Leta Hong Fincher on “Leftover Women” and Feminism in China
Editor’s Note: In February 2024, TSLR sat down with Leta Hong Fincher, a leading voice in the intersection of gender and social change in China. As an acclaimed journalist and scholar, Fincher’s work sheds critical light on the complexities of women’s rights, feminism, and the intricate power dynamics at play in modern Chinese society.
Brian Haman: Your first book was Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China [London: Zed Books, 2014]. Can you briefly explain the significance of the term “leftover women” and its implications for women in China?
Leta Hong Fincher: I first wrote about this topic in an article in 2011, and it was translated into Chinese for the Chinese edition of the Wall Street Journal. At first, I thought it was just a free-floating term. I was doing research for my PhD dissertation in sociology at Tsinghua University, and I was looking at real estate agents and the real estate market. I discovered that quite a lot of the young women I was interviewing felt like they really had to get married, even though they were only in their mid-twenties. They felt that they had to make a lot of compromises in getting married, and that included making financial compromises with the purchase of a marital home. And so more and more of these young women were using the term 剩女 (sheng nu) or “leftover woman,” saying things like, “I’m almost a leftover woman. I’m already 26 years old” or “I am a leftover woman. I’m 27 or 28, so I don’t have the luxury of waiting—I really need to get married.”
As I did more research into the term, I realized that the state media was very aggressively pushing a lot of really sexist reports, trying to stigmatize and insult—particularly college-educated, urban, single women, trying to scare them into thinking that if they didn’t hurry up and get married that they would become “too old”, and no man would ever want them. In a nutshell, that is the origin of my research. I concluded that this was a very deliberate propaganda campaign to push educated women into marrying and having a child.
BH: You started to think about this term in 2011, your book was published in 2014, and we’re now in 2024, marking the tenth anniversary of Leftover Women. How has this term evolved over time?
Hong Fincher: Well, the term is still very widely used everywhere, but it’s no longer weaponized in Chinese state media, which has a very long history of doing so. Today, it’s really more relevant than ever because the government is even more explicitly pushing pro-marriage and pro-natalist propaganda. Of course, on the policy side, China has now eased its so-called one-child policy. It’s been trying to boost birth rates, which have been falling for seven consecutive years now. The government had rolled out a two-child policy, which failed to really result in the baby boom that was hoped for, and so it then introduced a three-child policy in 2021. And none of these policies have worked. What we’re still seeing is a lot of very aggressive, pro-marriage, pro-natalist propaganda. A lot of it is no longer designed to appear to be misogynistic, which is what it was like in the beginning, starting from 2007, and certainly when I first published the book. The propaganda surrounding leftover women was still very aggressively misogynistic, but today, a lot of the propaganda that you see is presenting more of a rosy, optimistic picture of how happy single women could be if they actually married and had children. It’s definitely still very sexist, but I’m not seeing the egregiously offensive misogyny in the propaganda today.
Having said that, when I was thoroughly revamping the book and updating it with a lot of the latest developments, one of the most important developments over the last decade with regard to single women is a change of mindset. When I was doing my original interviews for my PhD and the book, the overriding concern among most of the women that I interviewed was this fear that they would miss out on marriage if they didn’t compromise in some way. And the book is very detailed about all of the different ways in which women are oppressed, from state policies and regulations on buying real estate to just gender discrimination coming from their own parents. But today, being single is no longer as widely stigmatized by young people. In fact, it’s become quite mainstream for women to just say, “You know, I don’t want to marry,” or “ I’m not ready to marry yet, and I’m not ready to have a baby yet.” It’s just much more widely acceptable, even though there is still very intense pressure on women to marry. That is a really striking change and certainly one of the main reasons, I would argue, behind the plummeting marriage and birth rates.
Leta Hong Fincher, Leftover Women. The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, 10th Anniversary Edition (London: Bloomsbury, 2023)
BH: To what extent has feminist activism played a role in these changes?
Hong Fincher: Well, there is a political feminist movement that is more radical, but it is definitely not followed by the majority of women in China. I would say that there’s a lot of evidence that young women, especially those who are in college or have gone to college, are just pushing back a lot more today against widespread gender discrimination and sexism, even if they don’t call themselves feminists—and a lot of young women really don’t want to use that term. If you just listen to what they say, they have their own dreams for themselves. Maybe they want to further their education, or maybe they want to advance their career—choosing to live for themselves more than for their families, which is a really big shift.
BH: What is feminism in China today?
Hong Fincher: Well, it’s perceived very differently. The fact that it is so widely discussed on social media in spite of widespread censorship just shows you that young women today, and also young LGBTQ people, are listening to themselves more. They’re standing up for themselves in their own lives, and they’re making choices that are best for them. One of the really important ways in which they’re choosing to live for themselves is choosing to remain single in the face of, at times, really suffocating family pressure to marry.
Or you can also see a lot of images of young women who are pushing back against traditional beauty standards. There’s just a lot more mainstream discussion and a wide range of topics being discussed, such as the possibility that there’s gender discrimination in getting into university or certain university programs. There are ways in which a lot of young women or young LGBTQ people in general are talking about their own lives and standing up for their rights, ways that are not overtly political. So there’s actually quite a bit of space for these kinds of very meaningful discussions about how to live a better life, how to make better decisions for yourself. And a lot of these discussions are not being censored, as long as they’re staying away from things such as political resistance.
