Chinese men are just like 'cattle'

What makes Chinese men tick? That question has received attention not only from scholars, but from advertising and media professionals, too, because anyone who can answer it will have a gold mine of marketing data on their hands.

Masculinity studies have developed greatly over the past 30 years, fueled initially by the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s that propelled gender onto media and scholarly agendas, said Derek Hird, a senior lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Westminster in London.

The field has expanded to include numerous perspectives from scholars from many different backgrounds, looking at masculinity everywhere since Anglophone sociologists formulated theories on the matter in the 1980s, he said.