Rewriting romance: How young Chinese are rethinking love and marriage

Dr. Liu Wenrong conducted a survey of 2,400 non-student youth aged 21-40 in China to understand contemporary young people's views on love and marriage.

Good evening! In recent years, China’s demographic challenges and shifting policy priorities have become a focal point for international observers. One closely linked and often underexplored topic is how young Chinese people view love, relationships, and marriage today.

From my own experience, those with some familiarity with China might already know that Chinese parents tend to play a more active role in their children’s marriage decisions compared to families in Western countries—a reflection of deep-rooted cultural norms. Those who understand China a bit more intimately might also be aware of the tradition of “bride price” or “caili”—a customary payment from the groom’s family to the bride’s, still practiced in some parts of the country.

You may have also heard about the growing reluctance among younger generations in China to get married or have children, a trend noted in a Xinhua News Agency report last June titled “Young Chinese not eager to walk into marriage.”

Beyond these broad strokes, I hope today’s newsletter can offer a more nuanced and grounded perspective on how young people in China are thinking about relationships and marriage—something that, for many, remains a deeply personal and defining part of life.

Today’s piece draws from an interview by 人物 People magazine with Liu Wenrong, a research fellow at Institute of Sociology, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS), whose reflections shed light on the shifting landscape of love and commitment among China’s younger generation. It covers:

1. How young people increasingly don't believe in love as a basis for marriage

2. Rising parental involvement in children's marriage decisions

3. The concept of "unlimited responsibility" in Chinese families

4. Comparison between Chinese and Western family models

5. The challenges of modern relationships and "relationship poverty"

About Liu Wenrong and her project

Dr. LIU Wenrong is a sociologist specializing in family studies. She serves on the governing boards of the Chinese Sociological Association, China Marriage and Family Research Association, and the Family Sociology Committee of the Chinese Sociological Association, according to the official website of SASS.

Her research examines family cohesion and intergenerational solidarity amid China's social transformation, with particular focus on:
• The modern manifestations of familism in everyday life
• The evolving relationship between family systems and societal development
• The interplay between family institutions and public policy

Dr. Liu was a visiting scholar at the Department of Child, Youth and Family Studies (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Feb-Jul 2014). Her work bridges theoretical frameworks with empirical studies of Chinese family dynamics in contemporary society.

In the 1990s, Chinese youth essentially achieved autonomy in love and marriage. Pursuing love and establishing deep emotional relationships of their own choosing became symbols of youth rebellion and agency in popular culture. But today, data shows that Chinese parents' involvement in their children's marriages seems to be increasing again. This time, it's the result of young people's "rational choice."

In 2023, Dr. Liu conducted a survey of 2,400 non-student youth aged 21-40 in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou to understand contemporary young people's views on love and marriage. The survey data shows that more and more young people no longer believe in love within marriage. Whether parents and friends support the match and whether objective conditions align play increasingly important roles in young people's marriage decisions. They seem more willing to believe that "parental arrangements and matchmaker's words" can truly bring them a better marriage.

For the past decade, Dr. Liu has focused on intergenerational relationships between Chinese youth and their parents within families. Contrary to academic expectations from the 1990s, urbanization and modernization have not diluted China's deeply rooted family culture but have instead deepened the economic and emotional bonds between parents and children. This family model of deep intergenerational binding and unlimited responsibility once helped many people find their footing during China's rapid social transformation, but for today's youth making marriage and childbearing decisions, it creates tremendous pressure.

Although Chinese parents' pressure to marry and have children has become a hot topic for online complaints, in Liu Wenrong's view, it's precisely parents and the family of origin that provide emotional support for single youth, allowing them to extend their time as "children" in a family. However, this extension is inevitably unsustainable. Liu Wenrong believes that one day, young people will step forward to create new scripts for marriage and family belonging to their generation.

The following is Dr. Liu Wenrong's account:

If someone meets all your criteria for a spouse but you haven't fallen in love with them, would you marry them?

At the end of 2023, I conducted a sample survey of 2,400 non-student youth aged 21 to 40 in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou to understand young people's views on choosing spouses and marriage, their family and personal circumstances, and their behavior in the marriage process.

