Media Representations of the Guanggun throughout the Ages
kimcraig
Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University
ANTH178B: Culture, Gender, & Power in East Asia
Prof: Elanah Uretsky
Fall 2020
INTRODUCTION
This essay aims to address the public understanding of the guanggun as a social identity and how its connotations have shifted throughout the years due to changes in social context. Examining depictions of the bare sticks in art, poetry, literature, film, news reports, urban legends, and academic scholarship, I explore the evolution of the term throughout the last ten centuries concluding with the modern-day iteration. With the reemergence of the guanggun as an unexpected consequence of the One Child Policy (Crow, 2010; Greenhalgh, 2012), I interviewed two sources who are familiar with the identity but have had no personal interactions with men who would be labelled as such. Examining the informant’s understanding of the bare sticks and the media that has led them to their framings, I deduce that the modern ideas carry residue from earlier representation. Because the portrayals of the guanggun are not produced or controlled by the men themselves, the works leave shadows of ideologies that have incentivized how the group is dealt with from a legislative perspective - a classic case of art reflecting life reflecting art reflecting life.
A class of men usually associated with the lowest rung of the social ladder, the guanggun lack social capital, and do not control their station, their image, or their persecution. I will show how the men have played a recurring role as societies scapegoat for those in power to divert culpability of the most pressing issues. By exposing how the bare sticks are branded, I argue that those who control the group’s representation in any form of media should recognize the power they have on the social consciousness and take precaution in the way they portray the men to avoid reinforcing stereotypes and further villainizing the guanggun without due cause.
DEFINITION
The term guanggun roughly translates to “bachelor” but is broken down into guang meaning “bare/empty” and gun “stick/branch”, so literally translates to “bare stick”. In a Confucius society centered around filial piety and ancestor veneration, inability to contribute to the bloodline is the greatest ideological offense that one could inflict on the social order (Greenhalgh, 2012). Therefore, the metaphor of a bare stick denotes that the bachelor’s singledom will leave his branch of the family tree empty (Jiang, 2013, p. 100). Due to Chinese hypergamous practices of women marrying up and men marrying down, this often leaves women at the top of society and men at the bottom alone (Jiang, 2013, p. 100). Often referred to as shengnu and shengnan respectively, the skewed gender imbalances that have ebbed throughout China’s history have more often found themselves dealing with more bare branches than leftover women (Banister, 2004, p. 24).
The connotations associated with bachelors of a marriageable age, usually around 27 years old (Jiang, 2013, p. 100) have shifted throughout the years. In its earliest uses guanggun was understood to mean, not simply a “bachelor”, but incorporated more immoral nuances of “degenerative evil character” (Sommer, 1997, p. 147), “rootless rascal” (Sommer, 1997, p. 148), “bandit” (Crow, 2010, p. 75), “ruffian” (Hao, 2010), “hoodlum” (Hao, 2010), “gangster” (Buoye, 2014, p. 38) “robbers” (Mann, 2011, p. 35), or “an unmarried rogue with no family ties” (Sommer, 1997, p. 170). The correlation with criminal activity is linked to the social and political structures of the time. There is also a recurring undertone of the guanggun’s association with being sex crazed is tied up in an essentialist ideology of men needing sex, as opposed to women who simply tolerate it, therefore a man who does not have regular access to a woman to accommodate his needs is a likely threat to society and a potential “rapist” (Sommer, 1997, p. 170). Remnants of these villainizing associations still persist today but in slight variations that resulted from new social contexts. As we will see in the next sections the severity of the connotations is wrapped up in the gender politics, sex ratios, and the elite’s need to find a victim in order to flex and maintain their power.
EARLY DEPICTIONS
Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD)
The earliest use of the term guanggun is seen in literature from the Song Dynasty (Buoye, 2014, p. 36). The term was used in this era to denote a sense of danger that these itinerant bandits were violent and became used as a reason to cloister women and keep them out of public sight in order to secure male lineage (Mann, 2011, p. 37). We see evidence of this segregation of the sexes in the artistic expressions of the day, like that of the scroll painting (see figure 1), a street scene from the 1100s in which there are no women in sight (Ebrey, 1993). While it’s unclear if any of the characters are meant to be marked as guanggun, the obvious lack of women is evidence of the belief that the public sphere was dangerous for women. The fear of unattached men raping young girls is made evident in the Book of Rites, a text at the core of the Confucian canon, which states that "a girl ten or older does not go out, which means she remains permanently inside." (Ebrey, 1993, p. 24). We can see the embodiment of this social rule depicted in yet another 12th century painting of women working safely within the confines of the home, while men work the fields (see figure 2). Painting and texts like these were created by and meant for the class of literate elite men who, due to their high-status positions, were able to reinforce a creed that uses the threat (read: scapegoating) of their socially inferior male counterparts to control women and dominate public life.
