Uxorilocal Marriage in Xiaoshan, 1970s to 2020s
In late March 2024, I accompanied Yifan to Golden Phoenix, a matchmaking agency specialising in arranging uxorilocal marriages in Xiaoshan District, Hangzhou, a place where life still moves at a leisurely pace. Yifan was in his early thirties, short, and slightly balding. As we were on our way, he constantly made self-deprecating jokes about his appearance, worried that the matchmaker would reject him at first glance. When we arrived, the agency’s owner, Wang Zilong, an elderly man with grey hair, was talking with another male client. While we waited anxiously outside the door, we heard the following dialogue:
‘Tell me about your basic information—your profession, income?’
‘Pet groomer, with an annual income of over 150,000 yuan.’
‘Sorry, young man, I’m afraid I can’t help you. The parents of the girls don’t desire this profession’.
‘But my education and appearance are both excellent.’
‘But the girls’ families just don’t like boys in this profession.’
Overhearing this from the doorway, Yifan cast me a worried look.
‘Xiaoshan is crowded with men waiting to marry into wealthy families.’ Since the early 2020s, this phrase has become ubiquitous on the Chinese internet, where Xiaoshan is often jokingly referred to as the ‘capital of zhuixu’ (赘婿, that is, ‘live-in sons-in-law’). Nestled in an old farmers market, the matchmaking agency and its owner, Wang, used to receive a diverse array of male clients daily. These men, hailing from all over the country, exhaustively showed all their capital—education, appearance, and income—to Wang in the hope of a chance to marry into a wealthy bride’s family.
Marriage in China has always been intertwined with a range of issues, including preference for male offspring, generational conflicts, and political implications—everything bar love (Croll 2010). In contrast to the patriarchal qualities of traditional Chinese marriages, the uxorilocal marriage is often seen as an abnormal form because it ostensibly degrades the status of the man (Wolf 1995). Although there are variations, uxorilocal marriages generally see the groom move in with the bride’s family as a live-in son-in-law, without having to pay a bride price. In fact, he may even receive gifts from the bride’s family. In the past, this would have been grain or livestock, but nowadays it can be a car or a house (Zhang 2008: 114). In the current online sphere, uxorilocal marriage has sparked debates about gender. In the eyes of many, uxorilocal marriage signals female empowerment and gender equality. Furthermore, terms like ‘soft rice man’ (软饭男) have cast male inferiority in this type of arrangement in a playful and entertaining light, which has had the effect of overshadowing the challenges that women can face in this type of marriage arrangement.
My research on the topic arose from a sense of disjunction. Growing up within an uxorilocal marriage family in Hangzhou, discussions about gender were a subtle taboo within my household. For those embedded in the lived experience of uxorilocal marriages, the hopeful rhetoric of female empowerment often diverges from personal realities. During fieldwork in 2024 in Hangzhou’s periphery, I sought to uncover how people from different social backgrounds and generations perceive uxorilocal marriages and zhuixu. What changes have occurred in uxorilocal marriages over the past few decades? What is the primary source of tension in these marriages? Do women truly hold the upper hand, and how do they view their own status?
The 1970s: A Widow’s Dilemma
Huang Meixian vividly recalls the day she married her husband, Chen Shuigen, in the spring of 1969. After she had her first menstrual period at 18, the village elders told her family about a young man of similar age in the neighbouring village. ‘I just thought he looked decent because he was a worker at the gear factory, unlike us, farmers. My parents were very solicitous and said: “Let’s settle this”,’ Meixian remembers.
A year after her marriage, Meixian became pregnant: ‘At that time, everyone was poor. Most families survived on wild vegetables and watery porridge. Because my husband had a stable job and received benefits from the state system, we sometimes received allocations of pork. We were the most well-off people in the village.’ The couple lived a simple life for seven years, during which Meixian gave birth to three daughters, each one year apart. But in the winter of 1976, tragedy struck when Shuigen was accidentally caught in a machine and died.
