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Love and money reshape family in China
By Robert Marquand (The Christian Science Monitor)
Updated: 2006-01-19 11:10 A sense of acceleration
On Nov. 27, a documentary by Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, shot
in China in the waning years of the Cultural Revolution, was screened in Beijing
for the first time. Its patient camera angles show bygone urban scenes: a lower
skyline, donkeys and pigs on the street, and lots of smiling children with
tattered clothes. The film is a window on rapidly China has moved into the
modern world.
That acceleration is reflected in the way relationships are being formed and
conducted. Cellphones and the Internet provide the kind of intimacy and instant
connection never before possible in China. The nation now has 400 million
cellphone users, double the number in the late 1990s, according to Bo Landin, a
former executive with Ericsson. Even many migrant workers now carry cellphones.
In a way not found in the West, young Chinese take their new cellphone
liberation and Internet relationships seriously. There is even a sense of
generational separateness between 24-year-olds, who got their first cellphones
in college, and 19-year-olds, who have been talking to each other since junior
high. Text messages allow young men or women, who are often painfully shy, to
conduct a rapid-fire dialogue that has its own interpersonal language.
Twentysomethings in China will hold hands on the street; teenagers feel no
remorse about kissing in public.
The generation gap and pace of relationships is clear to Liu Jin, a mom who
works at a joint venture. At first, Liu got excited when her son brought home
his girlfriend. She sized up the young lady as a potential daughter-in-law. Then
the young man brought home another, and another, and they still keep coming. Liu
gave up trying to figure out her son's wishes. It isn't how we used to do
things, she says.
The new craving for "feeling" has brought new experimentation - not always
with happy results. The most popular film in China last year, "Shouji
(Cellphone)", centered on a man who cleverly used his cellphone to shield his
lovers from his wife. The film introduced the phrase "aesthetic fatigue," which
describes a culture of too many overripe relationships. The pace is often so
intense that the passion burns out quickly; too many relationships are based on
sex alone, Chinese complain.
"Singles aren't talking about marriage, lovers aren't talking about the
future," as one put it. A saying among high school and college students
describes a weariness with a growing pattern of "one-week" relationships: "On
Monday, you send out vibes. Tuesday, you express true desire. Wednesday, you
hold hands. Thursday, you sleep together. Friday, a feeling of distance sets in.
Saturday, you want out. On Sunday, you start searching again."
At the same time, sex is becoming common at an ever-younger age. One college
freshman who started an "innocent youth" campaign on the Internet asked visitors
to the site to sign a vow of purity. But few would sign. One wrote, "If it comes
to being a virgin or breaking up with my boyfriend, I won't sign it."
High-tech has made introductions easy. White collar companies now woo
recruits by bragging about their weekly singles mixers. Introduction services
have cropped up, advertising that clients will "find that right spouse." One
service in Beijing offers four levels of matchmaking possibility, ranging from a
$25 Web inspection of members to an $800 "Gold" membership featuring a party for
you with booze, balloons, and an "A" list of prospective females. Yet our
reporting shows that couples rarely find each other at these places. Rather, it
remains friends, alumni, work, and family where marriages develop.
"Women now speak very differently about men," says Li Yinhe of CASS. "They
rate them as A, B, C, or D. They find it hard to locate an A man, and much of
the talk I hear is about settling for a C-group man."
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