The changing contexts of marriage choices

Throughout Chinese history, the patrilineal and patrilocal Chinese family ideology represented marriage alliances as arrangements in which women change family. The choice of a marriage partner was regulated by prohibitions of various kinds (for example, surname endogamy) as well as the broader structures of social stratification.Footnote ⁷ The principle of homogamy, marriage between spouses of equal social standing, expressed by the widely quoted Chinese saying of ‘equal doorways, fitting households’ (mendang hudui, 门当户对),Footnote ⁸ was considered ideal for a match. Yet, while the saying expressed the ideal of wife-seekers, wife-givers often aspired towards hypergamy by marrying their daughters up in the social hierarchy.Footnote ⁹

Romantic courtship was not an integral part of a marriage system that was oriented towards Confucian values of strictly hierarchical social relationships between the generations and genders. Family and kin leaders controlled marital decision making, usually with the goal of serving the collective interest by securing reproduction and the advancement of the patrilineal, patrilocal, and patriarchal family.Footnote ¹⁰ Still, marriage has never been just a legal act of forming an alliance between social groups; it is also a personal, emotional, and intimate experience that, moreover, offered women much more agency than their structurally disadvantaged position within Chinese kinship ideology would suggest.Footnote ¹¹

A fundamental criticism of the old marriage and family system became inextrictably linked to the reform projects of Chinese society. The 1950 Marriage Law ratified marriage by ‘free choice’, thus liberating young men and women from the control of older family members. While the new law strengthened the couple's autonomy vis-à-vis family authority, the party-state at the same time redefined marriage and family life in terms of their rules and regulations.Footnote ¹² State-registered monogamous marriage between partners of a legally proscribed minimum age was defined as the only appropriate context for sexual conduct and procreation, while the right of those in such marriages to divorce became dependent on the outcome of third-party mediation, a practice that clearly encouraged martial reconciliation.Footnote ¹³ Forcefully arranged marriages dropped sharply, while different kinds of ‘negotiated marriages’ involving more or less family or third-party intervention proliferated.Footnote ¹⁴ Only a small percentage of all marriages conformed to a completely ‘free choice’ in which only the couple themselves had a say. The dominant practice was rather that the older generation retained some of their rights.

With the Marriage Law of the 1980s, the party-state reduced its control over and intervention in citizens’ private lives. Individuals were granted more rights of decision in their marriages, particularly in terms of ending a marriage by divorce.Footnote ¹⁵ Following rapid economic development spurred by the post-Mao reforms, new mores and practices of marriage, family, and sexuality emerged. Yet, marriage itself remained a central social institution that was never questioned as such. Given the conditions of a highly competitive market-oriented economy, the choice of marriage partner became ever more connected to anxieties about making the right choice.Footnote ¹⁶

Post-Mao market reforms decisively altered the stratification of Chinese society and, by implication, also the criteria relevant in the marriage markets. Rapid economic development in some parts of the country aggravated existing socio-economic disparities between different regions, thus boosting the significance of residence as a criterion of socio-economic status. At the same time, the household registration system continued to limit long-term rural–urban migration. Rural youth took advantage of their increased mobility to find new opportunities of temporary work available in cities. This meant new possibilities for the young generation to meet potential partners but also diminished parental influence on their lives, including on their marriage.Footnote ¹⁷

It has been argued that in contemporary Chinese society, processes of individualization brought about by earlier socialist revolutionary movements as well as the more recent market orientation have displaced individuals from their binding in a community.Footnote ¹⁸ In this situation people are confronted with moral uncertainty concerning the right way to behave.Footnote ¹⁹ Yan Yunxiang described how rural youth use their new power over the older generation for their own purposes. In his view, life in a village in northeastern China bore witness to the young generation's power to indulge in selfishness and ‘egotism’, displaying ‘uncivil individualism’ that showed little consideration for the needs of others.Footnote ²⁰ Thus, young girls (and their fiancés) ruthlessly use their marriage arrangements to squeeze money from their parents.Footnote ²¹ A different development was witnessed by Vanessa Fong among urban youth from the (lower) middle class in the northeastern city of Harbin.Footnote ²² Here, parents’ heavy investment in the education of their only child has engendered a sense of entitlement among the urban teenagers. Yet, it has also caused most—but not all—of them to internalize the cultural model of filial devotion, implying a sense of responsibility for their parents’ happiness and future living conditions. Similarly, Andrew Kipnis maintains that parental sacrifice for the sake of their children's education in richer rural regions on China's east coast creates an emotional bond between the generations which helps bridge the generation gap caused by recent rapid economic development.Footnote ²³