FIGURE 1. By C. Tse-tuan (fl. 1000-1130), A street in Kaifeng. Detail from the handscroll Spring Festival on the River. The Palace Museum, Peking. From Ku-kimg 1981:78 (Ebrey 1993, p.22).
FIGURE 2. By L. Sung-nien (ca. 1150-after 1225), painting of a women splicing hemp, located at the Collection of the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, Republic of China (VA 35c) (Ebrey, 1993, p.135).
Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD)
Later, in the Ming Dynasty, the legal and medical archives show that the practices of separating the sexes were given biological validation in the fact that there was no pathologizing of hypersexual men or under-sexual women (Furth, 1988, p. 6). This institutionalized a binary view of gender in relation to libido that naturalized men’s need for sex while emphasizing female virtue and chastity to justify the social norm of keeping women sequestered. This view of the differences in gender was reflected in the social-accepted practice of concubinage, where elite men were allowed exclusive access to multiple women which inadvertently (or perhaps very intentionally) siphoned off the already limited number of available women from the poorer class of men (Xiao, 2011, p. 608). These hegemonic ideas essentialized gender difference and prioritized men over women leading to practices of female infanticide (Jiang, 2013). Such gender inequality led to an imbalance in the gender ratio which, at times, found more than 20% of men unable to find brides (Jiang, 2013, p. 112). These men, unable to form families of their own, often converged forming secret societies and groups of bandits (Jiang, 2013, p. 112) as a means of creating surrogate family units (Sommer, 2015, p. 37). It’s clear that the rhetoric that prioritized the sex lives of elite men created, institutionalized, and maintained by elite men, consequently created a social atmosphere where women became rare commodities that only the wealthy could consume, while concurrently forcing poor men to utilize survival strategies which marked them as criminals.
But not all the untethered men formed gangs. Many remained independent and begged in the streets for money and food. We see these types of guanggun depicted in the work by painter Zhou Chen from the early 1500’s (see figures 3-6) (Bianchi, 2007). These beggars were thought to be “mean” as was made clear in the common terminology used for them at the time, jianmin (Bianchi, 2007). Chen often depicted them carrying some kind of stick (see figures, 3, 4, and 6), a visual metaphor marking their identity as a “bare stick” while also denoting their weakness, and dependency on society when the stick was used as a cane (see figure 4), or a reminder of their danger as the stick can easily be used as a weapon (as in figure 3).
FIGURE 3. By Z. Chen, 1516, detail of Beggars and Street Characters (Liumin tu), Album leaves mounted in handscroll, ink and colors on paper, overall 31.4 x 245.3 cm, Honolulu Academy of Arts (2239.1: 1956) (Bianchi, 2007).
FIGURE 4. By Z. Chen, detail of Beggars and Street Characters. Located at the Cleveland Museum of Art (Bianchi, 2007).
FIGURE 5. By Z. Chen, detail of Beggars and Street Characters, located at the Cleveland Museum of Art (Bianchi, 2007).
FIGURE 6. By Z. Chen, detail of Beggars and Street Characters, located at the Honolulu Academy of Arts (Bianchi, 2007).
Lacking kin and community ties marked the men as outsiders, differentiating them from “ordinary commoners” (liangmin), they were instead understood to be dangerous with the potential of “causing harm and disruption if ignored.” (Bianchi, 2007). Living on the periphery of society, not fully attached, and therefore not fully human (A. Candela, lecture, August 27, 2019; Borneman, 1996), they were thought to be ghostlike (see figure 6). Adding to their frightening aura, their connection to the supernatural was captured in the following poem titled “Lamentation for the Liumin” written by Zhang Yanghao in 1329 (Bianchi, 2007). The opening verse reads:
Alas, the liumin!
哀哉流民
They are ghosts, they are not; they are human beings, they are not.
