GEB 1305

China and the World

Lecture 2

The Development of Modern China:

Social and Cultural Development
Confucian Familialism
• Throughout much of pre-modern history, Chinese rulers adopted Confucianism as the core
principle for state governance.
• Family is the cornerstone of Confucianism: the relations between husband and wife, and
between father and son, underpin other social relations; everybody should know and
behave in accordance with their role.
• The idea of women are inferior to men guided women's conduct in society, as exemplified
by prescriptions such as the Three Obediences (Min, 1997)
live with the husband family

• Confucian familialism prescribed a patriarchal, patrilineal and patrilocal gender system in

which women were located at the bottom of the hierarchy (Ebrey, 1993; Mann, 2001).
Confucian Familialism

• The subordination of women was considered essential to preserve social stability

and civilization itself in pre-modern China (Watson and Ebrey, 1991).

• Some have argued that in reality the Confucian patriarchal arrangement was less
negative than feminist historical interpretation might imply (Wolf, 1985; Watson and
Ebrey, 1991; Mann, 2001).

• It is noted, however, that whatever powers women obtained in pre-modern China,

these were not theirs by right but delegated to them by men and circumstance
(Wolf, 1985)
Transformation in the Twentieth Century

• The founders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) also tried to promote the
liberation of women, outlawing female infanticide or abandonment, and the
practice of foot-binding
female 18, male 20.

• More significant changes came with the 1950 Marriage Law, which did away
with the Confucian obligation on women to show obedience to male relatives,
ended the practices of concubinage, polygamy and child marriage, and
allowed women to divorce their husbands
Family Structures
• The pre-modern Chinese family was built upon a multi-generational ideal of extended household living
(Lang, 1946; Cohen, 1976)

• Fei (1992) argued that the number of members was less important to the Chinese ‘expanded family’
than the principle of its generational structure, so that even the smallest household should be seen as
part of a larger, patrilineal clan (zu).

• From his study of 1930s rural China, Fei (1992) described a dominant family structure based on lineal
ties between fathers and sons, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, as opposed to the conjugal
relationship between husbands and wives.

• The last century has witnessed a move from extended to smaller households such as stem or nuclear
families (Whyte 2005; Zang, 2011).
Family Structures
• Census observations on average family size presented give us some indication of the trend towards
smaller households.

• Data from the 2010 national census (Wang, 2014) revealed a marked rise in the proportion of
conjugal nuclear families and cross-generational families as well as a growing number of one-
person households.

• The proportion of three- generation linear families was relatively stable.

• The one-child policy has resulted not surprisingly in an increasing proportion of three-person
households and also, with the decline in young married couples residing with parents, more and
more ‘empty-nest’ households consisting of the two older parents of single children (Feng et al.,
2014).
Average size of Chinese families, selected years, 1930–2010
Family Structures
• Such trends in household size and composition have not been uniform but vary according to local economic
circumstances (Davis and Harrell, 1993; Zang, 2011).

• Cities (Wang, 2014):

• families were consistently downsizing in line with modernization
• adherence to the one-child policy
• the increasing trend for newly married couples to live independently of parents
• Rural areas:
• the linear family was more likely to endure.
• This was in part because of:
• rural–urban migration by younger adults, leading to demand for grandparent care of left-behind children, and
• in part because the increase in only sons resulted in fewer conflicts of interest within the rural family.
Inter-generational Relationships
• In contemporary China, insufficient public welfare provision means families remain
the main providers of finance and services, particularly in rural areas (Shang and
Wu, 2011).
• Traditionally, the care of parents was primarily the concern of sons.
• Because of the patrilocal marriage practice in most parts of China, a daughter left
home to take her place in her husband's household.
• In 1995, Sheng, Yang and Xu found 40.76 per cent of couples lived with husbands’
families and 7.03 per cent lived with wives’ families.
Inter-generational Relationships
• However, in recent years, scholars identified a shift away from patrilocal living
arrangements in urban areas, where co-residence with a daughter had become acceptable
for older parents (Zhan and Montgomery, 2003).
• The decline in intergenerational co-residence does not diminish the amount of support
from adult children to their adult parents as non-co-resident children also provide regular
emotional and practical care (Bian et al., 1998)
• This is confirmed by Whyte's (2005) Baoding study which also highlights the increasingly
bilateral nature of intergenerational support with daughters as likely to care for their own
parents as for their in-laws.
Inter-generational Relationships
• When residing together, daughters provide most care for their parents; however, this care is
neither recognized nor compensated financially.