After her husband’s death, Meixian, along with her three children, was kicked out of the house by her in-laws. ‘People see daughters as burdens who will eventually marry out, so they don’t want to continue raising their own granddaughters,’ she complains. After her in-laws reclaimed her land, she returned to her parents’ home with her daughters. They were penniless. To make things worse, three generations were now living together under one roof and the only male member was an elderly man who could no longer work, which made them a target of bullying in the village. She discovered that someone had tried to sabotage her livestock—her sole source of income—which heightened her sense of isolation and despair. When her eldest daughter neared the age of 10, Meixian’s life came close to taking a radical turn. Meixian’s parents told her about a bachelor from another village whose parents, wife, and children had all passed away. Living in extreme poverty in a thatched hut, he had made a surprising proposal to Meixian’s parents: when he learned that their daughter was also widowed, he had offered to become a zhuixu, asking for nothing more than the chance for the two of them to live together as a family.
Uxorilocal marriage in Meixian’s village dated back to the period of collectivisation in the 1950s. ‘At that time, men earned eight work points a day, while women only earned six,’ she explained. ‘So poor families with sons would sometimes offer their sons as zhuixu to slightly better-off families with daughters. They would also privately negotiate to give the man’s natal family some grain each year.’ ‘However,’ Meixian adds, ‘a zhuixu had to change his surname to that of his wife. Everyone believed this was a disgrace.’
When local officials learned about Meixian’s situation, they actively encouraged her to consider this marriage arrangement. However, when the discussions were reaching the final stage, the man suddenly reneged. Not only did he refuse to take Meixian’s surname, Huang, but he also demanded that at least one of Meixian’s daughters be given his surname. The cadres unexpectedly supported this idea, arguing that it would enable both families’ lineages to continue, while also relieving the remarried couple of the need to have more children, which would lessen the population burden on the state. Meixian felt deceived and betrayed. She recounts: ‘Even this ugly old man wanted to humiliate me! I refused his demand, and then he insulted me, claiming I was cursed to bring bad luck to my husband!’
Meixian’s story shows how, during the Mao era and in the early reform period, many men in China entered uxorilocal marriages reluctantly. Unless they had no other choice, what man would willingly abandon his ancestors to humiliatingly serve someone else’s family? Nevertheless, Meixian’s experience highlights how, for women, too, uxorilocal marriage was far from a matter of pride. ‘Actually, I felt embarrassed and ashamed about this idea, and my parents felt the same,’ she tells me. ‘It was like constantly telling others that our family had no sons. Moreover, it was as if I were announcing that I was a slutty woman who needed to remarry. This was my disgrace.’
What happened to Meixian in the 1970s vividly reflects a disorientation caused by the ambiguity of gender roles as population control became a priority of the Chinese leadership in the early reform era. According to Croll (2010), national population control officials recognised early on that uxorilocal marriages might elevate women’s status, which would ultimately help reduce the national birth rate. However, even among grassroots cadres during the early period of family planning, efforts to eliminate gender discrimination in practice were still unconsciously influenced by an entrenched patriarchal ideology and implicit expectations of female chastity. Even though a woman in an uxorilocal marriage brought a live-in husband into her family, this did not necessarily mean a reversal of power dynamics. Men, having lost their position, felt emasculated, while women, bestowed with the role of ‘head of the household’, were filled with anxiety that stemmed from a deep-seated sense of inferiority due to the absence of a male heir in the family. The fervent cult of the son in popular society constituted the ultimate value—one that was grafted on to daughters in peculiar ways.
The 2000s: Daughters as De Facto Sons or Zhuixu as Adopted Sons?
Born in 1977, Hu Baojuan is the eldest daughter in her family. In Hu Village, her birthplace, the eldest daughter in families with only daughters was required to ‘stay at home’ to carry on the family name, like a son. Although Baojuan sometimes struggled with this duty, she accepted her fate. She knew a girl in the village who had run away from her arranged uxorilocal marriage, which had left her parents angry and ultimately had forced their youngest daughter to assume the obligation instead. ‘That was unfair because it changed the order of precedence,’ Baojuan says. ‘It was impossible for a family not to keep any offspring. I don’t want to disappoint my parents: after all, they raised me, shouldn’t I fulfil their wishes?’
In 1999, Baojuan met Li Qiwei, a young man from a poor mountainous area, who had just been assigned to a steel factory in Hangzhou. By then, she already held a tenured primary school teaching position and had secured urban hukou (户口) status, while Qiwei had no connections in the city. ‘My parents thought Qiwei’s family was too poor,’ Baojuan recalls, ‘but I told them that such poverty and simple relationships had its advantages: it was a little less of a face-saving burden for him.’ Finally, in 2000, Qiwei married into Baojuan’s family, and they lived together in a two-storey self-built house in the village. Qiwei informed his parents and brothers of the news over the phone since his family could not afford to travel the long distance to Hangzhou. The only wedding ceremony was held in Hu Village, with Baojuan’s parents covering all expenses.