為鬼非鬼，為人非人
So, whether criminalized or not seen as being fully human, the first 700 years of the social identity guanggun did not garner much sympathy from the general public.
Qing Dynasty (1644-1911 AD)
By the 18th century, Manchu rule brought in a wave of conservatism and strict moral code that tightened men’s access to women (Sommer, 1997, p. 141). The Baojia System had been implemented which functioned as a sort of neighborhood watch surveillance system of imperial China where community members watch, detect, and report any suspicious behavior (Mann 2011, p. 35). Unsurprisingly, the primary victims of such a system were those that were seen as outsiders, like the itinerant guanggun, further stigmatizing them as dangerous people to be avoided (Mann, 2011, p. 35).
Qing society had been constructed in a manner where everyone was “safely anchored in a registered household” (Mann, 2011, p. 45). At least that was the ideal, which allowed China’s last royal empire to maintain control as it struggled to stay afloat. The system punished those who were unrooted, putting the homeless or guanggun migrating to find work easy targets for villainization. This is especially evident in crimes regarding sexual offenses. The legal code defined jian, “illicit sex”, as any sexual activity outside of marriage, (Sommer, 2000, p. 30) which meant that that any sexual act performed by a bare stick, who were by definition never married, illegal. It’s unsurprising then that most of the men prosecuted for sex crimes during this era were marginalized men (Sommer, 1997, p. 170). A political order rooted in family networks presumed anyone without social bonds as a threat to society (Sommer, 1997, p. 170). There was even a legal sub-statute on “rootless rascals” (guanggun) in Qing law in which “gang rape of a person of either sex was punished ... ringleaders by immediate beheading and followers by strangulation after the assizes” (Sommer, 1997, p. 145). This fear of single men was reflected in the popular narrative plotlines of the day where lecherous men trafficking young gullible ladies into their keep was a recurring theme (Mann, 2011, p. 38). Sommer points out that these works of fiction were created by and for the literate elite class who knew little of the lives of the actual guanggun whom they described in their stories (Sommer, 2015, p. 39).
As we have seen throughout imperial China, the guanggun were created as a byproduct of social practices that favored men over women and privileged the wealthiest of those men while villainizing those who could not have families of their own. The series of the penal codes enforced the ideologies that were reflected in the moral texts, medical documents, paintings, literature, and poetry created over these ten centuries which only further stigmatized these men by limiting their already narrow options. But the fall of imperial rule did not erase the tainted image of the guanggun as we will see in the next section.
20th CENTURY AND THE ONE CHILD POLICY
The 20th century brought about a series of radical changes to the political organization of the Middle Kingdom. The fall of the last Chinese empire in 1911 led to nearly a half century of China trying to get itself on its feet and catch up with the rest of the world. The rising status of women that came about during Mao’s cultural revolution of the 1960s resulted in one of the most balanced gender ratio that China’s history had ever seen nearly erasing the category of guanggun in a single generation (Crow, 2010; Banister, 2004). It wasn’t until Deng implemented the infamous One Child Policy that the gender balance began to tip again (Crow, 2010; Greenhalgh, 2010). Despite Mao’s attempt to disconnect from Confucius values and empowerment of women, the prioritizing of sons over daughters was made apparent in the rash of sex selective abortions (Greenhalgh, 2010; Fong, 2016; Jiang, 2013; Jefferys & Yu, 2015), female infanticide (Mannienen, 2019; Greenhalgh, 2010), female child abandonment (Wang, 2019; Manninen, 2019), and female infants given up for adoption (Wang, 2019) that occurred during the first two decades of the policy.
While the policy was successful at preventing somewhere between 200,000 - 400,000 births and creating a generation of highly educated global competitors, the Chinese government is now dealing with the side effects of its policy (Greenhalgh, 2018). Forty years after the policy’s inception, the now mostly male population born from this legislation is looking to marry and having trouble locating female partners. The guanggun have returned and so have their stigma. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Science, it is currently estimated that there are at least 30 million more men than women in the country (Manninen, 2019, p. 134). According to One Child Policy expert, Susan Greenhalgh (2014), the occurrence of single men of marriage age is especially high in rural areas (p. 363). In the 2009 national census, the JiangXi province reported that there were 140 boys for every 100 girls between the ages of 1-4 (Manninen, 2019, p. 135).
