The anti-marriage turn: economic precarity and racialized grievance in the Chinese manosphere

In the context of a global resurgence in right-wing movements, this paper investigates how economic precarity becomes reconfigured into gendered and racialized grievance within the Chinese manosphere. Whilst misogynistic discourses have historically championed the traditional family, a distinctly anti-marriage feeling has recently emerged amongst some Chinese men. We frame this as a reaction to a cost-of-living crisis and the erosion of men’s superior wages in China’s emerging neoliberal labour market. We focus on social media reactions to a legal judgement emphasizing sexual consent arising from the infamous Shanxi Datong engagement rape case, in which a man was imprisoned for 3 years for raping his fiancée. Our analysis demonstrates how the Chinese manosphere reframed this judgement as male victimhood in the context of a bride price (Caili) having been paid. Anger was directed not only at women but also at (weak) ‘turtle’ men who acquiesce to women’s demands. We also identified a proprietorial nationalism in which Han Chinese women were constructed as choosy ‘national assets’, whilst women from the Global South were commodified as easy-to-please wives. This article reveals that the Chinese manosphere echoes both Western ‘red pill’ ideology and local traditions increasingly strained by global neoliberal economic policies.