BH: Your book addresses intersectionality—of gender, class, and age. Can you elaborate a bit on its importance?
Hong Fincher: The way feminist discourse has evolved in China, I think, is very intersectional because it overlaps very strongly with LGBTQ communities and issues of marginalization, marginalized identities, and disability rights. Standing up for feminism as a belief system in China can be politically dangerous in the extreme, but whenever you’re embracing the ideology of feminism, you’re basically standing up for marginalized people of all kinds.
BH: Shifting gears slightly, your book deals with the gender gap in terms of property ownership. In light of China’s recent housing market difficulties, has this gap changed?
Hong Fincher: My book does talk a lot about gender inequality in wealth, particularly through the real estate market. Residential real estate is by far the most important family asset in China because of a dearth of other places for consumers to invest their money. So I detail all of the different ways in which women were shut out of the accumulation of property wealth during the initial privatization of housing in China. Women are typically left out of property deeds on marital homes. Families often have to pool assets to purchase a home, and so assets tend to be channeled toward men in the family. It’s a very complicated dynamic, and there are many different kinds of forces involved in perpetuating this gender inequality in wealth.
Over the past decade, there has definitely been evidence that parents today are no longer as blatantly discriminatory against daughters in terms of accumulating property. For example, one of the ways in which women were shut out of property ownership in the past (more than a decade ago) was that parents would often scrape and save to buy a home for their son but not for their daughter. And sometimes, even if they had a daughter or one that was an only child, they would actually help their nephew buy a home rather than their own daughter. So there is definitely evidence that there is less of this type of behavior—but it’s still happening. It’s quite disturbing the degree to which there still is this entrenched gender inequality in wealth through the purchasing of property.
Nevertheless, there is more evidence that women are succeeding today in buying their own homes and having their names on property deeds. However, that should not necessarily just be a phenomenon to be celebrated, as we need to acknowledge the severe downturn in China’s real estate market. All these real estate developers are in a lot of trouble. There are millions of unsold housing stock, so of course there are indications that there are developers who are actually choosing to market their homes toward single women. This is just a rational business move for them; real estate is simply no longer the incredible investment that it has been over the past two decades.
If you buy your own home today, it’s entirely possible that it will fall in value, whereas for almost 20 years, the expectation has been that you’re guaranteed to make a profit if you get into the property game. The greatest period of wealth accumulation through the purchasing of property is absolutely over now, and it is unlikely to return. On the bright side, though, it does mean that there are fewer barriers to single women buying property today, and it may even become easier if you look at the direction of loosening real estate restrictions on single people. This might be a case of something that is only just happening in Shanghai, for example, but it’s really too early to tell.
BH: There’s a certain irony in the fact that increased access to the property market comes at a time when property prices have fallen.
Hong Fincher: Well, yes, it makes business sense. Single women have been dying to buy their own property. When I started my research in 2011, I interviewed many single women, and this was one of the reasons that they were getting married. In many cases, they didn’t even like their boyfriend, but they thought it was too difficult for them to purchase a home without getting married.
More than a decade ago, I interviewed so many single women who didn’t want to marry, who wanted to buy their own homes, but it was impossible for them because it was just out of reach financially. But today, those homes are no longer completely out of reach for them. I would also say that the increased self-confidence of single women in China is very heartening actually, and we see that confidence reflected in falling marriage and birth rates.
But we should also note that the outlook for women’s rights is bleaker today than it was in the past. Another really important thing, though, that is very bad is that the government is making it more difficult, especially for women, to get a divorce. For women who are already married, they are unfortunately trapped in their marriage because it is so difficult to get a divorce if your spouse doesn’t want you to divorce. It’s actually a rather new development because the government introduced this so-called “divorce cooling-off period” in 2021. There’s actually a lot of wide-reaching, quantitative research that has been done, for example, sociologist Ethan Michelson’s open access book Decoupling: Gender Injustice in China’s Divorce Courts [Cambridge University Press, 2022], an authoritative analysis of divorce lawsuits based on hundreds of thousands of cases.
BH: Would you characterize this difficulty as part of China’s patriarchal authoritarianism?
Hong Fincher: Absolutely. A related phenomenon is the epidemic of domestic violence in China. When I originally wrote this book, it was before the government passed the anti-domestic violence law, which was enacted in 2016. At the time, that law was a legal milestone, one widely celebrated in the state media in China. Unfortunately, however, there is no evidence that the law has been properly enforced at all. The government is simply not enforcing the laws, and there is very disturbing new evidence from a number of scholars that divorce judges pay absolutely no attention to the fact that the spouse, generally the husband but not always, has been incredibly violent with his wife. It just has almost no bearing on whether or not the victim of that violence is allowed to get a divorce as she goes through a divorce court, which is very disturbing.