The question mentioned at the beginning was from the survey. Shanghai data shows that the proportion choosing "yes" reached 25% for men and 23.6% for women. This means over 20% of respondents believe that in marriage, compared to economic conditions, family background, appearance, and other spouse selection criteria, whether I love them isn't that important. In 2001, these figures were only 11.6% for men and 8% for women. The trend is significantly upward. Those firmly choosing "no" account for only about 30%. Around 40% feel it's "hard to say."

When I was young, many people believed you needed love to get married. Although you didn't really know what love was, at least you were pursuing that ideal. Today's young people are very clearly telling us they think dating is dating, marriage is marriage—two different things. In 2001, only about 6% of unmarried Shanghai youth "strongly agreed" that "dating and marriage are two different things," but by 2023, the proportion "strongly agreeing" had risen to over 40%, with women reaching 46.5%.

We all know that declining marriage and fertility rates among Chinese youth have become topics of social concern in recent years. Since 2010, the average age at first marriage for Chinese youth has risen by nearly 4 years. In this Beijing-Shanghai-Guangzhou survey, we also found that nearly 70% of young people agree that "marriage is a personal choice, it's fine whether you marry or not," especially unmarried young women, over 80% of whom endorse this view.

But one rather surprising finding is that young people's emphasis on parents' and friends' attitudes in marriage decisions is increasing. Regarding the statement "Even if my parents and friends oppose the person I love, I don't care," half of unmarried young women in Shanghai expressed disagreement. Some even actively propose the concept of "new arranged marriages." Accepting parental introductions or arrangements and choosing "well-matched" marriages has become a rational choice. This caught my attention. We generally believe that China basically achieved youth autonomy in love and marriage in the 1990s, but today, parental involvement in children's marriages seems to be increasing again.

One young man told me very frankly: I've been in love, I've experienced that state, now I'm getting married according to my parents' wishes. He said, if I don't follow my parents' opinion in marriage, and they don't buy me a wedding home or help with childcare, what would I do? This is the result of his rational choice.

To some extent, I can understand young people's sense of powerlessness when trying to establish themselves in first-tier cities, facing issues of buying homes, getting married, and raising children. 2010 was a turning point for the rise in first marriage age among Chinese youth, coinciding with the takeoff in urban housing prices. Before that, when post-70s and post-80s urban youth got married, they might not have relied much on parents, perhaps only informing them when getting the marriage certificate. Parents had little say in their children's marriage choices, and "naked marriage" was once a hot topic. But in the past decade or so, as housing prices have risen and family wealth has mainly accumulated in the parental generation, children's marriage and childbearing can't be separated from parental support, so parents' influence has naturally increased.

From another perspective, as long as a child remains in their original family, they remain a child forever. Although parents pressure their children to marry, the existence of parents and the original family can also hold young people back. As long as parents are there, your sense of danger and loneliness isn't that intense, you don't feel the urgency to change yourself.

In recent years, in the Jiangsu-Zhejiang-Shanghai region, the phenomenon of "two-headed marriage" has emerged. Neither the man "takes a wife" nor the woman "marries out"—although they marry, they still mainly form support and mutual aid networks with their original families, have two children, and each cares for their own parents.

From some perspectives, it has positive effects—for instance, it promotes gender equality in Chinese families, changing the cultural tradition where only sons inherit family names and property, and enhancing women's socioeconomic status. But from other perspectives, such families actually have significant internal conflicts. Some young couples in two-headed marriages, lacking something to manage together and conditions that force compromise when conflicts arise, find their relationships difficult to handle. What keeps them together without divorcing might just be the authority of both sets of parents. After experiencing such marriages, some young people remain very immature—although following parental arrangements, they lack the ability and willingness to manage relationships, leaving the couple in torment with their relationship in shambles.

So today's young people, especially those in top-tier cities, choose to listen to their parents in marriage decisions partly because the economic costs of establishing a marriage and family and the demands of childcare are high—reality dictates they can't do without parental support. But on the other hand, it's also because these young people have been overprotected since childhood, lack independent and mature plans for their marriage and life, and are unwilling to leave their parents' safe harbor to endure hardship. It seems young people today particularly "oppose unnecessary suffering," but personal maturity definitely requires experiencing pain.

