One out of every three families is unmarried, and where is the difficulty of "getting rid of a single" for young men in Heping Village, Wanping Town, Yongshun County, Xiangxi Prefecture?
During this year's Spring Festival, cadres of the Hunan Provincial Discipline Inspection Commission's Organization Committee took advantage of the opportunity to return to their hometowns to visit their relatives and carry out a grass-roots research and study activity of "listening to the will of the people and solving difficult problems." Recently, the WeChat public account "Sanxiang Fengji" has successively announced the research results, etc., and one of the grass-roots research micro-reports talked about the problem of "difficulty in getting rid of singles" of rural young men.
According to the author, there are 419 households and 1590 people in Heping Village, 110 unmarried young men of appropriate age, and only 31 young women of school age.
One reason for the "difficulty of getting off the list" is that there are fewer girls. In the rural areas of the "old, young, border and poor" areas in western Hunan Province, in the past, the concept of having children from generation to generation was deeply rooted, and the proportion of men and women was seriously imbalanced. Chen Shaoyuan, secretary of the heping village party committee, introduced that most young women and boys are the root cause of the "difficulty of getting rid of singles" of young men. Unmarried young women of school age in Peace Village are only 28 per cent of young men. Villagers reflected that a divorced woman with a child in the village is also very "sought-after", and many young men who come to the door to kiss are still young men who are married for the first time, and the bride price is comparable to the first marriage. In contrast, some girls in the village are relatively easy to marry even if they have slight physical and intellectual defects, which also confirms the "scarcity" of unmarried young women of the right age.
The high cost of getting married is also a reason.
The article mentioned that the villagers calculated an account, and now the marriage standard is equipped with "three major pieces", that is, the rural self-built new house or the town, the county commercial house, the family car, the bride price, plus the purchase of "three gold" jewelry, etc., the average cost is more than 600,000 yuan. If you buy commercial housing in the county, the cost is more than 1 million yuan. The village will complete 9 marriages from 2020 to 2021, with a minimum dowry of 80,000 yuan and a maximum of 168,000 yuan, with an average of 128,000 yuan. According to the memory of the village party secretary, the dowry when his relatives got married in 2002 was only 8,000 yuan, and now it is 168,000 yuan, a full 21 times. It takes 10 to 15 years for a young man to get married, and it also takes 10 to 15 years to ensure that there are no major disasters. Villagers joked, "In the past, whoever gave birth to two sons was eager to beat gongs and drums to show off, and now whoever has two sons has to sit on the wall and secretly wipe their tears."
The article also mentioned that the difficulty of "getting rid of a single" is that the population flow is large. With the acceleration of population migration from rural to urban areas, young men, due to their low cultural quality, most of them are engaged in low-skilled and low-income manual labor in cities, and it is difficult to gain a foothold in the cities, and finally they have to return to the villages to solve marriage problems.
According to statistics, of the 110 unmarried young men in the village, 74 have junior high school education, accounting for 67.2%. In contrast, the impact of urban life on young women is more obvious, with the growth of insight, the expansion of the marriage circle, they basically marry into the city as a goal, which is also the neighbors to compare with each other. This dislocation and imbalance exacerbates the "difficulty of getting rid of a single" of young men in rural areas. In addition, the phenomenon of "difficulty in keeping marriages" in rural areas has also quietly spread. In recent years, there have been 5 outdoor daughters-in-law in this village who have married in, and they have given birth to a baby and "run away", fraudulent marriages have also occurred from time to time, and some families are also worried about the marriage of their children.
The article said that the difficulty of marriage of young men in rural areas is not a new topic, and actively responding to the marriage problem of older unmarried men in rural areas is not only an effective measure to deal with the "trap" of low fertility, but also conducive to planting the living force of rural revitalization from the population. Marriage has become a heavy burden on rural families, and a series of rural governance problems have been derived. Many villagers put forward suggestions and hopes: The government should strengthen guidance, vigorously change customs and customs, carry forward the new trends of the times, and reduce blind comparison. It is necessary to pay more attention to education and skills, and strive to enhance the comprehensive quality of young men and their competitiveness in the marriage market. It is necessary to take the opportunity of rural revitalization to develop and prosper the rural economy and attract outstanding young people to return to their hometowns for employment and entrepreneurship.
The survey report addresses some common issues.
Last year, the Henan Provincial Department of Civil Affairs also mentioned in replying to the suggestions of the npc deputies that over the past few years, due to the influence of various factors, the imbalance in the proportion of men and women in rural areas has gradually become prominent, and a large number of young women who have gone out to work in rural areas have decreased year by year to return to their hometowns for marriage and love.
At the beginning of this year, a survey report released by Jingyan County, Leshan City, Sichuan Province, pointed out that from the perspective of marriage and love customs in the region, the economic burden requirements are not large, and there is generally no excessive demand for bride price. The main problem faced by the marriage of young people in rural areas in this county is that the number of young people is too small. According to the report, many young people in the area are not at home to work outside the home, and the family is often only middle-aged and elderly. The number of young women is even less lacking. This makes it difficult for young single men of the right age to find suitable candidates. Even through the introduction of relatives and friends, most of them are single young women in other places.
Li Yongping, a scholar at Nankai University's Zhou Enlai School of Government and Management, has long been concerned about the phenomenon of mate selection and sky-high bride price for young men in rural areas, and she previously believed in an interview with the surging news that behind the "difficulty of marriage for older young men in rural areas" is a structural problem, the main reason is the imbalance in the sex ratio, and nearly 35 million elderly single young men are objectively existent. "Young women in rural areas cannot be retained, and most of the unmarried young men are also migrant workers."
Li Yongping said that rural women, especially young women, go to big cities to work, not only to earn money, but also to experience urban life, in order to gain insight, broaden their horizons, and experience the lifestyle of young people in cities. Judging from the situation in rural research, young women in their 20s who have finished reading and are not yet married are basically willing to go to big cities. Therefore, rural young women cannot stay. On the other hand, unmarried young men are no longer in the countryside. Most unmarried men are not in the countryside every day, and young or potentially unmarried groups work in the cities. The so-called "honest people and bare sticks" are a part of the people who are more introverted and less willing to contact the outside world, and there is such a group of people who remain unmarried in the countryside. In general, very few unmarried men around the age of 30 stay in the village, and most of them are in the city.
It is worth mentioning that according to the documents of the National Bureau of Statistics, the Notice of the Office of the National Bureau of Statistics on Doing a Good Job in the Research on Key Topics in 2021 and the Notice of the National Bureau of Statistics on Conducting research on the Marriage Relationship of Rural Youth, the statistical departments of Zhejiang, Chongqing, Shandong and Sichuan have carried out research on the marriage relationship of rural youth in some areas in their jurisdictions in June and July 2021. The purpose of this survey is to "understand the current situation of marriage and love among rural youth and pay attention to the interests of rural youth groups."
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