Copyright © William R. Jankowiak and Robert L. Moore 2017

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First published in 2017 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8554-0

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8555-7(pb)

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Names: Jankowiak, William R., author. | Moore, Robert L., 1949- author.

Title: Family life in China / William R. Jankowiak, Robert L. Moore.

Description: Malden, MA : Polity Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016013483 (print) | LCCN 2016027806 (ebook) | ISBN 9780745685540 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745685557 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780745685571 (Mobi) | ISBN 9780745685588 (Epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Families–China. | Marriage–China. | China–Social life and customs.

Classification: LCC HQ684 .J36 2016 (print) | LCC HQ684 (ebook) | DDC 306.850951–dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013483

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This project grew out of our long-term collaboration that resulted in various co-authored papers. Research for this project was supported in part by the Critchfield Fund and the George and Maeching Kao Fund for Chinese Scholarship at Rollins College.

We are most grateful to the staff at Polity Press overseeing the manuscript as it moved from design stage to production. We especially want to thank executive editor Emma Longstaff for first suggesting the topic, Jonathan Skerrett and Neil de Cort for their excellent advice and continuous attention to detail, which helped so much in making sure we met our target date for publication.

We would also like to call out and acknowledge support of Thomas Paladino who served as our ad hoc editor and provided advice and editing skills on several of the chapters. The numerous trips to Boston were well worth the finished product. In addition, we would like to thank Gene Anderson, Tami Blumenfield, Don Brown, Susan Brownell, Robert Carson, Myron Cohen, Goncalo dos Santos, Shanshan Du, Vanessa Fong, Tom Gregor, Stevan Harrell, Barry Hewett, Bonnie Hewlett, David Kronenfeld, Xuan Li, Melvyn Goldstein, Stephanie Sang, Alice Schlegel, Ray Scupin, Chuang-kang Shih, Charles Stafford, Yuzhu Sun, James Watson, Rubie Watson, Li Wei, Arthur Wolf, Yunxiang Yan, Yusheng Yao, Wenxian Zhang, Chang Zhao and two anonymous reviewers for their earlier research and analysis, which helped structure and guide our synthesis. We would also like to express our appreciation for the support offered by the ever patient and understanding members of our families: Sadie Hinson, Darla Moore, Grace Moore and Tyler Schimmelfing.

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 modernization. His thesis, that the primary forces reshaping family organization were urbanization and industrialization, is accurate as far as it goes, but in the case of mainland China there is more to this story. There has been a worldwide trend in which the extended family is replaced by the nuclear family; the kin group's influence declines and there is decreasing emphasis on marital transfers of wealth such as bride prices and dowries. Concomitant with these changes comes a loss in parental control over whom their children should marry. These factors reflect a growth in individual independence, and they are connected to the expansion of individual opportunities in the labor market. They amount in particular to a shift toward increased freedom in mate choice, the timing of marriage, and, finally, an increase in divorce rates. Seeing this pattern as a consequence of industrialization and urbanization may be valid for Western Europe (as well as for Hong Kong and Taiwan) but it is only partially true for mainland China, where an active and often aggressive state has a significant role in shaping citizens' everyday lives. In this environment, forceful, top-down policies brought about some of the changes that in other societies came along as part of broad social developments. For example, soon after the establishment of the PRC, state policies began to dismantle the power of lineages and clans, particularly in urban areas. The new marriage law, promulgated in 1950, undermined parents' control over their offsprings' courtship and mate choice, and men's control over their wives. Both of these changes resulted in enhanced opportunities for the development of conjugal affection and spousal loyalties.

Property and Parental Power: In the PRC the State Changes All

Goode's thesis is consistent with Jack Goody's emphasis on the importance of heritable property as a factor in shaping family decisions. (For a discussion of family and property, see Davis and Harrell 1993:6.) Goody argued that families with land tended to invest heavily in their children since they could give them an inheritance. However, families living within a state-sponsored collectively owned property unit were not in a position to offer their children a family inheritance. Davis and Harrell (1993:1) were the first to point out that the “elimination of most private property destroyed much of the economic motivation that had previously shaped family loyalties. And the frontal attack on ancestor worship and lineage organization struck at the cultural religious core of the extended family.” Yet the reforms undeniably provided stability, at least in the early years of Maoism, and during this time more children survived to marry and more parents survived into old age than had been the case before 1949. State policies created the conditions conducive to the formation of larger multigenerational households that had extensive economic and social ties to kin. In effect, and contrary to Goode's materialistic thesis, Davis and Harrell (1993) point out that China's state power has been the creator of the contemporary family form.