Unlimited Family Responsibility Makes Marriage a Risk

One case is particularly interesting. After a young woman got married, her father kept pressuring her to have children, which she deeply resented. Once the daughter was provoked because her father even bypassed her to discuss this with her husband. She had a huge fight with her father, saying: "You live your life, I'll live mine, can't we each live our own lives? Why must you arrange my life?"

As a result, her father announced to his daughter that he wanted to divorce her mother.

This bewildered the daughter. What does whether I have children have to do with whether you divorce my mother? Later she understood that her father had actually been incompatible with her mother all along, unable to communicate. The only motivation that kept the father wanting to stay in this family was this daughter. Throughout her life, this father had given his daughter lots of love, and the daughter had always excelled academically and professionally, making him proud. So he felt his daughter was the only meaning in maintaining this family. When the daughter wanted to cut ties with him, he felt there was no need to maintain his marriage anymore.

I've been wondering why Chinese parents are so dedicated to pressuring marriage and childbearing. Why do parents suffer so much when their children don't marry or have children? Later I realized that perhaps for some Chinese parents, who don't have great careers or spiritual lives, their life's most important enterprise is family and children. In developing the family, they find their life's value and purpose. But when their child grows up and decides not to marry or have children, for parents this fundamentally negates their life's value choices. The years they struggled through, the family values they worked to maintain, are suddenly deconstructed as meaningless. This blow is enormous for elderly people.

In modern discourse, this suffering is unspeakable. Because we think such values are backward, even superstitious, not fit for the "modern" table. But in my research, this is a deeply rooted part of many Chinese parents' self-identity. Why do we say Chinese society is familistic? When family becomes an "-ism," it's equivalent to a faith, part of spiritual life. Countless parents have confided in me, telling me their children think parents are selfish. Children say "I'll pay you back later," and parents think, "Did I raise them their whole life just so they could pay me back?" What parents actually think is: my child has no partner, no children—when we're gone, they'll be all alone in this world. How will they live? This is enormous fear and sadness for parents.

Chinese culture views parent and child as one unit. This is very different from Western individualism. Fei Xiaotong once proposed that the West follows a relay model: each generation in Western society only raises their own children, who when grown relay the task by raising their own children, without needing to care for the elderly upward. China follows a feedback model: parents raise children, who when grown must feed back to parents, caring for them in old age while also raising their own children downward.

In the 1990s, academia expected that with urbanization and modernization, China would also transition from the "feedback model" to the "relay model," with our families gradually centering on the husband-wife relationship rather than intergenerational relationships, like in the West. But several census surveys show that over the past 20 years, the proportion of Chinese stem families (three generations living under one roof) has remained around 20% without declining, while the proportion of nuclear families (a couple and their minor children) has actually decreased. This shows China's intergenerational support and mutual aid model is quite stable. Even after market deepening in the 21st century, the closeness of intergenerational mutual aid in Chinese families continues to strengthen.

China's modernization is a highly condensed process, completing massive social transformation in just decades. From the planned economy era to reform and opening up, the layoff waves of the 1990s, the dramatic impact of market economic reforms, and so on. But we haven't seen large-scale youth unemployment or youth poverty as serious social problems. When social public services were still inadequate, many social contradictions were absorbed by families, absorbed by parents for their children. We find that in such massive social change, Chinese families' intergenerational relationships have shown very strong resilience. Generations remain interdependent economically and non-economically, with resources remaining complementary and reciprocal.

Against this backdrop, what are Chinese children's attitudes toward their parents? I remember when I was doing my PhD in 2008, there was a loud social voice criticizing young people's "declining filial piety," feeling young people were unwilling to give back to parents, morally corrupt, and so on. I felt this contradicted my intuition. The "filial piety" they spoke of seemed to me as a young person then like old Confucian learning, as if only treating parents as supreme authorities counted as "filial." But my feeling was that the post-70s and post-80s around me were all good to their parents—we just valued emotions highly. Our relationships with parents were based on emotion, not authority.

