Transcript

China is in the grip of a gender war. While government officials are texting and even cold calling women to urge them have children, the fertility rate continues to drop. Better educated and often better paid their male peers, many urban Chinese women are simply choosing not to marry. To discuss the growing female backlash to the Party’s pro-natal policies, Louisa and Graeme are joined by Chloe Mofei Shen, lifestyle director of Elle China and Qiqi Huang, post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Macau.

Image: “Marrying late has many advantages”, BG E15/716, Landsberger Collection, 1975.

Graeme Smith  00:05

Welcome to the Little Red Podcast, which brings you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. I'm Graeme Smith from the Australian National University's Department of Pacific Affairs, and I'm joined by my co-host, Louisa Lim, former China correspondent for the BBC and NPR, now at the Center for Advancing Journalism at Melbourne University. We're on air thanks to the support from the Australian Centre on China in the World. And we're coming to you from the lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people and the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation.

Louisa Lim  00:36

This year may be the year that Chinese women got angry. Two out of 2024's buzzwords have been “she economy” and “married donkeys”. That means the female economy, driven by female consumers, and a derogatory way of talking about married women. This year, the number of marriages in China was down to a ten-year low, and all this as chairman Xi Jinping has been pushing to get women back into the home.

Graeme Smith  01:08

Or maybe it’s because of Chairman Xi's calls for women to, “actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and childbearing.” But China appears to be undergoing something of a female backlash. Divorce rates are on the up, and women are doing things their own way. Our guests are two women who are at the forefront of this change, Dr Qiqi Huang, postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Macau, and Chloe Mofei Shen, lifestyle director of ELLE China. Chloe, let's start with you, how has ELLE China captured the zeitgeist this sort of change in female thinking this year?

Chloe Mofei Shen  01:49

First of all, ELLE China has always focused on the woman's power here in China, and I think we have really actually noticed the shift in the mindset of the Chinese women, as you have said before. Like more and more women are reluctant to get married, and they are more likely to get divorced than before. So, we actually have seen this trend, like the Chinese women are become more and more independent on their own. I think one of the reasons for them to have making this kind of decision in their life is that first of all, they are more educated than before. So, they are more financially independent. And they have the control, more control over their own life. So, they are more free to make their own decisions, instead of, you know, being driven to make the same old decisions as their peers before. And one more thing I wanted to add is that I think the price for the Chinese woman to pay, for them to get into marriage or to have labor is higher than before. So, when a woman need to get in the marriage, or need to have a baby, then it will very much affect their pursuit in their career life. So, I think more and more women are more focused on their career life. And they wanted to have their personal achievement, you know, as an independent person, not just as somebody's wife or somebody's mother. So, they are trying to have a more sense of self-identity. I think that is why the mindset have changed, and you can see all these different decisions that they make.

Louisa Lim  04:03

So Qiqi, I've seen statistics that this year, for the first time, women who are married are more educated than their partners, and I've also seen you say that women want pets more than they want husbands. Why did you come to that conclusion?

Qiqi Huang  04:24

Yeah, because my previous supervisor, have conducted a project on the low fertility as a global phenomenon. So, in China, the total fertility of China is around one in 2023. Not only has China's fertility rate fall dramatically, but China's total natural population dropped by more than 2 million in 2023. So as you say, it is a drop dramatically. But since the Chinese government has implement and promote lots of pro-natalist policies. For example, the government encouraged young couple to have the IVF and also provide free uterine device removal.

Louisa Lim  05:21

Hold on a minute. When you say a free uterine device removal, what you're talking about is an IUD contraception, is that right?

Speaker 1  05:31

Yeah, that's right, yeah. And so with all these like policies and incentives, but we observed on the other side that young generation, for example, when the state says “You should have more children, more children, more blessing.” But for the young generation, they will say, “Oh, I already have three children,” and alongside with a photo of his or her three cats. So, so the pet, like, we call it fur babies, so the pet became like a baby for the young generation. And I think pet needs care, but young people don't need to invest as much as raising up a children for pets. And pets can also provide a kind of intimacy and companionship for the younger generation.

Graeme Smith  06:29

And Chloe, before we came on air, you mentioned you were getting these text messages encouraging you to have babies. What's actually in the text messages that are popping up on your phone?

Qiqi Huang  06:38

It was said that to have a marriage is a really good thing. Harmonies, family is the like most important things for the China's future, more child, more blessings. Something like this is not the originally called, but it conveys such meanings.

