A March 2016 reflection on Sekihei’s China Watch column, humorously yet incisively depicting China’s extravagant marriage market and the social values underlying it.

2016-03-10

I read Mr. Sekihei’s essay on the subway heading for Umeda and later at a Starbucks in Umeda, and I could not help but burst out laughing.

The following is from Mr. Sekihei’s serialized column titled China Watch in the Sankei Shimbun.

All emphasis in the text other than the headline is mine.

“Marriage Hunting in Contemporary China”

On the first of this month, the following incident occurred in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, where I was born. A middle-aged man displayed simple household items such as bedding, tableware, and clothing—calling them “all my possessions”—on a street corner and began recruiting a marriage partner from among passing women. The man claimed to be 38 years old, with a monthly income of 6,000 yuan (about 100,000 yen), and said that pressure from his parents had driven him to take this action.

He sought an ordinary woman between the ages of 30 and 40. According to him, it would be enough if she could read, perform addition and subtraction up to 100, and do the laundry and cooking.

The “requirements” themselves were modest, but the act was rather bold. Conducting a one-man “marriage recruitment theater” in full public view reveals a temperament of contemporary Chinese people that is utterly removed from the Japanese sense of modesty or embarrassment.

When it comes to boldness, women are no different.

On January 21, in several locations around Pingquan County in Hebei Province, large advertising billboards appeared, all bearing the same message: recruitment of a marriage partner. These gigantic billboards—about two meters high and over four meters wide—displayed a full-body photograph of a woman printed at life size or larger, advertising for her future husband. Even in China, this became local news and spread nationwide via the internet. The effect of billboard advertising was enormous.

Of course, not every Chinese woman can do such a thing, but the ability to boldly place such an advertisement without hesitation is characteristic of today’s Chinese society. If ordinary people’s marriage searches are so flamboyant, then the search for a wealthy man’s bride is something that truly astonishes Japanese sensibilities.

This January, the Chinese Entrepreneurs Singles Club held a matchmaking party at a five-star garden hotel in Guangzhou. Although called a “party,” there were only eleven male participants—each an entrepreneur with average personal assets of 360 million yuan (approximately 6.3 billion yen). To attend, each man paid a participation fee of 99,999 yuan (about 1.75 million yen).

For the sake of these eleven tycoons’ marriage prospects, 320 beautiful women gathered from across the country as potential brides. All had passed regional “preliminary rounds” and arrived full of confidence, only to face even harsher screening.

First, a deputy director of a cosmetic surgery hospital in Guangzhou examined each woman’s beauty, determining whether it was natural or the result of surgery. Next came a personality assessment specialist, who chatted with them to judge their character. Finally, a physiognomist appeared to evaluate whether the woman’s facial features would bring “fortune” to her future husband. This final judgment, it seems, was considered the most important.

Only after passing all these multiple hurdles could the women finally attend the party where they would be seen by the tycoons. In this case, just over sixty women remained in the end. How many of them would actually become the wives of wealthy men remained unknown.

Reading about this multilayered screening process, I could not help but admire the ingenuity and meticulousness of the “great Chinese people.” At the same time, I thought that if such ingenuity and diligence were applied to manufacturing, the reputation of “Made in China” products might improve somewhat.

On the other hand, when I consider the actions of women who present themselves almost like product samples, submitting to such scrutiny in their single-minded desire to become the wife of a tycoon, and the social climate that lies behind it, I cannot help but feel a sense of sadness.