Growing Pains: What’s Behind China’s Obsession With Height?

Hatty Liu

Faced with still-rampant height discrimination in society, Chinese parents go to great lengths to make their kids tall

Jiang Yong, a 32-year-old programmer from Hubei province, still remembers when his fourth-grade teacher asked him to repeat a grade—for no other reason than because he wasn’t as tall as his classmates. “My grades weren’t too bad in elementary school,” he recalls with a chuckle.

Today, at a height of 162 centimeters (5 foot 3 inches), Jiang is the shortest in his family and below the average height of 175.7 centimeters (5 foot 8 inches) for 19-year-old males in China, according to 2020 figures published in British medical journal The Lancet—and still below the more conservative estimate of 169.7 centimeters (5 foot 6 inches) for adult males from the State Council, China’s cabinet, the same year.

Growing up, Jiang felt he was too short to try out for sports. As an adult, he has had other experiences that he suspects were due to people’s negative reaction to his height: such as being rejected by partners at the swing dance events he regularly attends in Beijing or, once, at a speed-dating masquerade, where the participants couldn’t see each other’s faces.

“I think being short does give you a sense of inferiority...and being tall gives you an advantage in dating and other areas,” he tells TWOC. “I’m already an introverted person, so in addition to my height, I don’t get much attention in social settings and I feel like I don’t fit in.”

Height discrimination is not unique to China: Various studies around the world have suggested that height is correlated with higher earnings and career advancement. But the problem is heightened here, with intense competition for job and educational resources, and little public consensus on discrimination.

Few countries in the world specifically prohibit employers from discriminating against job-seekers on the basis of height. Though a few states in the US have legislation against “arbitrary” job discrimination, and the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission advises employers against inquiring about applicants’ height, it is not a protected characteristic at the federal level (unlike race or gender).

In China, Article 33 of the Constitution states that all citizens are “equal” before the law, but this may be too broad to affect discrimination on an individual level. It’s still routine to see job ads openly list minimum height and other aesthetic requirements for non-physical roles, such as customer service or even nursing, and this has led to several attempted lawsuits.

To date, only one has made it to court: the 2002 case of Jiang Tao, who sued the Chengdu branch of the People’s Bank of China for advertising a civil service role that required male applicants to be over 168 centimeters tall and female applicants to be over 155 centimeters. As the bank later removed the requirement, the court rejected Jiang’s claims.

Anxious about their children's chances of success, today’s parents are taking active measures to ensure that their children don’t (literally) fall short of the competition in the future job and dating market. Up to the start of the pandemic, the Changchun High-Tech Group, China’s leading producer of human growth hormones, saw its market value increase over 100-fold since it first began trading publicly in 2008.

Known colloquially as “height-increase shots (增高针),” growth hormone injections are one of the more extreme methods that parents have turned to in hopes of taller kids. Another is having their school-aged children assessed for “bone age” to determine whether they are likely to start puberty early (thus finish growing earlier than their peers), and getting puberty blockers. In a 2021 report by China Youth Daily, a Chongqing clinic specializing in bone age assessment said it could receive up to 100 bone X-rays of children per day from various hospitals, and up to 200 during the summer holidays.

Besides medical interventions, parents also resort to lifestyle changes and folk remedies. Growing up, Jiang Yong’s parents gave him calcium pills to eat, and he tried to exercise more in college in hopes of gaining a few more centimeters.

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