UNLIKE SOME of her friends, Kalinda Duan, a 28-year-old woman from Shanxi province, is not opposed to marriage. Having grown up without siblings, she thinks the companionship of matrimony wonderful. But she has one firm requirement of a future husband—he must also be an only child. No one can persuade her otherwise—“Even if it’s the son of the party secretary of the State Council”.
In China’s cut-throat marriage market, cars, houses and savings are all topics for a first date.
UNLIKE SOME of her friends, Kalinda Duan, a 28-year-old woman from Shanxi province, is not opposed to marriage. Having grown up without siblings, she thinks the companionship of matrimony wonderful. But she has one firm requirement of a future husband—he must also be an only child. No one can persuade her otherwise—“Even if it’s the son of the party secretary of the State Council”.
In China’s cut-throat marriage market, cars, houses and savings are all topics for a first date. More offbeat is the number of siblings. In Shanghai Mr Yue (who does not want to share his full name), the organiser of a matchmaking group with thousands of members on WeChat, a messaging app, says that many will politely turn down someone who has a brother or sister. They are typical. A working paper by Fangqi Wen of Ohio State University finds that only children are more likely than others to marry only children. Their chances of such a match are 18.4 percentage points higher than those of their peers with siblings, even after accounting for things such as education and family background.
Contrary to popular belief, only children are not even in the majority among young Chinese today, so they do have the choice. Though China had a one-child policy from 1979 to 2015, it was never uniformly enforced, especially in the countryside. From 1984 a “1.5-child policy” also allowed some rural couples to have a second child if the first was a girl. Only children make up little more than 40% of all university-age students, according to a nationally representative survey in 2019.
These departures from the one-child model appear to have created a rift in values between different-sized families. Only children are used to having it all, rather than sharing (and bickering) with the other little emperors in the home. So they think that a spouse’s ties with his or her siblings would be bothersome, says Mr Yue. They don’t like the thought of devoting energy to managing such relationships. “There’s nothing wrong with it,” says Ms Duan, “but I can’t accept that my partner could love his sister so much. I just can’t.”
Money matters, too. Ms Duan’s father financially supported his brothers, and, she thinks, neglected her mother. Only children inherit their parents’ entire estate. Some siblings make bigger claims on the family silver than others. A man with brothers is in the worst position: when a bride price is paid to help a son marry, it leaves less for the other boys.
The peril posed by sisters is different. If a man has several older sisters, it suggests his parents were trying hard for a son. That could be a warning sign that patriarchal attitudes run in the family, which might also deter some potential brides.
The single child does not have it all easy. The windfall of an undivided inheritance is often preceded by the undivided burden of caring for two frail parents. But siblings cannot always be relied on to bear their fair share of the burden, and the uneven division of care can lead to arguments. At least for only children, the responsibility is clear, says Ms Duan.
These attitudes may seem heartless or mercenary. But good jobs are scarce—and a date’s financial standing is important. Economic anxiety will not help China’s marriage rate. In the first half of this year 3.3m couples got married, down by 7.5% from a year earlier, and the lowest number on record. For a government worried about the shrinking population, sibling-phobia is yet another headache. Oh, brother.
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