While it is commonly believed that the strong backing of the natal family should grant the women in uxorilocal marriages a dominant position, the reality is more complex. ‘A wise parent-in-law won’t mistreat the zhuixu; instead, they will treat him like an adopted son,’ Baojuan explains. She recalls how in the early years Qiwei’s meagre income often fuelled his deep-seated insecurities. He would vent these frustrations by lashing out at Baojuan. Out of guilt and a sense of indebtedness, she silently endured and shouldered more ‘gender labour’ as she and her parents made every effort to restore the zhuixu’s masculine dignity (Ward 2010: 237).
In 2008, Baojuan accompanied Qiwei to his hometown for the first time. Before their departure, Baojuan’s parents gave Qiwei RMB6,666—a sum considered auspicious. Baojuan referred to this as ‘saving-face money’ (面子钱), meant to show Qiwei’s relatives that the family’s finances were under his control. Asked how such a significant sum was spent, Baojuan explains: ‘Part of it went into red envelopes for the relatives’ children, and it was essential for Qiwei to hand them out, symbolising that he is the head of our family.’
‘The other part is more interesting,’ she laughs. ‘Qiwei would deliberately lose money in poker games with relatives. Every time he pulled out a thick stack of bills, his relatives would feel reassured that Qiwei was doing well in our family.’ The child’s surname became another important issue. Baojuan specifically instructed her son: ‘If someone asks your name, don’t say your surname is Hu, since you won’t see them for years, just tell them you take your father’s surname.’
The 2020s: From Shameful Taboo to Open Desire
Every Saturday morning, Wansong Park fills with people coming for matchmaking. It is there that I encountered Yifan, the man I described at the beginning of this essay. He was holding in his hands a placard that read:
Male, 32 years old, height 167, average appearance
Master’s degree in Mathematics from Zhejiang University
Hukou in a fourth-tier city in Gansu
Programmer, annual salary of 300,000 yuan before tax
No house, owns a car (still paying off the loan).
Looking for a local Hangzhou girl
Ideally with property
Willing to offer a bride price of up to 200,000 yuan
Open to being a zhuixu.
Like millions of migrant workers, Yifan was forced to adapt to a so-called 996 work regime (9am to 9pm, six days a week). ‘Nowadays, some tech companies have even started implementing an 11/11/6 work schedule,’ Yifan said with a bitter smile. ‘I’m really reaching my limit.’ Failing to demonstrate sufficient resilience and competitiveness meant being fired. He once believed that life was a straight line: work hard to save money while young and, eventually, everything would fall into place—career, marriage, and stability. However, he gradually realised that he was helpless as he came from a small town and was the product of an exam-oriented education. He was brought up to believe that study and hard work are the only paths to success; yet, no matter much effort he put in, he did not seem to be able to find a way forward and society never felt as fair as an exam. ‘Many people take 20 minutes to get from home to this city centre, but for me, this journey has taken 30 years,’ he said to me, looking at the crowd.
Yifan is an only child and his parents, who are self-employed in aquaculture and do not have a pension, rely entirely on him for financial support. ‘With the current housing prices in Hangzhou, my yearly savings can only buy 1.5 square metres.’ ‘So,’ I asked him, ‘does that mean you don’t see becoming a zhuixu as something shameful?’ He replied: ‘Compared to barely scraping by in my current life, the pressure of becoming a zhuixu is nothing. There’s nothing that money can’t alleviate.’
Forty years after the implementation of the One-Child Policy, the boomerang of societal preference for male offspring is once again returning. The surplus male population has led to a marriage squeeze and the ever-increasing bride price demands have transformed sons from reliable caregivers into financial burdens for their parents (Driessen and Sier 2019; Shi 2017). In this context, masculinity is becoming another form of capital, marketed to those who still believe in its necessity. The continuation of the family lineage has given way to the pressures of survival, and the zhuixu’s commitment to the patriarchal expectations of his natal family is effectively transferred to his wife’s family.
