"The breeding, spreading and rising of high bride prices in rural areas has brought many negative impacts to peasant families, rural society and rural governance. In order to deal with the problem of high bride price, we must first understand the social mechanism of generating and shaping high bride price. ”
Recently, the second issue of Women's Studies in 2024 published an article written by Yang Hua, a professor and doctoral supervisor at the School of Sociology of Wuhan University, and a researcher at the China Rural Governance Research Center, "Research on the Social Mechanism of the Formation of High Bride Price in Rural Areas".
It is found that the social mechanism of the formation of high bride price mainly includes five mechanisms: marriage squeeze mechanism, bride price attribute mechanism, bride price attribution mechanism, intergenerational responsibility mechanism and marriage market mechanism. According to the article, these five social mechanisms are not only different from each other, and different mechanisms have different constituent elements and operating mechanisms, but also condition and interact with each other, which jointly promotes the current "high" phenomenon of rural bride price.
Among them, the marriage squeeze mechanism is the dominant mechanism and the basic mechanism, and its emergence and role promote the prominence of the payment attribute and the weakening of the contract attribute of the bride price, and give the woman a high price to make it socially reasonable; while the bride price attribution mechanism and the intergenerational responsibility mechanism reveal the micro driving force and mechanism of the occurrence of high bride price in rural areas from the perspectives of the woman's parents and the man's parents, respectively; and the marriage market mechanism shows the game field of each market entity and its influence mechanism on the marriage behavior and the bride price in the mesoscopic sense.
To sum up, the basic logic of the formation of high bride price is as follows: the more serious the squeeze of marriage in rural areas, the higher the amount of bride price that marriageable men need to pay; where the higher the attribute of bride price payment, the more likely the bride price behavior to be recognized and imitated; the bride price eventually flows to the newlywed family, which further enhances the ability of the woman's family to ask for the marriage price; in places where the father's responsibility for the marriage of the offspring is strong, the woman's asking price can be both focused and higher; and the marriage market mechanism determines the higher the dependence on the local marriage market." sky-high bride price" is more likely to appear.
Yang Hua believes that under the effect of the above mechanism, several laws can be found for high-priced bride price that are mutually verified by experience:
First, the more you go to the rural areas in the central and western regions, the higher the bride price. Marriageable women in the rural areas have migrated to the eastern regions, and there are very few "singles" in the eastern rural areas, and men in their forties and fifties can still marry young women in the rural areas of the central and western regions in their twenties and thirties. Men in rural Midwest China have to pay a large bride price if they want to retain local girls, or attract girls from other places.
Second, the more remote and mountainous areas, the higher the bride price. Girls in remote mountainous areas are moving to flat land and towns, and if local men want to get married, they have to improve their ability to pay and cost performance, that is, they can afford to pay a higher bride price.
Third, the poorer the family, the higher the bride price. In the rural marriage market, the worse the man's family conditions and the more sons he has, the higher the bride price demanded by the woman;
Yang Hua pointed out that the main purpose of this paper is to reveal the social mechanism and internal logic of the high cost of marriage in rural areas, including high bride price. As far as the current rural society is concerned, the social basis for the five major social mechanisms that shape the high bride price is the high degree of competition and rapid urbanization of the rural society, and the "target" of the rural social competition directly refers to the urbanization of peasant families, that is, to compare who has purchased real estate in the town.
In his view, in addition to the imbalance in the gender ratio, social pressure in the context of urbanization is an important root cause of the high bride price and marriage costs in rural areas. In order to deal with the problem of high bride price in rural areas and the high marriage cost behind it, we can start from three aspects:
First, we should take common prosperity as the guiding principle, break the dual antagonism between urban and rural areas, strengthen the integration and complementarity of urban and rural areas, coordinate the integration of urban and rural areas, and promote urbanization based on central towns and towns. At present, the main destination of rural urbanization is the county seat, but the housing prices, education expenditures and daily living costs in the county town are relatively high, and they are far away from the villages, so the women of the family generally withdraw from the labor market to take care of the schooling children. In the face of the trend of peasants moving to the cities, a compromise solution is to promote the urbanization of peasants in central towns and villages, and this urbanization mode is compatible with the mode of part-time work and half-cultivation of the family. Housing prices and living costs in central towns are relatively low, and they are closer to villages, so middle-aged and elderly people can go to the city to take care of their grandchildren without abandoning their land, while young couples can calmly go out to work, so as to realize the full mobilization and rational allocation of family labor.
Second, it is necessary to promote the construction of "central schools" in the township boarding system. The development of "central schools" in townships and towns can concentrate high-quality educational resources and improve the efficiency of the use of educational resources. Boarding schools can free up the rural labor force and allow them to go out to work with peace of mind, and grandparents can pick up their grandchildren home on weekends. If the township central schools are well built and can provide a quality education similar to that of the county seats, young farmers will not need to be forced to move to the cities.
Third, it is necessary to further clearly define the behavior of using "sky-high bride price" to solicit wealth and defraud money as illegal acts, advocate frugality in marriage customs in the whole society, oppose disorderly comparison, take a clear-cut stand to resist extreme marital behavior and marital immorality, promote the construction of family harmony, and form a positive and healthy social public opinion orientation and local customs.
According to the official website of the School of Sociology of Wuhan University, Yang Hua, a native of Chenzhou, Hunan, is a professor and doctoral supervisor of the School of Sociology of Wuhan University, and a researcher at the China Rural Governance Research Center.
He began to engage in rural research in 2007, and has conducted more than 1,300 days of research in villages in nearly 20 provinces and cities across the country, published more than 100 papers in journals such as "Management World", "Political Science Research", "Contemporary World and Socialism", and "Open Era", and published "The Dimension of Continuity: The Meaning World of Clan Villages in Southern Hunan", "The Hidden World: Rural Women's Life Belonging and Meaning", "Research on Rural Class Relations", "Strange Acquaintances", "County and Township China: Modernization of County Governance" He has published 5 monographs, presided over a number of projects of the Ministry of Education and the National People's Republic of China, and won the Hubei Provincial Outstanding Social Science Award once.
Women's Studies Review, a national academic journal in the field of women's and gender studies, is supervised by the All-China Women's Federation and sponsored by the Women's Research Institute of the All-China Women's Federation and the China Women's Studies Association. It was founded in 1992 and became the journal of the Chinese Women's Studies Association in 1999.
Based on China's national conditions, the journal is committed to using multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary theories and methods to lead the theoretical innovation of socialist women with Chinese characteristics, promote research on major issues related to women's development and gender equality, and promote the construction of a discipline, academic and discourse system of socialist women/gender studies with Chinese characteristics.