Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World's Next Superpower

Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World's Next Superpower

by Roseann Lake
Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World's Next Superpower

Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World's Next Superpower

by Roseann Lake

Hardcover

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Overview

Factory Girls meets The Vagina Monologues in this fascinating narrative on China’s single women—and why they could be the source of its economic future.

Forty years ago, China enacted the one-child policy, only recently relaxed. Among many other unintended consequences, it resulted in both an enormous gender imbalance—with a predicted twenty million more men than women of marriage age by 2020—and China’s first generations of only-daughters. Given the resources normally reserved for boys, these girls were pushed to study, excel in college, and succeed in careers, as if they were sons.

Now living in an economic powerhouse, enough of these women have decided to postpone marriage—or not marry at all—to spawn a label: "leftovers." Unprecedentedly well-educated and goal-oriented, they struggle to find partners in a society where gender roles have not evolved as vigorously as society itself, and where new professional opportunities have made women less willing to compromise their careers or concede to marriage for the sake of being wed. Further complicating their search for a mate, the vast majority of China’s single men reside in and are tied to the rural areas where they were raised. This makes them geographically, economically, and educationally incompatible with city-dwelling “leftovers,” who also face difficulty in partnering with urban men, given the urban men’s general preference for more dutiful, domesticated wives.

Part critique of China’s paternalistic ideals, part playful portrait of the romantic travails of China’s trailblazing women and their well-meaning parents who are anxious to see their daughters snuggled into traditional wedlock, Roseann Lake’s Leftover in China focuses on the lives of four individual women against a backdrop of colorful anecdotes, hundreds of interviews, and rigorous historical and demographic research to show how these "leftovers" are the linchpin to China’s future.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780393254631
Publisher: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date: 02/13/2018
Pages: 288
Product dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 2.20(d)

About the Author

Roseann Lake is The Economist’s Cuba correspondent. She was previously based in Beijing, where she worked for five years as a television reporter and journalist. Her China coverage has appeared in Foreign Policy, Time, The Atlantic, Salon, and Vice, among others. She lives between New York City and Havana.

Table of Contents

Preface 9

1 Ultrasound Checks and Imbalances 19

2 "Golden Turtles" 39

3 Doors and Windows 55

4 Marriage and Mortarboards 74

5 Chickens and Ducks 97

6 Freedom and Submission 116

7 Higher Callings 136

8 Love, with Chinese Characteristics 153

9 Cars, Houses, Cash 177

10 East Meets West 194

11 Bamboo Ceilings 206

12 The Way Forward 236

Epilogue: New Beginnings to Happy Endings 263

Acknowledgments 267

Bibliography 269

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