In China, as elsewhere, celebrity gossip and public policy tend not to intersect. The boundary dissolved late last month, however, when Xu Jinglei, a popular (and single) 41-year-old actress, explained in an interview that she had traveled to the United States in 2013 to freeze nine of her eggs. Although she could have had that procedure performed in China, she wouldn't have been permitted, as long as she wasn't married, to have those eggs implanted for a pregnancy.
Xu's trip abroad has sparked a vigorous debate at home about whether China's restrictions on in vitro fertilization — and the social values informing them — have failed to keep pace with the country's economic advances.
China's debate over IVF is partly a debate over single motherhood. China still reveres — and its government still promotes — traditional family structures. Women are expected to marry and bear a child to carry on a family line; those who wait past their mid-twenties are widely stigmatized as "leftover women." And the only status that's considered worse for women than not marrying and having children is having one without a spouse.