Continuity and change in urban Chinese family life

China Journal

Volumn , Issue 53, 2005, Pages 9-33

  Whyte, Martin King ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

FAMILY STRUCTURE;

EID: 16444385265     PISSN: 13249347     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/20065990     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. See Martin K. Whyte (ed.), China's Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, 2003).
2. William J. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York: The Free Press, 1963).
3. It should be noted, however, that one particular type of Western cultural influence, as conveyed through the Soviet Union and China's state promotion of "learning from the Soviet Union", had a deep impact on Chinese society during the 1950s, up until the Sino-Soviet split in 1960. So the period of fairly total isolation from all Western cultural influences was roughly from 1960 to 1980.
4. See the discussion in Susan Greenhalgh, "Families and Networks in Taiwan's Economic Development", in E. Winkler and S. Greenhalgh (eds), Contending Approaches to the Political Economy of Taiwan (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1988).
5. This shift toward a more conservative atmosphere regarding the family has been the subject of a number of studies, including C. K. Yang, The Chinese Family in the Communist Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1959);
6. and Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983);
7. although the particulars are disputed by Neil Diamant in his book, Revolutionizing the Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
8. The details of this strengthening of bride price negotiations during the collective era are spelled out in William L. Parish and Martin K. Whyte, Village and Family in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp.183-89.
9. It should be noted that the institutional consequences of China's actual socialist institutions are different and much more complex than assumed by socialist theory. The primary text in which classical Marxist predictions about family life in a future socialist society are discussed is Friedrich Engels's On the Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1902). In Engels's account, marriage in a future socialist society becomes an entirely voluntary and perhaps temporary union unconstrained by economic, religious or legal restrictions. It will be obvious that this sounds much more like family life in advanced capitalist societies today than like the family patterns of contemporary China.
10. Baoding is a fairly ordinary industrial city on a major railway line about 2 hours southwest of Beijing. Its urban population in 199 was about 600,000. No claim is made here that Baoding is typical or representative of all of urban China. However, at the same time there is nothing we know about Baoding that leads us to expect that the family patterns there would be particularly distinctive compared to other medium-sized and large cities in China. It should also be noted that, although the sort of detailed analysis presented in this paper is only possible because of the post-1979 opportunity to conduct sample surveys in China, the primary conclusions about patterns of contemporary family life in Baoding drawn from our survey are in all respects consistent with the conclusions of earlier research conducted from Hong Kong as ethnography "at a distance", see Martin K. Whyte and William L. Parish, Urban Life in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), chapters 5-7. In other words, for the Chinese family, at least, research conducted earlier at the Universities Service Centre has stood the test of time, even if such research could not yield the sort of detail and statistical precision of more recent survey work inside China.
11. The Taiwan surveys were jointly sponsored by the Population Studies Center and the Institute of Gerontology at the University of Michigan and the Taiwan Provincial Institute of Family Planning. The 1989 survey involved a probability survey of 4,049 individuals over age 60 living in Taiwan. In the follow-up survey conducted in 1993, 3,155 of those respondents were re-interviewed, and then all children of a randomly chosen one quarter of the 1993 parents were interviewed, yielding a grown child sample of 662. The Baoding survey was jointly sponsored by the Department of Sociology and Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan and the Department of Sociology at Beijing University and the China Research Center on Aging. That 1994 survey involved a probability sample of 1,002 registered residents of the three main urban districts in that city over age 50, and one randomly selected adult child residing in Baoding of each interviewed parent, with 753 of these grown children interviewed.
12. One major exception to this generalization occurred during the Cultural Revolution decade (1966-76). Millions of urban secondary school graduates were mobilized to settle down in the countryside and become farmers. However, after Mao's death and the launching of China's economic reforms in 1978, almost all of these "sent-down intellectual youths" were allowed to return to their cities of origin. So even in this case the end result was an eventual job in the city where the parents resided.
13. These ties were also reinforced by Chinese law. Both the 1950 and 1980 versions of the Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China legally obliged grown children to contribute to the support of their aging parents. In extreme cases the wages of an unfilial child could be docked in order to provide a needy parent with such support. This same provision was included in the revised Marriage Law adopted in 2001.