This study focuses on rural youth originating from a geographically remote region and economically underprivileged family backgrounds in northwestern China. In contrast to their peers who, like the village youth descried by Yan Yunxiang, stayed in the countryside or left their place of origin as migrant workers, secondary high school and university students from this region strive for long-term upward mobility into stable white-collar employment, preferably in a government position. All their energy and life planning is focused on the goal of overcoming the status of a peasant or labour migrant. Yet, in contemporary market-oriented Chinese society, they face the challenge of creating their own life story. Unlike the situation of many students from urban family backgrounds, the lack of a social welfare system in rural China forces on them the full responsibility for taking care of their parents during old age, even though they might have siblings to share this burden. Compared to those siblings who have dropped out of the education system, they are enmeshed in deep relations of support and indebtedness with their parents and others who have supported them through all their years at secondary high school and university.

When it comes to choosing a marriage partner, these graduates thus can expect those who have supported their education to feel entitled to have a say in their marriage decisions. Some, moreover, have to cope with the dilemma that the decision in favour of a particular marriage partner may impair the career prospects in which they—and their supporters—have invested so much hope and so many resources.

The impact of a rural family background

With the exception of some years during the Cultural Revolution, higher education has for a long time been one of the few pathways to long-term upward mobility that crossed the socialist ‘citizenship divide’Footnote ²⁴ between rural and urban society, installed by the hukou system.Footnote ²⁵

Introduced in the late 1950s, the hukou system ascribed to every citizen agricultural or nonagricultural household registration (hukou), thus administratively dividing the Chinese population into those with rural and those with urban residence rights. During three decades of high socialism the hukou system thus helped to prevent rural-to-urban migration. Moreover, it facilitated highly preferential resource allocation and subsidization to the cities, thus creating a profound gap between the rural and urban sectors which also came to connote people's identity and socio-economic status, not least by confining eligibility for encompassing ‘cradle-to-grave social welfare’ to urban residents only.Footnote ²⁶

After the end of the Cultural Revolution, those who passed the national college entrance exam during the first two decades after its reintroduction in 1977 benefited from the shortage of qualified personnel the state needed in order to carry out its reformist project. Covered by the governmental job allocation system that existed until the late 1990s, all graduates of this historical period were guaranteed a post in the government administration or in academia and were thus granted long-term urban residence rights, including the comprehensive social welfare provided for city residents.

In Huining County, where field research for this study was conducted, only a couple of hundred students from the region passed the college entrance exam and were allocated urban employment each year.Footnote ²⁷ Yet, even among those graduates who attained mobility into cadre positions, their rural family backgrounds continued to matter.

Within the hukou system which ascribes either ‘rural/agricultural’ or ‘urban/non-agricultural’ household registration to every citizen, graduates from rural family backgrounds constitute an intermediate grouping between ‘the rural’ and ‘the urban’. While their educational endeavours aim at crossing the ‘legal Great Wall’Footnote ²⁸ between the groups by achieving upward mobility into the formal urban sector of the economy, thus attaining long-term urban residence rights, their natal families remain mired in the structural lack of state social welfare that goes along with rural household registration. After all, the heavily subsidized comprehensive social welfare provided for by the socialist work-unit (danwei, 单位) system during the Maoist era was restricted to those with urban household registration only, while rural residents were left with minimal welfare cover provided by their local brigade or commune.Footnote ²⁹ Certainly, more than three decades of post-Maoist market reforms have in the meantime eroded most of the comprehensive socialist welfare schemes that were provided to city residents during high socialism and the early reform socialist years. But the household registration system still entails major differences between families with rural household registration and the majority of the urban population in terms of eligibility to community-based rights, opportunities, benefits, and privileges, such as health care, housing subsidies, high-quality schooling, and secure employment.

