“On the flip side, I’d also hear gossip in the office directed toward my single female colleagues, who were considered too old to ever find a partner. “I’d often hear anecdotes from these friends and colleagues about the pressure they felt to settle down and how this affected their lives,” Holmes remembers. They were smart, successful, and crippled by overwhelming societal stress to marry young. Holmes worked at a news organization where most of his colleagues were young women aged between 24 and 34 years old. “You need a shorter and more plain man.”ĭaniel Holmes, the filmmaker behind China’s Fake Boyfriends, became intrigued by the concept of sheng nu after he moved to China in 2013. “He is too tall and too handsome for you,” her mother scoffs upon meeting him.

Despite their preparation (and the significant finances that Li Chenxi invested-the going rate for a fake boyfriend is roughly $150 per day) the plan quickly derails. With falling birth rates and much speculation on the impact to China’s economy, Fincher argues that the government is deliberately frightening women into believing that if they delay marriage, no one will want to marry them at all.Īnd so Li Chenxi finds herself trundling north, prepping her hired boyfriend with photos of her family and confirming details of their fabricated relationship. She believes that the Chinese government, concerned with creating a so-called “high quality” workforce that can compete in the global marketplace, coined the phrase as part of an aggressive propaganda campaign to coerce educated women out of the workforce and into matrimony and motherhood.

“If you look before 2007, there wasn’t this extreme, extraordinary anxiety surrounding marriage,” says Leta Hong Fincher, a consultant on the documentary and author of Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. But despite the progressive movement, the message from society remains unchanged: If you’re not married, you’re doing something wrong. Sheng nu, which refers to any woman over the age of 27 who is still single, applies to a growing body of women seeking education, economic freedom, and a more unconventional life path than their parents. But for millennial Chinese women, it was an all-too-familiar concept. When a four-minute documentary-style video exploring the pressures placed on single women in China was released in April, the term sheng nu, which translates into English as “leftover women,” was new to the rest of the world.

Leftover women leta hong fincher