Popular Stereotypes
Lengthy plane rides are boring. However, the current project first arose from just such a long-haul flight from China to the UK. A conversation overheard on this flight drew my attention to Chinese-British ethnic intermarriage in the first place and inspired me to undertake this research. I sat behind a middle-aged Chinese mother on her way to visit her daughter and only child,1 a chemical researcher working in a British university. Sitting next to the mother was a Chinese girl pursuing undergraduate studies in the UK. Nodding in and out of sleep, I overheard part of the conversation struck up between the two. Their exchange soon took a ‘personal’ turn, as despite her pride in her high-flying daughter, the mother expressed concern that her daughter was dating a yangren (Chinese slang for ‘White Westerner’) from her laboratory. The girl agreed that inter-ethnic relationships could be a ‘Pandora’s box’ full of troubles, and the two went on to talk about various incidences of domestic violence, discrimination, conflict and so forth in the context of ethnic intermarriage. Indeed, it turned out that the major purpose of the mother’s visit was to make sure that her potential son-in-law was treating her daughter well.
The mother I encountered on the flight is not alone in her ‘uneasy’ response to ethnic intermarriage. According to the 2008 East Asian Social Survey,2 people from mainland China are less supportive of ethnic intermarriage than people from South Korea, Japan and Taiwan. The survey’s respondents were asked to give a binary ‘yes’/‘no’ response to the question of whether they would accept Europeans as kin by marriage. While more than 65 % of the respondents in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan accepted this practice, as many as 60 % of the Chinese respondents indicated their refusal to accept Europeans as kin by marriage. The same sense of ‘unease’ about ethnic intermarriage, particularly with White Westerners, is mirrored and indeed fuelled by the dramatised and sometimes far-fetched journalistic portrayals of inter-ethnic families in both China and the UK.
Ethnic intermarriage is both glamorised and vilified by the mass media. An ‘exotic’ practice that has become popular only in recent decades due to a rapid increase in cultural exchange, population mobility and international communication (Therborn, 2013), intermarriage is still novel enough to make headlines, eliciting endless and unfounded speculation about this ‘one-time taboo’ (Spickard, 1991; Stonequist, 1937). However, the presentation of intermarriage in the mass media also encourages stigmatisation and hostility. For example, the marriage and eventual divorce of Wendi Deng and Rupert Murdoch created a media sensation, furnishing material for cover stories in both China and the West.3 The depiction of their relationship was representative of the image of Chinese-Western marriage in the mass media. The marriage is usually between a White man and a Chinese woman; the former is old, divorced and wealthy, and the latter is young, pretty and greedy, using intermarriage as a utilitarian shortcut to social status. Such marriages, according to the mass media, usually end up in divorce (Farrer, 2008). The image of marriage between Chinese men and Western women is no more positive. For example, the bitter divorce of the famous educator Yang Li and his American wife caused unnecessary furore.4 Men who enter international marriages are still widely stigmatised as ‘losers’ in local marriage markets in East Asia (Cheng, 2012). Against the backdrop of this much-distorted and dramatised journalistic portrayal of Chinese-Western ethnic intermarriage, it is not surprising that the mother I encountered on my flight decided to see for herself what her daughter’s relationship with a British man was really like.
As I contemplated the popular stereotypes, I also decided to see for myself how accurately the media represent intermarriage by gathering information on the actual lived experiences described by Chinese-British families. When I began to formally gather information on Chinese-British ethnic intermarriage, however, what first came to my attention was a YouTube documentary entitled ‘Yellow Fever’. Made partly for entertainment purposes, but with a distinct ethnographic flavour,5 the documentary has received 6.5 million views to date. Its aim is to explain the popularity of Asian and Chinese women among White Western men, particularly compared with the ostensible ‘unpopularity’ of Chinese men among Western women. From physical appeal to temperament, and from dating styles to marital orientation, ‘Yellow Fever’ provides a somewhat ‘systematic’ exploration of the gendered pattern of Chinese-Western inter-ethnic relationships. However, it is also heavily informed by cultural prejudices and predicated on the cultural stereotypes of feminine Oriental women, masculine Western men and androgynous/patriarchal Oriental men. The need for evidence to counterbalance such far-fetched popular images of ethnic intermarriage provided the initial motivation for this research.
So How Is the Family?
With my curiosity piqued by the YouTube documentary described above, I was eager to examine the evidence more seriously documented in the academic literature on this subject. It was clear from my initial literature review that ethnic intermarriage has become an increasingly established field of academic enquiry, as presented in Fig.
1.1. Between 1990 and 2013, there was a five-fold increase in the number of academic articles published on the topic of ‘intermarriage’. It is impossible to provide an exhaustive review of literature on this subject; with one click, the keyword ‘intermarriage’ yields more than 96,000 results in the Google Scholar Citation Index. However, it would not take long to confirm that due to inconsistencies between disciplines, the existing research on ethnic intermarriage is considerably fragmented. This fragmentation is reflected in researchers’ approach to how members of inter-ethnic families are treated—as ethnic minorities, immigrants or gendered individuals (Kalmijn,
1998). Intermarriage offers a kaleidoscopic lens through which scholars from a variety of disciplines—such as demography, geography, sociology, economics, anthropology, law, politics and biology—can address research questions in accordance with their divergent approaches. What information can we gain from the fragmented jigsaw of intermarriage research? More importantly, what have we missed in the gaps between pieces?
Following Weber’s approach to intermarriage as a measure of ‘racial segregation or attraction’ (Weber, 1978[1922], p. 385), most early scholars were interested in the reasons for the formation of marital unions across ethnic boundaries (Fu, 2001; Grossbard-Shechtman & Fu, 2002; Kalmijn, 1998). Behaviourists such as Homans (1958) focused on the material exchange between husbands and wives in racially exogamous relationships. With the rise of neoliberalism, theorists developed these early arguments by defining intermarriage explicitly as a contract of status-economic exchange (Becker, 1991). However, Farrer’s (2008, 2013) exploration of Chinese-American marriages in Shanghai indicated that the economic paradigm of Chinese-Western intermarriage shifted in the 2000s from ‘passport-unions’ to ‘joint-ventures’, which counters the economic and neoliberal thesis of exchange. Other scholars have underlined the role of non-material sociocultural ideation in the formation of inter-ethnic union. For example, Jayakody, Thornton, and Axinn (2012) described a form of ‘developmental idealism’ in which different cultural ideologies of ‘development’ are the key drivers of demographic change. According to them, the cultural stigmas surrounding intermarriage, which are usually criticised by social scientists, are key to understanding why intermarriage happens, given that its participants perceive each other as originating from different developmental ‘castes’. Therefore, intermarriage is viewed as a means of gaining symbolic mobility on the ideational scale of development. From past attempts to explain the macro-social mechanism of intermarriage, we know that the formation of exogamy is largely explained by three factors—the cultural values embodied in personal preferences, structural opportunities in terms of ethnic and socio-spatial mixing/segregation, and third-party factors such as immigration laws, political contexts and so on (Kalmijn & van Tubergen, 2010; Kalmijn, 1998; Muttarak, 2004).
Whereas some scholars have explored the pathways leading to intermarriage, others have addressed its consequences in sociocultural and even genetic terms. Although early researchers focused mainly on marriage between groups with different national origins already residing in multicultural societies such as the USA and the UK (Kalmijn & van Tubergen, 2010), the development of modern transportation and communication has provided new opportunities for inter-ethnic contact, making international migration a major channel into intermarriage (Castells, 2010; Therborn, 2013). As a result, interm...
