“Ran some numbers with my wife today to see how much money it really takes to raise a kid:
All of our pregnancy checkups added up to about 7000 RMB.
Vaginal delivery, roughly 3000 RMB. If you need a C-section, then add another 6000 RMB.
Formula for five years, roughly 20,000 RMB.
Diapers, roughly 5000 RMB.
Taking the kiddo to the hospital due to sickness: really hard to estimate this one. Right now, going to the hospital for a mycoplasma infection takes four-figures.
Going to public daycare for three years: about 30,000 RMB.
From primary school to university, 16 years worth of food, tuition, extracurricular costs, and other living expenses, about 10,000 a year? For a total of 160K.
Add all that up, and you need 226,000. Of course, this is just a super rough estimate, and there’s a lot of factors that could change things, like how wealthy your family is, how much you want to invest in your kid, how healthy they are, what region you live in, etc.
I welcome any parents to share their childrearing experience in the comments, so people have a frame of reference.”
Comments say, “Just the first two points is pretty bullshit.”
“You’re being way too conservative. From the moment they’re born to when they go to university, it’s gonna take well over a million RMB.”
“You gotta at least budget 100K a year for the seventh point.”
“Ignore everything else, how do you figure tuition would only be10K a year? In southern Jiangsu, just tutoring costs minimum 20-30K.”
“Hey, I just got married around Independence Day [1st of October in China], and I didn’t ask for any bride price. My husband bought a marital house for us, paid off in full, so we have hardly any savings left. My family paid 50,000 RMB towards furnishing the house. Since I’m not getting a bride price, I wanted a set of gold jewellery. My husband said that he really had no money left, and he showed me his bank account balance. It was just enough to cover the wedding, and we’d have to start over from square one once we were married.
My family insisted on the gold jewellery though. I mean, we already waived the bride price. We can’t waive the jewellery too. He spent 40,000 on the jewellery, and he borrowed the money from a friend. We got about 70,000 in wedding gifts, and he used that money to buy a new car. He sold his old car for 90,000, and put the money together to buy a 150K new car. At that point, we only had 20,000 in savings.
As soon as I got the jewellery, I’ve been keeping it in a box. I only wore it at my wedding, and never opened it since. Just kept it in my vanity drawer.
At the end of the month, when I got paid, I wired some money to my husband so he can go pay his friend back, but he told me that was unnecessary. That he’d already sold my jewellery to pay his friend back.
I really honestly thought about divorce. From the moment we started dating to when we got married, he never talks to me about any major decisions. He always goes home to talk with his mom and just tell me what decision he’s made. I don’t know if his mom put him up to selling my jewellery, but his mom knew about it for sure. And nobody told me until it was all done.
We weren’t that far off from having enough money to pay back the debt. I don’t understand why he’d sell my jewellery to pay his friend back.”
Comments say, “I only got to the second paragraph before I got too frustrated to keep reading. No bride price + fully paid off house on the guy’s side + woman is paying for furnishing. You’ve got every red flag there is. Do you die if you don’t get married or something?”
“You’re still not divorcing him? “I’ll buy another set for you once I have money?” Don’t believe men’s bullshit. He won’t buy shit for you until the day he dies.”
“Thank god you guys are out there marrying all the shit men.”
Lately, in Zhejiang, a court in Shaoxing City ruled on a divorce hearing. The parties involved got married after knowing each other for a mere three months. The woman paid for the house, car, and their living expenses, but the man still demanded that she do all the housework. Based on our investigation, the 26-year-old Qin worked at the same office as her dad. Her good looks attracted a lot of her male coworkers, including Hui. Hui learned that Qin’s father was higher level management in the company, and began to pursue Qin. Qin’s father approved of the highly capable Hui too, and told his daughter to not pass this one up. Qin couldn’t take her dad’s constant pressuring anymore, and married Hui after 3 months. After their marriage, they’ve been having constant conflicts. City girl Qin and country boy Hui had a lot of differences in their ideas of how to go about living. Hui believed that Qin should do all the housework. Qin claims that the money to buy their house, their car, and even do their wedding was all paid for by her family, specifically in the hopes that Hui would treat her well in daily life. But Hui is super ungrateful, annoyed that Qin’s family bought her a BMW but only bought him a normal car. And he won’t let her hire a maid or travel overseas, insisting that she save all her money for a second house. Finally, after failing to arbitrate this case, the judge ruled in favour of divorce.
Comments say, “He married into her family and still wants to wear the pants? If he has that much dignity, why didn’t he just marry someone his own class?”
“Lol, she paid money to get herself a slave driver.”
“A great candidate for begging for food on your feet, but demanding people feed you on their knees.”
“Fuck. Just two days after giving birth to my daughter, and I’m already full of regret.