Among the now-adult only-child population, many of the rural women have migrated to the cities for better job opportunities and marriage prospects (Jiang, 2013, p.103-104), leaving a mass of mostly-male communities that have been dubbed “bachelor villages” by the national media (Greenhalgh, 2012; Jiang, 2013). Some of these villages have a gender ratio as high as 10:1 M:F (Jiang, 2013, p. 105). The men that remain usually share a handful of traits: they are poor, often living with male siblings and parents, with limited job opportunities, and low education (Jiang, 2013, p. 103-104). The return of the identity after its near-half century hiatus, is again due to political decisions implemented by elite men who as we will see continue to use them as the target in which to blame the country's ills as we will see in the ways in which the contemporary iteration of these men are being represented in the modern media within the next section.
MODERN DEPICTIONS
To get a better sense of how the modern day guanggun are perceived I interviewed two Chinese urbanites whose backgrounds gave them particularly insightful perspectives on how urban populations are thinking about the overabundance of men in China. The first was a Chinese-American journalist who worked as a copy editor for China Daily from 2009-2016. A paper intended for international readers travelling through China, David’s position along with his insider/outsider status allowed him to see how the state depicted guanggun to outsiders. I was curious to see how the kinds of stories that came across his desk concerning the guanggun and how he was encouraged to shape their narrative to stay in line with China Daily’s image: “you always have to be mindful that you’re gonna [need to] paint a good impression of China for them [the foreign readership].” The second person I interviewed was a 21-year-old anthropology student from Hunan called Xiaoyuan. Coming from an upper middle class urban family, and having never met someone she would consider guanggun, I wanted to see how she understood the identity. My intention for both my informants was to see how media representations had shaped their ideologies of the social category of the modern-day bare sticks.
Guanggun Jie (aka Single’s Day)
Despite having possibly one of the largest gender imbalances in Chinese history and therefore one of the largest numbers of guanggun the country has ever seen (Banister, 2004; Crow 2010), the most common use of the word today is in relation to the shopping holiday to which the men are the ironic namesake. Guanggun Jie, often translated as Single’s Day is celebrated on November 11th, (11/11) which legend has it was chosen because of its visual symbolism of four single ones, representing four bachelors looking for partners (Bird, 2018). There are many variations of the holiday’s origin story but one that seems to reappear places it’s birth in 1993 among four college-aged bachelors at Nanjing University where for the first decade the holiday was meant for college students to collectively commiserate in their single status and celebrate the antithesis of Valentine's Day together (Greenhalgh, 2014; Bird, 2018). By 2009 Jack Ma of Alibaba commandeered the day and turned it into the world's largest shopping holiday (Bird, 2018). It’s since almost completely alienated itself from the guanggun. This was evident in the fact David, who arrived in China in 2009, had never heard of Single’s Day referred to as Guanggun Jie and only knew it by the more commonly used name of Double 11 Day (shuang shiyi) (see figure 7).
FIGURE 7. By S. Song, 2015, photo, A giant billboard promoting this year’s Singles’ Day shopping festival in Beijing subway. The holiday is referred to as “Shuang Shiyi” (double 11) and not “Guanggun Jie” and the figures in the ad are both women. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/money-wealth/article/1877295/calling-all-single-ladies-alibabas-singles-day-shopping
In my interview with Xiaoyuan, we discussed her understanding and use of the term guanggun. She explained that she mostly only uses the word to tease her female friends about their single status around the “relationship holidays” (Guanggun Jie and Valentine’s Day...etc). During our interview she was surprised to learn that the term had been in use so long and had assumed that it was created within the last few decades coinciding with the rise of Single’s Day. This was evidence of an erasure of the term and social category within Chinese the public education system. When asked what word she would have used to refer to these men in a historical context, she couldn’t think of a single term to encapsulate the idea, and therefore did not feel the word carried the same criminal connotations covered in the previous sections.
