1. Introduction
Aunty Lin is a retired civil servant in Fujian Province, China. She enjoys going to public square dancing after dinner. To her, joining the so-called “dancing grannies”Footnote 1 in her neighbourhood for a few hours’ dancing and conversation after dinner is the best part of the day—this is her way to relax and make friends. In a humid evening, Aunty Lin came home after dancing and suddenly announced that she was no longer going dancing in the neighbourhood. Surrounded by dancing grannies who were always showing off their grandchildren, Aunty Lin felt a sense of losing face whenever those dancing grannies asked about whether and when her daughter was going to get married. She kept telling them that her daughter was too picky and had difficulties in choosing among many young men chasing after her. But deep down, she knew the grannies would not believe in what she said. This was because her daughter, Shujing, was already a “leftover woman”—a term that has been widely used in the media and people’s daily conversation in China to refer to women who remain unmarried in their late 20s and beyond.Footnote 2 The terminology plays into the notion that these women fail to sell themselves in the marriage market. Being in her early 30s, Shujing was considered to be hopeless to find a good partner. Shujing’s leftover status had taken away the face of her family and affected her guanxi networks.
As a civil servant and the only child of a middle-class family in urban Fujian, Shujing had never been worried about her leftover status. With a decent income, she was open-minded about her future family structure. She had done some online research concerning where and how she could freeze eggs. She considered it a way to buy herself some time to wait for the right person or even become a “single mother by choice.”Footnote 3 Shujing complained: “I don’t understand why state law has to deny single women the access to freeze eggs. How could it be difficult for such a powerful country to freeze eggs?”Footnote 4 Being aware of the legal restrictions, Shujing decided to find her own way. She joined some online communities where single women exchanged ideas and shared their experience of travelling overseas for reproductive services.Footnote 5 Shujing was determined that she would go to Taiwan to freeze eggs if she had not found the right person when she turned 35.
Things changed significantly after Aunty Lin announced her decision to quit the group of dancing grannies. Shujing started to feel a sense of obligation to hurry up and find a partner. Shujing said: “I felt bad seeing my parents losing face because of my leftover status. It took me only one month to decide to marry my husband, whom I used to believe was not good enough for me.”Footnote 6 It may appear on the surface that Shujing changed her mind because of the gossip of dancing grannies. In fact, Shujing did not care about those dancing grannies, whom she had never met.Footnote 7 It was Aunty Lin’s sense of losing face that led Shujing to worry about her family’s face and guanxi networks. In my view, guanxi, which loosely translates into the network of personal relationships or connections,Footnote 8 is what makes dignity relational in Chinese society.
In this article, I put forward the term “relational dignity” to stress the precarious nature of dignity within one’s guanxi network and the potential impact of this precariousness on ordinary people’s choices and behaviour. I argue that ordinary people’s desires for social recognition within guanxi networks play a significant role in shaping the ways in which state law operates in daily lives. Through the analysis of leftover women’s choices in marriage and childbearing, I identify two forms of relationship between state law and relational dignity: first, attaining relational dignity requires the individual to fulfil dominant social expectations and fit in. As a result, relational dignity often marginalizes those who do not agree with dominant social norms. Relational dignity, therefore, reinforces the existing discriminatory socio-legal environment and reduces the possibility for positive legal changes. Second, the rubber-stamp quality of state law enables the individual who does not embrace dominant social norms to obtain relational dignity through her manipulation or appropriation of state law.
I hope this article can serve as a springboard for future research on different forms of interaction between state law and dignity in relation-based societies. This article also aims to contribute more broadly to the area of law and society by facilitating a better understanding of the relationship between state law and other forms of social control in societies in which communitarian values trump individualism.
2. Research methods
The data for this article were collected in Fujian Province, China, between July and November 2016, through my in-depth, open-ended interviews with 51 Chinese women who are—or used to be—leftover women and three focus groups with seven to ten women in each group. Unlike current research that focuses almost exclusively on heterosexual and professional women, I include the experience and narratives of women who are relatively more marginalized. In addition to heterosexual and professional women, I talked to women who self-identify as lesbians, bisexual, and asexual. I also spoke to women who migrated from rural areas or small towns to the cities and are having difficulties in making ends meet. My aim is to avoid having the interests and voices of all women who are referred to as leftover women determined and represented by elite heterosexual women.Footnote 9 Additionally, I interviewed a few parents of leftover women to examine family relations from the perspectives of parents.