Later research validated my thoughts. From 2008 to 2012, during my doctoral dissertation, I conducted research on intergenerational family relationships using Shanghai and Lanzhou as samples. In terms of differences, urban Shanghai parents provided more economic support to children, while rural Lanzhou children helped parents more—it's about who has the capacity to give. But overall, they still followed the pattern of parents nurturing children and children feeding back to parents when grown. Children not only remained willing to support parents economically, but many survey subjects told us that young people's emotional relationships with parents were better and closer compared to the previous generation. Economic development and increased population mobility have eased some very rigid and intense family conflicts—for instance, extreme mother-in-law/daughter-in-law conflicts in rural areas have eased as women go out to work. This actually allows natural emotions between generations to flow, enabling parent-child affection to develop from genuine interpersonal love.

This nurture-feedback model creates unlimited responsibility between Chinese family generations. Parents give their all to raise children, and children feel they should give their all to feed back to parents in the future. This affects young people's marriage and childbearing decisions. This unlimited responsibility, combined with today's enormous cost-of-living pressures, makes children feel marriage is an extremely high-risk endeavor.

This unlimited joint responsibility also shapes our self-perception. When young people don't want children now, many tell me: "I can't even live well myself, I don't want to bring a child into this world to suffer. If I can't give them good educational resources and living conditions, I'd be letting them down—why bring them into the world?" They bind the responsibility for a child's entire life development to themselves. In a society with intense competition, if my future child can't get into a good school or "succeed" in competition, I myself would feel so painful. This series of bundled pressures all become sources of risk for future unhappiness.

Korean scholar Chang Kyung-sup proposed a concept called "individualization without individualism." Our East Asian culture is familistic, not individualistic, but we're experiencing individualization—some of our youth no longer marry, "de-familializing" themselves. This is their "risk-averse individualization." In unlimited-responsibility families, marriage and childbearing become sources of risk that young people want to avoid.

Family Scripts, No Perfect Choice

Sometimes online, we see today's young people yearning for the childcare environment of the collective economy period. Back then, work units had unified nurseries and kindergartens, making child-rearing less difficult. During that period, our social system attempted to explore communal child-rearing and public elderly care—from cradle to grave, all borne by the state, with childcare labor viewed as part of social labor. We experienced such exploratory practice.

I was born in 1978 and grew up in such a "work unit compound." After graduating from university, my parents were assigned to work in a geological team far from their hometown and applied for housing in the unit's family quarters. The unit was basically an acquaintance society with nurseries and kindergartens. The affiliated schools weren't competitive at all—everyone lived similar lives, there was no pressure about how one must study. I played with same-age friends every day without much worry about the future. Compared to today's children, it was indeed more relaxed.

But my experience as a child wasn't as good as people imagine. In the work unit compounds then, people generally couldn't bring their parents—my grandparents' generation—to live together. Before age 6, I was left with my grandparents in my hometown—essentially a left-behind child. When I was about to start school, my parents brought me over, and I went through a very harsh adjustment period. My father was a geologist who often worked in the field, basically away from home for half the year. At home were my mother, an older brother, and an older sister. My mother worked at the unit every day and had to care for three children at home—her sense of time pressure was extremely strong. For instance, if we didn't do our assigned chores well, didn't sweep the floor clean, or broke something, she would suddenly become extremely angry, attacking us with vicious language that escalated to personal attacks. In the compound, every household beat their children harshly. Later when I chatted with peers, many had such traumatic childhood experiences.

Until I went to university, I kept having nightmares about being abandoned by my parents. I experienced all the confusion, pain, and meaninglessness of being a young person. Back then, I had deep conflicts with my mother and often ran away from home. So I deeply understand the harm Chinese families can do to children. If I hadn't done sociology research later, I might have grown up to join the "Parents Are Harmful" group too. But later, when I began doing family and women's research, I started to realize our family situation was actually related to the "nuclear family" lacking support. I began to understand why my mother treated us so harshly. As a woman shouldering everything inside and outside the home with no domestic support, her anxiety and pain were vented on us.

