Resistance to Paying For Brides in China

The 30 women sat in wooden chairs, facing each other in a rectangular formation. At the front of the room was the ruling Communist Party’s hammer and sickle logo, with a sign declaring the meeting’s purpose: “Symposium of unmarried young women of the right age.”

Officials in Daijiapu, a town in southeast China, had gathered the women to sign a public pledge to reject high “bride prices,” referring to a wedding custom in which the man gives money to his future wife’s family as a condition of engagement. The local government said it hoped people would abandon such backward customs and do their part to “start a new civilized trend.”

As China faces a shrinking population, officials are cracking down on an ancient tradition of betrothal gifts to try to promote marriages, which have been on the decline. Known in Mandarin as caili, the payments have skyrocketed across the country in recent years — averaging $20,000 in some provinces — making marriage increasingly unaffordable. The payments are typically paid by the groom’s parents.

To curb the practice, local governments have rolled out propaganda campaigns such as the Daijiapu event, instructing unmarried women not to compete with one another in demanding the highest prices. Some town officials have imposed caps on caili or even directly intervened in private negotiations between families.

The tradition has been met with growing public resistance as attitudes have shifted. Among more educated Chinese, many are likely to see it as a patriarchal relic that treats women as property being sold to another household. In the rural areas where the custom tends to be more common, it has also fallen out of favor among poor farmers who must save several years or go into debt to get married.

Even so, the government’s campaign has drawn criticism as reinforcing sexist stereotypes of women. Chinese media outlets, in describing the problem of rising marriage payments, have depicted women seeking big sums as greedy.

After the Daijiapu event went viral on social media, a flurry of commenters questioned why the burden of solving the problem fell on women.

By targeting women, official campaigns like the Daijiapu event sidestep the fact that the problem is partly of the government’s own making. During the four decades of the one-child policy, parents preferred sons, resulting in a lopsided gender ratio that has intensified competition for wives.

The imbalance is most pronounced in rural areas, where there are now 19 million more men than women. Many rural women prefer to marry men in cities to obtain an urban household registration permit, or hukou, which provides access to better schools, housing and health care.

Poorer men must pay more to marry because the women’s families want a stronger guarantee that they can provide for their daughters, a move that instead could plunge them deeper into poverty.

The tradition is also linked to entrenched attitudes about the role of women as caregivers in families. In parts of rural China, the payment is still seen as a purchase of the bride’s labor and fertility from her parents. Once married, the woman has been expected to move in with her husband’s family, get pregnant and be responsible for housework, child raising and the care of her aging in-laws.

Sociologists say a more effective way to curb the tradition would be to put more funding toward child care and into health care for seniors.

A new generation of women, more educated than their parents, may also be playing a role in changing attitudes around the issue. A 2020 survey found that highly educated couples were less likely to pay bride prices, believing that loving each other was enough.

Cities are trying to popularize the idea of getting engaged without exchanging money. Last month, officials in Nanchang hosted a free mass wedding for 100 couples who got married in a sports stadium, touting the slogan “We Want Happiness, Not Bride Price.”