Chloe Mofei Shen  07:01

Because I've never actually received any of this kind of message before on my phone. So I'm not sure it is happening in mainland China, or is in other part of China. I'm not sure, because personally, I have never got such message. My impression of the government's policy about encourage people to get more child is they have this, you know, encourage policies like, if you give birth to a third child in your family that maybe you will be rewarded with the money or stuff, it's like that. Or if you have a third children, that maybe your kids will get easier to get into a better school, or something like that. But it's never like a message directly to your phone saying, we encourage you to have a baby or sort of that.

Louisa Lim  07:59

And Qiqi, have you actually had one of these texts, or any of these texts?

Qiqi Huang  08:03

Yes, it's in Shan, I can't remember. It's my friend in Shanxi or Shaanxi Province? So is that, maybe it's limited in that province, that things happen like that.

Graeme Smith  08:17

And so a local government's kind of taking the initiative on this. Because when I used to work in rural China, like the whole of the local government, was focused on making sure the opposite happened, that women didn't have children. I mean, they would, literally, 20 years ago, hunt people down, follow them to the city to make sure they had an abortion. Completely reversed. So, so is this happening? Do you get the sort of local experiments in trying to have more kids or what? What's going on?

Qiqi Huang  08:45

I think different province have different incentives, such as Sichuan province allowing single parents to formally register their children, and Guangdong increase public kindergarten places and housing fund laws for larger families. So different province, they have different policies, but all their goal is to increase the fertility rate.

Louisa Lim  09:11

And, Chloe amongst your circles, which are probably more sort of young urban women, what is the conversation like? Do people talk about these pro-natalist policies?

Chloe Mofei Shen  09:22

Well, actually, yeah, we do pay attention to these policies. But I think, because I live in Shanghai, so I don't get the feeling of the government pushing us to do something. I feel like the policy is going on in a kind of mild way, like the government is giving out benefits to people who are willing to have more kids, to encourage people to have more kids. But actually, I think, especially for the women in Shanghai, I think some of them are willing to have more than one kid. Yes, because most of our generation come from the one-child policy. So, a lot of us, I think a lot of the female of my age, they have had enough of this one child policy thing, so they are happy to have more than one kid. For a third kid, I think most of them, they don't want to do that, because the price, and, you know, the money and the time you have to pay to get into this parenting thing is huge. And also the expense you have to pay, especially for living in a big city like Shanghai. So, I think the price is just too high to have a third child, but I think around me, I see a lot of families having two kids. It is quite normal in Shanghai.

Louisa Lim  10:49

But it occurs to me that in the past, almost everybody got married. It was actually very rare to have single women who didn't marry. You know, the figures were like, 99 plus percent of Chinese women get married. But now it seems that sort of marriage, people not getting married, or even refusing to get married, is becoming more popular. Why? Have you had, have you done coverage on that, Chloe?

Chloe Mofei Shen  11:18

Well, I'm not sure if we have a particular topic on that, but for me, personally, I do pay attention to this phenomenon of like a woman doesn't want to get married. I think the society is being more tolerant to such figures. Like maybe, if you think about in 20 years, it's I think it's not terrible, especially for the families themselves, like the parents of these single women who doesn't want to get married. They will be really criticized from their parents and also from the society itself. But right now, I think people are being more tolerant, and they think it's a really normal thing for a woman to just choose to be married or not to be married. It's a personal choice. It's not a, you know, something you are forced to do, okay, you can choose. And if this kind of lifestyle is acceptable, I think, from both sides, from the family, from their parents, and also from the society. I think that's a really huge development, from my point of view. And also around me, I have some friends like single woman who established their idea of not getting married at all. Yeah just they decided to do so, and sometimes they do face the persuasion from their family, but it's not like years before. I think it's more tolerant now.

Graeme Smith  13:07

And Qiqi, I mean, is this different to what we're seeing in the rest of the region? Because I just got back from Taiwan, and if you saw like an actual baby in a stroller instead of a puppy, you kind of had bit of a second look. I mean, because fertility rates are down like across the region, Taiwan has the lowest, and then it's Korea, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore. I mean, what’s different about China? What’s different about the Chinese situation for women? Because marriage refusal doesn't seem to be a thing there. Is there something peculiarly Chinese about what's happening, or, particularly mainland Chinese, about what's happening in China?

