Chinese youth take to ‘naked weddings’

Come the Chinese New Year, which falls on Valentine’s Day this year, Cindy Li and her boyfriend of four years plan to have a ‘naked wedding’.

“It’s not what you think,” Li says. “A luo hun (‘naked wedding’) is a ‘no-frills civil wedding’: it means getting married without a house of our own, a car, a wedding ring — or even a wedding ceremony.”

It’s also a measure of the desperation that the post-1980s generation face in today’s China, where an unstable job market, soaring property prices, and creeping inflation are compelling the affianced to either postpone their wedding until they’ve acquired the material aspects of matrimony — or settle for a ‘naked wedding’ now and together build a home and everything in it.

The term ‘naked wedding’ gained traction last year when a collapse in China’s export market led to job losses and severe pressure on new graduates looking for employment.

And although the economic revival in China this year, on the strength of a massive government stimulus, has eased the pressure on employment, the runaway rise in real estate prices, driven by an avalanche of bank lending, has priced large numbers of middle class folks out of the market.

The post-1980s generation, which thought of itself as the ‘happiness generation’ because it did not suffer any of the economic and political upheavals that wracked China in the 1960s and 1970s, is now of marriageable age. But the path to the wedding altar is proving prohibitively expensive for most of them, given the pressure to “secure” their future with material things that are considered the bare necessities of life.

“Leave it to rich fat cats to have lavish weddings,” a commentator noted on a popular bulletin board service. “I’m going to have a ‘naked wedding’.”

In an opinion poll conducted by media giant Sohu, many youngsters said that under the circumstances they faced, a ‘naked marriage’ wasn’t such a bad idea. But there was a huge gender gap to the responses: more than 80% of males said they preferred a no-frills wedding; more than 70% of females, however, said that a luo hun was “impractical”.

According to sociologist Liang Liwen, that finding matched stereotypes about “providers” in any marriage: men had an “obligation” to buy a house before wedding, and were therefore under great pressure. It’s no wonder that many more men prefer a luo hun, he adds.

However, social sciences professor Yan Zhuping sees the gradually increasing acceptance of ‘naked marriages’ as a positive influence as more and more young people realise it isn’t the material trappings that make a marriage successful, but the fundamental relationship.