Opting Out, Fitting In: Non-Marriage and Non-Childbearing Discourse Among Chinese Women on RedNote

Sammanfattning

In recent years, “not getting married or having children” has become a highly active discourse on China’s social media, especially on RedNote (Xiaohongshu), a platform whose user base is predominantly young urban women. This study conducts a multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) of 25 posts on RedNote to investigate the discourse of non-marriage and non-childbearing among Chinese women. It draws on Rosalind Gill’s postfeminist theory and José van Dijck’s platform logic framework, supplemented by concepts of family scripts and intimate publics. The analysis proceeds across three layers: mechanism, content, and ideology. The findings are threefold: First, the discourse operates primarily through affective connection. Through the multimodal coordination of titles, videos, and comment sections, users are assembled into an intimate public, while platform mechanisms further reinforce this emotionalized and low political-risk form of content. Second, narratives of freedom always negotiate and coexist with traditional family norms, with two typical figure of the mother and the aunt. The mother functions as the embodied agent of normative transmission, and the aunt shows the deviation yet conditioned on economic capital and filial compliance. Third, the discourse systematically frames non-marriage and non-childbearing as individual choice, packaging freedom through consumerist imagery. While it appears to promote empowerment and freedom on the surface, it ultimately reproduces the ideological conditions it seeks to resist. These findings are further discussed in China’s specific political and historical context, including socialist legacy, neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics, and Confucian values, the last of which is connected to the concept of queer temporality, thereby situating the Chinese case within a broader cross-cultural critique of normative life timelines.