纽约时报中文网 - 中英对照版-中英抵抗婚育中国年轻女性对官方政策说不
November 27, 2023 6 min 1240 words
这篇报道揭示了中国年轻女性在面对官方政策推动婚育的压力时，选择推迟或拒绝结婚生子的趋势。作者通过采访个体案例，呈现了这一现象的复杂性，从家庭压力到公司相亲，以及对婚姻的不同看法。文章指出，许多中国女性在获得比共产主义早期更多的个人自由后，开始默默抵抗党的期望，形成了与政策背道而驰的群体选择。政府为应对人口减少和经济减速可能采取激励生育的措施，但作者也强调，政府面临限制，无法强迫婚姻或怀孕。这一问题将进一步挑战党的领导，引发与女性权利和人口未来相关的深刻争论。
The pressure to marry began when Amiee was in her early 20s.
结婚的压力是在艾米20岁出头的时候开始的。
By 25, her Chinese parents were accusing her of causing them a public loss of face because she still had no plans to wed. Her father warned her that women are worth less to a man as they near the age of 30, when — according to Chinese government propaganda — their peak childbearing time has passed. When Amiee was 29, her mother threatened to jump off a building if she didn’t find a husband.
25岁时，她的中国父母指责她给他们丢脸，因为她还没有结婚的计划。父亲警告她，女人到了快30岁的时候，对男人来说就不那么有价值了——根据中国政府的宣传，在这个时候，女人的生育高峰期已经过去。艾米29岁时，她的母亲威胁说，如果她找不到丈夫，自己就跳楼。
At family gatherings like Chinese New Year, relatives badgered her to help her “entire clan find peace,” she told me, and at work she was pressured into company-organized blind dates, chaperoned by several colleagues. These were “terrifying,” she said.
她告诉我，在春节这样的家庭聚会上，亲戚们缠着她，要她“让全家人能安下心来”；在工作中，她被迫参加公司组织的相亲，由几位同事陪同。这些都很“可怕”，她说。
Amiee — whose full name is being withheld to avoid potential repercussions for questioning government policy — wasn’t against marriage, per se. She simply hadn’t found her soul mate at that age and didn’t want to rush into marriage to please her parents or a government eager to push up the birthrate. Today, still single and with a successful career in public relations, she is finally enjoying some peace; she’s 34, past what China’s government says is a woman’s reproductive prime, and her family has stopped pressuring her.
艾米本人并不反对婚姻——为了避免因质疑政府政策而受到潜在影响，本文不公布她的全名。她只是在那个年纪还没有找到自己的灵魂伴侣，也不想为了取悦父母或急于提高出生率的政府而仓促结婚。如今，她仍然单身，在公关领域事业有成，终于享受到了一些安宁；她今年34岁，已经过了中国政府所说的女性生育黄金年龄，她的家人也不再给她施加压力。
I hear similar stories from single women across China, where sexist state propaganda labels single professional women older than 27 as sheng nu, or leftover women. While conducting fieldwork in China for my Ph.D. in sociology from 2011 to 2013, I spoke with many who endured relationships they didn’t want, often making great personal, financial and career compromises. I wanted to tell them to just walk away.
我从中国各地的单身女性那里听到了类似的故事，在中国，性别歧视的国家宣传将27岁以上的单身职业女性称为“剩女”。2011年至2013年，我在中国攻读社会学博士学位期间进行了实地考察，我与许多人交谈过，她们忍受自己不想要的关系，往往在个人、经济和职业上做出巨大的妥协。我想告诉她们，不要理会这一切。
Now many young Chinese women are doing exactly that, delaying or shunning marriage and childbirth altogether, mirroring the journey of women in other, wealthier patriarchal East Asian societies such as Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. As individuals, these Chinese women are generally unwilling to challenge official policy. But through their reproductive choices, they collectively pose a radical and complicated problem for the Chinese Communist Party.