I cannot judge to what extent rural and urban household registration and the many differences in eligibility for social welfare it implied actually obstructed relationships between partners from rural and urban backgrounds during the early reform period. Yet, what became clear from conversations with graduates in rural-urban marriages registered during this period was that even though both partners may enjoy equally privileged positions of steady urban employment and eligibility for comprehensive social welfare, the rural family background of one of the partners still often triggers marital conflicts.

During an afternoon I spent with 46-year-old Lanzhou University professor Wang Jin at her flat on the new university campus on the outskirts of the provincial capital, she explained to me that it is mainly the differences in terms of each partner's obligations to their natal family that cause problems in mixed rural-urban marriages. Both Wang Jin and her husband, also a university professor, originated from rural Huining County. Since Wang Jin's father was a retired local government cadre and thus eligible for pension payments that covered his expenses in old age, Wang Jin described herself as being from a ‘half urban’—that is, salaried—family background. As a result, her situation in terms of social obligations towards her kin was radically different from that of her husband. His parents were both farmers and did not have any pension. As they approached their eighties, they were forced to move in with their son and daughter-in-law. This situation had caused many arguments between Wang Jin and her husband. She had no problems in admitting to me that she resented having to care for her in-laws; moreover, she had obviously also quarrelled frequently with her husband about financial matters and had finally demanded separate budgets. Against this background, it seems likely that when she described in detail the problems generally inherent in mixed urban-rural marriage constellations to me, she was also referring to her own situation of being ‘half urban’:

While Wang Jin's description addresses various aspects of rural-urban difference that may easily cause marital conflict, it is above all the structural discrepancy in terms of welfare protection that causes mixed rural-urban marriage alliances to violate the conventional notion of ‘equal doorways and fitting households’.Footnote ³⁰

Graduates originating from rural Huining County not only have the moral and legal obligation to care for their elderly parents, who, as soon as they became too frail to work in the fields, have no other source of income,Footnote ³¹ in addition, the graduates’ siblings and other kin back in the village can hardly afford the rising expenses of daily life, such as their children's tuition fees or any unexpected medical costs, from the incomes they earn in agriculture or the insecure jobs they hold as labour migrants. Often the only person in the wider family network with a steady income and with access to crucial urban support resources—such as personal contacts with doctors or teachers in the city—these graduates are frequently approached by their rural family for support in financial and other matters. The legacy of a highly disparate level of welfare protection experienced by the urban and the rural population during high socialism as well as increasing socio-economic discrepancies in contemporary Chinese society thus caused the factual burden of social support obligations to differ widely between both status groups. This is still true today, even though welfare protection in the cities has witnessed severe erosion following increasing market reforms since the mid 1980s. The ongoing structural influence of the rural–urban difference was summarized by a 24-year-old recent graduate of Lanzhou University, Song Dukuan, with the pointed remark: ‘Of course not all urban people are rich, but people in their networks just have more money and better contacts than in ours.’

Therefore, even when graduates successfully achieve upward mobility into secure urban employment and permanent urban residence rights, in the marriage market their family backgrounds still matter. After all, 23-year-old student Zhang Baoya explained to me, ‘the notion of “doorway” (men, 门) in the saying “equal doorways, fitting households” (mendang hudui) is not about yourself as an individual, but about your parents’. When I asked about her own ‘men’, she immediately answered ‘peasant’, brushing aside my objection that she soon would be a university graduate with the argument ‘but my roots are still those of a peasant’.