News Stories
Although both informants were unaware of some parts of the history of Guanggun Jie, they both were aware of the real-life guanggun and noted that most of their understanding of the modern identity came from news reports. David, who worked for China Daily for 7 years, and Xiaoyuan who has been reading Chinese newspapers since she was in middle school, both noted that most common reports about the guanggun are not personal stories, but mostly statistics of how many bachelors the country is expected to have that particular year (see Liu, 2011 for example). David confirmed that these are the kinds of stories that China Daily runs: “We love numbers”. He noted that if they were to run anything more personal it would be the funny things that guanggun are doing to seek female attention, like taking out billboards advertising themselves as eligible bachelors (see figure 8). Rarely was anything published that denoted how difficult the guanggun’s lives were or the government’s involvement in the problem. When I asked if China Daily ever mentioned the One Child Policy in connection to the guanggun, David responded:
“They do but if they are gonna mention the One Child Policy, it’s like a small paragraph and it doesn’t really put the onus on the policy itself that led to this mess in the population. It’s more like, well that was one thing and this is the small side effect … they are always minimizing these problems in society as something that will eventually go away if we do ‘this’. So they will most likely segway into the Two Child Policy … they will talk about all these beneficial plans that the government has for these kinds of people … but they never really talk about how history has reared its ugly head … [with the general attitude of] don’t worry about that stuff that is in the past.”
FIGURE 8. By China Daily, 2014, photo, three guanggun advertising themselves to try to attract a partner. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201409/26/WS5a2a42b0a3101a51ddf8fecc.html
Both informants noted that the guanggun are not receiving as much press today as they were five to ten years ago and that their female counterparts, shengnu (leftover women) were getting more airtime. Xiaoyuan suspected that it most likely had to do with the women’s high status social positions allowing them to take up more space and therefore having more of a voice in the public domain, whereas the guanggun don’t have enough social credit to leverage. “It’s also just kind of a sad, pitiful story,” David added, “they are just going to be lonely for the rest of their lives…” noting that this did not fit into the positive, feel-good image that his paper was attempting to project.
One thing David pointed out in his interview that was helpful in addressing how the modern guanggun were different than their dynastic ancestors was that the image we have of guanggun as uneducated rural farms who can’t afford wives is outdated and needs to be expanded to include men from other socio-economic backgrounds who were also suffering from the gender imbalance. While bachelors are no doubt overwhelmingly an issue in the countryside, as more and more of the single children that resulted from the One Child Policy come of age, the plague of singledom is now infecting the middle urban class. According to China Daily article, the guanggun were no longer only the rural uneducated poor, one study found that of 56,000 single men born in the 1970s and 1980s , more than a third had master’s degrees or higher and almost 30 percent earned more than 15,000 yuan a month (Ottery, 2014). As the author states: “The shengnan, it seems, are a mixed bag” (Ottery, 2014).
David and Xiaoyuan had both mentioned reading news stories about how the issue of excess men looking for wives has led some men to purchase brides from other countries, but these stories were only ever seen in foreign media sources, never something published by the state. When asked how China Daily frames the issue with human trafficking of women from South East Asia, David replied, “China Daily would never touch that stuff...if trafficking was happening it was elsewhere...in other countries”. Whether or not the Chinese papers were willing to report the recent surge of human trafficking that has resulted from the recent influx of guanggun, Chinese citizens are still being exposed to media that connects the guanggun to abduction and raping of women, a hallmark of their earlier connotations.
Susan Greenhalgh (2014) has written about the difference in the way domestic and international news have portrayed the guanggun that the two informants noticed (p. 375). She notes that China only ever recognizes an issue once they have taken steps to address it. This echoes David’s statement about China Daily only recognizing the One Child Policy’s involvement in gender imbalance alongside rolling out the Two Child Policy solution. Greenhalgh (2014) examines the PRC’s framing of human trafficking stories as rescue narratives where the government successful executed mission to safely returned many women back to their home countries, away from the clutches of the lecherous guanggun (p. 375). This narrative simplifies the story into bifurcated roles of evil trafficking guanggun and victimized women who have been trafficked. The problem is that the reality is much more complex: women oftentimes have more agency than the media gives them credit (Feingold 2003; Hackney, 2015; Phinney, 2009) and the men are oftentimes victims of scam artists that con them out of the little money that they have (Jiang, 2013; Manninen, 2019). This is not to deny the occurrence of trafficking narratives that play out just as the media has depicted. Enough women have come forward to verify those experiences (Feingold 2003; Hackney, 2015), but it’s the only story. There is another version where both the guanggun and the South East Asian women they marry find via matchmaking services (see figure 9) are both victims of larger structural inequalities, but rarely will you find this narrative being run.
