China is isolated from Western social media applications primarily due to government policies and regulations that aim to control and regulate the flow of information within the country. And as a result, there’s very little knowledge about Chinese social and cultural issues .
Over the years, thousands of young Chinese students have flocked to Western countries to better their education and observers say that mostly millennials in their mid-30s are taking to the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu to talk about their great escape to the West.
These women, mostly students in higher education in Western countries have gathered under the hashtag Xiaohongshu, which translates to “ studying abroad at an older age”. They received worldwide attention with the hashtag generating 57.2 million views. The young women talk about escaping the stigma of being unmarried and childless, opting to run away to align with Western norms where being a single woman is not frowned upon.
In China, unmarried women often face societal stigmas and pressure due to various cultural and social factors, including family expectations. Local media have reported about a young and unmarried woman, who was branded a “leftover woman” a deeply unflattering term for those left on the shelf. Peking University’s China Centre for Economic Research reported that Chinese women have also had to contend with widening gender gaps in employment.
The report further stated that working mothers with children under seven years of age were over 43% more likely to be unemployed than other women. The recent social media hashtag Xiaohongshu has attracted the attention of news media worldwide and the South China Post has spoken to many. 34-year-old Claudia Ke told SCMP that she left China to pursue an MBA in France, despite having a consulting company in Shanghai and all her friends being in the city,.
To marry a woman in China, the groom has to pay a token of appreciation (Pin Jin) usually of monetary value to the bride’s family before marriage, This practice is also common in African countries along with India where the bride’s family is expected to pay the groom’s family a dowry. Reports say that as economic conditions improve in China, more women are becoming financially independent and delaying marriage or choosing not to marry at all.
However societal pressures have generated a stigma towards women who choose to be independent. But China has seen the population decline. The population count declined when the number of deaths exceeded the number of births by 2.08 million people in 2023.Despite China ditching the controversial one-child policy and introducing a three-child policy in 2021 to boost its plummeting birth rate, some also wonder if societal pressure towards women is a push factor.
Another woman in a Xiaohongshu viral post told local media that she would not choose to spend part of her income on children because it’s expensive. In the diary-style posts, the women talk about how higher education in the West has been their ticket to freedom. But they also talk about it being hard to learn in a foreign language, getting used to being a student again in one’s 30s, and the social pressures and expectations they still face in China.
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