3. “Relational dignity” and its underlying social norms
One of the most prominent definitions of dignity in legal studies remains Immanuel Kant’s concept of dignity, which considers dignity to be an “inner worth” or “unconditional, incomparable worth” belonging to all rational beings.Footnote 10 The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, begins with the claim in its preamble that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”Footnote 11 This claim emphasizes that dignity is something that cannot be taken away from an individual. Likewise, in his widely cited book, Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the Nineteenth-Century American South, Edward Ayers defines dignity as an intrinsic value that each individual possesses at birth.Footnote 12 Angela K.Y. Leung and Dov Cohen suggest that Ayers’s notion of dignity exists in societies in which there is “an egalitarian system of autonomous individuals”Footnote 13 ; in these societies, each individual’s inherent worth neither depends on the esteem of other people nor can it be taken away by them.Footnote 14
Unlike individualistic cultures in which dignity is determined by the individual’s assessments of whether the standards have been met, people who are immersed in collectivist cultures have to rely on other people’s assessments of whether the individuals have fulfilled stable social-role obligations to gain and maintain dignity.Footnote 15 Soroush Aslani et al., for example, argue that people in individualistic cultures do not have to follow the goals and obligations dictated by the social groups to which they belong, whereas, in collectivist cultures, identity is interdependent with the fulfilment of the individual’s obligations to family, community, and society.Footnote 16 Building upon Aslani et al.’s argument, I use “relational dignity” to emphasize that dignity is subject to the evaluation and judgement of people within their guanxi network.
By “relational dignity,” I argue that, in relation-based societies, dignity is both precarious and highly dependent on other people’s attitudes. I will draw upon literature on guanxi and face to show that dignity can only be understood within guanxi network—a network that determines whether a particular person and her family deserve dignity. In my view, it is the guanxi network that makes dignity “relational.” The precarious nature of dignity in guanxi networks leads to both the fear of losing dignity and the desire to gain and maintain dignity.
Dignity is, of course, important to ordinary people in China, as well as in other countries in the world. The question that needs our attention is why people in China generally think about dignity in a relational way. To answer this question, one needs to examine the complicated relationship between dignity, face, and guanxi. Fei Wu, the author of Suicide and Justice: A Chinese Perspective, writes:
Face is important not only because it is a symbol of personhood, but also because it is the essence of human dignity. Human dignity is identified in interpersonal relationships…Because nobody can live in isolation, and nobody is immune from power games, face is an issue for everyone.Footnote 17
Wu’s explanation briefly demonstrates the interaction of face, guanxi, and human dignity in Chinese society. I will now provide a detailed discussion on how face and guanxi serve as the underlying norms of “relational dignity” in Chinese society.
No one will deny that Chinese society has always been organized around guanxi networks. Scholars generally agree that guanxi is “a specifically Chinese idiom of social networks, integrally linked to other building blocks of Chinese sociality such as ganqing (sentiment), renqing (human feelings), mianzi (face), and bao (reciprocity).”Footnote 18 Guanxi, however, is not an unchanging and fixed cultural trait.Footnote 19 Yanjie Bian, the author of Guanxi, How China Works, argues that guanxi is what Clifford Geertz calls “local knowledge,” which is embedded in the spoken and unspoken symbols and meanings as well as explicit and implicit codes of behaviour of the local people.Footnote 20 Bian advocates that scholars should see guanxi as dynamic rather than static, meaning that one should not adopt a fixed theoretical mindset to investigate guanxi.Footnote 21 Bian suggests that “guanxi as local knowledge requires a grassroots approach as well as diligent fieldwork to explore it before valid conception and measurement can be constructed in the social sciences.”Footnote 22
This article takes on his invitation and includes close, moderate, and distant guanxi in the discussion,Footnote 23 with the aim of accommodating the different scales of guanxi described by leftover women. I use the term guanxi to cover the entire social networks of personal relations described in the eminent sociologist Xiaotong Fei’s chaxugeju (差序格局), or “a differential mode of association.”Footnote 24 To describe Chinese social networks, Fei suggests that the construction of Chinese social relations is based on social networks of personal relations with the self at the centre of each netFootnote 25 ; the network of relationship in Chinese society “is similar to the concentric circles formed when a stone is thrown into a lake” and “each circle spreading out from the center becomes more distant and at the same time more insignificant.”Footnote 26 Following Fei’s chaxugeju, guanxi refers to relationships with family members, relatives, friends, colleagues, neighbours, and other people who are in the individual’s social network, no matter how far or close the person’s relationship is with the individual involved.