Marriage considerations and negotiations

In the late 1990s and early 2000s a new wave of reforms in China turned higher education into an expensive ‘private’ endeavour. At the same time the state also stopped allocating jobs to graduates as it had done during the planned economy. For students from economically deprived rural family backgrounds, this meant that each year of university education would cost their families multiple annual incomes. In the case of Huining County, the cost of one year at university amounted to as much as six times the average annual income of the rural population.Footnote ³² Higher education thus became an enormous investment for the local population. At the same time, the rapid expansion of national enrolment quotas and the rising number of graduates made the ‘return’ to higher education in terms of employment in the formal urban sector of the economy increasingly insecure.Footnote ³³

Higher education has therefore ceased to be a secure ticket to steady urban employment. However, in rural Huining County, villagers maintain their hope that graduation from a tertiary institution will give their children at least a chance to carve out a future that is different from their own. Local conditions such as an arid climate, mountainous territory, a lack of infrastructure, and a marginal geographic location a great distance away from the major economic centres offer hardly any opportunities for economic development.Footnote ³⁴ In years with average annual rainfall, agriculture yields just enough harvest to feed the population. Most of the cash income necessary for education, health care, and other daily expenses is earned by those who migrate to work in other parts of the county, but who are expected to return when their physical labour power deteriorates. Local parents’ ‘only hope’ is therefore to enable at least those children who manage to keep up extreme educational discipline at local schools to achieve long-term upward mobility into urban society.Footnote ³⁵ However, this means that these parents must bear years of skyrocketing educational expenses, paid for by cutting back on other kinds of family spending, asking for loans from relatives and friends, remittances from students’ siblings who have gone into into labour migration,Footnote ³⁶ or, and not least, taking out high-interest credit. Parents hope that a high level of education will give their children at least a certain chance of upward mobility. If nothing else, educational achievement will advance the graduate's position on the marriage market.

In the village, level of education counts as an important, if not the main, determinant of a person's social standing. It thus also limits young people's range of suitable marriage partners. Accordingly, university student Zhao Mei, who originated from rural Huining County, stated that her youngest paternal uncle, who had been a migrant worker after graduation from junior high school, had been very lucky that his future wife had dropped out of senior secondary school. ‘Otherwise he would never have met her, since they would not have been persons of the same rank,’ she explained.

On a national level, China is currently facing a severely disparate gender ratio in the age cohort of those who are about to approach marriage.Footnote ³⁷ Such gender distortion implies a serious lack of potential brides, aggravated by the fact that in order to avoid never marrying at all, men tend to move down the social and spatial hierarchy when looking for a bride. Accordingly, women ‘marry up’ more easily in the socio-economic hierarchy.Footnote ³⁸ In economically deprived regions like rural Huining this makes it particularly difficulty for men to find a wife, especially for those men with a low level of education. Ma Wenhong, a 20-year-old male student from a rural Huining family background, who blamed his short stature and slim figure on a serious lack of food during his childhood arising from his family's poverty, explained this situation as follows:

When I asked about his own future marriage plans earlier in our conversation he maintained:

Besides the level of education, another important dimension of stratification in the marriage market is the notion of a spatial hierarchy that reflects the great disparities in economic development between different administrative levels and geographical regions of contemporary Chinese society. Accordingly, the position of Gansu Province as one of the least economically vibrant regions of the country negatively influences the way in which Huining students are perceived in the marriage market. However, such geographical disadvantage can be balanced by academic achievement. A case in point was Zhang Ting, a master student at Lanzhou University. When her boyfriend, who originated from more affluent Shandong Province but held a bachelor's degree only, proposed to Zhang Ting, a soon-to-be postgraduate student from rural Gansu, they were considered to be a perfect match in terms of mendang hudui. The geographical advantage Zhang Ting's potential fiancé had to offer was considered sufficient compensation for the disadvantage of his lower level of education.

When considering their future marriages, male students from rural Huining family backgrounds in particular connect the issue of marriage with their future obligations in terms of providing care for their parents. Aware that local custom still expects them, as sons, to become the main care providers for their parents in old age, they feel obliged to consider that above all their future wives will shoulder that burden. For example, student Han Mengqiang maintained:

His fellow student Ma Wenhong seemed more determined to consider his parents’ well-being when choosing a partner:

Certainly, such statements relate only to students’ ideas and intentions; they say little about how their marriage decisions will turn out in practice in the future. However, they reveal the moral demands such students make on themselves. In a similar vein, students from rural Huining backgrounds stated their intention to consider their parents’ wishes in their choice of marriage partner. They connected such considerateness to feelings of gratitude and obligation towards their parents, who had supported their educational career over the years. Yet the same students maintained that their parents would in fact not even expect to have a say in their son's marriage decision.

