Alex Yang thought he had found a wife in Ran Ran. Not only had they lived together in Beijing for three years, but they had consummated their relationship and, besides, he loved her. So when the 23-year-old secretary decided to move out recently, saying she was too young to make a life-long commitment, he begged her to stay. When that didn't work, he hit below the belt.
The 33-year-old engineer from Hubei reasoned no other man would want Ran Ran because she was no longer a virgin. But all that earned him was the confident reply, 'Oh don't you worry about that at all.' His soon-to-be ex-girlfriend said she had several options on that front and finding eligible men was going to be 'no problem at all'.
'Virginity is not a serious moral issue for many girls any longer,' lamented Yang, longing for a return to more traditional values. 'They just want to play around and pursue sensual pleasure.'
Until recently, it was generally accepted that if a dating couple had sex they would get married; it was taken for granted that other men would consider the woman 'spoilt goods' if she had lost her virginity. As Yang has discovered, painfully, however, mainland women are starting to free themselves from that mind trap. Not only is virginity losing its appeal, but cohabitation has become an accepted practice in Beijing and other big mainland cities as the country quietly copes with a subtle sexual revolution.
The number of single people in major cities on the mainland is growing rapidly. According to the National Statistics Bureau (NSB), in 1990 Beijing had 100,000 single people aged from 30 to 50. Today it has more than half a million, with more than 60 per cent of them women. The total number of single, adult women in Beijing and Shanghai has jumped from 200,000 to more than a million in both cities in the same period.
A few factors lie behind the burgeoning number of urban singletons. The jump is due partly to continuing urbanisation as people from rural areas gravitate towards big towns and cities in search of better employment opportunities. Beijing's population has increased from 10 million to 14 million in the past decade, according to the NSB. But liberalised attitudes towards sex, virginity, cohabitation, marriage and divorce have also played a major role in this demographic trend.