Another social norm underlying relational dignity is face—a complicated concept that scholars find it difficult to give a precise definition. As a concept that sets the most delicate standard to regulate social interaction in China, this abstract and intangible concept is almost impossible to define.Footnote 27 Mianzi and lian are the two words most commonly used in Chinese to refer to face. Scholars tend to consider lian as the moral face of an individual and use mianzi to refer to the social face of the individual.Footnote 28 Hsien Chin Hu, for example, makes a distinction between mianzi and lian: mianzi stands for “a reputation achieved through getting on in life, through success and ostentation”Footnote 29 ; lian, is “the respect of the group for a man with a good moral reputation.”Footnote 30 To Hu, lian is more basic than mianzi in that one cannot survive in society without the former, while the latter is the accumulation of reputation and prestige. Lisa Rofel also suggests that mianzi has a closer linkage with social status and is indispensable to social status, while lian tends to be the fundamental layer that all human beings have.Footnote 31
The subtle distinction between lian and mianzi, however, is sometimes invisible to ordinary Chinese people. As David Ho argues, many people do not distinguish between mianzi and lian in some contexts.Footnote 32 For example, Buckley et al. use the word mianzi interchangeably with face and define mianzi as the recognition by others of an individual’s social standing and position.Footnote 33 Xiaoying Qi criticizes the simple dichotomy between lian as moral face and mianzi as social face by demonstrating the fact that, if a person believes she has lost lian, it does not necessarily indicate that she has transgressed moral standards.Footnote 34 In my view, although the focuses of lian and mianzi are slightly different, they are not completely differentiated from each other. While acknowledging that “face” has both moral and social aspects, I use “face” to refer to the combination of mianzi and lian for the reason that these two concepts interweave to a large extent to shape leftover women’s understandings of marriage and childbearing.
The relationship between face and dignity has attracted much scholarly attention.Footnote 35 It is generally agreed that having face is a prerequisite for achieving dignity.Footnote 36 Ho suggests that “dignity is what one strives to attain through leading a way of life superior in quality to that of merely keeping face.”Footnote 37 In Ho’s view, face is more basic than dignity. Likewise, Wu holds the view that face is the essence of human dignityFootnote 38 and, as an essential part of personhood, face is a signifier of one’s dignity in society.Footnote 39 To Wu, face is an issue for everybody, no matter whether the individual involved is considered to have human dignity. He writes: “Beggars, mentally ill people, prostitutes, bachelors and others who do not live a family life are seen to lack human dignity, but they still interact with other people and psychologically care about face.”Footnote 40 Wu’s analysis not only reveals social discrimination toward the marginalized and the difficulties for them to obtain dignity, but it also clearly demonstrates the differences between face and dignity. In short, gaining face does not translate into attaining dignity; rather, having face is merely the basic requirement for achieving dignity.
As an underlying norm of dignity, face is widely considered to be an inevitable aspect of interpersonal encounters, connections, and relationships in people’s everyday lives in China.Footnote 41 Face is what a person feels about her image as it is seen through the eyes of others.Footnote 42 It arises in social interactions within one’s guanxi networks.Footnote 43 As Erving Goffman suggests, while a person’s social face can be her most personal possession and the centre of her security and pleasure, it is only on loan to her from society; it will be withdrawn if she fails to conduct herself in a way that is worthy of it.Footnote 44
In addition, severe loss of face places the individual and her family in a despised and isolated position, which closes the opportunities for such individuals and their families to use social networks to obtain resources.Footnote 45 Lawrence Hsin Yang and Arthur Kleinman suggest that the core credential that allows individual membership into guanxi capital in China is cultivation and maintenance of lian; and the amount of mianzi one possesses then determines the total network resources that one can mobilize.Footnote 46 To some extent, maintaining one’s guanxi network is not only a moral duty, but also a strategy to survive in society.
In conclusion, guanxi and face, as underlying norms of dignity in Chinese society, have contributed to the precariousness of dignity. The emphasis on the attitudes of people within her guanxi network complicates the concept of dignity in Chinese society. Whether an individual deserves dignity depends on how her family members, relatives, friends, colleagues, neighbours, and even the wider public think about her. Rather than determined by the individual’s own assessments of whether she has met the standards, dignity in a relation-based society is highly dependent on other people’s evaluations and judgements. Dignity is, therefore, both relational and precarious in Chinese society. I will now draw upon leftover women’s experience to demonstrate how relational dignity and state law interact to shape ordinary people’s choices concerning marriage and childbearing in China.
