The Economist: “CHINA’s communists attacked many bourgeois institutions after taking power in 1949. But marriage was not one of them. On the contrary, they enacted a marriage law in 1950, four years before they introduced a constitution. The pressure to marry remains heavy in today’s China, where almost 80% of adults have tied the knot at some point, compared with only 68% in America. But today, in contrast to the 1950s, marriage is bound up with another bourgeois institution: property.
In China mortgages often precede marriages. According to popular belief, if a man and his family cannot buy property he will struggle to find a bride. In choosing a husband, three-quarters of women consider his ability to provide a home, according to a recent survey of young people in China’s coastal cities by Horizon China, a Beijing-based market-research firm. Even if a woman herself dismisses this criterion, her family and friends, not to mention the country’s estate agents, will not let her forget it.
“Naked marriages”, as property-less ones are known, are endorsed by increasing numbers of young people. But as they get older, their attitudes may regress faster than society’s progress. One 28-year-old Beijing woman married her husband after falling in love with him at college. But “if you introduced a man to me now, and he couldn’t afford a home, I wouldn’t marry him,” she says. “I need to be more realistic. I’m not a 20-year-old girl.”
Some economists argue that competition for brides in China’s marriage “market” helps explain the punishingly high prices in its property market. Houses are least affordable in those parts of China where men most outnumber women, argue Shang-jin Wei of Columbia University, Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute and Yin Liu of Tsinghua University (see chart).
via Women and the property market: Married to the mortgage | The Economist.
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