Zhang Huan.
Lecturer at South-Central University for Nationalities).
First published Tencent News @ New Township) Every Spring Festival, rural youth blind dates and marriages have become hot topics. When I returned to my hometown this year, I felt the most deeply that it is becoming more and more difficult for young people in rural areas to get married, and they may really enter an "era of difficult marriage". In the original words of the peasants in eastern Henan, "a son gets married for 1 million", and "divorce is like a common thing". After repeated verification, the author found that this is not a joke, but a living social fact that ordinary peasant families are experiencing. The question is, why is the current cost of marriage for ordinary peasant families so high, and the 1 million funds have to come from **? In other words, how do farmers cope in the era of marriage difficulties?
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Coordinates of the East Henan Plain, the region has also become one of the highlands of rural bride price in recent years, from about 150,000 yuan in 2020 to about 250,000 yuan at present, and houses and cars have generally become a hard condition. "It costs 1 million yuan for a son to get married", and the cost of marriage faced by ordinary peasant families is getting higher and higher, which has almost become the consensus and fact of local farmers. In view of this, the author interviewed some relatives and friends, who have lived in the village for a long time, are keen to participate in the village wedding, funeral and other ceremonial relationships, deeply embedded in the social relationship network of village acquaintances, well versed in the local society's way of dealing with the world, and are familiar with the relevant situation of local rural marriage life.
It is understood that in the eastern Henan Plain, the specific details of the marriage cost of an ordinary peasant family are as follows.
Let's take a look at two more cases, both of which come from real stories around us.
Case 1: 51 years old, two sons, the younger son will get married at the end of 2023. His marriage expenses: 280,000 yuan for engagement, 210,000 yuan for buying a car, 420,000 yuan for buying a house in the community, 10,000 yuan for the wedding suona team, 10,000 yuan for changing the mouth, 40 tables of banquets including 30,000 yuan for tobacco and alcohol, 20,000 yuan for three golds, etc., a total of 980,000 yuan. Among them, the parents borrowed 20-300,000 yuan.
Case 2: In his 40s, a son, married at the end of 2021. In 2017, the county bought a total of 500,000 houses + decoration. The bride price is 240,000. Buy a car for 230,000 yuan. Banquets, tobacco and alcohol, wedding 30,000 yuan, etc. The total cost is 1 million.
Judging from our interview, it costs 1 million yuan for a son to get married, which is a relatively common situation in the eastern Henan Plain. Due to the imbalance of the gender ratio caused by the traditional preference for male children, family planning policies, and the superposition of various factors such as high marriage and low marriage patterns, the imbalance of the sex ratio between men and women has brought about the dilemma of difficult marriage for young people in rural areas. Judging from the experience of the eastern Henan Plain, the imbalance between men and women in rural areas is also becoming more and more severe, especially in the fact that the success rate of blind dates is getting lower and lower, and the cost of marriage for young people is getting higher and higher, which undoubtedly aggravates the difficulty of the marriage era. Therefore, this paper attempts to further answer: under the social fact of high marriage costs, how does an ordinary peasant family cope with this marriage pressure?
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Originally, I thought that "a son marries 1 million", which is undoubtedly a huge difficulty and pressure for ordinary peasant families, the cost of marriage is so high, can ordinary peasant families afford it, and will the number of older unmarried young people who cannot afford marriage in rural areas increase significantly? As a result, to my surprise, in a village of 200 households, except for a few old singles, there are very few unmarried young people over the age of 30. It is understood that at present, there is only one unmarried young man over 30 years old, his father died, and his mother remarried to this village, the main reason is that he is not handsome, and he is not doing his job, and the local people call it "half-hanging", and he has a black history of petty theft outside before. In the eyes of the villagers, such a person "beating a single" is their inevitable fate. Therefore, the fact that there are only a few older unmarried young people also shows that under the high cost of marriage, most peasant families are basically able to help their offspring complete the life task of marriage.
The question is, in the era of marriage difficulties, why are there not many rural older young people who are unmarried in the eastern Henan Plain because of the high cost of marriage? If most rural young people can afford to get married, it costs 1 million for a son to get married, and the money comes from? How, exactly, is this done? With this question in mind, I interviewed some of my relatives and friends. To sum up, there are mainly the following strategies.
First, it will take at least 15 years of continuous accumulation. In families with sons, parents generally start planning and saving money 15 years in advance. For the parents, if it is only three or five years, no one can make up 70-800,000 yuan. If they don't do business, it's very unlikely that rural people will want to get rich. If you just rely on part-time work, a balance of 50,000 yuan a year is remarkable. Therefore, since the parents start to live after marriage, in addition to the necessary daily expenses, the remaining money must be saved for the next generation to be used for the future generations to get married, build a house, buy a house and buy a car. Judging from the experience of local middle-aged people, it is generally necessary to start saving money when they get married at the age of 25, and they will start to face the major event of children getting married on a blind date around the age of 43.