4. The interaction between state law and relational dignity
When asked about the sources of pressure to marry, almost every leftover woman I interviewed related the pressure to the family’s reputation and face. The most frequently identified factor that contributes to leftover women’s pressure to marry is a sense of losing face experienced by parents when their daughters are approaching or have passed the most suitable age for marriage. Like Shujing, many leftover women live under great pressure when they realize that their choice to delay or forego marriage has a negative impact on the family’s dignity. In this part, I will first provide a brief discussion of key literature on legal pluralism, with a focus on the interaction of multiple levels of social ordering. After that, I will draw upon leftover women’s narratives to discuss the complicated relationship between state law and relational dignity.
4.1 Legal pluralism and the interaction of multiple levels of social ordering
Legal pluralism is a concept developed in legal anthropology and sociology to analyze overlapping normative orders within societies.Footnote 47 Legal scholars generally agree that “we live in a world of multiple overlapping normative communities.”Footnote 48 Non-state social orders are equally important as state law to many legal anthropologists, sociologists, and theorists, whose observations of how law really worked in real life motivated them to study “law”Footnote 49 of different varieties. David Engel, for example, argues that “Even if one focuses on ‘official’ law, one still finds a significant dependence on unofficial or customary rule structures to determine norms of reasonableness or fairness.”Footnote 50
Sally Engle Merry refers to the analysis of the intersections of indigenous and European law as “classic legal pluralism,” while she uses “new legal pluralism” or “legal pluralism at home” to describe the approach that applies the concept of legal pluralism to study non-colonized societies.Footnote 51 While “classic legal pluralism” often lost sight of the state, “new legal pluralism” paid more attention to the relationships between local normative orders and state law.Footnote 52 During the 1960s and 1970s, several legal pluralists investigated the state law’s power or its lack of power in shaping social orders.Footnote 53 Research from the 1980s onwards has increasingly emphasized the interaction between state law and other normative orders.Footnote 54 Boaventura de Sousa Santos, for example, stresses the importance of understanding how different types of law interact with one another.Footnote 55 He argues that the legal character of the social relations of law does not derive from one single form of law, or state law, but rather from the different constellations among different forms of law.Footnote 56 According to Santos, “our legal life is constituted by an intersection of different legal orders, that is, by interlegality.”Footnote 57 Interlegality, in his view, is a highly dynamic process “because the different legal spaces are non-synchronic, and thus result in uneven and unstable combinations of legal codes (codes in a semiotic sense).”Footnote 58 Compared to classic legal pluralism stressing that legal systems operate in parallel, Santos points to the continuous interaction between different legal orders.
Building on Santos’s interlegality, I argue that leftover women do not necessarily choose between state law and non-state orders to guide their behaviour in their daily lives. Instead, they navigate through the complexity of the interaction of multiple levels of social ordering. One may have noticed that I avoid using either “law” or “legal order” to refer to non-state social orders. My reluctance to refer to relational dignity as “law” or “legal order” stems from the fact that legal pluralists have not reached an agreement on the repeatedly asked question: “What is law?” In other words, whether non-state law should be called “law” or whether some other terminology would be preferable remains an unsettled question among legal pluralists.
The question of nomenclature, however, is not central to my study. No matter what we call non-state social norms, we would not deny that non-state orders are of critical importance for understanding how, when, and why state law operates—this is the question I aim to answer through my investigation of leftover women’s choices in marriage and childbearing. My qualitative research on leftover women not only draws upon legal pluralism and recognizes the coexistence of plural social orders; it also contributes to the area of legal pluralism by using leftover women’s experience as an example to demonstrate how relational dignity, as a form of “local knowledge,”Footnote 59 interacts with state law to shape ordinary people’s choices and govern their behaviour.
4.2 The complicated relationship between relational dignity and state law
At a time when China’s legal system denies childbearing outside marriage and same-sex marriage, relational dignity interacts with state law at least in the following two different ways to shape leftover women’s choices: first, relational dignity creates difficulties for those who do not agree with dominant social norms, thereby reinforcing state law’s control over unmarried women’s reproductive rights through the former’s emphasis on “complete” families; second, as people’s judgement and evaluations determine whether the individual deserves dignity, some leftover women use the rubber-stamp quality of state law to attain recognition as a way to obtain relational dignity. Here, I will first discuss social stigmas attached to leftover women to set the stage for the examination of the interaction of relational dignity and state law.
