Family Life in China

William R. Jankowiak, Robert L. Moore

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745685557, 9780745685540
• eBook ISBN: 9780745685588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

The family has long been viewed as both a microcosm of the state and a barometer of social change in China. It is no surprise, therefore, that the dramatic changes experienced by Chinese society over the past century have produced a wide array of new family systems.

Where a widely accepted Confucian-based ideology once offered a standard framework for family life, current ideas offer no such uniformity. Ties of affection rather than duty have become prominent in determining what individuals feel they owe to their spouses, parents, children, and others. Chinese millennials, facing a world of opportunities and, at the same time, feeling a sense of heavy obligation, are reshaping patterns of courtship, marriage, and filiality in ways that were not foreseen by their parents nor by the authorities of the Chinese state. Those whose roots are in the countryside but who have left their homes to seek opportunity and adventure in the city face particular pressures – as do the children and elders they have left behind. The authors explore this diversity focusing on rural vs. urban differences, regionalism, and ethnic diversity within China.

Family Life in China presents new perspectives on what the current changes in this institution imply for a rapidly changing society.

1
The Chinese Family: Enduring Ideals and Changing Realities

The Master said, If for the whole three years of mourning a son manages to carry on the household exactly as in his father's day, then he is a good son indeed.

(The Analects, Confucius, trans. Waley 1938: 106)

The Swain's Dilemma

In the great, sprawling Qing dynasty novel The Dream of Red Mansions, the central character, a young man named Baoyu, is faced with a dilemma: which lady shall he marry? The exquisitely lovely and delicate Black Jade, or the equally beautiful, but more worldly and pragmatic, Precious Virtue? His parents have settled on Precious Virtue as the most appropriate bride for their son, but he winds up falling in love with Black Jade. Both of these potential brides for Baoyu, by the way, are his first cousins.

First-cousin marriage was not unusual among elites of eighteenth-century China, the setting of The Dream of Red Mansions. Nor was it unusual in eighteenth-century Europe—or all that unusual in twentieth-century USA (Ottenheimer 1996), for that matter. But a distinction that Baoyu's family insists on, a distinction that reflects a longstanding principle of distinctly Chinese kinship, is the prohibition of marriage to patrilineal first cousins, that is, cousins related through one's father's brother. Welcoming Spring was, in fact, just such a first cousin to Baoyu, but marriage to her was as starkly prohibited as would be marriage to his own sister. Though Welcoming Spring is also a great beauty, nobody so much as hints at the possibility of her marrying Baoyu. Such a thing would be simply unthinkable.

In addition to the patrilineal principle, another issue brought forward by Baoyu's dilemma is parental control over marriages in traditional China. In the dramatic wedding scene near the end of The Dream of Red Mansions, Baoyu is led toward the sedan chair wherein the cousin his parents have selected for him waits, her face concealed behind a heavy red veil. But which maiden have they selected? The frail and gentle Black Jade, whom they know their son is mad about, or the capable and knowing cousin whom they have long favored: Precious Virtue.

Here too an enduring Chinese kinship principle comes into play: the idea that parents are in the best position to choose a wife for their son (or a husband for their daughter). Furthermore, by virtue of Confucian ethics, parents or other elders in the family have an undisputed right and obligation to make this selection.

These ideals—patrilineality and the right of elders to arrange their children's marriages—have undergone a number of transformations since the fall of China's last dynasty early in the twentieth century. But the hold that these ideals have on the thinking of contemporary Chinese has not entirely vanished. What role does the memory of the traditional Confucian family play in the lives of Chinese today? The answer to this question cannot be provided in a phrase or even a paragraph, but it is our hope that the historical and ethnographic overview that we present here will provide some answers, along with ideas for ways to pursue further investigations on this topic.

