen’s parents were left with a debt of 200,000 yuan.

“We knew the bride’s family was asking too much, but we were worried that our son might never find a wife,” Chen’s father told the media. “So we borrowed money from relatives and friends.”

No one exactly knew what happened on the wedding night. Chen’s family said only that the newlyweds sat for three hours on the sofa in the living room, fighting. The betrothal gift was a main bone of contention. After killing his wife, Chen turned himself in to police.

The tragedy was not an isolated incident. In 2015, at least three similar cases were reported.

One involved a man in Hunan Province who killed his fiancée and her mother after they demanded a betrothal gift beyond what he could afford. Another related to a man in Gansu Province who killed his father-in-law when he tried to get a betrothal gift returned after a divorce.

While in Shanxi Province, a man jumped from a cliff after killing his fiancée’s mother and younger brother over a betrothal gift dispute.

People generally blame the problem on demands made by the bride and her family. However, even when women don’t demand big offerings, the families of many grooms feel they have to save face by providing them.

Guo Dehu, a woman from Fuyang in Anhui Province, said her family didn’t ask for any betrothal gifts before she married her boyfriend of four years. Neither family was wealthy.

She was quite shocked when her fiancé subsequently called her a “cheapskate” and was even more distressed to hear that her future in-laws were calling her “a good bargain who threw herself” on their son.

“I thought they would respect the fact that I wasn’t putting a price tag on our marriage,” Guo said. “But I guess they would have been happier if I had asked for 100,000 yuan instead.”

Sociologists speculate that the huge wealth gap between urban and rural areas plays into the gift issue. Not many women are willing to live in places of poverty anymore.

“Economic considerations are now a vital, if not the most vital, factor in marriage,” said Zhang Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “When women are not willing to continue a life of poverty, a costly betrothal gift may be what’s needed to get them to accept a marriage proposal.”

But there may be another deeper, sadder reason behind it all — the sex ratio in China.

By the end of 2015, there were 113 boys born for every 100 girls, creating one of the most unbalanced ratios in the world. An estimated 30 million single men may not be able to find a wife of their own age by 2020.

Many people blame the imbalance on illegal sex selection procedures or even the abortion of baby girls, still practiced in some backward rural areas.

While some of the zeal for a son may be attributed to the decades-old one-child policy, the situation hasn’t improved much since couples were allowed last year to have two children.

In 2016 in Shandong Province, the sex ratio of births of second children was 112 boys for every 100 girls, according to provincial public health and family planning authorities.

In the next four years, Shandong is bracing for 480,000 more boys than girls born in the province.

Elizabeth Remick, an associate professor of political science at Tufts University in Australia, has done research on the demographics. She said it will take a long time for balance to be restored.

In her article “Don’t blame China’s skewed sex ratio on the one-child policy,” she argues that “simply haranguing Chinese citizens to change their ‘backward’ ways of thinking and culture will not suffice.”




 

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