Single Mothers in China Forge a Difficult Path

By Howard W. French | The New York Times
April 06, 2008

As a young migrant worker, Lei Gailing sought her fortune in China's fast-industrializing and freewheeling south. She found a steady factory job and a less stable boyfriend, then became pregnant.

The routine course for most women would have been to marry the man or to arrange an abortion. Ms. Lei, who was by then 33 and fiercely independent, did neither. Refusing to marry the man but afraid she might never have a child, she chose to become a single mother.

That decision carried implications that Ms. Lei never fully anticipated, marking her as something of a social outcast in a country that still strictly controls population growth and makes few concessions to women like her.

Today, at 41, Ms. Lei says she has no regrets, even after facing a life of bitter twists and turns: pretending to be divorced at one point to avoid bringing shame on her son and ultimately marrying a much older man in an effort to obtain the basic identification her boy needed to go to school or receive other social services.

For all this, Ms. Lei, who now lives with the older man in Beijing in what she describes as an abusive relationship, said she would do it all over again for her son. "I look at him today, and know it was worthwhile," she said, tears forming in her eyes. "He is so lovely, I cannot regret it."

In a society where until quite recently premarital sex was often punished, the issue of single motherhood has been slow to enter the public arena. But now, a new awareness of the issue is raising questions about the status of women in China, as well as other rights issues like the hukou, or residency permit, a central tool of population control passed down from the Maoist era that restricts movement by linking people to the towns of their birth.

The Chinese government has long maintained that the Communist Party liberated women in 1949 along with the rest of the country. But in an era of rapid modernization, China has lacked anything like a broad current of thought about women's rights.

"When we argue that a woman owns the uterus, and it's her right to decide whether to deliver the baby or not, people won't buy it," said Yuan Xin, director of psychology at the Consulting Center of Nankai University. "If you are a woman, your personal choice is monitored and supervised by a lot of others, and they expect you to do what everyone else does."

Official statistics on the number of single mothers are unavailable in China. But with premarital sex now commonplace and women's earning power growing, particularly in the wealthy cities of the east, experts believe their numbers are rising fast, albeit from a small base.

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