4.2.1 Social stigmas attached to leftover women
Discrimination against unmarried individuals was a topic of concern in Chinese society long before the term “leftover women” became prevalent in China. As Wu suggests, sociologically, only a married and normal person is qualified to be a full person in Chinese society.Footnote 60 Wu writes:
Without interacting with other people in proper ways, one cannot be worthy, respected and generous…. An unmarried person is not supposed to be a full person, because he or she has not experienced that interpersonal relationship that is necessary for full personhood. In local society, marriage is a sociological sign for one’s personhood, because only a married person will have his or her own family and live his or her own family life.Footnote 61
Wu seeks to demonstrate that unmarried individuals are not qualified to be respected persons because the most important sociological mark for becoming a full person is family life.Footnote 62 Marriage is still considered to be a must for everybody in today’s ChinaFootnote 63 : many people assume that those who remain single must have trouble with marrying and establishing families.Footnote 64
When getting married and having children equate to normalcy in Chinese society, remaining single at a marriageable age is considered a problem. As the Chinese proverb goes: “When a woman is in her 20s, she is like a flower; but if she is in her 30s, she is like leftover fibre from homemade soy milk (女人二十一枝花,女人三十豆腐渣).”Footnote 65 Women who have passed the age of 30 often have the burden to challenge the assumptions associated with unwanted womenFootnote 66 : physically unattractive, without good interpersonal skills, with poor health and personality defects.Footnote 67 Harriet Evans’s 2008 study suggests that
if you don’t marry, people think you have some problem[s]. It is really scary. If you don’t marry it is really difficult to have a life. Lots of things. You might think it’s okay, but other[s] would think it’s a bit odd.Footnote 68
Evans’s finding has a strong echo among leftover women I interviewed. For example, Xiaomiao, a 29-year-old single woman in Fuzhou, is pessimistic about her future because of the difficulties in dealing with social stigmas and stereotypes as an unmarried woman in China. Xiaomiao sets a deadline for herself: she thinks that, when she reaches 30, she will marry whomever she meets at that time in order to have a baby and avoid taking away the face of her family.Footnote 69 Xiaomiao suggests that people in her guanxi networks tend to believe that only those women who “have some problems,”Footnote 70 either physically or mentally, will remain single or choose to be with same-sex partners.Footnote 71
Being single is considered to be “a personal failure that also reflects badly on one’s family and therefore comes at an emotional and material cost that is simply too high for most people.”Footnote 72 In China, parents are supposed to be responsible for raising and cultivating their children until they could be independent to set up their own families.Footnote 73 If the child has not managed to find a marital partner when she reaches the age of marriage, parents will lose face due to their “failure” in educating and cultivating their child to be a qualified marital candidate.Footnote 74 As the experience of Shujing’s mother shows, parents of leftover women often face inquiries about their daughters’ marital status in their daily conversations. In fact, asking about marital status is a normal conversation topic in China.Footnote 75 Although most of the inquiries may come out of good intentions, they still bring a sense of shame and losing face to parents of leftover women. The concerns about taking away the face of parents often significantly contribute to leftover women’s pressure to marry.
Elisabeth Engebretsen suggests that remaining single carries a deep social stigma in China because the married status brings social and familial recognition that is otherwise unattainable.Footnote 76 The social stigmas attached to unmarried women have generated a competition that leftover women and their parents are forced to participate in. According to Kang, a 30-year-old researcher who works for a research institute in Fuzhou: “Having a daughter who is ‘leftover’ is similar to the scenario that your friends’ children all attend prestigious universities, but all universities and colleges have rejected your daughter.”Footnote 77 By suggesting that being leftover is similar to the lack of a chance to receive higher education, Kang stresses the assumption that having a marital partner, no matter whether he is a good match or not, is better than being single. It may be true that some parents of leftover women would hold different views toward their daughter’s marriage, especially when parents themselves do not agree with patriarchal notions of gender norms. The pressure to fit in as a way to maintain dignity, however, often overrides the critical perspectives of marriage among those parents.
Conforming to social norms is the prerequisite to generate and maintain respectable social status.Footnote 78 Only through conforming to social norms can the individual generate and maintain respectable social status. This precariousness of relational dignity has imposed great pressure on leftover women to consider entering a heterosexual marriage for social recognition. The underlying social norms of relational dignity also shape the way in which state law operates in leftover women’s daily lives.
