Television’s “Leftover” Bachelors and Hegemonic Masculinity in Postsocialist China

ABSTRACT

This article looks at the renegotiation of Chinese masculinities by analyzing the gendered performances of participants of a popular TV dating show If You Are the One (Fei Cheng Wu Rao). As symptomatic media texts, the reality TV show points to the quandaries of evolving gender politics faced by singletons of China’s one-child generation within the country’s neoliberal restructuring. The textual evidence shows that male participants follow the rule of a market economic hierarchy and uphold the hegemonic ideal of versatile, successful, and upper-middle-class manhood, which hinges on the patriarchal, heteronormative model of love and marriage. Paradoxically, this disempowering ideal is reinforced by female participants in their relational reconstruction of masculinities. The article argues that the Chinese state media not only discipline masculinities but also naturalize a regressive gender mandate in alignment with neoliberal values and the state’s pursuit of capitalist economic development. Consequently, the multiple, hybridized versions of masculinities emerging in media discourse and popular parlance complicate the cultural repertoire of gender relations yet without challenging deeply entrenched structural gender inequality.

KEYWORDS:

• Dating game shows
• hegemonic masculinity
• neoliberalism
• postsocialist China
• reality television

Notes

Not an official holiday, 11/11 (November 11)—with four Arabic numerals resembling the shape of four smooth sticks, which in Chinese ideograph literally refer to “smooth sticks” (guang gun) but allude to singletons—was ingeniously created at a college campus and has become in vogue among unmarried youths nationwide (Yu, 2009).

The video is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gbi1wP03QnA.

Although Ward (2007) does not discuss Judith Butler’s work in this particular article, it is notable that Ward borrows from Butler’s theorization of gender performance and performativity. Butler (1998) posits that “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (p. 519).

Chinese men’s consumption of female sexuality does not necessarily refer to prostitution at market exchanges. An array of journalist reports point to the disconcerting social phenomenon of bao ernai, meaning “raising mistresses on the part of unfaithful husbands who became wealthy and desire extramarital affairs” to showcase their newly gained economic power (Luo, 2012, p. 109). In this regard, “sexual economy” involves more than “sex work.” Rather, the notion reveals how women’s sexuality functions as a sort of symbolic currency at the new marketplace that disempowers women.

In their influential book titled Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China, Song and Hird (2013) make nuanced distinctions of Chinese men in media representations and everyday life based on such intertwined identities as class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and so on. Whereas they focus on examining manhood in the post-Mao era (especially since 2000), they have not singled out Chinese men of the one-child generation.

The leftover women (sheng nü) label, when officially imposed on Chinese women over age 27, has derogatory connotations. As Luo and Sun (2015) state, this label “suggests a self-blamed woman who misses her opportunities to marry herself off by mid 20 s. In the vernacular discourse, a sheng nü is suspected of not being attractive enough or being too picky” (pp. 243–244). In this article, I use the label “leftover” to modify “bachelors” in the literal sense, specifically referring to the surfeit of one-child-generation male singletons in local marriage markets.

I used stratified random sampling, selecting a minimum of two episodes from each year. The 24 sampled episodes consist of two episodes from 2010; three episodes from 2011; seven episodes from 2012; four episodes from 2013; three episodes from 2014; and five episodes from 2015.

FCWR was broadcast on Jiangsu Satellite TV every Saturday and Sunday night between 2010 and 2014. The show was on Sunday night only in 2015. Therefore, the first episode of 2010 was shown on Saturday, January 2, whereas the final episode of 2015 aired on Sunday, December 27.

The notorious statement of “BMW lady” epitomizes rampant materialism. Ma Rao, a 20-year-old model from Beijing, bluntly rejected a potential suitor who offered her a bike ride in one of the 2010 FCWR episodes. Then she pronounced on the stage that she “would rather cry in a BMW.” Being thus labeled “BMW lady,” Ma received torrents of criticism from viewers at home and abroad. This incident sparked SAPPRFT’s call for regulations (Luo & Sun, 2015; Chen, 2016).

As Hinsch (2013) observes, 1980s and 1990s TV and cinematic productions pioneered in creating imageries of tough, virile, heroic manhood with spiritual and physical strengths in response to a widespread recovery from the emasculated manhood of the evolutionary era. For instance, the much acclaimed Red Sorghum, one of Zhang Yimou’s most successful films, depicted rugged, macho images of “a rejuvenated manhood” imbued with sexual potency (Hinsch, 2013, p.160).

In this list, Huang Lei, Lu Yi, and Liu Ye are famous, popular actors from Mainland China, each of whom took a turn serving as the male commentator of FCWR in episodes from 2014 and 2015.

Baymax is a superhero robot character in comic books published by Marvel Comics. Baymax appears in the 2014 Disney animated film titled Big Hero 6, in which he is a loving, tender health companion for Hiro Hamada, the protagonist (Vejvoda, 2013). The film’s market success in China goes hand in hand with the popularity of Baymax, who symbolizes the “Sunshine Boy” (in the Chinese term), who generously brings others feelings of warmth and love (Zhou, 2015).

I translate this title as literal as it can be. The use of “best” here in Chinese language means “most exemplary,” which is to satire Mr. Cai for being a “loser.”