Page 162 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE FAMILY 149
One thing, at least, is certain. Demand for new housing is not correlated solely with
the age of habitations or a shortage of space. Most people living in dwellings that had been
put up more than six years earlier said that as soon as they had sufficient savings, they would
build again. Yet by their own admission, the average per capita floor space of
respondents’ houses had increased from 41 square metres in 1995 to 71 square metres
in 2000.
Official accounts explain the housing boom as a product of peasants’ residual ‘feudal’
thinking and irrational competition for ‘face’. In the words of Zhu Yinchuan, Head of the
Bureau of Land Administration in Hangzhou, ‘many villagers who have been farming their
entire lives have been building houses their entire lives, and the little profit that they have
ploughed from the soil largely has been spent on house-building’ (Zhongguo guotu ziyuan
bao 2000:1). So keen are some villagers to outdo their neighbours, wrote Zhu, that they
demolish sound houses inhabited for only a few years in order to replace them with ever
larger, taller and more exotic buildings. Families who cannot afford to rebuild are
considered ‘impoverished’, even though they inhabit a massive new villa. Zhu omitted to
identify young women’s housing ambitions as one of the factors driving residential
construction in Zhejiang. Yet time and again when I queried people’s motives for building
I was told, ‘No woman would marry a man without a new house.’
This bald assertion is remarkable on three counts. For one, it demonstrably is untrue.
Many people in the western regions of rural China lack the wherewithal to construct any
sort of new housing. Newly-weds must, perforce, live in dilapidated accommodation. The
second remarkable point is that it contains an acknowledgement that most women do,
indeed, decide whom they will marry. Many factors have combined to accommodate
women’s freedom of choice in marriage. In most families, at least two generations have
now been born since national legislation was passed to grant women the right to decide
whether, and whom, they will marry. Novels, newspapers, television programmes and
popular music and, to a lesser extent, propaganda and educational materials, have
promoted the idea that marriage should be a romantic, voluntary and mutually satisfying
union (Friedman 2000). Although market reforms have not eliminated gender
discrimination in agriculture, industry and business, village women now enjoy a wider
variety of job opportunities. Many young women move to cities and towns where they
become economically independent and are relieved of parental supervision of their social
life. Further, throughout China there are considerably fewer females of marriageable age
than there are males (New York Times 2002). As economists from the Chicago school might
put it, this places young women in a strong bargaining position in the ‘marriage market’
(Grossbard-Scechtman 1995:101–7).
The third notable point in the assertion above is that housing is believed to be a crucial
criterion in women’s marital behaviour. On survey questionnaires, 25 respondents wrote
that they had built their new houses solely because their son was intending to wed. In
answer to my query about how house-building is linked to marriage, most respondents
stated that women decide between suitors partly on the basis of the age and quality of
their housing. Indeed, so directly do some villagers connect marriage and housing
construction that one survey respondent reasoned, ‘A new house shows that a family has
an unmarried son. Without the son, they would have no need to rebuild.’