Apr 24, 2009
Edited and translated by eChinacities.com staff
Source: Baidu.com

The economic crisis is having an impact on the choices people are making in their love lives. It would appear that now foreign men are appearing less attractive options for many Chinese women.

Now those Chinese girls that were looking so desperately before for a foreign husband are now having second thoughts, and it’s all to do with the economic crisis. At the end of the day, it is financial stability and a sense of security that is the main driving force behind these women’s choices.

Over 6,000 Chinese girls on the dating website Hongniang, when questions before the Lehman Brother’s Bank collapse in September 2008, said that they would be on average 75% happy with a foreign match. Over 4,000 women surveyed by the same website after the start of the crisis saw the happiness rating drop to an average of 50%.

More over, this decline in interest in foreigners was backed-up by the drop in the number of Chinese women who gave the reason of marriage for leaving the country in the last several months. The percentage fell from 42.5% to a mere 16.8%.

When it comes to which countries, if any, Chinese women are choosing their husbands from the pre-crisis list looked like this in order of preference: Canada, USA, Korea, France, Japan, Singapore, UK, and Australia.

However, since the crisis struck, the top list now looks like this: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, USA, Korea, France and Holland. It would look like quite a few of the smaller countries that are considered to have been less damaged by the crisis.

The CEO of Hongniang, Mrs. Fang said that apart from the cultural and lifestyle differences between China and the West, Chinese people are much more traditional and introverted. Chinese people are not as flexible as westerners and women especially have a much greater sense of belonging. This is very true of Chinese girls that are settled in a city here with a good live and friends around them.

Plus, another of the greatest reasons for the failure of international marriages is that foreign men have a much more indifferent feeling towards family values, and this can be something that Chinese women find hard to adapt to.

Mrs. Fang went onto say: “When it comes to family wealth, Chinese people respect the value of saving, in other words first saving for something and then buying it. But abroad because of the influence of credit spending, the ‘overdrawn’ lifestyle is the norm. Something Chinese woman find it hard to imagine is how little foreigners save compared with people from developing countries, and this makes them feel unsafe. It has become even more of a consideration in light of the economic crisis.

So, it looks like this is good news for Chinese guys, who only made the first choice for 53% of women on the dating site before September 2008, and afterwards have grown in popularity, up to a respectable 68%.

This article was taken from http://www.echinacities.com/main/ChinaMedia/ChinaMediaInfo.aspx?n=2274