Qiqi Huang  13:40

And so, as Chloe said, Shanghai, I think, is a really open and international city. And so what we now try, what we try to discuss, we need to maybe limit it in like the middle class woman, middle class well-educated woman. So, they may have the choice to think about whether they want marriage, because they are economically independent. But when we think about women in the rural area or in a less developed city, they may have a really struggle relationship with their parental family. And they maybe they need to face a really big, huge pressure from their family if they don't get married, particularly over 35. And you may also know that women over 27 is called left over women in China. So that's really a big issue for young generation. But I think for the well-educated young woman particularly grow up under the one child policy, although one child policy is really problematic. But for the only child as a girl in the family, it is a really, is a like a good policy, because all the family invest their resources into one girl. And so for these women, I think they will have more choices. And I also want to emphasize a phenomenon in China is that for women in China, marrying up is socially desirable for women. So, when these well-educated, middle-class women, when they have already reached a certain level of social status, there is no man for them. I think like to marry up. Though so, this is a kind of dilemma here. And what we observe is that young people, young women, start to look for younger men as their partners. So, the younger men may not provide enough financial support, but the younger man can provide emotional values.

Louisa Lim  13:47

Is there a name for that phenomenon? So I mean women who are marrying younger men. What is that called?

Qiqi Huang  16:20

I think in the UK it is called cougar but in China, little milk dogs.

Chloe Mofei Shen  16:27

Milk dogs. Yeah, I've heard that. I…

Qiqi Huang 16:28

Yes, that's it. That's it. I was like...

Graeme Smith  16:32

Xiao nai gou? (小奶狗 Little milk dog)

Chloe Mofei Shen  16:33

Because these men they are providing emotional values for this woman. So, they appear to be caring and gentle and soothing. It's like, they don't have like, a lot of alpha male characters, you know. So, they are more like very just like puppies. That's why they are called xiao nai gou.

Louisa Lim  17:00

But that's that is so interesting. In a year, at the moment when the official policy is kind of super hyper masculine, there seems to be a disconnect, right?

Chloe Mofei Shen  17:15

Yeah, and I think you can see how the power structure is shifting. When the male used to be very dominant in a relationship, but right now, for some of the cases in China, especially for well educated women, they are kind of more dominant in the relationship. So, they… they are superior, and they can look for men who is, yeah.

Graeme Smith  17:48

And, I mean, it's so interesting. Do you think it's mostly about popular culture changing? Because I've always been struck, even for 20 years ago, the most popular things on television, even in rural China, were these Korean soap operas where the men were unimaginably soft and beautiful. I mean, they just had this incredible skin. And yet, you know, you look at the men you’d see in the street and go, well, there’s none of those around. I mean, it almost seems like these, these soft men, have manifested and are meeting a demand.

Chloe Mofei Shen  18:21

All this pop culture is here because people need it. And, like, all these, because, you know, in the traditional value, men are supposed to be like masculine and supposed to be like alpha and fierce. But, but like, why are these you know, like, soft male figures become so popular in this area, it’s because women likes them.

Louisa Lim  18:48

How much do you think it’s driven by economic reasons? I mean, women's per capita income is growing faster than men's. And you know, we're seeing the rise of this she economy, where women are just spending more money on themselves, because damn it, you know, I earned it, I want to spend it on me. Do you think the that economic side of things is driving, is a driver there?

Chloe Mofei Shen  19:13

Yeah, I think so. Because I think women are paying more attention to themselves, like way more than before. So, it's everything is about wanting to make me happy. So, I spent money to make me happy. That is why I also think when women, when if they go into a relationship, it's like if they make the decision to see if they, they are happy about being in this relationship. It's not about I have to accomplish some, you know, achievement that society requires me. But it's that if, if I enjoy this relationship or not, if not, I would just, I would just throw away. That's why I think we are seeing this increase about divorcement. It's because women, they don't enjoy this marriage anymore, so they have the power to just say, okay, I want to leave. I don't want it anymore. And I think because they have more money than before, than their peers before, so they have the power to make the decision.

Qiqi Huang  20:29

Yeah, and I think women are less inclined to marry due to the responsibility and the cost involved in building up a family. Also, I would like to talk a bit about on the men's side. So for men, maybe they can't earn as much as their father, their grandfather. I mean the percentage in the family income, but also with a very high housing cost, many men are becoming boomerang children. So they live with their parents. But maybe others are refashioning themselves into a more feminine I mean, “feminine little milk dogs”, and so they can care for older women. So, they may get they can get some financial support from the older women. And older women can get emotional and sexual needs so they all get what they want.

