Marriage and Family in Modern China

A Psychoanalytic Exploration

David E. Scharff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367569488
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000299168
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Marriage and Family in Modern China is a groundbreaking psychoanalytic examination of how 70 years of widespread social change have transformed the intimacies of life in modern China.

The book describes the evolution of marriage and family structure, from the ancient tradition of large families preferring sons, arranged marriages and devaluation of girls, to a contemporary dominance of free-choice marriages and families that now prefer to remain small even after the ending of the One Child Policy. David Scharff uses extensive reports of his psychoanalytic interventions to demonstrate how the residue of widespread trauma suffered by Chinese families during past centuries has interacted with the effects of rapid modernization to produce new patterns of individual identity, personal ambition and family structure.

This wholly original book offers new insight into Chinese families for all those interested in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and in the intricacies of Chinese domestic life.

Part 1

Marriage and Family in the Context of Contemporary China

Chapter 1

Introduction

I never imagined that I would be so involved with China. As far as I knew, China was an opaque society. What I read about it was usually in terms of China’s adversarial position with regard to the United States and to our culture. But for the last dozen years, I have found myself deeply immersed in the study of what is happening with changing patterns of marriage and family life in modern China. This book sets out things I have learned in many trips to China, but unlike the now-frequent news stories about Chinese politics, international relations and economy, trade or even their struggles with environmental dangers, I have been interested in learning about relationships in China.

China has been multiply traumatized for the last 200 years. Many changes in the rules governing social life have led to a cascade of unpredictable consequences in China’s highly managed society. The social engineering practiced for the last 70 years has been full of unintended consequences. For me as a psychoanalyst and family and couple therapist, the most interesting effects have concerned patterns of marriage and relationships, the shape of family life, and the consequences for the mental health of the families and of their children. Changes in these patterns derive from aspects of the widespread social changes, China’s battle with poverty and its growing economy, repeated waves of trauma in China, an aging population and the shrinking workforce, all counteracted by an enormous resilience, energy, creativity and intelligence of people who work hard to adapt to every change in circumstances. When I have met Chinese colleagues and engaged with Chinese patients, I am struck both with the differences between our cultures and the commonality of human experience. This is the story of what I have learned.

This book is about the Chinese as a people and the implications of current developments for the future of China. As an outsider who cannot speak the language, I write from a perspective of profound respect for a people I have encountered using the unusual lens of a psychoanalyst who is interested in the interplay of cultural differences and personal commonalities. My lens yields pictures that have not so far been developed, pictures that are just as relevant to our emerging understanding of China as those taken from the perspective of economics, demographics or international affairs. It is my hope that the reader of this book will emerge with new, up-close and personal impressions of actual Chinese people, and that this will enhance the mutual understanding between us, not only as Western mental health professionals and our Chinese colleagues and patients, but as people from two very different cultures who seek to know and be known by each other. This seems all the more important to me as I watch the growth of an increasing wariness between our nations at the very time when our pressing international need is for increased mutuality and understanding.

In writing, I have drawn on my experience with a number of families and couples from the Chinese middle class who sought consultation for family difficulty. I believe this book offers much more than a view of how to understand these personal challenges, because every couple or family that sought our help inevitably brought elements of their entire culture and society with them to the consultations. I began my study as if focusing a kind of clinical high-powered microscope on the individuals, couples and families themselves, but I have embedded that view in a consideration of the social and cultural issues that constitute our understanding just as surely as do the clinical considerations.

Integrating this dual focus – between the microscopic view of the family and the macroscopic view of the society in which the family is embedded – offers the possibility of constructing a stereoscopic picture that links each person and family to the culture, that can show us the role of the culture in constructing individual experience and the role of the individuals and families in constructing the culture.

Four Questions

Looking from this dual perspective, four crucial questions emerge.

First, how does the history of Chinese culture influence the intimacy of family life today?

China has an ancient history – more than 2,500 years – of explicitly valuing the family as the fundamental unit of social structure, a building block in each community, which is a fundamental Confucian tenet. It depicts a defined hierarchy that extends from loyalty to the emperor, to the father, the son and the whole family, and then to the surrounding social group. The configuration of this loyalty to the family and group was challenged by the social restructuring of the Communist Party beginning in 1950, then again with the imposition of the One Child Policy 30 years later, by the opening up of society of the 1980s, and again now with the ending of the One Child Policy. We do not know how this will change Chinese families going forward, but the experiences I chronicle in this book can give us a good start towards that understanding.

Second, how do the large-scale social factors influence developments inside the family, and how will these family developments, in a reciprocal way, influence the social changes to China as a nation?

China has a history of repeated social and personal trauma dating back more than 200 years. Therefore, national trauma is a central feature of modern Chinese history, from the Opium Wars caused by the imposition of the opium trade by the Western powers from the eighteenth century into the late nineteenth century; the overthrow of the final Qing Dynasty early in the twentieth century; the fight between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, interspersed with Japanese invasions that began at the end of the nineteenth century and continued into the first half of the twentieth century; and a combination of famine and cultural disruption from the late 1950s until the mid-1970s. And, of course, there have been large scale natural disasters such as the Tangshan, Sichuan and Yunnan earthquakes over the last 50 years that caused widespread harm in focused geographical regions.

