been able to shed more of their burdensome traditional roles, men are expected to continue upholding many of their own. To marry, a man must first own a flat; many will be asked to pay a “bride price” to the bride’s family. Lan Zhaoxia, a matchmaker in Langfang, just outside Beijing, says the demographic shift has thrown the marriage market off kilter. She builds databases of young men and women that include details such as their parents’ pension status. Now, however, the odds are so stacked against rural male migrants that she does not accept them as clients. “Since all the village girls have gone to school, there are now more ordinary boys in rural areas and more outstanding girls in the city,” she says. Women want to marry up, while men want to marry down or just find an obedient girl. “The gap is huge.” One of those frustrated rural men is Mr Zhao, who is tucking into a lunch of noodles near the car-parts factory in Hebei province where he works. The unmarried 27-year-old often scrolls through social-media posts arguing about the status of men and women. He points to a big debate about a widely publicised ruling on marital rape last year. “When something happens, it’s always the woman who’s portrayed as the wronged party.” Another discussion prompts him to ask why, if the sexes are equal, he should have to
give up his bus seat to a woman. He appears resigned to the fact that he may not find a wife. Debates about China’s manosphere focus a lot on economic issues. Poorer men like Mr Zhao face immense economic pressure. Online, they use the term baojinbi, or “exploding gold coins”, to describe women wringing them dry by demanding expensive dates, gifts and bride prices. Research by Minhee Chae of Nankai University and Zhang Dandan of Peking University found that around a third of young male migrants who intend to marry think their chances of doing so by the age of 30 are only 50% at best. They estimate that a young migrant worker would have to save every penny for six years to afford the average bride price of 127,300 yuan ($18,780). The backlash is not just about women, says Sara Liao of Pennsylvania State University. Men want “to vent their anger, frustrations, precarities regarding their life status, regarding the general economic and cultural environment”. The safest outlet is attacking the opposite sex; doing so aligns with what the government itself is saying. Under President Xi Jinping, “sissy men” have been banned from appearing on television, while traditional marriage and child-rearing have been promoted. Belatedly, however, leaders are also becoming aware that intensifying xingbie duili, or “gender antagonism”, may be setting the scene for broader social instability. They are trying to tackle some of the root causes of male anger, for instance by intensifying campaigns against the practice of bride prices. Most of all they worry about plunging marriage and birth rates. In the first quarter of this year China registered just 1.7m marriages, half as many as in the same period in 2017. And it is not just the government that blames feminism and gender antagonism on foreign forces. Griffin Liu, a sports teacher, who is 35, is still looking for a wife. “Chinese people receive Chinese education and ideas,” he says. But now the internet is bringing new Western thinking. “The two are in conflict.” Gender antagonism is frequently in the news. Last year, a legal ruling in favour of a male Wuhan University student accused by a female student of masturbating in front of her became a lightning rod for men’s concerns about
feminist overreach and women’s concerns about a lack of clarity in defining sexual harassment. In 2024, after a gaming influencer nicknamed “fat cat” committed suicide, netizens “doxxed” his former girlfriend and cast her as a gold-digger who sent him to his grave. In a country where much is censored online, misogyny is less likely to be silenced. Instead online censors are more likely to target feminist posts that are judged to be advocating buhun buyu (unmarried and childless) lifestyles. Last year the cyberspace regulator’s campaign to crack down on harmful content listed “extreme feminism”, including posts that promoted singledom or gender antagonism. Weibo, China’s answer to X, last year added “inciting gender antagonism” (usually blamed on feminists) as grounds for reporting content; the company said it punished 15,000 accounts for this offence and deleted 640,000 relevant posts. Xiong Xiaoneng, a 40-year-old consultant in Beijing, is one more man yet to find a wife. He partly blames the rise of microdramas, which he says create unrealistic expectations. He thinks women want to be like Wu Zetian, a seventh-century empress portrayed as the archetypal girl boss on screen. His hometown of Guilin has seen a boom in businesses catering to single women, such as shows with shirtless male performers. Men like him are trapped unhappily in their singlehood, he says, while women seem to be enjoying theirs. ■ Subscribers can sign up to Drum Tower, our new weekly newsletter, to understand what the world makes of China—and what China makes of the world. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//china/2026/07/12/china-is-dealing-with-its-own- manosphere
Xi Jinping expels another leader from his top team He has set a record for booting out members of the Politburo July 16th 2026 CHINA’S POLITICAL system prides itself on stability. Reshuffles of core leaders normally happen only every five years. But Xi Jinping has been taking the axe to members of his team at a rate not seen since the days of Mao Zedong. The latest to fall is Ma Xingrui, who until last year was the Communist Party boss of the far-western region of Xinjiang. State media said he had been stripped of his party membership for “extremely serious” corruption and his case handed to prosecutors. Another seat on the ruling Politburo—now down to 21 active members from its initial 24—has thus fallen vacant. Mr Ma’s downfall is no surprise. Once a celebrated aerospace engineer who helped oversee lunar-exploration projects, he has long been absent from
major events. In April the party said he was being investigated for “serious violations” of its rules and the law. Now it has publicly accused him of accepting “huge amounts” in bribes, engaging in “large-scale family corruption” and using his power and money to gain sexual favours. Since the Mao era, charges of graft have almost always been laid against those expelled from the Politburo. Such wrongdoing is easier to explain to the public than revealing what is often suspected to be the main reason: political tension with the party chief. In this case, however, there has been little official hint or plausible rumour of serious political friction between Mr Ma and Mr Xi. Egregious corruption may be enough to explain his ousting —not that Mr Ma will be able to comment publicly or deny the charges against him. His removal from the Politburo is a reminder of Mr Xi’s willingness to lash out. Since the most recent five-yearly party congress in 2022, two defence ministers, a foreign minister and dozens of high-ranking military officers have been purged. The armed forces’ two most senior generals have fallen: He Weidong was expelled from the Politburo and Zhang Youxia is under investigation and all but certain to lose his Politburo seat, too. Since Mr Xi took power in 2012, three Politburo members have been dismissed—the most under any leader post-Mao. (The other was Sun Zhengcai in 2017, once considered to be a potential successor to Mr Xi.) Mr Ma can expect, at a minimum, to spend a very long time behind bars. No former Politburo member has been executed, but that is an unreliable guide to his likely fate. Mr Xi is a norm-breaker. ■ Subscribers can sign up to Drum Tower, our new weekly newsletter, to understand what the world makes of China—and what China makes of the world. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//china/2026/07/15/xi-jinping-expels-another-leader-from- his-top-team
China wants to end AI romances It was all having too much impact on young people’s lives July 16th 2026 “I COULD TALK to him for the rest of my life,” says Yu Miao, a 27-year- old woman from Zhejiang province in eastern China; he is at once “a lover, a friend and family”. She claims she shares everything with him. Her confidant is an AI agent on Doubao, a chatbot made by ByteDance, that Ms Yu has customised to mimic a dead friend of hers. When she learned recently that ByteDance would soon remove this type of personalised agent entirely, Ms Yu became so depressed that she left her job at an e-commerce company. Chinese tech firms are stripping human-like personas from their chatbots in order to comply with new government rules aimed at reducing “emotional dependence” on AI. The regulations, which took effect on July 15th, are the