A week later, I accompanied Yifan to the Golden Phoenix matchmaking agency, where the scene at the beginning of the essay took place. Over the past two decades, urbanisation in Xiaoshan has prompted large-scale demolitions, which has allowed many local families to exchange their ancestral rural houses for city apartments after receiving millions in compensation. Low-density rural residential plots have been requisitioned and replaced with newly constructed high-rise commercial buildings. These land development projects have become a primary source of revenue for the government, drawing both residents of the outskirts and new arrivals in the metropole into the market transaction game of the propertied class. As newly affluent families with only daughters grow increasingly reluctant to marry them off for fear of losing family assets, they turn to matchmaking agencies to seek out zhuixu.
In June 2024, Yifan eventually went on a date with a girl named Song, whose family house was set for demolition the following year. The number of family members is one of the determining factors for compensation, so Song’s family hoped that she would marry soon and, ideally, have a child quickly to secure a larger payout. However, their matchmaking efforts ultimately did not work out. Yifan acknowledged that a zhuixu should proactively relinquish certain rights and, in a conversation with me, he expressed his conviction that the fact that the children would not carry his surname would not affect his love for them. Nevertheless, he found that things were crazy beyond his expectations. ‘They laid out a dizzying plan for the child’s surname: the first child, regardless of gender, would take the surname Song. If the firstborn is a boy, no further children are needed,’ he explained. ‘If it’s a girl, they’d try again; if the second child is a boy, he’d also take Song. But if the first two are girls, they’d attempt for a third child …’ This type of zhuixu, as he put it, is like ‘an obedient reproductive machine’, continuously selling off his reproductive capacities to ensure a male heir for another family. ‘It’s like I’m marrying Song’s parents, not their daughter. This is not what a free marriage should look like.’
Although I have not spoken with Song, the disputes over the family name in the next generation shed light on the dark side of uxorilocal marriage in the 2020s. Today, this type of arrangement has become a shortcut for young migrant men to settle in the big cities. Interestingly, it is often not the women themselves who chose this path, but rather their middle-aged parents, who hold authority within the extended family. For the financial benefit of the entire family, women thrust into the arena of uxorilocal marriages are treated as fill-in heirs only when there is no male heir in the family, and the legitimacy of their status is immediately revoked when the opportunity arises to bypass them in favour of a new male heir. The family surname passed down through zhuixu primarily belongs to the woman’s father and only secondarily to her. The effort to bear grandsons largely moderates the regrets of those families who were unable to have a son three decades ago under the One-Child Policy. The preference for sons, once hidden by the needs of the times, is ironically being revived under the guise of uxorilocal marriages.
The Illusion of Empowerment
In this essay, I selected representative episodes to present a broad canvas of uxorilocal marriage spanning five decades. When juxtaposed, these stories reveal a vertical thread that guides the evolution of this practice—the conflict between the traditional preference for sons and the state’s intervention in families—leading people to continuously recruit male members into the paternalistic extended family under the guise of women’s empowerment. This shows that, far from the contemporary glorification of uxorilocal marriage as a symbol of gender equality, this practice has always been underpinned by patriarchal control over women’s gendered value. Whether the eldest daughter was elevated to the status of a son, the son-in-law was treated as a de facto adopted son, or disputes arose over the right to the surname of the grandson, the matrilocal residence pattern did not really challenge the authority of the patriarchal line. Only by moving away from top-down grand narratives can we see the hollow prestige and unacknowledged labour of mothers, daughters, and wives and their real-life experiences.
Featured Image: Matchmaking corner in Wansong park
References
Croll, Elisabeth J. 2010. The Politics of Marriage in Contemporary China. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Driessen, Miriam, and Willy Sier. 2019. ‘Rescuing Masculinity: Giving Gender in the Wake of China’s Marriage Squeeze.’ Modern China 47(3): 266–89.
Judd, Ellen R. 1992. ‘Land Divided, Land United.’ The China Quarterly 130: 338–56.
Shi, Lihong. 2017. ‘From Care Providers to Financial Burdens: The Changing Role of Sons and Reproductive Choice in Rural Northeast China.’ In Transforming Patriarchy: Chinese Families in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Gonçalo Santos and Stevan Harrell, 59–73. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.
Ward, Jane. 2010. ‘Gender Labor: Transmen, Femmes, and Collective Work of Transgression.’ Sexualities 13(2): 236–54.
Wolf, Arthur P. 1995. Sexual Attraction and Childhood Association: A Chinese Brief for Edward Westermarck. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Zhang, Weiguo. 2008. ‘State, Gender and Uxorilocal Marriage in Contemporary Rural North China.’ The China Journal 60: 111–32.
