Seeking western men: Mail‐order brides under China’s global rise. By MonicaLiu, Stanford University Press. 2022

Based on repeated interviews in China and across USA and in-depth longitudinal ethnography conducted between 2008 and 2019, Liu provides an engrossing account of how and why women born in the 1960s and 1970s in China chose to date western men online. Adopting an intersectionality approach to examine lively vignettes and detailed personal stories, the analysis explores the different experiences of these women by their class and family circumstances. Specifically, the research compares Chinese women who are “financially flexible” because they have their own property and savings, and Chinese women who are “financially burdened” because they are single mothers who need to support their children's educational costs alone or because they otherwise lack financial security. By means of comparison, the reader learns about differences between and within these two groups of women with respect to their motivations for seeking a western man, and with respect to their experiences of courtship and post-migration marriage. Liu's analysis is replete with fascinating empirical and conceptual insights throughout. One set of insights pertains to changing gender relations and gender norms in China and their intersections with globalization and class stratification as drivers of migration. Liu demonstrates that, contrary to common assumptions about transnational online dating by women in the global South, the women she met pursued international marriage migration not in response to western influence on their society. Instead, they pursued marriage migration in response to macro-level structural and cultural circumstances and changes that made them feel despair about their lives in China. Some of the women in Liu's study wanted to escape the combination of gender and age discrimination in marriage and labor markets in China. For instance, the ex-wives of the nouveau rich who had tired of cheating Chinese men wanted to find western men who the dating agencies portrayed as more open with respect to a woman's age and as more faithful than Chinese men. Meanwhile, some financially struggling women, who felt daunted by their impending retirement and by the privatization of health care services in China, wanted to migrate to seek greater economic security in their old age. A further set of insights pertain to the situatedness and the fluidity of the most esteemed forms of masculinity in China and globally. Specifically, Liu explores the implications of the ways in which, with the economic rise of the east and with increasing socioeconomic polarization in both the west and the east, class has increasingly trumped race and nationality in structuring hierarchies of masculinity. This is even as the dating agencies Liu researched still tried to represent American men to their Chinese female clients in ways that reproduced hierarchies privileging men from western countries. Indeed, in Liu's study, the men who searched for Chinese wives online were uniformly from lower middle-class and working-class backgrounds in the USA. Moreover, their status and prospects in local and global marriage markets had been undermined by the stagnation of agriculture, manufacturing and small businesses in the USA over the past four decades. Nevertheless, the men in Liu's research belonged to a class and a generation that still aspired to a marriage script whereby the woman did the housework, while the man was the breadwinner. As Liu reveals, though, even as some of the Chinese women performed “emphasized femininity” to try to conform to the men's wishes, the women's hopes of the men were informed by expectations of masculinity grounded in China's social conditions. Notably, the women expected the men to express their affection for and commitment to them through generous economic provision, and sought to empower themselves by using their femininity to gain access to the men's financial resources rather than necessarily by engaging in paid work. But the women often encountered pecuniary and controlling behaviors from the men. In circumstances where both parties had mismatched expectations or else had misrepresented their possibilities to deliver on their side of this patriarchal bargain, disillusionment resulted. Liu's book contributes powerfully to a wider sociological literature that examines how interpersonal relationships are influenced by market forces and by globalization. Concurrently, sensitive to the impact of historical structural and economic conditions on biography, the book also emphasizes generation as a further important intersectional influence on intimacy and agency. Indeed, the epilogue updates the readers about the fate of the dating agency and reflects on the marriage expectations of Chinese women born in the 1980s and how these differ from those of the previous generations, with housing pressures contributing to a new set of structural circumstances. Meanwhile, the analysis also considers how women's situated strategies to pursue individual goals through patriarchal bargains impact on wider gendered dynamics, which at a group level intersect with class to unevenly intensify women's structural disadvantages. In this excellent book, Liu's stories from her superb fieldwork speak for themselves, always with a sharp eye to their sociological theoretical significance. Her monograph will be enthusiastically welcomed by students and researchers of ethnography, and the sociology of gender, globalization, migration and China.