• Moreover, provision of the care has a detrimental impact on women's employment opportunities

• Zhang (2004) identifies a time-varying process of relations between parents and adult children in
urban China:
• with co-residence in the parents’ middle life being child-centred and focused on their needs
for housing, childcare and financial support as the young couple establish their careers.
• This pattern changes to a parent-centred one as parents age, and have greater need for
personal care.
Inter-generational Relationships
• Lee and Xiao (1998) found that financial transfers from children to elderly parents were largely motivated by
the parents’ need, and the requirement to fill gaps in state welfare provision.

• Older people in poorer, rural areas are even more dependent on their adult children than their urban
counterparts for the provision of basic material needs, including food and medical expenses (Li et al., 2012).

• Children in urban areas were able to give larger sums to their parents, having higher incomes.

• One study in urban China found that married daughters, especially those living with parents, provide more
financial support than married sons.

• This significant gender difference is explained by urban daughters’ relatively higher education and income (Xie
and Zhu, 2009).
Inter-generational Relationships
• China has seen a large-scale migration of younger rural workers to the cities since the 1990s.

• In this context, where married men are more likely to migrate than married women, left-behind daughters
have become an important source of emotional and instrumental support to their parents (Liu, 2014).

à Gendering of care roles:

• with sons paying expenses; while

• daughters, if they live locally, provide day-to-day care.

• Cong and Silverstein (2012) show that the rural elderly experience improved emotional wellbeing if they
receive assistance with household chores and personal care from their daughters-in-law, illustrating the
psychological and affective rewards of conforming to socially prescribed familial roles.

• However, due to the persistence of gender discourse and patrilineal inheritance practice in rural communities,
women's labour is not adequately recognized or compensated.
Inter-generational Relationships

• The process in which Chinese families negotiate their support for the older generation has

created a new pattern of intergenerational relations (Ikels, 2006; Croll, 2008).

• The traditional value of filial piety characterized by a subordination of the young to the will

and welfare of parents and grandparents à transformed to pattern of care based on

‘mutual need, mutual gratitude and mutual support’ (Croll, 2008: 100).
Inter-generational Relationships
• Important ideological shift in intergenerational relationships in Chinese cities:
• mutual support and care are increasingly grounded in affective interpersonal relationships rather than duty- centred
family obligations (Holroyd, 2003)
• older parents in urban China try to make themselves useful or less needy, anticipating their future reliance on the
goodwill and filial loyalty of their children (Ikels, 2006)
• older interviewees in rural China actively pursued strategies to ensure their own short- or long-term security and
care; for example, they extended material and childcare support to their married daughters to weave a web of
interdependence that would be reciprocated in their old age
• Stafford (2000) defines a ‘cycle of nurture’:
• a system of mutual obligations centring on parent–child relationships, which is characterized by the exchange of
food and transfer of money, and
• is somewhat different from the idea of filial piety, since such relationships may extend to those not related by
patrilineal descent who care for each other, such as foster-parents and foster-children, or older siblings who become
the principle carers of their younger brothers and sisters.
Love and Marriage
• Fei (1992) emphasizes that marriage in Chinese tradition was not a private relationship between
spouses, but a social or public matter in which vertical relationships between father and son, and
mother and daughter- in-law, take precedence.

• Since the 1950s, the Communist state has attempted, via legal regulations and political campaigns,
to transform traditional marriage from an exchange of women between groups, controlled by senior
generations, to a personal relationship between individuals (Croll, 1983).

• With recent economic reforms and rural–urban migration, younger generations have enjoyed more
opportunities to find their own partner (Zang, 2011).

• In urban areas, parents might have relinquished absolute control but young people still place more
weight on their family's opinions than on their own (Zhang and Kline, 2009).
Love and Marriage
• Liu et al. (2013) argue that poor and rural men find it increasingly difficult to find a suitable bride and are therefore cut
off from a number of social and emotional advantages.

• The ratio of marriageable men to women is out of balance for several reasons:

• a smaller population overall is shrinking the pool of potential partners;

• the sex-selective abortion is changing the ratio of males to females; and

• women are emigrating to urban areas.

• Conversely, urban women who have achieved success in education and professional careers find themselves ‘left over’ by
potential husbands who prefer lower-status wives (Gaetano, 2014; To, 2015). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irfd74z52Cw

• The dissatisfaction which comes with remaining unmarried is significant: marriage remains a great source of intimacy
and life satisfaction (Liu et al., 2013) and is still the social norm (Xu and Yan, 2014), with national survey findings showing
that 80 per cent of people over forty in China have been married at least once (Xie et al., 2014).
 Gender Roles within the Families
• In line with socialist ideals, women in the PRC have been treated as equals to men in the workplace, and the
collectivization of production in the 1950s and 1960s saw the mobilization of women's labour outside the home.

• The movement of younger women in particular into paid employment resulted in the redistribution of some
domestic duties to older women, typically their mothers-in-law (Johnson, 1983)

• In a survey of Chinese university teachers, Zhang and Farley (1995) found women carried out a far larger share of
housework and shopping than their husbands.