4.2.2 Reinforcing state law’s discrimination: relational dignity and social expectations
Relational dignity requires an individual to obey social norms and fulfil social expectations as a way to fit in. As unmarried individuals are seen to lack human dignity,Footnote 79 it is widely believed that single mothers are immoral and that children born to an “incomplete” family are unfortunate.Footnote 80 Leftover women’s failure to comply with dominant social norms concerning marriage and childbearing would take away their face and place them in despised and isolated positions in guanxi networks. I argue that relational dignity plays an important role in reinforcing discrimination against single mothers and their children in Chinese society, thereby supporting state law’s denial of unmarried women’s reproductive rights.
China’s current population policies restrict childbearing within marriage, making it illegal to provide assisted reproductive services to unmarried women in China. Some lawyers and feminist activists in China have organized a series of movements in the past few years, aiming to demand reproductive rights for unmarried women.Footnote 81 In 2017, several members of the National People’s Congress proposed that the state should grant reproductive rights to single women.Footnote 82 The National Health and Family Planning Commission of the People’s Republic of China responded by stressing the need to constrain unmarried women’s access to assisted reproductive technologies for the interests of children.Footnote 83 The response also suggests that granting reproductive rights to unmarried women is at odds with China’s traditional values (传统价值) and public orders and customs (公序良俗).Footnote 84 In 2018, Global Times, an English-language daily newspaper under the auspices of The People’s Daily, published an article entitled “Giving Reproductive Rights to Single Women ‘Unlikely to Happen in China in 3 to 5 years’.”Footnote 85 The news article reiterates the Commission’s response by stating that legally allowing single women to have children will “lead to larger social and moral risks” and “challenge the traditional family pattern consisting of a man and a woman.”Footnote 86 If one examines these arguments closely, one will find that they are not only related to, but also dependent on, relational dignity to govern ordinary people’s daily lives.
The law’s restriction of childbearing within marriage for the interests of children reflects the prevalent attitude that “a child needs two parents,”Footnote 87 or what the news article refers to as “the traditional family pattern consisting of a man and a woman.”Footnote 88 Leftover women I interviewed are concerned that unmarried mothers, as well as children born to a single-parent family, may suffer from discrimination and gossip from other people. Jiani, a 27-year-old single woman, assumes that there are problems with children born to single-parent families, and thus it is irresponsible for single women to give birth.Footnote 89 Lili, a 30-year-old single woman, is not confident about bringing up a child on her own: “It is a problem for the child. At least there should be love from two parents. A complete and harmonious family is very important for the child.”Footnote 90 No matter whether one agrees with these women, one cannot deny that their definitions of the “complete” family align with that of state law.
Leftover women express concerns that the failure to comply with these social expectations will take away the dignity of both the child and the mother. According to Lei, a 30-year-old married woman: “Public opinions are quite scary. Those children who do not have a dad are often referred to as ‘bastards ( 野种 )’ by other kids and even adults.”Footnote 91 Lei supports those who choose to be single mothers, but she is worried about the difficult situations for single mothers in such a hostile social environment.Footnote 92 Likewise, Yanhui, a 25-year-old single woman, is pessimistic about the future of single mothers in Chinese society. She says:
It makes sense for state law to prohibit childbearing outside marriage. The law is to protect them. Unmarried women should not be too naïve about childbearing outside marriage. These women will be condemned by other people, which will also bring shame to their parents. Life is going to be very difficult for them. It may be fine to be single mothers overseas, but it won’t work here in China.Footnote 93
Jing, a 27-year-old single woman and a friend of Yanhui, strongly supports Yanhui’s viewpoint that state law’s denial of unmarried women’s reproductive rights may protect these women from gossip and the loss of dignity.Footnote 94
Even those who have a more positive understanding of single mothers are concerned about discrimination against unmarried mothers and their children. Xin, a 27-year-old single woman who works as a legal adviser at Xiamen Maternity and Child Care Hospital, got to meet many single mothers because she is in charge of issuing birth certificates. Xin says: “Unlike what we would expect, these women are usually very happy and energetic. They are not different from other people. In fact, I feel their status of being a single mother is not something that worries them.”Footnote 95 This, however, does not challenge her view that “a child needs two parents.” According to Xin:
A marriage may not be essential to me. But it is a must if I am considering having a child. I want to be a responsible parent. A child needs a family with two parents. I cannot carry on the responsibility belongs to a father—the public still looks at children born to single mothers through rose-tinted spectacles.Footnote 96
Like many other leftover women, Xin is reluctant to become a single mother by choice out of her concern about discrimination against her child.