Facing a shrinking population and a long-term economic slowdown, the party wants China’s women to be docile, baby-breeding guarantors of social, economic and demographic stability. Instead, many Chinese women, who now have greater personal freedom and control over their lives than during the early Communist era, are quietly resisting.
面对人口减少和长期经济放缓，中共希望中国的女性温顺、生儿育女，成为社会、经济和人口稳定的保障者。然而，与共产主义早期相比，许多中国女性现在拥有更大的个人自由和对自己生活的掌控，她们正在默默抵抗。
In the late 1970s, the government imposed its one-child policy to rein in population growth. But this led to plummeting birthrates, an aging population and a gender imbalance as millions of female fetuses were aborted because of a traditional preference for male heirs. (As of 2020, China still had about 17.5 million more men than women between the ages of 20 and 40, which government media has warned could pose a threat to social stability.) Worried, the government abandoned the one-child policy beginning in 2016, allowing all married couples to have two children and raising that to three in 2021.
上世纪70年代末，中国政府实施独生子女政策以控制人口增长。但这导致了出生率急剧下降、人口老龄化和性别失衡，因为传统上偏爱男性继承人，数以百万计的女性胎儿被流产。（截至2020年，中国20岁至40岁的男性仍比女性多1750万人，政府媒体警告称，这可能对社会稳定构成威胁。）出于担忧，政府从2016年开始放弃独生子女政策，允许所有已婚夫妇生育两个孩子，并在2021年将上限提高到三个。
But a hoped-for baby boom has not materialized. Marriage registrations have fallen for nine consecutive years leading up to 2022, when they sank to the lowest level since the government began releasing figures in 1986. New births have also continued to fall, with only 9.56 million babies being born last year, the fewest since records began with the founding of Communist China in 1949. The nation’s population shrank in 2022 for the first time in six decades, allowing India to overtake China as the world’s most populous country.
Many young Chinese men are also avoiding marriage. But this seismic demographic shift appears to be driven largely by an increasing unwillingness of women to make the requisite career and lifestyle sacrifices or bear the rising cost of educating children. Recent surveys have shown that young Chinese women have a significantly more negative view of marriage than men. A Communist Youth League survey released in 2021 found that 30.5 percent of urban youths ages 18 to 26 said they “don’t believe in marriage”; 73.4 percent of those respondents were women.
许多中国年轻男性也在回避婚姻。但是，这种人口结构上的巨大变化似乎主要是由于女性越来越不愿意做出事业和生活方式上的必要牺牲，也不愿意承担不断上涨的子女教育费用。最近的调查显示，中国年轻女性对婚姻的负面看法明显多于男性。共青团2021年发布的一项调查发现，30.5%的18至26岁的城市青年表示“不相信婚姻”；其中73.4%是女性。
That’s the last thing the party wants to hear. While Mao Zedong famously said that “women hold up half the sky,” President Xi Jinping has made clear that subjugating women is essential to his plans for Chinese modernization. This year, the government began a drive to encourage women to marry and have children, and at a top political gathering of women in October, Mr. Xi called for a “a new type of marriage and childbearing culture,” in which the party seeks to influence younger Chinese people to have babies. Last year, for the first time since 1997, not a single woman was among the 24 members appointed to the party’s new Politburo.
这是党最不想听到的。毛泽东有句名言：“妇女能顶半边天，”而习近平主席则明确表示，管住女性对他的中国现代化计划至关重要。今年，政府开始推动鼓励女性结婚生子。在10月份的一次女性高层政治大会上，习近平呼吁建立“新型婚育文化”，也就是说，党将努力影响中国年轻人生育。去年，中国共产党新一届政治局的24名成员自1997年以来首次没有一名女性。
But Mr. Xi’s regressive policies are up against the stark reality of what a traditional role means for women in China. Besides having to surrender personal and career freedoms, marriage can be downright dangerous for Chinese women. Many face domestic violence and an uphill battle in pursuing a divorce in court. In 2021 the government made it even harder for women to seek divorce, imposing a mandatory cooling-off period for feuding couples.