• In rural–urban migrant households, husbands take on a greater share of housework, and reach decisions on key
family issues jointly with their wives (Zhang et al., 2013).

• An interesting contrast between rural and urban families is found by Hu (2015) who shows that daughters of
working mothers in rural households take on a disproportionate share of the housework, compared with their
brothers, whereas in the cities, children whose mothers go out to work take on more chores regardless of gender.
 Gender Roles within the Families
• Political and economic reforms over the past thirty years have led paradoxically to a retreat from any gains
in gender inequality within many rural households, as decollectivization has led to the withdrawal of
women from the labour force to domestic work, regaining their pre-1949 status of ‘inside people’ (Nee,
1986)

• While women who migrate from the countryside for work experience greater power and autonomy when
they are away, this effect quickly evaporates when they return to their home communities and find their
lives and choices shaped once more by patriarchal power relations (Zhang, 2013).

• Wu and Ye (2016) confirm that women left behind in villages when men out-migrate for work take on
additional responsibilities including both family care and agricultural production, while enduring great strain
in their marriages due to long separation.

• Gender traditions are reaffirmed while women are assigned to unpaid or low-paid work.
 Childbearing
• A significant, and well publicized example of state intervention into family life is the one-child policy.

• Introduced in 1979, the policy allowed urban couples to have only one child and rural couples to have
two if their first child was a daughter: enforcement of the law was generally far stricter in urban areas.

• The purpose of the policy was to reduce China's hitherto drastic population growth

• Existing literature has documented the way in which this policy made women the objects of control,
requiring them to endure procedures such as close examination, forced abortion and use of obstetric
health services (see Croll et al., 1985; Doherty et al., 2001).

• Liu (2007) argued that women's bodies became a site where socialist patriarchy came into tension with
traditional patriarchy: women became sandwiched between the state's regulation to have one child
and the marital family's desire for more children.
 Childbearing
• One, unintended, positive consequence of the one-child policy has been the educational
opportunities now enjoyed by urban girls because parents have invested all their resources in
their only child regardless of its gender, where previously there had been a bias towards sons (Liu
2007).

• In urban China, singleton children – representing the ‘only hope’ to fulfil their parents’ dreams
and aspirations – find themselves under intense pressure to succeed in return for the huge
emotional and financial investment made in them (Fong, 2004).

• Indeed, the new desire to raise a ‘better quality’ child through education, which is becoming
increasingly expensive for parents because of marketization of the school system, may be nudging
some rural parents towards choosing to have just one son or daughter (Zhang, 2007).
 Childbearing
• Using survey data, Tsui and Rich (2002) found no gender differences in education between single-girl and
single-boy families in urban cities.

• Zhang (2007) reports many younger parents in one Chinese village chose not to have a second child after a
first-born daughter – although they would be permitted to do so – preferring to invest all their resources in
the schooling of just one child.

• Using large-scale survey data on individuals born in China between 1979 and 1985, Lee (2012) confirms that
parents are just as likely to invest in the education of an only daughter as of an only son, while gender
inequality in regard to children's schooling still exists in multiple-child households.

• Comparing urban and rural families, Lee (2012) shows that the one-child policy not only eliminated the
gender gap in years of schooling (boys outdid girls) in urban areas, but actually created a reversed gender
gap (girls outdid boys).
 Childbearing
• The birth of daughters as only children has contributed to the trend for daughters to care for
their elderly parents (Liu, 2007).

• This is true both for the urban women in Liu's (2007) study, and those whom Zhang (2009)
interviewed in rural north China, who visited their natal families frequently after marriage, a
practice that would have been unusual in earlier times.

• Fong (2002) shows the power of urban only daughters has increased within the natal family
because of the opportunities they have for paid work, allowing them to show their filial
support for their parents through financial contributions, and earn practical and emotional
support in return.
Childbearing

• While the one-child policy has undeniably had the most significant impact on
childbearing in China since 1980, there are indications that the ending of the
policy in 2015 will not lead to an immediate baby boom, since urban families in
particular may be deterred by the high cost of housing and education (Hesketh
et al., 2015).

• In addition, people are choosing to marry later, and marry less, which also
results in the birth of fewer children (Retherford et al., 2005).
Divorce

• Platte (1988) examined divorce trends and patterns in China from 1949 to the
mid-1980s and found rates were kept relatively low compared to those of
Western countries by legal procedures geared towards reconciliation rather than
dissolution.