From the narratives of these women, one can see how relational dignity reinforces and supports state law’s restriction of childbearing within marriage. The lack of dignity associated with children born to single mothers not only leads to leftover women’s assumption that it requires two parents to establish a complete and harmonious family for the child to grow up; it also provides a handy excuse for state law to deny unmarried women’s reproductive rights under the guise of “the interest of the child.” Under this situation, relational dignity serves as a barrier for positive legal changes to create a more inclusive socio-legal environment for women who are considering alternative family structures.
4.2.3 State law as a rubber stamp
The precarious and relational nature of an individual’s dignity attracts great attention to the attitudes of people in one’s guanxi networks. Gaining social recognition is essential in the process of making decisions. Among various ways of attaining dignity, using state law as a rubber stamp to ensure popular legitimacy is one of the main strategies developed by leftover women who do not agree with dominant social norms regarding marriage and childbearing. To be specific, some leftover women I interviewed deliberately seek or have already gone through the legal process of entering into heterosexual marriage to win societal approval. They manage to use state law as a protecting shield to gain relational dignity and create space for the “private” self to enjoy alternative family structures. Leftover women who desire alternative family formations find it convenient to use the rubber-stamp quality of state law to not only protect them from losing face, but also to grant them reproductive rights.
In a heteronormative regime such as China, same-sex marriage is not acknowledged by its current legal system. It is, however, not against the law for leftover women who self-identify as lesbians and bisexuals to go through the legal process of entering state-sanctioned marriage with men. A lesbian and a gay man can be legally recognized as a married couple as long as they meet the following requirements: entering into marriage with their own free will; and reaching the marriageable age stipulated by the law.Footnote 97 At the same time, as sexuality is identified by the individual involved,Footnote 98 there is almost nothing that state law can do to stop non-heterosexual women from hiding their sexual identities and entering into heterosexual marriage.
Some leftover women who self-identify as lesbians in my interviews have already chosen or are considering formality marriage ( 形婚 ).Footnote 99 Yingpu, a 34-year-old lesbian who has been in a stable same-sex relationship for several years, co-operated with a gay man and went through the legal process of state-sanctioned marriage two years before the interview.Footnote 100 When asked about the reasons underlying her decision to choose formality marriage, Yingpu describes it as a performance she put together with her “husband” for parents and people in the guanxi networks of both Yingpu and her parents. Yingpu says:
You need to have an appropriate evaluation of the social environment and adopt strategies to fit in. State-sanctioned marriage is a protecting shield (保护伞) for me both in my workplace and at home. I work for the government, and it is extremely difficult to be “different” within the governmental system. You must follow dominant social norms if you want to survive or get a promotion in the system. I entered into a formality marriage for my interest. I also did it for my parents. Now our relatives and colleagues believe that I am normal. My parents gain social recognition from my marriage. The decision to enter state-sanctioned marriage really gives me much freedom to plan for my future. I think I have managed to at least show people in my family’s social network that I am complete. My formality marriage frees me from discrimination and gossip to some extent, and thus I now have more time and energy to focus on what I really like in my life. I plan to get a divorce in a few years—our society is much friendlier to divorced women than those who have never married. So I guess formality marriage is my strategy to attain dignity, freedom, and the permission to do things that unmarried women are not allowed to do.Footnote 101
After entering formality marriage, Yingpu’s legal “husband” moved to Hong Kong for work—a decision that was deliberately made to avoid carrying on the burden of sharing the same apartment between the two of them and hosting family members on a regular basis. It ensures Yingpu the freedom to live with her girlfriend, whom others think is her room-mate. In Yingpu’s view, this arrangement has granted her both social recognition and the chance to live with the person she loves.Footnote 102
Instead of looking for a gay man to co-operate, some leftover women I interviewed made use of state law’s recognition of heterosexual marriage without revealing their sexual identity to their husbands, sometimes because they themselves are uncertain about their sexual identity. For example, Wenwen, a 26-year-old woman in Xiamen who has a strong preference for a same-sex relationship but self-identifies as bisexual, chose to marry a heterosexual man. Similarly to Yingpu, her decision to enter into a state-sanctioned marriage is to protect herself and her parents. Wenwen says:
I got married without letting my husband know that I might prefer to be in a same-sex relationship. I plan to divorce my husband sooner or later. My parents would feel bad if I was not able to even get married. If I do not get married, other people will think that my parents do not have a daughter who is as normal as anybody else, which will lead these people to look down on us. My parents may lose face and feel shame. If my parents really desired to see me getting married, I felt I should. I mean, getting married would not kill me (结一下婚又不会死). As the only child of my family, I felt the obligation to continue maintaining my family’s guanxi networks. I care about how other people think about our family. I cannot focus only on my own interests. Honestly, I also think entering into heterosexual marriage is good for myself. Coming out in Chinese society is not ideal, as people will gossip about me. And perhaps it would also endanger my career. If society is more inclusive, then I don’t mind coming out. However, under the current situation, I prefer to hide my sexual identity as a way to protect myself. More importantly, I want to have a child, which unmarried women are not allowed. If you asked me what my husband can do for me, I would definitely say that I need a man in order to have a baby. A “complete” family also looks better to the public than a family without a male figure.Footnote 103
Wenwen benefits from the state-sanctioned marriage at least in the following three ways: first, it ensures that Wenwen and her family would not lose face in front of people in their guanxi networks, which in turn is helpful in maintaining good guanxi with others; second, it prevents discrimination in the workplace and society as a whole; third, as unmarried women are not entitled to the right to give birth, entering into a heterosexual marriage enables Wenwen to have a child.
Yingpu and Wenwen’s narratives demonstrate how leftover women who do not agree with dominant social norms may use the rubber-stamp quality of state law to attain social recognition, thereby maintaining relational dignity. These women’s manipulation or appropriation of state law is a strategy to protect themselves and their family members from the unthinkable consequences resulting from the loss of relational dignity. It is the precarious and relational nature of dignity in Chinese society that leads to their decisions to use heterosexual marriage to free themselves from discrimination and gossip within their social networks.
In summary, relational dignity and state law interact in different ways to affect leftover women’s choices in marriage and childbearing. On the one hand, relational dignity creates a sense of obligation for leftover women to fulfil social expectations, thereby providing handy excuses for state law to deny unmarried women’s reproductive rights. On the other hand, leftover women creatively use state law as a rubber stamp to protect themselves from losing dignity within their guanxi networks and taking away face from parents.
A relational understanding of dignity enables us to see how state law operates in ordinary people’s real lives in Chinese society. As relational dignity often reinforces and underlines dominant social norms, it provides opportunities for state law to “justify” its discrimination against those who do not fit in. While some leftover women manage to attain relational dignity through their strategic manipulation of the rubber-stamp quality of state law, relying on this approach to obtain dignity may further reinforce social and legal discrimination against those who prefer alternative family structures. I hope my discussion will invite further investigation on how the precarious and relational nature of dignity in relation-based societies interacts with state law to shape ordinary people’s choices, especially the choices of those who do not agree with dominant social norms.
5. Conclusion
In this article, I have put forward the term “relational dignity” to emphasize that, in Chinese society, dignity highly depends on the judgement and evaluation of other people in one’s guanxi networks. Dignity is in a precarious status and can be taken away by others if the individual and her family members do not strategically maintain dignity within their guanxi network. Through the discussion of leftover women’s choices in marriage and childbearing, I have demonstrated two forms of interaction between state law and relational dignity: relational dignity plays a significant role in pushing ordinary people to comply with dominant social expectations, which are often consistent with state law’s discrimination against those who do not agree with dominant social norms; on the other hand, state law can be used to attain relational dignity and create spaces for the “private” self. Relational dignity and state law may interact in other ways under different situations to shape ordinary people’s choices and behaviour in relation-based societies. It is my hope that this article will invite future discussion on how state law and dignity interact in a society in which people’s identities are interdependent with guanxi.
Acknowledgements
This work was carried out with the aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada. Financial support for this research project was provided by the University of Victoria. I am grateful to Miyazawa Setsuo for organizing such a wonderful panel for us to exchange ideas on dignity in Asia. My research project and fieldwork have benefited greatly from the suggestions and encouragement from Gillian Calder, Maneesha Deckha, Feng Xu, Helen Lansdowne, David Engel, Lynette Chua, and many other colleagues. I also wish to thank Qi Kong for her unconditional support. Special thanks go to my interviewees who agreed to share their stories.