Enhanced Power for Women

Socialist policies also enhance China's longstanding social differentiation between rural and urban communities. These policies helped transform the PRC into a nation of two competing cultural universes: one in the cities, the other in the villages. They also forced the urban populace to rely on bureaucratic agencies, thereby weakening the traditional patrilineal and virilocal forms in favor of a more flexible system organized around the principles of neolocal residence and bilateral descent. Moreover, state policies provided expanded opportunities for urban women, who, unlike their rural counterparts, gained greater access to the labor force along with a salary that for many families proved crucial. On top of this, women in cities all over China for the first time had equal access to educational opportunities. These newly found resources of power enabled many women in the work-unit (danwei) era (1959–1990s) to achieve parity with men in family decisionmaking. These changes also served to enhance women's social standing generally, both within the domestic sphere and outside of it. Significantly, the Reform Era (from 1979 to the present), which has been characterized by a retreat of state policies, has not thereby seen a weakening of women's social standing within the family. The gains that women made in the Maoist era have not been lost in the Reform Era. This trend was bolstered by the increase in women's employment and the decrease in family size, which was further encouraged by the one-child policy of 1979. All of these things elevated the status of daughters in urban households, where they were often their parents' only child. This enhanced esteem has had some effect on marriages generally; urban females are often able to hold their own in interactions with their husbands.

Taiwan and Mainland

In a comparative study covering Taiwan and southeastern mainland China, Chu and Yu (2010) discovered a variety of changes that mark the family forms in these two regions. Some of the patterns their data reveal show a degree of similarity between Taiwan and mainland. For example, family size in both areas has fallen. On the mainland, family size shrank from a 1982 average of 4.36 to 3.45 by 2000. For Taiwan, family size steadily decreased from its 1961 high of 5.57 to 3.21 in 2003. Second, the average age for first marriage for both Taiwan and mainland China has steadily increased over the last fifty years. But Chu and Yu also uncovered some significant differences. For example, though age at marriage is rising in both regions, mainland couples still tend to marry at younger ages than those on Taiwan. Moreover, a significant proportion of people on the mainland still have their marriages arranged by professional matchmakers, a practice that has been all but abandoned on Taiwan.

Paradox: Old Cultural Ideals, New Cultural Realities

There are a number of paradoxes characterizing China's families today, as well as Chinese society in general. The People's Republic of China, established under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, has enjoyed a period of relative peace and increasing prosperity that has lasted for almost seventy years. Though CCP policies from the outset were aimed at establishing collective consciousness and collective institutions, they have often promoted individualism. Furthermore, Communist Party reform inadvertently enabled for a time the establishment of families that, more than in the immediate past, resembled the Confucian-based ideal family.

This ideal family is multigenerational and is organized around parental willingness to sacrifice for the sake of their dependents and to make judicious investments of their resources for the long-term advancement of the family's status (Davis and Harrell 1993). As we will discuss below, however, the parent-offspring obligations implied in these parental sacrifices are no longer the primary bases of emotional bonds today. At least they are not for a large proportion of China's families.

The economic reforms that gained steam in the 1980s resulted in a shift away from a redistributive system based on official rank and connections to one based mainly on class and adaptation to the new market system (Whyte 2005). This shift has had consequences for the organization of household property, as well as new ideals of intimacy, decisions about fertility, and the care of kin. With all of these factors, individual interests are coming prominently into play. We can see here a directional shift that is consistent with Goody's thesis that bride price and dowry should decline in significance in a redistributive economy but can be expected to increase in value whenever private property becomes more important. This is exactly what is now occurring in China.

There is no longer a consensus over what the preferred ideal actually is, nor is there clear agreement on the proper motivation for the performance of family roles. Today, there are different voices that vary across China and even within any given locale. Moreover, this complexity is generational—each age cohort having different understandings and expectations about family interactions. This does not mean there are no patterns; there clearly are. But it does mean that familial patterns are as varied as they have always been throughout Chinese history.

Rather than a single family type, there are today multiple forms that range from the joint family to the stem family to the nuclear or conjugal family to the post-nuclear or multigenerational family. And as in the past, family members, at different stages in their lives, often live in different family types that range from conjugal (that is, only one married couple) to stem (two married couples in different generations live together) to joint (two or more married couples in the same generation).

Throughout late imperial China, the ideal family was one where all married brothers and their wives lived under one roof with the brothers' parents. It was a place where sons and their wives were expected to prosper together. The wives, according to the ideal, had all followed the virilocal residence rule and married into their husbands' family, their natal family having received a substantial bride price as part of the marriage settlement. In this ideal world, it was deemed essential that the family and not the individual was the stabilizing factor that served as the basis for the maintenance of social, cultural, economic, and personal well-being. In this milieu, actions that promoted family stability and continuity took precedence over other interests, and stability and continuity were closely associated with shared common property. Cohen (1995:65) noted that property is the family's foundation, the cornerstone that enables it to act as a corporate unit.