• Nationwide, the divorce rate was 0.03 per cent in 1979, 0.07 per cent in 1990
and 0.21 per cent in 2003 (Zang, 2011: 45)
Divorce rate in three countries, 1975 – 2010
the women compromise the problem. the education level of women increase, they are not afraid of divorce and the rise of freedom of love
 Sex and Extra-marital Relations
• As a result of the 1950 Marriage Law, the role of love became gradually more important in marriage (Pan, 1994)

• With the introduction of the one-child policy in 1979, the traditional equation of sex with procreation was
fundamentally undermined.

• With the aim to promote birth control, official literature highlighted the pleasurable aspects of marital sexual
relations (Sigley, 1998).

• Since the 1980s, Chinese society has become increasingly open about sex (Evans, 1995: 357).

• Younger Chinese women are taking greater control of their sexual lives (Yang and Xia, 2008).

• Though all areas of China seem to be caught up in these changes, Yan argues that urban areas are being affected
at a more rapid pace, since urban Chinese youth have more freedom than their rural counterparts to separate
sex from marriage (Yan, 2006).
 Sex and Extra-marital Relations
• Between 2000 and 2010, about 20% of unmarried Chinese people aged 18 to 61 said they lived
with their romantic partner.

• The % of currently cohabitating couples who intend to get married is actually quite low.

• According to renowned scholar Pan Suiming’s 2015 sexuality survey, 24% of unmarried
respondents with live-in partners did not plan to marry their current partner

• Another 35% said they didn’t know

• Another 21% said there was “a possibility” that they would marry their current partner.

• Only around 1/5 of those with live-in partners reported that they were planning to tie the
knot.
Zhang, Chongqing University
Sex and Extra-marital Relations
• A romanticized view of the process of falling in love and living ‘happily ever after’ has become
problematized as younger urban Chinese see the difficulties of both living under the pressures of the
market economy, and being expected to form and sustain a loving relationship (Farrer, 2002: 148–
149).

• Dating is also more commonly accepted within large cities like Shanghai and dating programmes are
appearing on television (Farrer, 2002: 150).

• Abstinence from pre-marital sex and the culture around virginity are less strongly adhered to by
urban youth, though love may still be expected as part of a sexual encounter (Farrer, 2002: 257–258).
 Sex and Extra-marital Relations

• Despite the rhetoric of equality, women were still defined in ‘scientific’ terms as essentially

different from and less sexual than men.

• In this monogamous picture, women were represented as the principal targets and agents of

sexual morality and reason, so the double standard implicit in the Confucian principle of

female chastity was recast in a gender- specific identification of female responsibility for the

maintenance of social and sexual order (Evans 1997, 2000).

 Sex and Extra-marital Relations
• Since the 1990s, extramarital love has emerged as a common theme in public discourse.

• Through interviews with men and women in Shanghai, Farrer and Sun (2003) found that while
extramarital affairs allow the expression of romance and exchange of sex untainted by
economic factors, these affairs usually coexist with the fulfilment of family responsibility by
the philandering spouses.

• Although participants saw sexual satisfaction as important, media accounts of extramarital

affairs were gendered in ways that paralleled mate choice for marriage: women sought affairs
with men of higher status, while men looked for young and beautiful partners (Hershatter,
2004)
 Sexual Minorities
• Homosexuality entered into both popular and official discourse in the reform era when it became closely
associated with AIDS, crime, sickness and abnormality (Evans, 1997)

• Homosexuality and lesbianism are not merely objects of moral outrage – they challenge the foundations of the
Asian patriarchal family.

• To live as a gay man is to ‘renege on the paramount filial duty of continuing the family line and ensuring parents’
future status as ancestors; to live as a lesbian refuses women's part in this project, brings shame on the family,
and flies in the face of all tenets of feminine virtue’ (Jackson et al., 2008: 24).

• Although Chinese law makes no specific mention of homosexuality, narratives of LGBT people themselves show
that they are subject to brutal treatment including public beatings by police (Evans, 1997), administrative
detention and re-education as ‘hooligans’ (He and Jolly, 2002).
 Sexual Minorities
• Attention has been drawn to the practice of lesbians and gay men contracting legal marriages with
each other – variously described as ‘co-operative', ‘formality’ or ‘sham marriages’ – as a means to
diffuse familial pressure on them to marry, while maintaining their real homosexual relationships in
private.

• Such marriages are seen as evidence of love held by ‘lala’ (lesbian) daughters and gay sons for their
parents, as well as being the only way to make possible their real, homosexual relationships.

• Liu (2013) finds that in classified advertisements for potential partners in such formality marriages,
lesbians and gay men emphasize some traits consistent with traditional Chinese values such as filial
piety, compatibility and traditional gender roles, suggesting an effort to conform to heteronormative
roles and expectations while exploring ways to live as an LGBT person.
References

• Liu, J., Bell E., & Zhang J. (2018) “Family Life”, in W. Wu & M. W. Frazier

(eds) The SAGE Handbook of Contemporary China. SAGE Publications

Ltd.