14. One compilation of estimates provided figures of 56-71 per cent of parents over age 60 on Taiwan living with a married child, and 38-52 per cent for parents over age 60 in urban areas of the PRC. See John R. Logan, Fuqin Bian and Yanjie Bian, "Tradition and Change in the Urban Chinese Family", unpublished paper, Table 1. Figures on the elderly residing with their extended family in rural China are generally even higher. For example, an ethnographic study of a village in Heilongjiang shows that 64 per cent of those over age 60 were living with a married child in the mid-1990s. Figures computed from Yunxiang Yan, Private Life under Socialism: Individuality and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), Table 7.1.
15. See the discussion of the growing acceptance of "networked families" in urban China in Jonathan Unger, "Urban Families in the Eighties: An Analysis of Chinese Surveys", in Deborah Davis and Stevan Harrell (eds), Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
16. The housing space available to the average Chinese urbanite actually declined by 20 per cent from 1952 to 1978, to a measly 40 square feet per person. See Martin K. Whyte and William L. Parish, Urban Life in Contemporary China, pp. 76-85.
17. In one particular agrarian society, recent social changes have made support from grown children increasingly unreliable-the contemporary Chinese countryside. On this see Lihua Pang, Alan de Brauw and Scott Rozelle, "Working Until You Drop: The Elderly of Rural China", The China Journal, No 52 (July 2004), pp. 73-94.
18. One generalization from gerontological research around the world is that in developing countries the flow of assistance between generations tends to move upward from grown children to parents, while in developed countries it more often flows downward, from aging parents to grown children. This shift in the intergenerational flow of resources with economic development is the central focus of John Caldwell's theory of the demographic transition. See his book, Theory of Fertility Decline (New York: Academic Press, 1982).
19. The likelihood of cash assistance to parents was responsive to both parental need and a child's ability to pay. Parents with lower family income were more likely to receive such assistance, and grown children with higher incomes were more likely to provide it. See Shengming Yan, Jieming Chen and Shanhua Yang, "Living Arrangements and Old-Age Support ", in Martin K. Whyte (ed.), China's Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations, Table 6.5.
20. If we cumulate all of the various forms of assistance, then more than 50 per cent of Baoding parents are receiving at least one kind of specific assistance from their grown children-in fact, about two-thirds. But that still leaves a substantial minority of parents-the remaining third-who do not report receiving from their grown children any regular support of any of the types about which we inquired.
21. On this point, see also the evidence presented in Yanjie Bian, " Guanxi and the Allocation of Jobs in Urban China", The China Quarterly, Vol. 140 (December 1994), pp. 971-99.
22. See Martin King Whyte, "The Fate of Filial Obligations in Urban China", The China Journal, Vol. 38 (July 1997), pp. 1-31 and especially Table 3. To cite some specific examples, parents more than their adult children agreed with the view that public property is superior to private and that comradeship is a higher form of relationship than friendship, but at the same time they were also more likely to agree with a statement that there would be chaos unless society is ruled by a single set of common values and that the family is happiest when the man works and the wife takes care of the family. Adult children not only spoke more in favor of private property and friendship, but also were more likely than their parents to say that either a man or a woman could have a happy life without marrying.
23. For further details see ibid.
24. Research on intergenerational relations in the United States has found a similar tendency for each generation to stress their obligations more than their needs in relation to the other generation. See John Logan and Glenna Spitze, "Self-Interest and Altruism in Intergenerational Relations", Demography, Vol. 32, No. 3 (August 1995), pp. 353-64.
25. For details, see Shengming Yan, Jieming Chen and Shanhua Yang, "Living Arrangements and Old Age Support", Chapter 6 in Martin K. Whyte (ed.), China's Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations.
26. Before controlling for other variables, it looks initially as if married sons are more likely to provide cash assistance to parents than are married daughters, and that they give somewhat larger amounts of cash when they do. However, when you control for other variables (and particularly for the fact that males have higher incomes than females and married sons are more likely to co-reside with parents than are married daughters), it turns out that the net effect of being a daughter on financial assistance is negligible. On the other hand, married daughters are more likely to provide material goods (for example, food and clothing) to their own parents, and this is still the case even after statistical controls have been applied.