I’m regretting why I waited so long to have a baby! Just a few years earlier, and I’d have a pretty, 15, 16-year-old girl to dress up with and go shopping with! Now I understand why Ren Ruyi [character from recent TV show that was super baby-obsessed] was so insistent on having a daughter with somebody!
I thank the world a hundred times a day that I had a daughter.”
Comments say, “Travelling the world with a 14, 15-year-old sweetheart at 40-years-old—that’s me alright.”
“Oh, this is nothing yet. When they’re 2, 3-years-old, they’re the cutest things in the world. You won’t even want to ever leave your house.”
“As someone with no daughter and no intention for a second baby, I’m so envious I could cry.”
“A picture of a woman in a cafe in Iran in the 70s, before the Muslim Revolution. So, never believe too hard in what you have today.”
Comments say, “So? While you’re jibing Iran for conservatism, why don’t you dare to say a word about women going through the same thing in Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates?”
“Don’t fucking bullshit people. If you just look at the dance parties the Kong family threw back in Nationalist China, would you think that period was prosperous and peaceful too?”
”Okay, so fucking leave then. Even if you don’t have money, you can illegally immigrate somewhere else. Anything’s better than getting sarcastic on the internet here.”
Under the hashtag #Woman stabbed to death by husband during divorce cooldown period, a blogger writes, “To some extent, a divorce cooldown period is a way to protect scumbag men, because fundamentally speaking, a divorce cooldown period is just a continuation of mixed finances.
During the cooldown period, a scumbag man who’s financially disadvantageous could use his identity as the legal spouse of the woman to investigate his rich wife’s income situation, assets, etc. And make sure that his wife can’t transfer any property away.
So long as he can indefinitely extend the divorce cooldown period, then not only does he keep a hardworking, capable wife that shoulders all the family responsibilities, but every cent of money she makes during that time is still mutual property. He still gets half of it.
Of course, there’s cases of men getting screwed over by this too.
#MIL passes away during divorce cooldown period and husband refuses to split the inheritance
This is a case where the man got a 5 million RMB inheritance during the divorce cooldown period, and he legally has to split that with his wife too.”
Comments say, “So, does this guy qualify for the death sentence or not?”
“Louis the Thirteenth was tortured by his intestinal inflammation. Once, he was in so much pain that he was almost rolling around in his bedroom, and the female minister who lived downstairs of him sent someone up to tell him, “You’re making too much noise. I’ve got a migraine and can’t sleep.” And the King replied in a fury, “Paris is very big. You can find somewhere else to live!”
That is to say, the King of France, when faced with someone who’s entirely unsympathetic towards his pain, and even sent someone to tell him to shut up, all he can really do is to stop letting that person live and eat with them for free. France’s absolute monarchy was still young and naive in the 17th century. It can’t compare at all to China’s monarchy.”
Comments say, “Hahahahaha he’s too civilised.”
“When Louis the Fourteenth got a crush on a woman, he had to sneak around to cheat with her. I honestly couldn’t grasp that concept as a little kid.”
“The case that’s been blowing up on the internet, the one where the guy found out all three of his daughters aren’t his? Turns out, for all three kids, there was pretty clear proof that he never even had intercourse with his wife in the month that they would’ve been conceived. If he had the least bit of sex education, he wouldn’t have to wait until the third daughter to figure out they weren’t his. So see, knowledge really does change destinies. You don’t just have to get good at maths and physics, you’ve gotta study sex ed too!”
Comments say, “Sigh, society’s just too degenerate these days. In my work, in my personal experience, men and women have relationships that are absolute messes. It’s a shame to morality. There’s no virtue. This case is a monumental event that shows us something really has to be done about this, or else our whole society is gonna get infiltrated and broken apart.”
“Maybe he’s infertile?”
“It’s not that he doesn’t have common sense. He’s just being an ostrich. If it weren’t for the fact that his wife left him to begin with, he’d keep living with her. Even if all three kids weren’t his.”
“If the woman doesn’t want to get pregnant with his seed, even if he was sowing every day, it wouldn’t matter.”
[This weibo post isn’t actually on the trending posts. It’s only got 50 comments about 50 reposts. It’s a weibo post that was recommended to me in particular by the algorithm. Normally, I skip these posts that aren’t actually drawing a lot of attention in China, but well…it seems wrong when I encounter something like this to just skip past and not help spread the word.]
A woman holds up her national ID to report a CEO of a nationally-funded corporation in Guangxi for attempting to rape her, claiming to have suffered great hard to her mental state and body. She has severe depression now. She reported the incident right away to relevant authorities, and never got any kind of reply. She’s now begging people on the internet to help her get justice.
The comment section is full of people spamming, “Investigate this now.”