The Reform Era resulted in the end of collectivization and the return of the collectively held state land to the farmers. The state, in returning land to rural families, reintroduced the old incentive—private property—that Chinese farmers could once again use as a basis for a corporate or joint family. Cohen notes that in the pre-communist era, family property was always larger and more significant for life satisfaction than was individual property (Cohen 1995:65). Elders, for the most part, were able to use the benefits of having corporate family property to hold the family together. Married brothers, no matter how much they or their wives might have preferred conjugal living, were highly cognizant of the dangers that the pursuit of individual self-interests could bring about for the entire family (Cohen 1976). It was the wealth generated on the basis of commonly owned corporate property that kept the family together. Cohen further points out, however, that there was another factor that tended to pull married brothers apart. This was the desire of their wives (individuals who were usually born in different villages and had moved into their husband's parents' home) to live separate lives. Once she felt that her husband could support his family, a wife might well strive to break away from the large family, initiating a process that could result in the establishment of several separate conjugal units. This female strategy seemed to be most effective after the death of her husband's parents.

Cohen's mainland and Taiwan research reveals a paradox: the desire for privacy and independence results in the formation of an independent conjugal unit and, as such, represents the “modernization” of the Chinese family. On the other hand, wanting to form and maintain a unified family based on ownership of corporate property made economic sense, while upholding the belief that the joint family is the best family ideal (Cohen 1995:96). The Chinese government's efforts to move China away from an agrarian civilization into an urban one based on manufacturing, service, and professional development may render the current paradox moot. For the vast majority of Chinese citizens, the decision to live in a joint or conjugal family will be irrelevant. Something akin to a conjugal or post-conjugal family constituted by a married couple and perhaps a co-resident relative may be the only option, given the restrictions of urban housing in China today.

Rituals as Devices for Family Stability

One of the ways stability was ensured in the past was through the performance of family rituals that highlighted the importance of belonging to a larger institution, whether extended family, lineage, or clan. This ideal of an enduring, multigenerational kin group was often not achieved, as explained above, due to each brother's wife tacitly, but relentlessly, trying to undermine family unity (Cohen 1976).

The resources available to an individual always played a part in determining how close to the ideal family a household could come. Most men born to extremely poor families would never marry, since they could not afford the bride price. For them, no continuance of their family line was in the cards. Instead they would live their lives out in their natal families. Other impoverished men could marry if they agreed to move into their wife's natal family and perhaps adopt her surname and even agree to have some or maybe even all of their children inherit their wife's surname as well. This was considered an extremely undesirable fate. Other men from impoverished households might have been obligated to marry an adopted “sister.” This fate too, as Arthur Wolf (1995) documents, most men and women preferred to avoid.

Over the last fifty years mainland Chinese have had to confront a number of challenges. It would be incorrect to infer, however, that the intense transformation of the Chinese family only began under the Chinese Communist Party. Whyte and Parish's 1980s urban survey found that many of the domestic changes concerned with kinship obligations, conjugal duties, and parent-child interaction were already underway prior to the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949. Many of these changes, in other words, were gradual and not radical (Whyte and Parish 1984:191–92). In accordance with Goode's thesis, these changes have been unfolding in China's largest cities for over fifty years (Wu 1987). In this way some but not all of the changes in Chinese families are typical of Goode's claim that there is a worldwide trend toward the establishment of nuclear or conjugal families that also entails a decline in fertility and decreasing power for senior members of kinship groups.

The Conjugal Family

Goode's study of individualized Western societies illustrates that the conjugal family with its intense emotional bond between husbands and wives has become the modern ideal (1970:9). To some extent, this ideal has taken root in China, but almost always incorporating some trace of the Confucian past. Among urban singletons' families, the intimate emotional bond between parents and children appears to be just as powerful as the conjugal bond between husbands and wives (Yan 2003). Even before the promulgation of China's one-child policy in 1979 (Whyte et al. 2015), single children had become the primary source of emotional investment and satisfaction for their parents (Fong 2004:125, 143). Moreover, emotional investment and intimacy go in both directions: children often seek emotional support and intimacy from their parents. The remembrance and recalling of parenting offers us a lens through which to glimpse the establishment and formation of the love-based relationship ties between urban Chinese youth and their parents. These changes can be seen in rural migrant families, urban families, and most recently, in the households of same-sex couples. In short, China today offers a kaleidoscope of family types, differing in composition, with reinterpretations of kinship bonds, of marriage, of childbearing expectations, of parenting, of intergenerational obligations, and of understandings of the nature of youth and emerging adulthood as well. In the following chapters we will highlight some of the more significant trends and changes that have shaped and are continuing to shape the Chinese family as a conceptual form and as a lived experience.