Graeme Smith  21:36

One phenomenon I'm curious about is one of the runaway successes on China's social networks has been Xiaohongshu 小红书 (RedNote), this app that is, I think, 70 percent populated by young women, but that is mainly about selling. So, I mean, do you think part of this is the Xiaohongshu phenomenon, that there’s now a space where women can talk about these desires, these sort of commercial but also feminist desires?

Qiqi Huang  22:03

Yeah, Xiaohongshu has already become the most popular social media platform. And I’m the very first user of the Xiaohongshu first like when it's all about skincare at the very beginning. But and now there are all things on that, like, for example, even academia promotion on Xiaohongshu. So, its influence is huge. So, I think more women start to talk about their difficulties, maybe in intimacy and in marriage in Xiaohongshu. So, this platform, provides an opportunity for people to tell stories, sharing experience, so they might get some understanding of that, how marriage looks like for the young women. And maybe give a chance for them to rethink about, to think about and rethink about the marriage is not like the end of a fairy tale, but it is really a beginning of the other kind of life.

Graeme Smith  23:18

So Chloe, I can see you nodding there. Is Xiaohongshu reaching your readers as well?

Chloe Mofei Shen  23:22

Yeah, of course. I mean, I think every Chinese woman knows about Xiaohongshu, especially in the urban areas. Like I'm on Xiaohongshu all the time, because it's such a popular app right now. And I think it did, it’s quite influential on several points. I think one of the influential parts about Xiaohongshu is that there are so many real users on there, and most of them are women. So, there are so many influencers on there showing about their lifestyles. So, it’s about, you can see all these high quality posts about how to build a high quality lifestyle on every part, like on fashion, cosmetics and outdoors, like sports or even emotional. So, you can find everything on Xiaohongshu right now. And I think it also plays a really big part of, like, all these women demonstrating their lifestyle, so people started to understand that it's okay to, you know, to have this desire, like, if you wanted to have a better life. It’s not judgeable, like you can you if, if you just work on yourself really hard, and you can buy the stuff you want to buy. And it's a desire that can be accepted. And it's also, it's visualized on Xiaohongshu, so it's very obvious there. Yeah, and I think it kind of creates this mindset that it’s okay. I mean, like, you can have that woman can have desire, and you can spend money on yourself, and you can have that kind of lifestyle, it’s okay. And but I think the downside of that is, like, I can also see a lot of the women, they are starting to feel like it could be a trap also, you know, like you could be brainwashed by this kind of lifestyle. Like, if you see all this luxury lifestyle of these influencers, like on Instagram as well, like all these beauties that they show. Like the good part can see on the lifestyle, then you it could be a downside, like, oh, this is all my life goal could be. It's like buying stuff and buying stuff all the time. So, I think more and more people are realizing that it could be a trap, and they started to criticize this kind of lifestyle. And I can also see this happening right now.

Louisa Lim  26:12

Qiqi, I wanted to ask you about a paper that you wrote where you're tracing the use of this term married donkey, which is denigrating women who've decided to get married, right?

Qiqi Huang  26:27

Yeah, so married women have been called as married donkey, but now the term has been censored and banned on Weibo.

Louisa Lim  26:40

When we when did that happen, the censoring of the term married donkey?

Qiqi Huang  26:45

I think it’s around 2019, or 2020, something. Because I think why this term appear is because it is viewed as a feminist behavior. That group of feminists who claim they are feminists, they think women should not choose marriage and women should be staying single. Because if you choose marriage, that means you choose to be part of the patriarchal society and what you work, what you earn from your work, you need to support the family. You just like, you support the man. So that's the logic. So, they call those women who get married as married donkey. It doesn't mean that the married donkey, the married woman pay lots of effort, but it means it is a degrading term. What I try to argue is that this kind of behavior is a kind of neoliberalism, neoliberal feminism. So, because it's a kind of othering married woman from the woman group, and so that's really problematic. And now the term has been banned and censored, but new term appears, and that's the issue for like, the feminist group online.

Louisa Lim  28:16

What is the new term?

Qiqi Huang  28:17

It's called like jiaoqi 娇妻. It means a spoilt wife.

Louisa Lim  28:23

Spoilt?