It is understood that before 2008, the savings of an ordinary peasant family were basically not 20,000 yuan a year, because the wage level was very low at that time. A middle-aged farmer recalled that before 2013, his son was 24 years old, and the family only had less than 100,000 yuan in savings, and there were two large expenditures before his son got married, one was spent more than 40,000 yuan to build a house in 2004, and the other was that his old mother spent 50,000 yuan in hospitalization. In the past decade, local farmers have begun to grow watermelons in greenhouses on a large scale, and their living standards have improved significantly. If the couple grows about 10 acres of watermelons, they can basically save about 50,000 yuan per year. If the husband and wife have more management experience and their grandparents are healthy, they can expand the scale of watermelon planting to about 20 acres, and it is possible for families who can live to have a balance of 100,000 yuan a year. In the past ten years, many peasant families have built buildings in the village because of the large-scale cultivation of watermelons in greenhouses, and even bought houses in the county and married daughters-in-law. During the Spring Festival, the author found that the familiar and active neighbors in previous years were not at home, and later learned that it was because the weather warmed up during the Spring Festival this year, and the watermelon seedlings grew too fast.
Second, long-term low-spending habits. For an ordinary peasant family, there is basically no large consumption of more than 50,000 yuan before the son gets married, unless it involves major events such as building a house or the death of an old man. According to the interview, the daily consumption of an ordinary peasant family is 3-40,000 yuan a year. Among them, major expenditures include an investment of 20,000 yuan a year in agricultural production, 6,000-7,000 yuan a year in favor exchanges, and about 10,000 yuan a year for the Chinese New Year. In general, the consumption of peasant families in eastern Henan is relatively restrained. Because the local plain area has high-quality land resources, it has not yet been separated from agricultural production, and the self-sufficiency of rice, flour, oil, vegetables, eggs, poultry and other living materials is relatively high, and the cost of living for a family meal often does not exceed 10 yuan.
The author observes that peasant families in eastern Henan generally maintain the traditional habit of high accumulation and low consumption, that is, their sons generally accumulate hundreds of thousands of savings before they get married, while their daily consumption remains relatively restrained, and the consumption transformation of peasant families in this region is relatively slow compared with other places. For example, the eating habits of the average family are to fry one dish at a meal, and the daily diet of two elderly people is generally steamed bread + porridge + sauce beans, but it must be a sumptuous treat when there are guests. This is the logic of "living a life" in the words of the local fathers, and "losing rice and losing face is guilty" in the words of the ancestors who have been starving. The core goal of influencing this objective behavior logic is to successfully complete the life task of marriage of offspring through high accumulation and low consumption, and the increasing cost of marriage makes the intergenerational responsibility of parents to their offspring appear more heavy and heavy.
Third, the resource delivery and intergenerational support of grandparents. Every year during the Spring Festival, we will go to visit the elderly, and when we give a red envelope by the way, they will do everything possible to excuse themselves, and consciously or unconsciously worry about the marriage and purchase of a house for their grandchildren. In fact, grandparents are also involved in the core goal of grandchildren's marriage through resource delivery and intergenerational support. Specifically, one is financial support, for example, the neighbor's son asked for a bride price of 250,000 yuan in the blind date process a year ago, the neighbor mainly planted watermelons in the village, and spent 150,000 yuan to buy a car for his son's marriage, and the county spent more than 600,000 yuan to buy a house and already borrowed, so the family really couldn't take out more money to send a bride price, so the grandfather took the initiative to take out 100,000 yuan of pension money to send a bride price to his grandson. The second is labor support, the general livelihood of the local people is to plant watermelons in greenhouses, generally for the ancestors, as long as they can still do it, they will generally take the initiative to go to the watermelon field to help plant melons and weeds, and continue to provide labor support for 5-10 years. During the Spring Festival, you can always see the old people weaving handicrafts hard by the wall, and the old people say that "you are uncomfortable and make money to eat buns", in fact, you don't want to increase the burden of pension for your children. In this sense, an ordinary peasant family's ability to cope with the cost of marriage for its grandchildren is often paid for by the high accumulation, low consumption and self-exploitation of the two generations of parents and grandparents.
Fourth, the two sons must borrow foreign debts. It is good for an average family to have a surplus of 4-50,000 yuan per year for a labor force, and it must be saved for at least 15 years. If the couple can save 70,000-80,000 yuan a year, such a son will not need to borrow when he gets married. But if it is a family of two sons, then it is almost inevitable that the father will go into debt. Generally, after a son gets married, the savings of his parents in the first half of his life are emptied. Some parents are busy continuing to earn money to pay off their debts after their sons get married, and if they borrow 200,000 yuan, it will take at least 4-5 years of accumulation to pay it off.
It can be seen that a son's family, if the parents are hardworking, capable, diligent and thrifty, and continue to accumulate for more than 15 years, the grandparents can take care of themselves and even carry out intergenerational support, during which the whole family has no large expenses of more than 50,000 yuan such as serious illness, then if a son gets married, the parents can barely complete the task if they give everything they have, but the parents of the two sons must borrow foreign debts. Peasant families generally give priority to borrowing money from relatives and friends, and if they can't borrow it, they have to go to the bank for loans. However, all the expenses of the offspring's marriage are paid by the parents, the parents borrow the debts of the parents, and the sons rarely help to pay the debts.
Writing this, the author can't help but be in awe of our parents and grandparents. In the era of marriage difficulties, they not only took on heavy intergenerational responsibilities, but also showed great resilience and good qualities. However, when parents hollow out everything to help their offspring get married, more and more young children seem to take their parents' selfless love for granted, and many young people show an immature mind or lack of sense of responsibility under the overprotection of their parents. Especially when I see some young people around me getting a hasty divorce because of trivial things, it can't help but make people sigh. Because parents can't watch their son beat a bachelor, the cost of a second marriage is no less than that of a first marriage, which is obviously a heavy burden for the parents.
Zhang Huan is a lecturer at South-Central University for Nationalities.
February 20, 2024.