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Beijing-No white gown for Li Rong on her wedding day. No veil either. A husband was there, but Li wasn't planning on connubial bliss.
When Li, 35, a former captain in the People's Liberation Army and a rising star in the world of book design, decided to get married she hustled down to the registry office with her fiance, signed her name and promptly went back to living alone.
"Of course I love my husband," she said at a local restaurant as she plunged her chopsticks into a basket of steamed dumplings. "But we had a mutual agreement. Freedom was the priority."
Across this rapidly modernizing metropolis of 12.6 million people, links to Chinese traditions are being sundered. Much of Beijing's classical architecture-the houses built around courtyards, the temples and traditional shops-have been razed to make way for glass- walled office blocks. And now, a growing number of young Chinese are reworking the traditional marriage to accommodate their lifestyles.
"I'm a SOHO," Li explained, "a 'small-office, home-office' person. I want to work for myself, by myself, to be free."
So-called SOHOs, people who work by themselves, are an increasingly common phenomenon here. And Li has extended her search for freedom with what people here call a "walking marriage."
Translated into the lingo of American culture, women like Li seem to be seeking "personal space," rather than, say, the sexual freedom of the American counterculture movements of the...