Qiqi Huang  28:24

It’s just like you need to serve your husband. You need to obey the rules in your families. So that's really opposite to the feminist, like the awareness that you must be an independent woman, something. So, you can see the controversial discussion there.

Graeme Smith  28:48

And has there been, Chloe, has there been kind of a backlash, if you like, against the backlash by maybe people saying that these feminist ideas are kind of imported from the West, and there’s sort of this hostile Western attack on China. Is that something you guys face?

Chloe Mofei Shen  29:04

I think for feminism in China, I think it’s only starting. So, you can see it has not become a really big thing in China. I only noticed some of the social media accounts that they constantly posting like feminism content. But it’s hard to say, because some of the content are really, like Qiqi said, calling married woman like married donkey. It’s not really, I don’t think it’s feminism. It’s just something you say to drive traffic, you know, to provoke people. That’s it. That’s not what I see, how feminism should work. There’s still a long way for the Chinese feminism to go, like how to actually get the ideas right and to not try to just provoke people by putting out these kind of terms and for dividing people, not for unite them.

Louisa Lim 29:18

I mean, I wonder how possible it is with Chinese feminism to even develop, given that so many of the really well-known feminists have been targeted, as you know, political dissidents and feminism. And in some cases, has been seen, as you know, subversive, a subversive activity. Qiqi, do you think that a Chinese feminist movement could even develop?

Qiqi Huang  30:58

Yeah, I think so, although it is hard. So, before 2015 we have the movement, feminist movement in practice, so we can see the Feminist Five. But after 2015 and all those feminist activists move on to online spheres, and the most important one, I think, is the #metoo movement in 2018 follow after the global #metoo movement. So, I think it still has a possibility to have feminist movement online, and it is a really important place for women to speak out like for in the sexual harassment cases or for the domestic violence cases, I think, yeah. So, you mentioned the limitation, yeah that we have the limitation, like, for example, the censorship. But I think censorship also provide an opportunity to make the feminist movement to have more Chinese characteristic, for example, in the #metoo movement, #metoo, the term, has been banned. But Chinese women, they develop new terms, and it can be understand between each other. And we keep develop new terms for this movement, and we try to save those data, to save those stories from the victims, and I think that's incredible. So, I do think that feminist movement will continue, but definitely will they will face different challenges.

Chloe Mofei Shen  33:00

Yeah, I wanted to add to Qiqi because I'm kind of in the entertainment industry. So, what I observe about the feminism in this entertainment industry is that more and more female script writers and female directors and female actresses, they are speaking up about the feminism, not in a very broad way. But in a way that they add more female narratives to these storytellings, like in the movies, like also in like TV series and also in talk shows. So, I think that is one very big trend now here in China. I think the industry, the entertainment industry, is kind of dominated by male narratives, so that females are portrayed as being submissive in most of the stories. But right now, as more and more female directors and female script writers, they are in the industry, and they have the power to speak up. Then you can see all these stories, like telling the woman's perspective about a story. I think that really makes a difference.

Louisa Lim  34:25

I just wanted to jump in there and say that when I was at university and I did a class on Chinese film, and week after week, we watched these Chinese movies, and every film either the woman died or she disappeared. Normally, she, something bad happened to the woman. And within every film, within about half an hour, you know, all the women do is they come on, they cry, and then they die, or they're killed.

Graeme Smith  34:54

After they use the words fang kai wo, fang kai wo [放开我，放开我 “let me go, let me go”], it’s always in there.

Louisa Lim  34:58

Do you think that narrative is really changing?

Chloe Mofei Shen  35:01

Yeah, it is. It is changing. I mean, if you pay attention to these new films coming out in China, especially the ones directed by female director. So that you can see that the male roles are being like a second in these films, and the woman characters, they are being dominant in these films. And I think all of these directors, when they come out, they always say that how important it is to put in a woman’s perspective in the storytelling. Because men and women, when they see a story, they see different things. I think that in previous movies, especially in the ones directed by male crew, you can always see the female role like it has function. It's not a complete role. It just plays a function there in the movie, and then it ends. So, it’s not a very complete character. So, you cannot see a very complicated woman figure in a Chinese film.

Louisa Lim  36:19

Women are plot points, but they have no character, right?

