An agent showing a housing project to buyers at a real estate fair in Beijing. Property prices in the city have risen by up to 800 per cent over the past eight years. -- PHOTO: AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
BEIJING: In the realm of eligible bachelors, 28-year-old Wang Lin has a lot to recommend him.A college-educated insurance salesman, he has a flawless set of white teeth, a tolerable karaoke voice and a three-year-old Nissan with furry blue seat covers. 'My friends tell me I'm quite handsome,' he said confidently in English one recent evening.
But by the exacting standards of single Chinese women, it seems he lacks that bankable attribute known as property. Given that a cramped, two-bedroom apartment on the dusty fringe of Beijing sells for about US$150,000 (S$187,000), his US$900-a-month salary means he may forever be condemned to the ranks of tenants.
Last year, he said, this deficiency prompted a high-end dating agency to reject his application. In recent months, half a dozen women have turned down a second meeting after learning that he had no means to buy a home.
'Sometimes I wonder if I will ever find a wife,' said Mr Wang, who lives with his parents, both retired factory workers. 'I feel like a loser.'
There have been many undesirable repercussions of China's unrelenting real estate boom, which has driven prices up by 140 per cent nationwide since 2007, and by as much as 800 per cent in Beijing over the past eight years.
Working-class buyers have been frozen out of the market while about 65 million apartments nationwide bought as speculative investments sit empty.
Largely overlooked is the collateral damage to urban young professionals, especially men, who increasingly find themselves lovelorn and despairing as more women hold out for a mate with a deed.
Although there are few concrete ways to measure the scope of involuntary bachelorhood, more than 70 per cent of single women in a recent survey said they would tie the knot only with a prospective husband who owned a home.
Among the qualities they seek in a mate, half of them said that financial considerations ranked above all else.
Not surprisingly, 54 per cent of single men ranked beauty first, said the survey of 32,000 people which was jointly issued by the Chinese Research Association of Marriage and Family and the All-China Women's Federation.
Given China's gender imbalance, an outgrowth of a cultural preference for boys and its stringent family-planning policies, as many as 24 million men could be perpetual bachelors by 2020, according to the survey.
Many women are unapologetic about their priorities. Ms Gao Yanan, a 27-year-old accountant with a fondness for Ray-Bans and Zara pantsuits, said the matter was not up for debate.
'It's the guy's responsibility to tell a girl right away whether he owns an apartment,' she said. 'It gives her a chance not to fall in love.'
With such women on the prowl, men who do have their own homes have come up with techniques to weed out the covetous and the inordinately materialistic.
Mr Liu Binbin, 30, an editor at a publishing house in Beijing, said he often arrived for first dates by bus, even though he has a car. 'If they ask me questions like 'Do you live with your parents?' I know what they are after,' he said.
Mr Liu said he went on 20 unfulfilling blind dates before finding a suitable girlfriend last year. He said he knew she was the one after three months. 'The whole time she thought I didn't own an apartment and she still wanted me,' he said. 'Someone like that is rare.'
NEW YORK TIMES
