By Li Yinhe

(Caijing.com.cn) Recently, a real estate regulatory official put forth the thought-provoking argument that high housing prices are influenced by the demand of a bride's mother. When a young man proposes, the woman's mother will ask him for an apartment as a condition of marriage to guarantee an element of freedom for her daughter from the husband's family. The man expends all that he has to purchase a flat.

I have studied families and gender for decades. The mother-in-law's demand for housing happens to be related to both of them. Houses for newly-married couples are considered an imperative indicator for family studies and gender equality. Based on the male-centered hierarchy in traditional society, the wife is absorbed into the husband's family. In China, thousands of years of male-centered culture is embodied through the patriarchal residence. Under such conditions, the wife leaves her own family and to live with the family of the husband, without her relatives, putting the wife at a serious disadvantage. As a Chinese saying goes, the husband's mother and the daughters-in-law are born enemies, because the wife must compete for her husband's love with his mother, almost a stranger to the wife.
 
Since the dual forces of modernization and urbanization of China, such a family pattern has changed, with the emergence of new couples taking a separate residence. When the new couple buys or rents a house separate from their parents, the wife is no longer put at a social disadvantage from the outset. The relationship between the husband's mother and daughter-in-law will not be a problem any more, since living separately mitigates the potential frictions between the two women.

According to our recent survey in cities including Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Zhengzhou, Lanzhou and Harbin, half of all the couples live separately from their parents. It appears that the demand from a bride's mother has influenced at least 50 percent of couples with their own homes. If grouped by age, half of all the people who are going to get married are affected by the mothers-in-law's demand for housing.

The survey says, meanwhile, more than 40 percent couples still live with the husbands' family in the five cities. Very few couples choose to live with the wife's family. As the survey shows, patriarchy is deeply rooted in our society. According to other surveys, however, living with the husbands' family is not necessarily due to their own volition or merely following cultural customs but probably the result of housing shortages. Once they are able to get a new house, the couple moves out. Therefore, mothers-in-law's demand for housing is actually the rigid demand of the newly-married. Such a demand contributes to the new trend of a separate residence for the couple after the wedding, shaking patriarchy in families and society, and facilitating gender equality.
 
Obvious problems still remain. A lingering issue is that the husband is asked to purchase an apartment entirely on his own. In traditional Chinese society, men supported the family while women hardly took part in social production. Life in the countryside is the same in this respect -- farmers prepare a house nearby for their daughters-in-law before marriage. In cities, people also take it for granted that men should be responsible for housing purchases. Although women now earn more, average earnings are still around 60 to 80 percent of to what males earn. Therefore, it is the mother of the bride's demand for housing, rather than the husband's mother.  

Only when every couple chooses to live in separate houses from their parents, and the wife's mother and the husband's mother both demand a new residence for the couple, will we finally realize gender equality.

Li Yinhe, China's first female sociologist on sex issues, was born in Beijing in 1952. She is currently a researcher and mentor of doctorates with the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

All opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Caijing Magazine.

Full Article in Chinese: http://blog.caijing.com.cn/expert_article-151194-2005.shtml