When rural Huining students graduate, they look for urban employment rather than returning to the village and working the land. While some graduates postpone the issue of finding a partner until they find employment in the city, those who in the meantime have already become engaged to someone they plan to marry (zhao duixiang, 找对象) face the problem of synchronizing both partners’ futures, especially in terms of a common residence. Particularly when the partners’ family backgrounds differ too widely or employment prospects vary with respect to their level within the spatial hierarchy, graduates’ alliances become an issue that also concerns their parents and wider families. After all, the latter's access to various support resources, including not only money but also information and other kinds of help accessible via personal relations in the city, depends very much on the graduate's marital choice. At the same time, parents and other supporters can expect graduates to feel indebted to them for the educational support they have received. Such feelings make it difficult for the graduates to simply ignore others’ concerns about their future prospects. Particularly when recent graduates are in need of further help from their major supporter, often an uncle or an aunt,Footnote ³⁹ in order to find urban employment, these supporters’ stakes can have a strong influence on their marriage considerations.

Several of the male graduates I metFootnote ⁴⁰ who had recently finished university claimed that their former girlfriend had ended the relationship because of the pressure her parents had put on her to find a better-off partner.Footnote ⁴¹ Strikingly, I did not come across a single case of a female graduate having been left by a prospective marriage partner for the same reason. Even though some male graduates recalled that their parents had voiced the hope that their son would find a marriage partner from a better-off family background, these graduates at the same time pointed out that they had harshly rejected such an idea as being totally unrealistic. However, stories of parents pushing their daughters to look for better-off husbands were comparatively frequent.

The case of Liu Chang, a female recent graduate who grew up in rural Huining, shows that the influence parents may exert also varies according to the situation. During her time at university, Liu Chang's parents always warned her not to start a relationship with a prospective marriage partner yet. She kept her promise and got engaged to a partner she met on the internet only after she had graduated and found steady employment in a government agency in Huining County seat with the help of her father, who worked in the same institution. However, her parents rejected her choice. They considered the prospective groom to be from too poor a family background. Their main argument was that he was not even able to buy an apartment in the county seat for the newly-weds to start their new family. Since Liu Chang did not feel particularly attracted to her boyfriend, she accepted her parents’ view and ended the relationship. After that, she was introduced to a number of other men. These were either not interested in her or did not suit her parents for one reason or another. In the end she started a relationship with someone who held a position on a local street committee on the outskirts of Huining County seat. Even though such a position was considered low level in her parents’ eyes, at least his family was quite well-off, owning two apartments and a courtyard house in Huining County seat. Moreover, Liu Chang liked the man and also got along very well with his mother, who helped out a lot in the household when Liu Chang was at work. However, after her parents had agreed to the engagement, her father learned about a job opportunity for his daughter in a government agency at prefecture level. This meant she would have to move to the prefecture seat. But her fiancé, having graduated only from junior college compared to her university bachelor's degree, would not be able to join her there. His level of education simply would not allow him to get a position in a government agency at that level of the administrative hierarchy. Liu Chang's parents thus started to talk her into cancelling the engagement. But this time Liu Chang did not obey. Instead, she continued the relationship and rejected the job offer in the prefecture. As a result of the pressure this situation put on her, she lost her appetite and underwent a period of depression. In the end her parents submitted to her resistance and agreed to the marriage.

In fact, even though many graduates acknowledge the opinions of their parents and other former supporters about their prospective marriage partners, it does not mean that they are easily willing to give up an existing relationship in order to follow others’ wishes. In the eyes of graduate Zhao Mei, it was the nature of the liaison above all that determined the level of third-party intervention: the more pragmatic the match was from the start, the easier it was for parents or others to exert influence. She explained:

Certainly, as the case of Liu Chang above shows, daily practice is not as clear-cut as Zhao Mei's description implied. Still, while in more strategic marriages, parents and other supporters may have an accepted right to argue the material importance of a marriage, Zhao Mei's own case shows that things become much more complicated—for the graduates as much as for their parents and/or other supporters—when feelings towards the prospective marriage partner are involved.