FIGURE 9. By A. Saxton, 2014, Screenshot from an matchmaking agency that finds SE Asian women for Chinese men. https://southeastasiaglobe.com/a-perfect-match-brides-vietnam-southeast-asia-globe-magazine/
Boogey Men
The most unexpected thing to come from my interview was with Xiaoyuan, who despite not having any knowledge of the use of the term guanggun outside of Guanggun Jie, held a deep seeded fear of single men from the countryside that matched the terms ancient descriptions. Completely unprompted, she explained that her parents used the traditional understanding of the identity as a sort of scare tactic to teach their only daughter to stay away from strangers. Xiaoyuan insisted that most parents would describe a scenario in which a dangerous man will tempt little girls into cars with candy in order to kidnap them and sell them into forced marriages with impoverished rural bachelors.
“...they [parents] wouldn’t say the...guanggun, they just say ‘not gonna get married for their entire life’… so they [parents] say ‘be extra careful when others offer you a lollipop for free … don’t take strangers drinks … otherwise you will be sold to a man in a rural area who can never get married…”
Somewhere between urban legend and fable, Xiaoyuan’s parents using the guanggun as a boogeyman in her childhood shaped the way she now feels about rural men. She admitted that she would never travel to the countryside alone, and if so would never talk to single men and would be more likely to ask for help from women. When asked to spell out the fear as a worst-case scenario she described a situation where she needs to use a phone: “[I] go to a man’s house and that person … lives alone and then the worst thing … he locks the door and then … anything could happen.” She went on to talk about then being a prisoner in the house. Without directly referring to rape, the fear resembled the literature from the Qing Dynasty that Mann (2011) had described in the earlier section (p.38). While I had only intended on looking at top-down media depiction, Xiaoyuan’s oral history highlights the importance of interfamilial storytelling as a mode of representation when considering how ideologies are shaped.
Film Depictions
Not very well versed in Chinese cinema, I asked informants to give me examples of films that depicted characters who they would consider to exemplify their understanding of the guanggun identity. Noting that neither informant of this study had any direct contact with anyone they would consider a guanggun, investigating their media references not only helped me better understand how they see these men, but also provided insight into the sources that shaped their opinion. The two films XiaoYuan mentioned were from 2010. Lost on Journey, a popular screw-ball comedy by Raymond Yip (see figure 10) and Single Man, a low budget independent drama by Jie Hao (see figure 11). The films' differences in genre lend themselves to very different depictions of the identity but both matched her understanding of them being poor men from the countryside.
FIGURE 10. By R. Yip, 2010, Lost on Journey DVD case design. https://www.zoommovie.com/en-my/product-8288.html?t=lost-on-journe
FIGURE 11. By J. Hao, 2010, movie poster from the motion picture Single Man. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1652352/
Lost on Journey (2010) is a Chinese version of the 1987 American film Planes, Trains, and Automobiles (Hughes) that highlights class differences through a comedy centered around holiday travel. Director Jie Hao never explicitly refers to Niu, the poor migrant bachelor character, as a guanggun, in fact his singledom is only ever alluded to, but it is clear that Niu’s low wage earnings, poor education (the character is nearly illiterate - see figure 12) and general uncouth behavior, he’s not a viable option for women. Meanwhile Niu’s wealthy counterpart, Mr. Li, to whom he refers to as “Boss” (though there is no employment relationship, they are merely travel partners due to a series of unfortunate circumstances), is not only married with a child, but also has a young mistress. Harkening back to the days of imperial concubinage, where socially-superior men contributed to the marital problems of the bare sticks by hoarding the few available women, exacerbating the problem (Xiao, 2011, p. 608).
FIGURE 12. By R. Yip, 2010, still from the motion picture Lost on Journey. Still depicts the scene in which the guanggun character, Niu, and his coworkers struggle to read a note from his boss, showcasing the group’s near illiteracy.