The Family as Adaptive Institution

The family, in view of the benefits it provides for its members, is generally regarded as a positive institution, even a necessary one. Nevertheless, there has been a longstanding tendency among Western sociologists to view families in light of the problems often associated with them, problems like marginalization, gender discrimination, and child abuse. Differences in behavior linked to differences in social class have also drawn the attention of social scientists. Class differences are often cited as variables affecting rates of extramarital sexual relationships, the tendency to give birth to children outside of marriage, or the likelihood that marriages will end in divorce. These, of course, are all significant issues, but our goal here is to view the Chinese family not so much as a lens through which social problems may be viewed, but as an ever-changing and relatively adaptable institution which, over the past hundred years or so has undergone a series of dramatic adjustments in response to wider social changes.

Core Features

The Chinese family has displayed a variety of forms, functions, and relationship dynamics since the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Regional differences, urban vs. rural environments, and various other factors have resulted in variations in family organization, but these variations always respond to both traditional and officially sponsored ideals that make these forms identifiable as “Chinese.” Before the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the Chinese family was an economic, political, and jural unit. It rested on the assumption that males were central to its very existence; inheritance, both material and conceptual, was reckoned through males. The Chinese family was patrilineal. One's mother's relatives may have been emotionally significant, but power and, ideally, loyalty belonged to one's father's kin. Reinforcing this principle was the custom of virilocal marriage, that is, marriage in which a bride leaves her own natal family and joins her husband's. And finally, the traditional family was patriarchal, that is, power was presumed to be in the hands of men. Furthermore, family elders were expected to have authority over younger members. These principles—patrilineality, virilocality, patriarchy, and deference to elders—underlay what is commonly referred to as the Confucian family, a family in which elderly males held most of the authority.

Historical Changes: An Overview

With the creation of the PRC, socialist policies that created the hukou (household registration) system reinforced profound differences between rural and urban families, differences that had already existed to some extent. Cities became, more than ever, the centers of industry, commerce, and political governance, while rural areas, where 80 percent of the Chinese population resided in 1949, engaged primarily in agriculture. In response to these institutional changes, Chinese families began to diverge markedly along urban-rural lines. Rural Chinese families continued, more or less, the patriarchal tradition whereby parents arranged marriages, women were consigned to their status as the “inferior” gender, and pressures were placed on them to, above all, procreate sons. In contrast, the urban areas were organized around work units (danwei) that controlled individuals' employment and place of residence. In many ways, the state-sponsored danwei replaced the lineage and family in its role as provider of resources and cultural enforcer to its individual members. In the work unit–dominated era (from the 1950s to the 1990s), urban families typically followed a neolocal residence pattern. That is, wife and husband established a new residence rather than seeing the wife move in with the husband's family as had been the pattern in the past. Along with neolocal residence came a kind of de facto bilateral descent system, in which neither husband's nor wife's family took precedence in inheritance or family loyalty. To a large extent, the state initiated policies that wound up sweeping away the positions of authority previously held by older males in urban families.

Reform Era

Following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, China underwent a series of reforms that once again reshaped the family. In post-reform China (from about 1980 to the present) the work units were weakened and families, which during the 1970s had already been pressured to limit their size were, after 1979, legally obligated to restrict themselves to only one child. All of these policies were set forward with the idea of modernizing and enriching China. Certainly this goal is now being achieved at a remarkable rate, though the changes that the Chinese family is being forced to undergo are still under study and no firm consensus has been reached as to what final form or forms the family will take.

Variations and Cyclical Varieties

The term “Chinese family” serves as an umbrella term for an array of structures. In Chinese families today, individuals go through different stages of the life cycle, usually including marriage, parenting, and old age. Each of these life stages entails a different approach to identity with different expectations, rights, and responsibilities.

The rapidity with which the Chinese family has undergone change, particularly over the past few decades, is remarkable. Of course, this change has come largely in the context of, and in response to, changes in Chinese society at large. This dramatic series of changes in contemporary China presents us with an extraordinary opportunity to explore questions concerning change and the family in general. We might ask, for example, whether or not there is a kind of convergence with family systems in other societies, or if Chinese history and culture mediate change in such a way as to make them unique. Is the Chinese family today becoming an institution all but indistinguishable from the family in the United Kingdom or the United States? Or does it retain long-held values and behavioral patterns that make it distinct and different from families in the West?