In the midst of all this, China has been rapidly urbanizing, going from a predominantly rural society in the mid-twentieth century to a predominantly urban one now. Current internal migration and rapid urbanization, the expansion of internet-driven social connectedness and the explosive growth of what already is or will soon be the largest middle class in the world all produce disruptions to family and economic life in the transition to modernization. These changes cause further strain to families, and in turn, the family strains inevitably wash back into society. We will be examining many couples and families in detail in order to see the impact of these large-scale issues on family life.

Third, how do the current challenges facing young families and couples have an impact on emerging Chinese culture?

Many news articles focus on the growing power of internet culture and the plight of netizens everywhere. But the challenges facing Chinese families extend more importantly into the usual areas of how best to use education, plans for their own new and emerging families, the changing picture of employment from predominantly state-owned enterprises to private employment and the future in a society that will increasingly have a population top-heavy with elderly, dependent citizens. The challenges facing young people include whether to marry at all, whether and how many children to have, how to include much-needed help from grandparents in child-rearing and then, very soon, how to provide for those same grandparents as they age and are no longer self-sufficient. As we will see, these are both widespread social issues and very personal matters for families. Care of the elderly, for instance, is a problem for the young parents we have seen, and it will be even more of a problem for their children as these very couples age over the next 30 years.

Fourth, and finally, how can we help our Chinese colleagues more effectively serve the mental health needs that are currently emerging?

A major feature of this book is the detailed exploration of clinical issues and the questions they raise. It is not that I and my Western colleagues can presume to personally treat the large numbers of couples, families and individuals who seek help in China. Partly it is a sign of an increasingly mature country that more couples and families do seek help, just as this is true in the West. It is a sign of the maturation of the mental health system that it understands the needs and strives to face the challenges inherent in meeting those needs. Rather, the question is how can mental health professionals like me use an enhanced understanding of China’s social system and of individual Chinese patients and families to further enable our Chinese colleagues to better serve their individual, couple and family patients who come for help, just as our patients need help in the West and just as we continually strive to enhance our understanding of patients at home?

These four overarching questions have guided me in writing this book, and I will periodically come back to them as the book documents my attempt to understand more about China through a clinical and social lens.

Coming to China

A dozen years ago, out of the blue, my wife Jill got an email from a Chinese psychologist she didn’t know in Wuhan (a city neither of us had heard of) named Li Mengchao, who gives himself the English name Michael. (Many Chinese give themselves English names, which will be used in this book when they have used them with us.) Michael had read a book of hers on unconscious communication (Scharff, 1992) and wanted to know if she had written more on the subject. She sent him another article, and when he thanked her, he added that the professor who headed the hospital would be glad to invite her to Wuhan to teach. Jill does not like to travel as much as I do, but neither of us had ever been to China and she was happy to accept the invitation. I asked to accompany her, and both she and the Wuhan professor agreed. After some friendly and accommodating negotiation, Professor Shi Qijia made arrangements for us to teach over several days. He told us that students would come from across China and that they would be capable of absorbing some of our more advanced material.

Googling Wuhan, we found that it’s a second-tier but large Chinese industrial city, then of eight million, the place of Chairman Mao’s birth. We arrived and were ensconced in a modern hotel located a few blocks from the Wuhan Hospital for Psychotherapy, which Professor Shi directed. The hotel was located at a multi-road intersection where vehicles of all sizes and descriptions intersected, came together in a flood tide and then ebbed, leaving wave upon wave of gathering bicycles, scooters, people and cars gathering and dispersing, coming and going. We marveled at the bicycles and motor scooters, thousands of them loaded with people and goods, including an entire household loaded on the back of a bicycle, boxes and furniture piled high, wobbling down the road. On a day when it rained, a sea of umbrellas crossed the intersection and then disappeared down the various roads. When we walked to the hospital, we passed people squatting, cooking in woks with charcoal fires on the sidewalk, sometimes just for themselves and often to sell to passersby.

On our first day, Professor Shi picked us up at the hotel and took us to the hospital, introducing us to his staff while treating us to an elaborate tea ceremony hosted by his secretary in his office, which was dominated by large chairs that looked like thrones for emperors. Professor Shi’s English was excellent, as was that of some of his senior students, including Rose Wu, who was assigned to be our immediate guide and interpreter. Rose was a young psychiatrist who, like all the young adults that we met, was an only child who had been successful in her academic pursuits and now was a senior trainee at the Wuhan Hospital, which we learned was one of three of the most prestigious training grounds in China for psychiatrists and psychologists interested in psychotherapy. Dr. Tong Jun, a woman, was Head of Clinical Services and Associate Director. Dr. Tong also spoke fluent English but often with such speed and an accent that we had to work to follow. This trio was our point of contact with Chinese students and colleagues, most of whom did not speak sufficient English to communicate effectively with us, or indeed, any English at all. We, of course, spoke no Chinese, and even though we have been going to China for more than 13 years at the time of this writing, we have no capacity to communicate in Chinese. While I wish more Chinese could speak effective English, I have no room to complain given my inability to communicate effectively in any language other than ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editor’s Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1: Marriage and Family in the Context of Contemporary China
• Part 2: Marriage in China Today
• Part 3: The Changing Face of Families
• References
• Index