But Niu isn’t the brutal hoodlum or lecherous rapist seen in so many of the earlier depictions of the guanggun. Instead, he is the honest, kind-hearted soul that teaches Boss how to live with more compassion. Niu’s doofiness is portrayed with a childlike quality which almost emasculates his character. There is no evidence of sexual desire. He does not complain about his lot in life. It is through the lessons of kindness and generosity that Niu bestows on Boss that inspires Mr. Li to end things with his mistress, an act that could actually end up leveling the social playing field for a bare stick like Niu. Boss gifts Niu with a large sum of money, which ultimately raises Niu’s social status. We see evidence of this in the film’s final scene, which is set on a plane a year later. Niu enters the first-class cabin wearing a smart business suit. The subtext of the film reiterates the message of this essay that the guanggun are victims of socio-structural oppression that can only be mitigated by those with power taking actions to create and rebuild more equitable structures. Albeit a bit infantilizing, even the film’s representation of guanggun is a step in the right direction. Narratives that offer sympathy compete with the boogeyman image of impoverished bachelors who should be feared.
Jie Hao’s film, Single Man (2010), however, takes on a very different tone. Centering around the stories of four aging bachelor farmers in a mountainous village outside of Beijing, where men drastically outnumber women. Unlike Lost on Journey, Single Man explicitly labels the men as guanggun as it is directly referenced in the title and it doesn’t shy away from sexualizing the bachelors. In fact the story highlights the lengths the four men go to in order to attend their sexual desires. From participating in affairs with married women, to visiting brothels (see figure 13), to the wife buying and later trading of a young woman from the highly coveted Sichuan province, the film firmly connects the identity to its earlier illicit roots but in a humanizing way. The fact that the men in this film are “all non-professional actors playing fictionalized versions of themselves” (Single Man, 2011), offers a realistic account of the rural unmarried men. Yes, they can be dangerous, as the film shows fist fights as the primary mode of conflict resolution. Yes, they are desperate for brides. Yes, they will go great lengths to secure sexual trysts. But mostly they are sad and lonely. A large portion of the film depicts the men alone in their houses watching TV (see figure 14). The film does a great job of addressing some of the structural reasons for the men’s marital status and nods to the salaciousness that is often associated with the group in a song that reoccurs throughout the film. The ballad, yet another media representation that was most likely created by someone who was not a guanggun, is featured in the film’s trailer (Chinastarfilm, 2010) accompanied with the following subtitles to the lyrics:
The song Borrow Strainer is a little obscene. A little obscene
It’s a bit indecent. A bit indecent.
Heading on west when coming out. Heading on west.
Suddenly meet a ruffian.
He just wanna make love.
And expose her good thing.
Come closer, only something dark can be seen.
The ruffian is really anxious. Really anxious.
Brings out something grey from his crotch.
And scares the woman, who has never seen it.
FIGURE 13. By J. Hao, 2010, still from the motion picture Single Man.Still depicts the scene in which a guanggun solicits a prostitute in Beijing.
FIGURE 14. By J. Hao, 2010, still from the motion picture Single Man.Still depicts the scene in which a guanggun sits at home alone watching TV. The program he watches is a musical performance in which the song is about the vulgarity of the guanggun.
While both of the films offer a more nuanced version of the guanggun and recognize some of the factors that pin them in their social position, both films play off of age old stereotypes of the bare stick being poor country bumpkins. Just as guanggun are not seen as fully human (Bianchi, 2007; Borneman, 1996), Niu is not a full character. The four bare sticks in Hao’s film are more developed but the film offers no suggestions on how to improve the lives of the pitiful men. Additionally, neither film recognizes that the modern day guanggun come from all social classes and are not limited to rural areas. This could very well be due to the time period in which the films were made. In 2010 the first cohort of only (mostly male) children were only beginning to come of marriable age and the issues were not as dire as they are now a decade later. Art could only reflect the lives and imaginations of its time.
Academic Research
Whereas artistic representations are meant to be reflections of the cultural imagination, which act as windows into ideology, academic research is often thought to be free of such leanings, and only representations of hard facts. But the studies of social scientists are just as telling of hegemonic ideals. The kinds of questions being posed can be just as revealing of our fears as the scary stories we tell our children to keep them away from strangers.
A book titled Bare Branches: Security Implication of Asia’s Surplus Male Population is full of statistical information and behavioral studies that, as the subtitle suggests, positions the guanggun as a serious threat to society for which China should prepare itself (Hudson & den Boer, 2004). At the time the book was written, the first only-child cohort was not yet on the marriage market and the research was prepared by two political scientists working in international affairs who used historic data from high-sex-ratio societies to predict the kind of issues that China may endure in the near future. They cite studies insisting that guanggun are more likely to turn toward vice and violence, abuse women, and commit crimes and use biological explanation of testosterone levels of unmarried men to justify the findings (Hudson & den Boer, 2004, p. 192-197).