但习近平的倒退政策与中国女性传统角色代表的严酷现实是相悖的。除了不得不放弃个人和事业自由之外，婚姻对中国女性来说可能意味着彻头彻尾的危险。许多人面临着家庭暴力和通过法庭寻求离婚的艰难斗争。2021年，政府为不和的夫妻强制规定了一段冷静期，加大了女性离婚的难度。
Mr. Xi’s government has waged a broad crackdown on civil society organizations, making overt feminism dangerous. Huang Xueqin, a leading feminist activist and journalist who helped start China’s #MeToo movement by creating a social media platform for reporting sexual harassment in 2018, was put on trial in September on vague charges of subversion, after two years in detention. No verdict has been announced.
习近平政府对民间社会组织进行了广泛的镇压，使公开的女权主义变得危险。知名女权活动人士、记者黄雪芹在2018年创建了一个举报性骚扰的社交媒体平台，帮助发起了中国的“#我也是”(#MeToo)运动。在被拘留两年之后，她于9月以模糊的颠覆罪名受审。目前还没有宣布判决结果。
A clash over control of reproduction now looms, one with great implications for women’s rights and the country’s demographic future. The Communist Party has dug in, identifying Western feminism as an unpatriotic threat to its population-planning objectives and an example of hostile foreign ideological infiltration. Censorship of feminist topics online has intensified, as has misogynistic state propaganda.
一场关于生育控制的冲突正在逼近，这场冲突对女性权利和国家人口的未来有着重大影响。共产党坚持认为，西方女权主义是对其人口计划目标的威胁，是不爱国的，是敌对外国意识形态渗透的例证。网上对女权主义话题的审查加强了，厌恶女性的国家宣传也加强了。
But as record-high numbers of Chinese women attend college, interest in feminist issues and asserting one’s reproductive rights has intensified. Women continue to go online to challenge sexism and unequal treatment and exchange ideas. With China’s publishing industry heavily censored, the translated works of feminists like the Japanese scholar Chizuko Ueno have become best-sellers in China.
As this struggle over who controls reproduction escalates, the government may expand financial or other incentives to encourage childbirth. But given Mr. Xi’s mentality, the government is just as likely to ratchet up pressure on feminism and women’s rights in general. It is already becoming more difficult to get vasectomies.
随着这场关于谁控制生育的斗争升级，政府可能会扩大财政或其他激励措施来鼓励生育。但以习近平的思维方式，政府同样有可能加大对女权主义和女性权利施加的压力。男性结扎手术已经变得越来越难进行。
But the Communist Party’s options are limited. It can’t force women to marry or get pregnant and is unlikely to relax its tight immigration policies to make up for a shrinking work force. Placing even more pressure on women or drastic actions like imposing nationwide bans on abortion or contraception could harden women’s attitudes or even trigger an uprising. Young, educated women were conspicuously on the front lines of protests in several cities in late 2022 against the government’s oppressive pandemic-control policies.
但共产党的选择有限。它不能强迫女性结婚或怀孕，也不太可能放松其严格的移民政策来弥补劳动力的萎缩。对女性施加更大的压力，或者在全国范围内禁止堕胎或避孕等极端行为可能会使女性的态度变得强硬，甚至引发抗议。2022年底，在几个城市，年轻、受过教育的女性明显站在了抗议政府压制性疫情控制政策的前线。
The Communist Party has faced many opponents and dissenters in its decades of rule, quickly silencing and consigning them to oblivion. In the nation’s young women, the party’s male leaders may now be facing their most implacable challengers yet.
在其几十年的统治中，共产党曾面对许多反对者和异见者，并很快将他们压制，令他们被人遗忘。如今，这个国家的年轻女性可能会令该党的男性领导人面对迄今为止最难化解的挑战者。