In 2014, Leta Hong Fincher published her book Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, a book about the toxic vitality of sexism in China. You can read a review in English. There is also a documentary by PBS on this subject, called Leftover women, released in 2019.
This expression first appeared in a fashion magazine in 2006, as a Valentine’s day issue cover. It was an advertisement of 100 men that have three goods: good looking, good character, good job. And they were up to grab by “leftover women” in the big cities.
A year later, the education ministry included it in the new vocabulary for the “Report on the status of Chinese daily language”. The definition is: women with high education degree, high income, and older than 27 but still single because they are too choosy about their partners.
Later, the word evolved to describe any single women older than 27. Of course, many highly educated women with high income are single, hence belong to the leftover women.
There are even different levels of leftoverness:
25-28 years old: entry level.
29-32 years old: mid level
33-35 years old: high level
36 + : sky high level leftover
The name for each level is a pun for something sensational. For example, the “sky high level leftover” sounds exactly the same as the title that the Monkey King called himself when he rebelled against the Jade Emperor. Despite the exactly same pronunciation, the name is extremely insulting.
Since 2007, the All-China Women’s Federation (a government organisation founded in 1949 supposedly to defend women’s rights) have aggressively pushed the idea that unmarried urban females over 27 are “leftover women” and undesirable.
In 2011, they published a controversial article titled ‘Leftover Women Do Not Deserve Our Sympathy’ shortly after International Women’s Day. It famously said:
Pretty girls do not need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family. But girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult.
These girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is, they don’t realise that as women age, they are worth less and less. So by the time they get their MA or PhD, they are already old – like yellowed pearls.
Media and pop culture helped to put pressure on women to get married by 27 with relentless shaming. A women with internet name “ayawawa” took the opportunity, posed herself as expert on relationships, wrote sensational articles and organized match makings, and profited handsomely of course.
It lasted for about ten years. In recent years women managed to push back, eventually, in 2017, “leftover women / Shengnu” was listed as a discriminating word, and “ayawawa” was banned on Chinese internet.
If you have heard of the one child policy and the gender imbalance in China, you probably will wonder about “leftover men /Shengnan”: there are 35 millions more single men than single women.
Not only that, but the distribution is extremely unequal between city residents and rural residents.
As you can see, across all age range, there are more single men than single women (y>100), for both urban and rural. But the situation for rural men is dramatically different as people get older.
Square dancing is another uniquely Chinese phenomenon. It is a public exercise activity of dancing to music in city plazas or squares. Lots of the participants are retired women who came of age during the cultural revolution, a period of time that revolutionary dancing in public was routinely organized.
The reason that those retired women are so into square dancing is probably that they lack space in their family. Often the men controlled TV programs and there was not much communications in the family. The women found square dancing with their friends particularly enjoyable. They are called “square dancing grannies”.
When I visited Beijing in 2012, after dinner, the plaza in front of the local shopping mall was full of people. Some dances popped up every night. They were self-organized grassroot activities. Some people had talent and it is very enjoyable to watch them. Although I saw lots of old retired women, I also saw women and men of all ages.
However, young people started complaining that the Grannies were taking up too much space, their music was too loud. Even though there were men and younger women in the dancing groups, invariably, Grannies were singled out to be the ones most annoying.
So much so that “Granny” became a derogatory word. Once labeled as Granny, it means you are vulgar, ignorant, undesirable, selfish. There are many articles slandering them. “Granny” became a new word implying that old women are worse than “normal” Chinese.
One day, an elderly Chinese woman who used to live in Bangkok, complained to me: she had a good friend who is a professor in China. He sent her an article blaming every problem in China on Grannies. She told me she was very disappointed at her friend. It hurted, she said. Women in her generation did not benefit from the good times in China. They had little education, growing up during cultural revolution. They had to take care of their parents and children in the worst time in China. Now, everyone from a better off time despises them. Why, she asked me.
In all forms of misogyny, the hatred of older women is probably the most popular one, because this group of people had little public advocate for them. As the age to be a Granny is fixed at 50 (mandatory age for retirement for Chinese women), I am already a Granny now. My generation have much better resources and we might see the fight against stigma of old women win soon.