China, Where the Pressure to Marry Is Strong, and the Advice Flows Online
By Karoline Kan, NY Times, June 18, 2017
BEIJING--Every evening, Liang Xuemeng goes online to read the latest postings from Ayawawa, one of China’s most popular advice columnists.
“I’ve learned a lot from Ayawawa,” said Ms. Liang, 29, an office clerk in Beijing. “I wish I’d started following her before my first marriage failed.”
Ayawawa is the online name of Yang Bingyang, one of several online advice dispensers who have won celebrity in China by tapping into urban women’s anxieties about finding a man to marry.
A former model, author of nine books and, she says, one of the first Chinese admitted to Mensa, the high I.Q. society, Ms. Yang has 2.8 million followers on Weibo, a Twitter-like messaging service, and 1.3 million on WeChat, the social media platform where she answers readers’ questions.
“Since I was very young, even before I had my first relationship, I’ve been good at giving advice on relationships to people around me,” Ms. Yang said in an interview.
Although women in their 20s are greatly outnumbered by men in the same age group in China, a product in part of the since-abandoned one-child family policy and a cultural preference for sons, they face enormous pressure to marry. Those who do not have a husband by the age of 27 are routinely branded as “leftover women,” with diminishing value in the dating market.
Many of these “leftover women” are well-educated urban professionals in a society where men prefer women who are younger and less successful than themselves. The surplus of bachelors shows up mostly on the other end of the spectrum, poor rural men, prompting the state-run All-China Women’s Federation to urge women to lower their standards, lest they, too, end up as “leftovers.”
The stress surrounding the search for a suitable partner has given rise to highly rated television dating shows and public matchmaking events. And to advice columnists like Ayawawa, who can detail the techniques for dating and marrying a man.
The columnists have their critics, who accuse them of reinforcing gender stereotypes, but the columnists counter that they are simply acknowledging reality.
“Our world has been hijacked by political correctness,” Ms. Yang said. “I’m criticized for telling the truth about the differences between men and women.”
She compared managing a relationship to taking an examination. “If there’s something wrong with the exam, it’s not my job to change how it works, but to tell my followers how to take the exam and score a high grade under the existing circumstances.”
Many of Ayawawa’s fans consider her the personification of the success they crave for themselves: attractive, married to a man she describes as a loving husband, the mother of two children.
By contrast, Lu Qi, a popular online relationship adviser with 26 million followers on Weibo, owes much of his credibility to being a single man in his early 30s, who presumably knows firsthand what such men really think of women. He also said that his advice was based on extensive research in the social sciences and psychology.
“Chinese schools don’t offer a proper education in love and relationships,” Mr. Lu said in an interview. “People get their ideas mostly from TV dramas.”
Asked whether he really believed there were rules governing love, he said, “You can’t measure love, of course, but there are some rules that apply to all relationships and social interactions.”
He expounds on some of these in taped lectures he sells online, on such subjects as: “Teaching women to solve relationship problems in a scientific way. Overcoming lingering feelings from a former relationship. Fighting a ‘little third’”--a Chinese term for a third party in a relationship.