The problem with these kinds of studies is that they reinforce stigmatization leading to future ostracism, fueling the very behaviors that they describe (Jiang, 2013, p. 106). The kinds of research we choose to conduct can essentially function as a self-fulfilling prophecy, paving the direction of the guanggun’s future. This is not to say that the work like that of Hudson and den Boer (2004) is not useful or founded in “good science”, but rather academics must be careful how they wield their power. It's no longer the monarchs that are deciding the fate of the oppressed. These days the lords overseeing order are government bodies backed by academic institutions. If Chinese policymakers were to use Hudson & den Boer’s (2004) findings as the textbook supporting their laws concerning the bare sticks, then the guanggun would head toward futures not dissimilar from their namesakes of the imperial past. I suggest that science can show empathy by broadening their research and taking on a more holistic understanding by considering historical context and social conditions that have predestined the bare sticks to their current positions. Taking a more holistic approach has the potential to improve their futures. The first step for academics to take is check the biases that are embedded in our own research.
CONCLUSION
As is the problem with any stereotype, the guanggun depictions are problematic because they are not ONE unified group and do not speak with ONE unified voice. In fact, as we have seen, we rarely hear from them directly at all. Their voices have been silenced and those in power not only speak on their behalf but control the way in which they are represented. Susan Greenhalgh (2012) points out that the PRC uses the “excess men” as scapegoats for social instability and frames them as the perpetrators of future crimes and therefore not deserving of help, but punishment. Her study, published eight years after Hudson and den Boer’s book (2004), leads one to wonder if the authors had predicted the future or manifested it. Greenhalgh (2012) settles the argument using research from a study of a bachelor village in Xi’an, where she highlights that the problems the Chinese government had been pinning on these men did not exist. This just goes to show how powerful suggestion and ideology can be.
As we have explored in this essay, China’s long history of Confucian ideals of male preference, hypergamous marriage practices, and gender imbalances resulting in large numbers of guanggun is not a new phenomenon and is not predicted to go away anytime soon (Jiang, 2013, p. 110). What is unique about the current assemblage of excess men is the government’s direct involvement in their creation, their mobility from rural to urban space, and the fact that it’s no longer only the poor who are struggling to find adequate partners. The common denominator throughout the history of the guanggun is the social ostracism that accompanies the identity, which is at least partially due to the ways in which they are represented by others. News stories, the urban legends told to children, film portrayal, paintings, poetry, and even the research coming out of academic institutions all work together to reinforce stigma of either threat or inferiority. The way that society understands the identity will dictate how the issue is handled. Repeated messaging shapes ideology and determines whether help or punishment should be provided as Greenhalgh’s study confirmed (2012). Xiaoyuan and David illuminated how the media that they consumed largely influenced their attitudes. The current messaging available is sending mixed signals, both of which are problematic. A narrative of the guanggun being violent, sex-crazed rapists that are trafficking women lead to fear of single men like we saw in Xiaoyuan’s interview which was reminiscent of the early depictions of guanggun in Zhou Chen’s paintings from the Ming Dynasty and the theme song in Jie Hao’s film. Meanwhile, thinking about the bare sticks as pathetic, uneducated, country bumpkins as seen in Lost on Journey, a sentiment that was reflected in David’s interview, also doesn’t inspire much sympathy or aid in their marketability to potential brides.
I agree with Susan Greenhalgh’s (2012) suggestion of finding alternative framings of the gender imbalance that are in line with humanitarian values and her proposal that a more sympathetic approach may prevent the much-anticipated future violence. With this spirit in mind, I suggest that a top-down approach to addressing the issue is in order and anyone representing the guanggun, whether in an academic article, a work of art, or even a story told to children, needs to consider the way in which they are framing the men. From a policy perspective, whereas the PRC previously adopted measures to protect the female infants that were being discarded in the early days of the One Child Policy with campaigns like “Care for Girl Children” (Jiang, 2013, p. 113), I propose a similar push should be made to “Care for Bachelors”. A party move in this direction could lead to public sympathy which would result in less media villainization and perpetuate less stigma. We all need to be more considerate of what we produce and consume.
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