Western scholarship has emphasized the transformation of Chinese society, and in doing so has at times neglected the forces of cultural continuity. This is especially so in studies where the very definition of “the family” has long posed a problem for scholars, both Western and Chinese. The variations in the Chinese family's social organization and customary practices, both past and present, pose a number of challenges due to their complexity. Adaptations to regional economic opportunities, the varying restrictions posed by official policy, and sometimes significantly different ethnic backgrounds have produced a dazzling mosaic of forms and behaviors. The richness in family forms has, for the people of China, created ambivalence concerning which behaviors can now be considered proper and which improper. This ambivalence is most acutely experienced in the way individuals understand the family as a cultural ideal and attempt to adjust to their ideal as they experience their own family as a living entity.

Past Scholarship on Family and Lineage

Brandtstädter and Santos (2009) have argued that the theoretical perspectives of individual scholars tend to shape the way they conceive of the Chinese family. Some ethnographers (such as Fei Xiaotong) have focused their efforts on recording rural lives without organizing their research in terms of any overarching theoretical framework. Fei's work was groundbreaking and insightful on the specifics of family life, but it did not provide an analytical overview of Chinese kinship systems or family structures. It was not until the 1970s when Myron Cohen (1976) working first in Taiwan, then in the 1980s in northern China (2005), and Rubie and James Watson (2004) working in Hong Kong in the 1970s, provided more closely analyzed ethnographic data that resulted in more refined understandings of these systems. The Watsons revealed that the Man lineage, which was originally based in the rural New Territories of Hong Kong, had morphed by the late twentieth century into a global entity with branches both in rural Hong Kong and urban Europe. At about the same time, Parish and Whyte (1978) conducted the first major investigations of mainland rural social life, though their methodology was statistical rather than ethnographic. There have been fewer studies of urban families because the rural Chinese family was long believed to be the repository of tradition and therefore potentially more interesting than the city-dwelling households that Westerners imagined to be largely divorced from Chinese tradition. Davis and Harrell (1993) broke new ground in the study of reform-era families, finding a significant impact on family structure from socialist policies. This analysis went counter to an earlier, widely held modernization thesis that overlooked specific state policies as primary factors in shaping the urban family.

The Maoist Era and the Impact of the State

Families typically adjust their patterns of behavior in response to changing political and economic circumstances. This means that there is seldom a single ideal type to which every family aspires to conform. Instead, there is a range of ideal types based partly on enduring traditions and partly on the demands of local conditions, which may be in flux (Davis and Harrell 1993). For most of China's history, the ideal family was the multigenerational joint family, wherein married brothers continued to live together as a unified economic and social unit with their parents and children. It was never easy to maintain such a family, particularly for those with limited resources. This ideal was undermined with China's post-1949 experimentation with Maoist socialism. At this time, Communist Party policies “reshaped the social landscape and introduced new features or possibilities (e.g., high age of marriage, elimination of polygamy and concubinage, reduced dowries and weakened corporate kin groups) into the reorganized Chinese family” (Davis and Harrell 1993:19). Following the death of Mao in 1976, the Reform Era introduced an entirely new social landscape to which families had to adapt. This era was marked in particular by the retreat of the government from its effort to organize domestic life and it “resulted in the return of many traditional features (e.g., precommunist festivals, bride price and lavish dowry, and joint family households) associated with the Chinese family” (Davis and Harrell 1993:20–21).

Change: In China the Family Is a Big Factor

In the years between 1949 and 1980, the Chinese family organization owed more to the enforcement of state policies than it did to the forces of industrialization and urbanization. The important role of state policy in shaping family dynamics makes the Chinese case an exception to the model offered by William Goode in his discussion of modern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• China Today series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Map
• Chronology
• Acknowledgements
• 1: The Chinese Family: Enduring Ideals and Changing Realities
• 2: Kinship, Friends, and the Multigenerational Family
• 3: Chinese Families: Ethnic Variations
• 4: Courtship and Marriage: Twentieth-Century Transformations
• 5: The Preference for the Affection-Based Marriage
• 6: Parenting Philosophy and Practice
• 7: Parents, Adolescents, and Emerging Adults
• Intergenerational Exceptions and Uncertainties
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement