Les jeunes gens non mariés chinois prendre part à un événement de jumelage pour Qixi Festival, également connu sous le nom de Jour de Valentines, Chinois à Wuhan, Chine centrale
Unmarried young Chinese people take part in a matchmaking event for Qixi Festival, also known as Chinese Valentines Day, in Wuhan city, central Chinas Hubei province, 10 August 2013. As couples celebrate the Qixi festival on Tuesday (13 August 2013), the Chinese equivalent of Valentines Day, millions of women face stark choices as long-held ideas about matrimonial hierarchy run up against economic and social changes sweeping the worlds most populous country. The term shengnv, directly translated as leftover women, was coined to refer to professional women who have not married by their late 20s. Chinese people often think males should be higher in a relationship in every sense, including height, age, education and salary, said Ni Lin, who hosts a popular match-making television show in Shanghai. This leads to a phenomenon in which A-grade men marry B-grade women, B-grade men marry C-grade women and C-grade men marry D-grade women. Only A-grade women and D-grade men can not find partners, Ni said. In Beijing, more than a third of women in their late 20s and 30s are looking for husbands, according to the dating website Jiayuan.com. Media reports say there may be as many as 500, 000 leftover women in the capital. There are plenty of men to go round among Chinas nearly 1.4 billion people but social status can conspire against single professional woman once again. Chinas population is more tilted towards men than in many countries due to the governments one-child policy and a cultural preference for boys. The latest census in 2011 showed there were twice as many single men born in the 1970s as women of the same age.
