Features | Society | East Asia

China’s Young Women Are Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood

Modernization has expanded women’s choices and made the traditional sequence of adulthood – marry, have children, settle near family – less inevitable.

In the U.S. state of Hawai‘i, Iris lives far from the pressures of urban China. Growing up in Zhejiang, she spent much of her childhood on what her mother called “self-improvement”: Olympiad math, piano lessons, and daily swimming. After graduating from New York University (NYU), Iris chose a simple, quiet life in Hawai‘i, using geographic distance to protect her personal autonomy from the pressure facing Chinese women in their 20s to settle down, marry, and have children. 

Halfway across the world, Jessica is confronting the same expectations from within China. After studying in Shanghai and Europe and working at an international organization in New York, where a mentor once urged her to stop working late and “enjoy the New York night,” Jessica returned to China to finish her master’s thesis and enter the domestic job market. There, she met a second, more intimate pressure: the expectation that she should marry and have children. Rather than quietly accepting it, she confronted the idea directly, over dinner with her mother, asking: “Are you actually happy in your own marriage? What has it genuinely brought you?” 

Iris and Jessica belong to a highly educated cohort of young Chinese women whose lives are unfolding alongside a demographic problem the state is eager to solve. Facing an aging population, a shrinking workforce, and historically low fertility rates, Beijing introduced the Three-Child Policy in 2021, allowing Chinese couples to have up to three children. China’s government has since increasingly emphasized marriage and childbearing as social priorities. 

Yet China’s demographic crisis gained steam during the same decades of modernization that gave women access to more education, higher incomes, and greater mobility. That means women like Iris and Jessica have more reasons, and more means, to delay or reconsider marriage and motherhood. 

Research on China’s education expansion by Jiwei Chen and Jiangying Guo of Nanjing Agricultural University found that increased female education can delay entry into marriage and childbirth and reduce fertility, in part by raising the opportunity costs of childrearing. The modernization that expanded women’s choices has made the traditional sequence of adulthood – marry, have children, settle near family – less inevitable.

Jessica confronts this tension directly, pressing her own mother on whether marriage delivered what it promised and treating parenthood as a choice to question rather than a milestone to check off. Iris resists more obliquely: rather than arguing with the assumption that a good daughter eventually settles down close to home, she puts enough distance (first New York, then Hawai‘i) between herself and the people who would enforce the traditional path, letting their expectations fade into background noise instead of demands she has to answer. 

Neither is rejecting family, marriage, or children outright. Both are refusing to treat any of these options as the default for a Chinese woman. 

Jessica: Deconstructing the Script 

Upon returning to China to finish her thesis, Jessica found the job hunt less a search for a career than a reckoning with what kind of life she was willing to accept. In Europe and New York, she’d grown used to a workplace culture defined by what she calls “松弛感”: ease, dignity, being treated first as a person. One night, working late in New York, her mentor stopped her: “You are in New York. You should go enjoy the night.” The line stuck with her. 

The anecdote formed a sharp contrast with Jessica’s internship at a major Chinese internet company, where a hyper-competitive, results-only culture left people passing their anxiety down the hierarchy. 

She posted a comparison of the two experiences on Xiaohongshu and it sparked a fight in the comments: some dismissed it as a naive “student mindset”; others agreed with a Chinese woman writing from Europe, who argued that Western employers need their workers enough to treat them decently, while Chinese managers can simply replace anyone who underperforms. 

For Jessica, the real question was how much room there was for personal choice to override social norms. That questioning carried over from professional pressures straight into marriage. 

Years abroad had sharpened her sense of independence, but her father still pictured a conventional future for her, and relatives kept the pressure alive by mentioning which of her peers had already married. Jessica pushed back on the premise itself, arguing that a mother-daughter bond can matter as much as a marital one. She half-jokingly tells relatives that if marriage is unavoidable, it’s better to get in and out of it quickly than drag out something broken. 

The same skepticism shapes how she thinks about children. She’s fond of them but treats parenthood as a serious undertaking that shouldn’t simply follow marriage on a fixed timeline. She has watched enough families to conclude that unhappy marriages, and kids who are under-supported despite material comfort, are more common than the success stories that get celebrated. Teenagers hit adolescence with mental health struggles, some withdrawing from school, often because parents were too consumed by work to be present. 

Jessica has also watched women of her mother’s generation absorb the burden of family life, reshaping careers around husbands and children. She has no intention of doing the same by default. 

That came to a head at a family dinner, when marriage came up again and Jessica turned the question back on her mother: was she actually happy in her marriage? What had it given her? It was an invitation to examine whether women’s sacrifices for family are as inevitable as they’re made to seem. 

“If my pain can never be carried by anyone else,” Jessica told The Diplomat, “then my happiness has to be mine to build, too.” She’s stopped ruling out partners by age, and increasingly by nationality; a good match is rare enough without narrowing the field further. Her mother has softened too, no longer pressing on timelines. 

None of this makes her anti-marriage or anti-motherhood. But Jessica insists on the right to........

© The Diplomat