27. See the discussion in Martin K. Whyte, Albert Hermalin and Mary Beth Ofstedal, "Intergenerational Relations in Two Chinese Societies", Chapter 9 in Martin K. Whyte (ed.), China's Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations. Where the existing literature indicates differences in dominant family patterns in early twentieth-century Taiwan compared to mainland China, for the most part these are features that should work against the argument being presented here that Baoding family patterns are more "modern" today than the patterns found in urban Taiwan. For example, distinctive features of Taiwan families in earlier times included a more frequent remarriage of widows than on the mainland, and smaller and shallower lineages.
28. Mainlanders differ from Taiwanese in other ways beyond demography. For example, many more Mainlanders had careers in the military or the government bureaucracy, and fewer of them ran family businesses, than is the case for the Taiwanese. In general on the contrasting family patterns of Mainlanders and Taiwanese on Taiwan, see Arland Thornton and Hui-sheng Lin, Social Change and the Family in Taiwan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
29. This substantial gap in the proportion of the sample of elderly parents who are married rather than widowed or divorced remains a puzzle we cannot satisfactorily explain. We suspect that fear of cremation (mandatory in China's cities, optional in the countryside) may induce a substantial number of widowed Baoding elderly to return to their native villages, but we have no way to check on this possibility. There is no comparable rural-urban policy difference in Taiwan. Perhaps a slightly higher rate of divorce in Taiwan also contributes to this gap.
30. The reader should bear in mind that the figures provided for Baoding in this section differ somewhat from those presented earlier, since now we are restricting our attention to only those parents aged 60 and over, not the full sample of parents above age 50.
31. The remainder of the cases involve living with unmarried children (23 per cent in Taiwan; 13 per cent in Baoding) and in some other arrangement (8 per cent in Taiwan, 2 per cent in Baoding).
32. To be sure, if we had data on the rural elderly in the PRC we would find that very few of them are receiving pensions. Still, these data for Taiwan provide a striking indication that much of the employment even in urban Taiwan does not occur through modern corporations and public agencies that provide retirement pensions and other "modern" fringe benefits. Since 1989, policy changes have led to greater availability of pensions to the elderly in Taiwan generally, so that if we conducted our surveys today we would presumably find a somewhat smaller pension-coverage gap between these two populations.
33. The results presented here are drawn from Albert Hermalin, Mary Beth Ofstedal and Shiauping Shih, "Patterns of Intergenerational Support in Urban China and Urban Taiwan", Chapter 10 in Martin K. Whyte (ed.), China's Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations.
34. Of the four kinds of support inquired about in our questionnaires, physical care and domestic chores are most appropriate for focusing on the roles of married daughters versus daughter-in-law because these tasks were traditionally performed by women of the house.
35. We suspect that this disparity in naming the spouse as main provider of assistance results from a combination of the fact that more parents in Baoding than in urban Taiwan have living spouses, as well as the job demands on children and children-in-law in Baoding. As a result of the latter, there is less likely to be a grown child or child-in-law in Baoding who has enough free time during the day to provide substantial and regular assistance.
36. Mainlanders in Taiwan show an even more prominent role for the spouse than do Baoding parents, but a much less prominent role for the daughter (as well as the daughter-in-law), in comparison to the indigenous Taiwanese.
37. Island-wide in Taiwan, about 45 per cent of married women work outside the home between marriage and the birth of their first child (for wives married in the early 1980s). However, after the birth of children this rate drops markedly. See Arland Thornton and Hui-sheng Lin, Social Change and the Family in Taiwan, pp. 142-44.
38. See the evidence on remarriage of widows in Taiwan before 1949 cited in George Barclay, Colonial Development and Population in Taiwan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954).
39. For a thoughtful account of how Baoding parents try to encourage filiality in their children in the absence of meaningful inheritable property, see Jieming Chen, "The Effects of Parental Investment on Old-Age Support in Urban China", Chapter 8 in Martin K. Whyte (ed.), China's Revolutions and Intergenerational Relations.
40. Arland Thornton and Thomas E. Fricke, "Social Change and the Family: Comparative Perspectives from the West, China, and South Asia", Sociological Forum, Vol. 2, No.4 (December 1987), pp. 746-52.
41. To be specific, only 2 per cent of parents and 3 per cent of the adult children we interviewed were either self-employed or working for (or retired from) a private firm. Similarly, only 1 per cent of parents and 5 per cent of children were renting privately owned housing from others, with an additional 5 per cent of parents living in private housing of their own.
42. For example, there is nothing comparable in Taiwan to the strictly enforced one-child policy of the PRC after 1979, and China's market reforms to date do not seem to be leading to the proliferation of urban family firms of the sort found in Taiwan.