Chloe Mofei Shen  36:22

Yeah, that’s the thing in the previous I think the industry, the entertainment industry, but things are really changing right now. And I think I can also see that the challenge for this is it's kind of like the male character, the male audiences, they are not happy about this. You know, they are trying to ban these kinds of movies. They are voting to not go to see these movies. So, I think one of the challenge is not about the censorship in China. It’s about this conflict between the two genders. I think it’s getting more and more fierce. I think there is one very famous Chinese stand-up comedian. Her name is Yang Li. She’s really popular, and she really plays a big role in this feminism talk show. But she got banned by the male audiences because the male, they feel offended by her talk show.

Graeme Smith  37:37

That's because she described them as being ordinary. I think that was the...

Chloe Mofei Shen  37:40

Yeah, and she, she just said this one sentence, very simple. She’s just calling the males ordinary and confident for no reason. And I think she's become popular because a lot of females, they feel the same way. That's why we root for her. Like, okay, you are telling the things we feel all the time, but don't know how to say.

Graeme Smith  38:07

One thing, I think it was you that said that the older generation were actually quite supportive of their children's decision not to have kids, which sort of surprised me a bit. I mean, I would have thought there'd be a lot of resistance from the, you know, the grandparents, in a way, looking for the hoped grandchildren. I mean, how does that work?

Qiqi Huang  38:27

Because now the parent, grandparent, the government, don't have enough support for their older lives, so they need to find support from their children, which means they may need financial support or care support from their children. So maybe that's a part of reason that the older generation can tolerate the young generation that don’t want to have any more children because of their choice. Otherwise, they may [be] losing the opportunities that their children may offer their financial care, something. So, I think that's part of reason, and for maybe another thing is that young generation, when they get economically independent, so they have the choice to choose their life. And now more and more young generation and old generation, they live apart and maybe really far from each other. So, the parents can’t interfere their children's decision, but I think for me, like in those less developed cities, more parents still want their children to have children, to get married. And maybe that's why more and more young generation want to go to the developed city so they can escape from their parental family.

Louisa Lim  40:03

I’m going to ask, I guess, a final question. I mean, it seems to me that the possibility of an actual feminist movement in China is quite small because the government only permits a certain amount of sort of feminist sentiment to occur before they start clamping down. You know, we see this continuing influence of Confucianism, this sort of hyper masculine administration that is targeting feminist activists and is clamping down on various forms of expression. Qiqi, do you think an actual change is happening, or is this just kind of more of the same?

Qiqi Huang  40:48

I think there is something changing. And I think for particularly for the Gen Z, so they will have their own ways of doing feminism. Because I’m not Gen Z, I’m not that young anymore. So, I really look forward to see how things will, how they will do things in their own ways of... Like for us, maybe we think digital platform has already provide a good opportunity for us to speak out, to find like-minded people as we can't do that without internet. But for the Gen Z, maybe they will develop more ideas, because they have really different education from our generation. So, I will give them a hope. Yeah.

Louisa Lim  41:50

And Chloe, do you think that the sort of combined financial strength of women and the social changes mean that they are able to overcome any blocks by the government to actually stop them from being feminist?

Chloe Mofei Shen  42:10

When you think about like Confucianism or traditional Chinese culture, you always think about like for controlling the people or making people submissive. But to my point of view, I see a lot of good qualities coming from the traditional Chinese culture, which have been neglected by most of us because we are kind of having this educational background which is so different from the traditional culture. But I also see a wave like the traditional Chinese culture is coming back, and it's coming back in a good way. Like when I see all these literatures from like Confucianism, I really, actually think it has some, some really good part that can guide us to achieve a better life. Because it invokes the good qualities in people, like being nice to others and I think, because the woman nowadays they are, they have this power to find different ways, I think. And also I think we are being very tolerant about giving the opportunity to take the time to find our ways. And I think you just have to, you just have to have patience and have time. And there is a way there. I think I’m really optimistic about that.

Graeme Smith  43:45

Optimistic note. I don’t think we've ever ended on an optimistic note on our show. That’s fantastic. Maybe last time we did one on cooking. Chloe, Qiqi, thanks for joining us.

Qiqi Huang  43:54

Thank you for having me.

Chloe Mofei Shen  43:55

Thank you.

Graeme Smith  44:01

You’ve been listening to the Little Red Podcast, bringing you China from beyond the Beijing beltway. Many thanks to our guests and to my co-host, Louisa Lim. We're on air thanks to sport from the Australian Centre on China in the World. Our editing is by Andy Hazel, background research by Wing Kuang. Our music is by Susie Wilkins, and our cartoons and GIFs are courtesy of Seb Danta, bye for now.