Bride Price in Chinese Culture

Women in China currently have a lot more freedom than they did in the past. Chinese women are increasingly able to have their own careers and futures, but there are still some traditions and social practices that cause them to not be treated fairly. One of these traditions is the bride price. This is a payment from the groom’s family to the bride’s family when they get married. Originally, the bride price helped to compensate the bride’s family for the loss of her labor. While marriage in China is still usually determined based on the financial benefits of the match, the practice of bride price has started to be questioned in the past few years. Many self-supporting and independent women inspired by feminism are unsure if they should accept the bride price when they get married. This is because the bride price reinforces patriarchy in a number of ways. But while this is true, getting rid of the bride price on its own will not guarantee equitable treatment for these women in their marriages. In my opinion, the bride price symbolizes a lot of traditional patriarchal values in Chinese culture that must be fixed on the way towards better gender equality.

Bride price is practiced in many Asian countries including China, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, and some African countries. In China, bride price originated in the Qing dynasty (1840) and lasted for over a century before it was abolished by the People’s Republic of China during the cultural revolution. It then reappeared in the marriage negotiation process during the late 1970s. For the following decades, bride price was considered a merited custom that everyone followed without questions.

Traditionally, the bride price originated in patriarchal traditions. The number of people in a family represented the family’s labor force. After getting married, the woman permanently leaves her family’s household and is sent to her husband’s family, thus she becomes part of her in-law family’s workforce. There she is expected to take care of her in-laws, do the housework, and raise children. In order to compensate for the loss of her labor, the groom’s family thus paid a certain amount of money, essentially purchasing the woman. Sometimes the bride price could be paid in the form of goods, ranging from a couple of pigs to valuable jewelry, depending on the families’ financial situations. In modern society, there are a few ways of deciding the amount to be paid. The most traditional way is that before agreeing to a wedding, two families schedule a meeting to discuss the appropriate amount. If they are unable to reach a consensus, then the couple cannot get married. A more popular way recently is that the couple will discuss the appropriate number between themselves and will not consult their parents.

Unfortunately, while the bride price is an economic issue, it has caused many social problems for Chinese women. Because the bride has been “purchased,” her husband and his family often feel a strong sense of ownership over her. She is then considered as an appendant of the man and his family. She loses control over her own body and is left no choice but to obey her husband and his family, because “the bride price symbolizes the transfer of rights to control a woman’s body and labor from her natal family to her husband’s family” (Wei, 2019). This shows that women are being treated as commodities and a labor force to serve men, and that they can be transferred by their families using money and goods. This way of thinking does not recognize that women have agency and that they should have the right to control their own lives.

Bride price is also often considered a form of maternity compensation. This causes social problems for women when combined with the expectation for women by default to have kids. The purpose of bride price has changed throughout history according to social context but compensating women for giving birth and raising children has been a consistent consideration. After paying for the woman’s marriage, the man’s family expects her to produce a baby, like a buyer expecting cargo to be delivered after making a payment. This results in a lot of pressure on the woman to become a mother regardless of what she wants for her own life. What if she doesn’t want to have kids? What if her in-laws want two grandchildren but she doesn’t want to force her body to go through a second pregnancy? While her in-laws cannot legally force the woman to give birth, many women suffer tremendous social pressure to conform to this expectation.

Unfortunately, expectations like this are often not discussed during the bride price negotiations. The man’s family then often feels entitled to demand their daughter-in-law to do things against her will that she would not have agreed to during those negotiations. In a Chinese blog article titled “Female Doctor: Being Forced to Have a Second Baby by Mother-in-Law Makes Me Miserable,” the contributor tells that her first baby was a daughter, which dissatisfied her mother-in-law. The mother-in-law is now forcing her to have a second baby in the hopes of having a grandson. Because of this, she says “I feel like I cannot decide for my own uterus and became a reproductive tool” (Zi, 2015). While there are also other reasons that the older generations attempt to control the lives of the younger generations, bride price allows in-laws to justify unreasonable demands towards women who are not their blood relatives. Bride price thus takes away from the woman’s control of her own life by making her husband’s family feel more entitled to demand things of her.

This specific expectation has its roots in the deep preference for sons that emerged during the one-child policy, which lasted from 1980 to 2016. Under this policy, Chinese families were only allowed to have one child each. There is a traditional Chinese belief that sons are the family blood and family name carrier, whereas girls are raised to be given to other families. Because of this, during the one-child policy, many families would use ultrasound to learn the gender of their unborn baby and would only keep the baby if it was a boy. Statistics show that on average, 117 boys were born for every 100 girls born during this period. Now that those babies are old enough to get married, this means that “there could be 24 million Chinese men unable to find wives by the end of the decade” (Yin, 2013). This fact induced panic in the Chinese matchmaking world; finding wives became a challenging and competitive business. This is when the bride price then became a way of increasing men’s competitiveness.

Richer families can afford to pay higher bride prices, which helps the men have a better chance to find a wife. In an article named “For Chinese Women, Marriage Depends on Right ‘Bride Price,’” an interviewee who had just paid the bride’s family 68,888 yuan (about $11,000) to get married, indicated that marriage in China is treated very much like a business negotiation. Discussions are not filled with questions of love or compatibility, but rather questions like “how much do you want to marry me?” and “how much do I have to give?” Then the families begin to bargain with each other to figure out the right bride price before allowing the couple to get married, which involves additional business conversations. So while the bride price had been abolished during the cultural revolution, it re-entered the marriage discussion due to a generation’s gender imbalance due to the one-child policy.