When Zhao Mei became my assistant during field research in 2006, she was an undergraduate student at Lanzhou University. She got to know her later fiancé, Li Yongyuan, when we were both invited to visit the family of one of her classmates in rural Huining County, just two hours away by bus from her own village. Li Yongyuan was her classmate's eldest brother, and during our visit we all spent an afternoon together. Conditions in the Li family obviously were very poor, also by Zhao Mei's standards. The little courtyard was scarcely furnished and in bad need of renovation, with the roof in the living room leaking and the windows broken. The food offered to us as guests was extraordinarily simple: a plain noodle soup with some drops of sesame oil but hardly any other ingredients. With all three children attending university, the parents obviously saved on their own consumption in order to support their children's education. Following our visit to his family, Li Yongyuan, who at that time was an undergraduate student in his last semester at Lanzhou university, kept in contact with Zhao Mei. He used to wait for her every evening when she left the university library and accompanied her on the way to her dormitory, always taking the opportunity to give her little presents he had bought from the money he saved from eating less. She did not mind his company and they became friends, she told me.

After a couple of weeks she unexpectedly received a text message from him asking her to be his girlfriend. Since she did not feel attracted by his shy attitude and reserved manners, she rejected him. When he continued to court her, she upheld her refusal. Two years later, after they were no longer in such close contact, Zhao Mei felt she would like to have a boyfriend as many of her classmates did. Her classmate talked her into giving it a try with Li Yongyuan—who obviously liked her a lot—by maintaining that she would not have to reciprocate his deep feelings, since as long as she did not feel disgusted by him, feelings could develop. And in fact, after Zhao Mei had made up her mind and approached Li Yongyuan, she claimed that they both fell in ‘hot love’ (re ai, 热爱). During this period, her description of him showed all signs of romantic passion, like idealizing him, telling me how much she enjoyed being with him, and praising his manners in all kinds of ways.Footnote ⁴²

In the meantime Li Yongyuan had finished his bachelor's studies and had been looking for a job in Lanzhou city for two years without success. Finally he gave up on the idea and decided to participate in a state programme aimed at providing ‘one university graduate for each village government’. This meant that he was assigned a position in a township government in Huining County for several years. Zhao Mei, on the other hand, had been granted a government scholarship to do a master's degree at Lanzhou University. Consequently, she was no longer merely the first university student in her family, but also one of the most successful students in her village. Obviously, her parents were very proud of her achievements. During her studies, one of her main supporters had been her fourth paternal uncle.Footnote ⁴³ He himself was the main achiever in the family, as he had attained a cadre position in the provincial government of neighbouring Qinghai Province which was also accompanied by urban household registration. Since his position corresponded to the subject of Zhao Mei's master's programme, her family hoped that this uncle would be able to use his connections to further her career and get her a job outside Huining County, or even outside of Gansu Province.

Given this trajectory, Li Yongyuan's and Zhao Mei's courtship created a serious dilemma for her and for her family. In the ensuing discussions in her family, the fact that Li Yongyuan's parents were economically worse off than hers did not feature as prominently as the fact that his professional future was restricted to Huining County. Everybody in the family put pressure on her to end the relationship with Li Yongyuan, mainly because her fourth uncle insisted on it in return for his support for her career in Qinghai Province. After all, he argued, it was already difficult for him to help her to find a good job. He was not willing to do the same for her fiancé. In this situation Zhao Mei also came to doubt whether the relationship really should lead to marriage, since that obviously would put her own plans for the future at stake. Furthermore, her decision to marry Li Yongyuan would disappoint her supporters and betray her parents’ trust in her. Not only would she lose out on a good career, returning to Huining County for the sake of staying with or close to her husband with no prospects of advancing to a better-off place would cause her to lose ‘face’ and the standing her educational success had earned her in the family and in the village.