Back then, women's liberation and entry into work actually harmed some children's interests. For instance, when my mother went to work, she could only lock my brother at home, and he would cry continuously. Later I saw many materials discussing such childhood trauma cases—mothers having to return to work after maternity leave, families lacking external support, very young children having to be sent to nurseries or simply locked at home. But there was no choice—the overall living standards and economic levels were limited then. This was the situation for many families.

This is also one reason I later entered the field of family sociology. I wanted to explore how more people, more youth were living, wanted to solve my own repressed problems with no outlet. Back then, we had no internet, nowhere to express ourselves, couldn't "huddle together for warmth" like today's young people. So I could only try hard to see and understand how others were, why I was this way. But now I think this might not have been a bad thing. Today people can easily find others with similar feelings and build their own emotional echo chambers, becoming unable to understand those different from themselves, losing the space to understand others.

The nuclear family's dilemma isn't unique to China's collective economy era. In the West, taking America as an example, their classic 1960s nuclear family model was based on men working outside, women staying home, not working, wholeheartedly caring for children. Women then were shaped into "happy housewives," but in their individual experiences, the "nameless pain and repression" from lacking social value was very strong—these "happy housewives" were actually "desperate housewives." This led to the West's second wave feminism, with women breaking out of the home, participating in employment, achieving independence. But even now, American women still find it difficult to have both full-time work and children. They can purchase childcare services from the market, but the cost is high—not all couples can afford it, or it's simply not worthwhile.

In 2014, I visited America and investigated their family relationships. Previously, we understood their nuclear families as centered on the husband-wife relationship, with elderly people not depending on children for support. Many people at advanced ages were still constantly marrying and divorcing, seeking suitable marital relationships. I then understood this as a kind of individualistic cultural romance. But when I really carefully investigated and visited their families, I found this was also a kind of helplessness. Because the boundaries between them and their children are very strong—without an invitation from children, they can't visit uninvited. Even if they miss them terribly, they must restrain themselves. After children become adults, elderly people's support networks mainly come from marriage. If the marriage axis breaks—through divorce or death of a spouse—they must establish a new marriage axis.

I remember an elderly man in his 80s, a very spirited old conservative—what Shanghainese would call an "old classic" type. He had remarried several times in his life, and his current wife was a Japanese-American woman. When we proposed visiting his home, he repeatedly emphasized that we must praise her and express gratitude when we met her. We didn't quite understand at the time, thinking he was being too careful around his wife. Later I realized it was because he was now over 80 and desperately needed this marriage—if she became unhappy and proposed divorce, his life alone would become very difficult. We also interviewed a middle-aged man who said he didn't even visit when his mother died. Because she had remarried in her 60s to another state where she had no friends, so when she died, not a single relative or friend visited her, not even this son. I thought then, if it were a Chinese elderly woman, would she move far from her hometown and children in her 60s for remarriage? A Chinese elderly woman would probably prefer to move in with her son. In fact, if a Chinese elderly woman wanted to remarry, her son likely wouldn't agree. Of course, this interference is a restriction on the elderly, but it's also a kind of protection. This is cultural difference.

People under every culture have their difficulties. American individualistic culture requires you not to express the warmth of wanting to connect with family—you can only complete human connection through romantic relationships. This is their difficulty. For us, it's the overly deep binding between parents and children, sometimes becoming a kind of imprisonment.

Now, Chinese young people's childcare pressure is largely transferred to grandparents. Young couples both work outside, and elderly people sacrifice their retirement lives, even becoming "elderly drifters," with many resulting conflicts and discussions. No family model can satisfy everyone. How family systems should be designed ultimately becomes a question of interest negotiation between men and women, between generations, between different groups.

I think this is an open question. We still need to explore what kind of family script, marriage script, cultural script we need to make everyone as happy as possible. But I think sometimes we need to look further. Establishing intimate relationships and families isn't just interest negotiation—it's also a person's life process. If you feel this is important to you and you have psychological expectations for your own contributions, it can be a willing choice.