I wrote about domestic violence in the original edition, but today, unfortunately, I am more pessimistic when it comes to gender-based violence. Although it has been bad historically, the difference today is that it is even more difficult to escape an abusive marriage, which is terrible for all of these women who are already married. If their spouse is abusive, then they have no choice but to give up their property, all of their assets, and often custody of their children if they want to escape. It’s a very grim scenario, and, yes, this is all part of the patriarchal authoritarianism, which sees marriage and the family as politically stabilizing.
I wrote about this more in my other book, Betraying Big Brother [London: Verso, 2018]. The propaganda surrounding Xi Jinping emphasizes him as this powerful patriarch, as the head of this big family, with the emphasis on the term “family” in which China is this big family, a nation state of millions of little families where everybody plays their proper role in the hierarchy. And within that patriarchal hierarchy, men are at the top. Women are supposed to be subservient to the men—to take care of the home, to be dutiful wives and dutiful mothers, and to take care of the elderly. The government really doesn’t care at all about violence as long as it is contained within the politically stabilizing institution of marriage. In fact, containing violence within marriage is seen as conducive to the stability of the Chinese nation, which is all related to patriarchal authoritarianism, both within the small family unit and within the nation state as a whole.
BH: Confucian values weigh heavily on the male psyche in China. Have you seen any changes in terms of men and their self-perceptions and perceptions of Chinese women?
Hong Fincher: Confucianism obviously is a Chinese tradition, but let’s not forget that communism overthrew that belief. Confucianism was seen as a terrible relic of the feudal era, and so the Communist Party, to a great extent, really obliterated those traditional kinds of patriarchal beliefs. Or, more precisely, they didn’t completely obliterate such thinking, which still remains strong, but what I argue is that patriarchal beliefs in China today stem much more from state-led propaganda than from long-standing traditions that are organically passed down.
When I first started my research around the end of 2010, a lot of the young men that I interviewed back then definitely did not come across as blatantly sexist as they appear to be in the state media. So today, it’s striking that you see quite a number of young men in China who also don’t want to marry. It’s not so much that these men are anti-marriage per se—certainly not as much as women are—but there are young men who say, “No, I don’t wanna have a child; I’m part of the last generation, and this generation ends with me.” So it’s not exclusively a female viewpoint that it’s perhaps not so great to have children after all in today’s China.
But I would say that the falling marriage and birth rates combined, these large demographic trends, are driven more by changes in young women than by changes in young men. After all, men are still favored. It is a very patriarchal government, and these patriarchal beliefs are very strongly pushed through education as well as through propaganda, so it’s natural for women to resist marriage and childbearing a lot more than men do. But young men are resisting it more than they used to as well.
BH: Returning to this idea of political resistance, what is the political environment that Chinese feminist activists face in today’s China? Has it changed in substantive ways since your second book, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, was published in 2018?
Leta Hong Fincher, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (London: Verso, 2021)
Hong Fincher: Oh, it’s changed a lot. When I actually finished writing Betraying Big Brother, it went to the printers in early 2018, and I didn’t know its fate. Of course, I can’t know the future either, but I really didn’t know if the feminist movement would survive because there was so much persecution of feminist activists. But in the years since then, feminist beliefs have become so much more widespread and mainstream; there’s no going back. Or maybe there could be. There is a lot that the government could do to make things even worse for women’s rights than they are already. It’s going to be very hard for the government to win over young women in particular, who don’t want to marry and have children. And that is certainly related to the rise of feminist beliefs.
But you have to distinguish between the more mainstream beliefs about standing up for yourself as a woman, one who faces widespread gender discrimination, from the number of young people who openly describe themselves as feminists. Because the term is so politically loaded in China, it’s understandable that many don’t want to label themselves as such. But if you look at their behavior, you see that they’re asking for or even demanding more equal treatment. They are pushing back a lot more against patriarchal traditions and messages, which is a significant development. I think that it’s going to be very difficult for the government to reverse this trend.
BH: Could either of your two books be researched or even published in translation in mainland China today?
Hong Fincher: Well, the original edition of Leftover Women was published on the mainland in 2016, but I certainly do not expect the new edition to be translated into China, given the increasing political repression and the state of the publishing industry.
Also, speaking of feminism and the popularity of feminism, if you look at the publishing industry, a number of bestselling books are about feminism in Japan. For example, although Chizuko Ueno, the Japanese feminist sociologist, writes about feminism in Japan, Japan is culturally very similar to China. There is also South Korean literature—novels about women and the oppression of Korean women. As far as I understand, those novels are becoming increasingly popular [in mainland China], which is yet another indication that feminist thinking and feminist literature are just a lot more popular today than they were over a decade ago in China.
So, I would be thrilled if my new book were to be translated and published in China. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.
Leta Hong Fincher has written for a range of publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian. The 10th anniversary edition of her first book, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China (2023), was named one of the best books of 2023 by China Books Review. Her second book, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China, was named one of the best books of the year by Vanity Fair, Newsweek, and Foreign Policy Interrupted, among others. Leta is the first American to receive a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University’s Department of Sociology in Beijing. She graduated from Harvard University magna cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in East Asian Languages and Civilizations, and she is currently a Research Associate at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University.