“Not Ready Yet”: How Heterosexual Men in China Interpret Economic Capital in Relation to Marriage

• In Event: Family Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Employment, Economic Context, and Family

Abstract

In contemporary China, heterosexual men face mounting pressure to marry amid rising housing costs, competitive marriage markets, and deeply entrenched cultural expectations that men demonstrate economic competence (most notably through homeownership and bride price) before they can be considered marriageable. While existing research has documented structural barriers to marriage for men, it has tended to treat men’s responses to economic conditions as uniform, leaving open questions about how men subjectively interpret economic capital in relation to marriage readiness and how those interpretations vary across class and family contexts. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 24 heterosexual men conducted in Guangdong, China, this study examines how men make sense of economic capital when navigating marriage pressure. The findings identify three distinct interpretive narratives. For men with access to intergenerational wealth transfers, economic capital functioned as background security, providing temporal flexibility that allowed them to prioritize career development and relationship maturity over meeting immediate material thresholds. For men who possessed material assets but lacked stable self-earned income, economic capital operated as proof of masculine responsibility: even when family resources were available, these men framed marriage readiness as contingent on sustaining income through their own efforts, reflecting an internalized gender script of provision that family wealth alone could not satisfy. For men with limited family resources and precarious early-career positions, economic capital constituted a concrete material threshold, making marriage feel both objectively unfeasible and subjectively undesirable until sufficient resources could be accumulated. Together, these findings reveal that economic capital does not function as a straightforward material constraint on men’s marriage decisions. Rather, its meaning is actively constructed through the interplay of class position, intergenerational resource flows, and gendered scripts of masculine provision and responsibility.

Author

• Guangquan Shen, Indiana University-Bloomington