She tried to separate from Li Yongyuan several times, but could neither bear the despair this caused him, nor the loss it would mean for her. Moreover, she told me, it felt wrong to split up after she had lost her virginity to him. ‘We still value “only one during a whole lifetime” (congyi erzhong, 从一而终). Especially we women are afraid that other men will discriminate against us afterwards,’ she explained. Since Li Yongyuan had shown patience towards her moods, despite all the quarrels and several attempts from her side to end the relationship, and had stood by her in difficult times when her father had died, Zhao Mei became more and more convinced that he was the right one. She started to excuse her former critical attitude towards him, saying, ‘I was very much influenced by the people around me before.’

As time passed and it became obvious that she would not end the relationship, people in the family lost hope in her and her professional future. When I first met her, Zhao Mei was proud of the recognition, respect, and standing she enjoyed in the wider family and in the village. She always expressed her gratitude towards everybody who had helped to support her education. When approaching the end of her master's studies, with her prospects bright and a career in sight, she was still grateful for the help she had received. But she was also torn between her mixed feelings towards Li Yongyuan and the need to follow the career path she had concentrated on over the previous years. When she finally decided to get formally engaged to Li Yongyuan, a decision she was only able to take after her family had given up their strong resistance to the liaison, she did not just harm her own career. She also disappointed her supporters and betrayed her parents’ trust in her and in their vision that her professional advancement would improve the social situation of the whole family.

Things changed when, after more than a year of looking for a job, she was finally employed in the administration at prefecture level on her own initiative. Since Li Yongyuan also had the chance of a job in the same city, it felt like a solution ‘sent by heaven’ (tianwujue renzhilu, 天无绝人之路), Zhao Mei maintained. In this situation, even those in her family who had resisted the liaison fervently—above all her main supporter, the fourth uncle—reluctantly agreed to the marriage.

The case of Zhao Mei and Li Yongyuan shows that notion of mendang hudui not only relates to the broader social categories of household registration and level of education but also to more refined distinctions. Relevant criteria also include each partner's career options, which are often connected to ideas of spatial hierarchy, as well as the relative economic and social conditions of each partner's family, including their access to support resources. The poor economic situation of Li Yongyuan's natal family was likely to change in the future, with all three children having graduated from university. Yet the family obviously still lacked access to crucial support resources in the family network which might have helped Li Yongyuan to also find proper employment outside Huining County, comparable to the options Zhao Mei's fourth paternal uncle was able to offer to her.

Zhao Mei's story also makes clear that her considerations about a suitable marriage partner were in no way only about economic strategizing aimed at maximizing individual and familial material gains. Emotional bonding and feelings of responsibility towards her partner also played a role, as well as considerations about her lost virginity. At the same time, as a student from an economically deprived rural Huining family background, she simply could not afford to ignore the impact her marriage decision would have on her professional future and, by implication, her ability to ‘repay’ and support her natal family. The situation caused a dilemma she struggled with for several years.

Due to the enormous financial and other kinds of support they receive during their years of study, graduates from economically deprived rural family backgrounds become much more enmeshed in a web of indebtedness and obligations than their siblings and fellow villagers who drop out of school early and become migrant workers on their own initiative. Unlike these peers, whose moral attitude has been described as ‘uncivil egotism’Footnote ⁴⁴ and ‘moral arbitrariness’,Footnote ⁴⁵ the graduates usually feel that the educational support they have received under local conditions of scarcity creates long-term exchange relations that are characterized by feelings of indebtedness and duties of reciprocity at a later point in time.Footnote ⁴⁶ Accordingly, in their marriage considerations they feel obliged to consider the interests of their former supporters. Prospective marriage partners are thus also perceived in terms of the influence a marriage union would have on their own capability to reciprocate the educational support received.

At the same time, a high level of education and the prospect of leaving village life behind on a long-term basis certainly puts graduates in a better negotiating position with their parents and the wider family. While parents usually have nothing more to offer these graduates, some influential uncle or aunt could still exert influence by giving the graduate support to set up a life in the city. As the case of Zhao Mei shows, when an engagement with a prospective marriage partner clashes with the life their supporters have planned for them, graduates are empowered to neglect their supporters’ interests, especially if they manage to find employment on their own initiative. In spite of the dilemmas caused by their ongoing entanglement in local social support networks and the reciprocal obligations this entails, in the end the graduates are in the position to choose to what extent they are willing to listen to their inner voice of gratitude and indebtedness.