Welcome to Sisyphus Highway: In Depth.

Recent episodes moved from history and theory to property, ritual, and custom. By now it should be increasingly clear that bride price is so difficult to discuss not because of the practice alone, but because it connects social issues on too many different levels.

It is easy to see thatwhen we discuss bride price, we are discussing far more than marriage: urban-rural migration, housing policy, family planning, women’s circumstances, fertility rates, social security, and more. In a sense, decades of change in Chinese society converge in this one issue.In everyday life, people may appear to discuss bride price while actually arguing about something else.

In the final episode of this chapter, we place bride price within broader social change and ask what kind of Chinese society it reflects.

 

- Urbanization and urban-rural migration: rural land, urban housing, and the cost of marriage

- Family planning and son preference: sex selection as a debt of history

- After the awakening of women’s consciousness, the bride-price dilemma between ideal equality and practical security

- The absence of sex education: how do conservative sexual ideas continue to shape marriage and women’s circumstances?

- Compressed modernity: why do wife-buying, ghost marriages, and marriages in which couples belong to both families coexist?

- Individualization 2.0 and neo-familism: when social risks return to the family

- Beginning with bride price to discuss obscured social problems

 

- A Dream of Splendor (television series)

- Women from the Highlands of Northern Myanmar (2022) (documentary)

- Jin Yihong, Mobile Patriarchy (book)

- Pan Suiming, Traces of the Wind (book)

- Ma Hongjie, Seeking Wives in Western China (book)

- Jia Pingwa, The Poleflower (book)

- Chang Kyung-Sup, South Korea under Compressed Modernity: Familial Political Economy in Transition (book)