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Three generations of women in my family attended Shanghai No. 3 Girls’ High School, which is next door to where I used to live. It produced the most famous political wives in early 20th century China: the famous Song sisters, Ailing, Qingling and Meiling, who were married respectively to the country’s richest banker, founder of the Chinese republic and its most powerful general. My grandmother was an alumna. She was an elegant taitai—a privileged matron—with five children.
By the time I attended Shanghai No. 3, this girls’ school had embraced a very different ethos. Women did not have to be extensions of their husbands, for example. The talk was of independence and personal achievement. We ran, swam, and beat the boys in district mathematics contests. We were expected to become scientists, technocrats, or writers (if you did not happen to be good at numbers, that is). Or bankers, politicians and generals.
Bright, smart girls in my school days were told to postpone marriage and child-rearing. If we started a family early, we were told it might endanger our careers. That, combined with China’s strict one-child policy back then, led to many of us being unmarried and childless, even as we moved across the world to pursue the most exciting jobs.
Of course, we would be pestered by our parents, especially during the Lunar New Year. And if we were applying for work visas in Hong Kong, we would have to check the ‘spinster’ box in the application form. However, we could laugh off that bureaucratic holdover from British colonial days and also deflect the family pressure to get married.
Chinese society, at large, tolerated spinsters like us. We paid our taxes, after all. We spent a lot of money. We contributed to the gross domestic product (GDP) of the People’s Republic of China. We made the Chinese economy work. We held up our part of the sky [the “half” that Mao had famously said women do].
But lately, being childless in the country has become the new sin to be atoned for. As Beijing starts its single-minded pursuit of its new three-child policy, independent Chinese women are being marginalized and pushed aside—not just in terms of political polemic but in practical, economic terms. We need to do extra just to retain middle-class privileges.
To its credit, the Chinese government has decided that one main reason people aren’t having as many kids as it would like is that home prices are too high. In recent months, big cities have launched home buying policies aimed at cooling China’s red-hot real estate market and sell residential apartments to those who fit the right demographic profile.
My hometown Shanghai has adopted a point system: Potential buyers need to have enough points to enter a raffle for apartments in new property developments. You could earn up to 60 points if your marital, residency and existing home ownership status fit the Chinese government’s target demographic profile. You can also collect more points if you’ve been making regular payments to the city’s social security system since 2003.
If I was looking to buy a home, I would already be 10 points behind a married couple of comparable age with children. To be eligible for some of the housing development projects, I would need to have paid 8.3 more years into social security to be at par. In fact, I am on the same footing as those who do not have a city hukou, or residency permit. I would have to work especially hard to become a deserving Shanghai resident.
Don’t get me wrong. Parenthood is not easy. It has its own insane juggling act between career and childcare. But if a woman does not or cannot reproduce, does she then have to be more economically productive to deserve an equal spot in society? That seems to be the emerging mindset in mainland China.
In the US, tens of millions of households last month received upsized child credit cheques, worth as much as $3,600 per kid. Most people do not mind paying more taxes to subsidize larger economic goals. But why make us less eligible than others when it comes to such elementary rights as owning property?
I have many single women friends who work long hours—opening the Chinese market for foreign banks, flying into the middle of nowhere to investigate distressed companies, or chasing news leads non-stop for a break. By the time they start to think about their personal life, time and demographics are usually against them. Sometimes being alone isn’t their choice; it’s just their circumstances. They have been rather busy holding up their part of China’s economy.
Shuli Ren is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asian markets.
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