"Relationship Poverty"

My real reconciliation with my mother happened after I had my own daughter. Before having a child, I thought I must make my child especially happy, I must be especially good to her, and I really did my best. But later I discovered my child still had trauma.

Many things I thought were right at the time—like separate beds when young, like not picking up a crying child immediately—these "scientific" parenting methods I read about in books actually harmed my daughter. Because my child was highly sensitive with high needs, I only learned later that with such children, you must satisfy them first. I remember once she told me: "Mom, since I can remember, my world has been gray." I discovered she had completely replicated my childhood experience of the world.

At that moment I suddenly realized that my childhood sadness wasn't necessarily brought about by my mother's malice.

Later, I also adjusted how I raised my daughter. I could see her smiles gradually increasing, her confidence gradually strengthening, and I felt very good too. I once really hated when people told me "If you don't marry and have children, you'll never grow up"—I hated that saying. Looking back now, marriage is more complex than I imagined, parenting more difficult than I thought, but precisely because of this, I don't regret entering marriage at all. It brought me out of that childhood fragility, made me more composed, more confident, and better understanding of myself. I very clearly felt my own growth. I think a good relationship is one that brings self-growth. If I had never experienced this adjustment process, I might never have reconciled, I would have been stuck in place unable to move forward.

Many young people I interview tell me marriage is "too troublesome." Marriage requires adjusting to someone, establishing this deep connection is too difficult. Now the single economy is very developed—if you have a job in a first-tier city, you can live very well alone. Delivery, takeout, cleaning services—machines and the labor market can solve your various problems. Our emotional needs also have various emotional consumption substitutes, like binge-watching shows, shipping fictional couples, keeping pets, even purchasing chat services or virtual romance. Many people feel they don't really need a "companion" to live with anymore. Even in friendships, people maintain more distance than we used to. When we were young, the trend was "Young and Dangerous" brotherhood—I'd take a knife for you. Now the trend is "activity partner socializing"—if I want entertainment, to watch a movie or play murder mystery games, I just find an activity partner. I don't want to trouble others or be troubled by them.

Logically speaking, today's young people's parents, compared to the previous generation—my parents' generation—have improved both in their attitudes toward children and parenting investment. But 2023 survey data from Shanghai shows youth satisfaction with parent relationships has significantly declined compared to 2001. People's expectations of parents have become very high, and they attribute many problems to their family of origin. I think this is because they have too few social relationships—the only place to invest emotional needs is their family of origin, only their parents. This also reflects a narrowing of youth's social networks and social development space. Young people are now facing severe "relationship poverty."

Many young people today were only children growing up in a highly competitive environment with very singular experiences—school, work, making money—already exhausting. For people from this growth environment, wanting deep communication and emotional connection with others has especially high psychological costs. My daughter often worries whether others dislike her. When I take her to play with same-age friends, the children's interactions are especially polite—I feel they're very constrained, find it hard to be happy, lacking the casualness we had as children.

Actually in our surveys, what young people most want from intimate relationships is still psychological feedback and growth, but they don't know how to achieve it. Because these things heavily depend on experience and are hard to grasp, when choosing partners they use very practical but superficial value standards to judge people: appearance, education, income, family background, etc. But they can't judge whether someone is suitable based on the values needed for two people to genuinely overcome life's difficulties and cope with life together. To a large extent, it's because lacking life experience, they not only lack a sense of reality about life but also lack insight into self, human nature, and relationships.

I think this is a piece of life education we're currently missing. No matter what stage people ultimately reach, they still need stable interpersonal connections to generate a fundamental sense of security. This is inescapable regardless of what views on love or friendship you adopt. It ultimately points to the question of "who am I"—who knows my past, participates in my present, anticipates my future. If you can't establish your own deep interpersonal relationships, then this role might only be filled by parents, but what happens after parents are gone?

The most important question is whether our society can ease up from its highly competitive atmosphere, allowing our young people to regain a sense of relaxation, enabling them to experience life. Let friendship, romance, marriage, and parenting—establishing deep connections between people—no longer be the result of strategic games but rather a process of life experience.