However, even while the one-child policy made women more financially valuable in society, they were still treated like commodities rather than people. Instead of giving women more choice in marriage, it only made marriage more expensive for men. And during this time the old patriarchal views on “owning” women after paying for them had not changed, so a lot of Chinese brides did not get much freedom in their marriages.

The bride price is not only a problem for women in their marriages, but also in the workplace. It is commonly accepted within Chinese culture that society is filled with discrimination against young women. While Chinese women are entitled to maternity leave, companies have responded by becoming unwilling to hire marriage-aged women (26 is the average age for marriage). According to Labor Protection of Female Works, in China employers must pay full salary for maternity leave with a length between 98 to 180 days, with a maximum extra 6 months of extension possible. During maternity leave, companies are not allowed to lower the salary, lay off, or terminate the employment of a contract in any other form (“产假, chǎn jià”). Due that companies of any size are bound by law to carry out this policy, companies often hesitate to hire female employees full-time because they are not financially capable of paying maternity leave to people who are not currently contributing to the company.

Negotiations of bride price often try to account for this hiring discrimination. That newlywed women are less likely to be hired is an elephant in the room, so her bride price is adjusted to compensate for the upcoming sacrifices she will have to make in order to become a mother, regardless of her own desire to have kids or not. While maternity leave and bride price seem to be designed in favor of women’s rights, patriarchal society has figured out how to make them work against women. The big problem here is that bride price is treated as an easy solution to both gender inequality and workplace discrimination. Rather than trying to resolve very complex and important social issues, people just pay over them with the bride price. It seems that it will be hard to improve gender discrimination while the bride price continues.

However, in some situations, bride price can give women a bit of leverage, especially when the woman’s family is superior to the man’s. As a country with a population of 1.4 billion people, China has large social class divisions. There is a ranking of several hundred Chinese cities that is divided into five tiers—tiers one to four and countryside. In these categories, the higher the tier of the city, the better the quality of life in terms of education and job opportunities there are, with countryside cities being the least valuable on the list. While the majority of people from non-first-tier city dream of upgrading to a higher-tier city, doing so is as challenging as trying to immigrate from one country to another. Marriage is the most convenient route to move to a higher-tier city. If the woman happens to come from a higher-tier city than her suitor, he will need to pay a higher amount to financially compensate for his unequal contribution to the new family.

Wang Xuerui, a 30-year-old Chinese woman from a second-tier city, was considering marriage to her boyfriend from a countryside city. She asked for a bride price of 200,000 yuan (around $30,000). This negotiation ended badly, as he could not afford such a price. She was asked “Don’t you love him? Why did you ask for such a high number?” She answered that she considers herself better than him in terms of family background and education, and so she wants him to give her and her family a big amount of money to increase his value (Wang, 2020). Culturally, the majority of Chinese men and women believe that men should be superior within a marriage, and so if a woman is able to provide more, then her bride price should be increased.

The problems of gender inequality caused by bride price are not as simple as other forms of misogyny. Under most circumstances, with bride price and other special social treatments, women have come to see themselves as beneficiaries. This is especially true in China, where bride price has existed for hundreds of years, while opposing voices have only appeared in recent years, largely inspired by western movements for gender equality. As a result, most Chinese women are used to being objectified as much as the men are used to objectifying them. The core of this problem is that the bride price is determined on a vague idea of the “value” of the woman. Factors like how innocent she is (whether or not she is a virgin), how beautiful she is, if she has studied abroad, how good of a cook she is, family background (what tier of city she’s from and how educated her parents are), and her degree of education (a bachelor’s is considered just right, while a master’s is intimidating, and a PhD is repelling for most) are all converted to being factors of just how much money the woman is worth. Women then spend a lot of time comparing their assigned value with other women’s worth to try to find rich men who are capable of providing more bride price to improve their social standing. Because they are the financial beneficiaries of bride price, many Chinese women indulge themselves in the illusion of privilege and thus don’t want to work on the more difficult problems of patriarchy.

At first, abolishing the tradition of bride price sounds like a targeted solution to a lot of issues of gender equality in China. Without bride price, women would be freer from their husbands’ and in-laws’ expectations, and they would work harder to challenge patriarchy. However, bride price currently provides money that a lot of women need for their new families, so bride price cannot be abolished unless other benefits are given in its place. Other actions need to be done while attempting to work through gender inequality as a social phenomenon. The government needs to fix the loopholes and workarounds in the systems that are supposed to benefit women.

Works Cited:

Wang, Xuerui. Interview. By Junru Wang. 10 December 2020.

Wei, Zhou “Should New Women Take Bride Price?”. Sohu, (23 Feb. 2021). https://www.sohu.com/a/452184250_481285

Xiao, Y. (2017, October 06). The Maternity Leave Policy in China is So Much Better Than America, No Wonder No One Wants to Hire Women [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://www.sohu.com/a/196464427_99912168

Yin, Sim Chi “For Chinese Women, Marriage Depends On Right 'Bride Price'” NPR, (April 23, 2013) https://www.npr.org

/2013/04/23/176326713/for-chinese-women-marriage-depends-on-right-bride-price#:~:text=In%20an%20ordinary%20family%2C%20the%20betrothal%20gift%20is%20about%20%2410%2C000.,-To%20be%20honest

Zi, Ju (2015). Female Doctor: Being Forced to Have a Second Baby by Mother-in-Law Makes Me Miserable. Translated by Junru Wang.