Village to distant village: The opportunities and risks of long-distance marriage migration in rural China

Journal of Contemporary China

Volumn 16, Issue 50, 2007, Pages 97-116

  Bossen, Laurel ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MARRIAGE; MIGRATION DETERMINANT; RURAL POPULATION; RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION; VILLAGE;

EID: 33847753048     PISSN: 10670564     EISSN: 14699400     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10670560601026843     Document Type: Article

References (92)

1. See E. Judd, 'Niangjia: Chinese women and their natal families', The Journal of Asian Studies 48(4), (1989), pp. 525-544.
2. See Laurel Bossen, Chinese Women and Rural Development: Sixty Years of Change in Lu Village, Yunnan (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002)
3. Weiguo Zhang, Chinese Economic Reforms and Fertility Behaviour: A Study of a North China Village (London: China Library, 2002).
4. For the few exceptions, see Delia Davin, Internal Migration in Contemporary China (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999)
5. Wang Feng, 'Gendered migration and the migration of genders in contemporary China', in Barbara Entwisle and Gail Henderson, eds, Re-drawing Boundaries: Work, Households and Gender in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 231-242
6. and Lin Tan and Susan E. Short, 'Living as double outsiders: Migrant women's experiences of marriage in a county-level city', in Arianne Gaetano and Tamara Jacka, eds, On the Move: Women in Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 151-174.
7. See Gaetano and Jacka, eds, On the Move.
8. Wang Feng, 'Gendered migration', p. 231.
9. See William Lavely, 'Marriage and mobility under rural collectivism', in Rubie Watson and Patricia B. Ebrey, eds, Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 286-312.
10. See Zhang Li, Strangers in the City (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001)
11. and Wang Feng, 'Gendered migration'.
12. For a recent study focusing on uxorilocal marriage in rural China, particularly Shaanxi and Hubei provinces, see Li Shuzhuo et al., Dangdai Zhongguo nongcun de zhaozhui hunyin [uxorilocal marriage in contemporary Rural China], (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2006).
13. For discussion of variation in uxorilocal and village endogamous marriage rates in Taiwan, see M. Cohen, House United, House Divided: The Chinese Family in Taiwan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976)
14. S. Harrell, Ploughshare Village: Culture and Context in Taiwan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982)
15. B. Pasternak, Guests in the Dragon: Social Demography of a Chinese District, 1895-1946 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)
16. A. Wolf and C. S. Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980).
17. For south China, see R. Watson, Inequality among Brothers: Class and Kinship in South China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
18. S. Potter and J. Potter, China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
19. For Yunnan Province, see H. T. Fei and C. I. Chang, Earthbound China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945)
20. and Bossen, Chinese Women and Rural Development. 9. Potter and Potter in China's Peasants (p. 200) show that the traditional prohibition of village endogamy in Zengbu, a village in Guangdong Province, may have been weakened since the revolution. In 1964-1968, only 10% of marriages were endogamous to the brigade, whereas in 1979-1981, 21% were village endogamous.
21. Zhang, Chinese Economic Reforms, p. 100, studied a village in Hebei where endogamous marriage rates since 1959 fluctuated between 6 and 18%, suggesting no particular trend.
22. See E. Croll, The Politics of Marriage in Contemporary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)
23. and G. W. Skinner, 'Marketing and social structure in rural China', Journal of Asian Studies no. 24, (1964), pp. 3-43, 195-228, 363-399.
24. Croll, The Politics of Marriage, p. 85.
25. See Zhang, Chinese Economic Reforms; Cohen, House United, House Divided;
26. Harrell, Ploughshare Village;
27. Watson, Inequality among Brothers;
28. Croll, The Politics of Marriage.
29. See also Lawrence W. Crissman, 'Spatial aspects of marriage patterns as influenced by marketing behavior in West Central Taiwan', in Carol A. Smith, ed., Regional Analysis, Vol. 2 (New York: Academic Press, 1976), pp. 123-147
30. and John W. Adams and Alice Kasakoff, 'Factors underlying endogamous group size', in Smith, ed, Regional Analysis, pp. 149-173
31. and John W. Adams and Alice Kasakoff, 'Central-place theory and endogamy in China', in Smith, ed. Regional Analysis, pp. 175-187, for detailed discussions of the relationship between spatial systems of endogamy and market systems in Taiwan and China. Their concern is more with the correlation between local market and marriage systems rather than with longdistance marriages per se.
32. Liyi He with Claire Anne Chik, Mr. China's Son: A Villager's Life (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003), p. 278.
33. See Cohen, House United, House Divided, p. 41, map.
34. For younger women of Ha Tsuen, a change had occurred by 1978. Only 44% came from the local market area, whereas 41% came from urban Kowloon, a distance of about 30 kilometres, or a two- or three-hour commute by bus or minibus. See Watson, Inequality among Brothers, pp. 127, 151. This change reflects improving transportation and communication, reducing 'effective distance'.
35. Croll, The Politics of Marriage, p. 85.
36. Graham Johnson cites Parish and Whyte's survey for results comparable to his own. See G. Johnson, 'Family strategies and economic transformations in rural China: Some evidence from the Pearl River Delta', in D. Davis and S. Harrell, eds, Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era (Berkeley: University of California, 1993), pp. 103-136
37. and W. L. Parish and M. K. Whyte, Village and Family in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 134. Johnson reports only 34% of brides in his Pearl River Delta sample came from outside the zhen, or market town, while Parish and Whyte found proportions ranging from 34 to 42% for marriages outside the zhen.
38. In Parish and Whyte, the proportions of brides from 'other' origins, neither the market town nor the adjacent market town, ranged from 11 to 15% (see Johnson, 'Family strategies', p. 117). This category seems comparable to my category of 'distant exogamous marriage'.
39. Lavely, 'Marriage and mobility', p. 292.
40. Zhang, Chinese Economic Reforms, p. 100.
41. Li Xu, Intra-family Gender Relations, Women's Well-being, and Access to Resources: The Case of a Northern Chinese Village, Ph.D. thesis, University of Western Ontario, Canada, 2006, p. 132.
42. Davin, Internal Migration in Contemporary China, p. 138.
43. As a rough estimate, China had a population of 1.295 billion in 2000 with approximately 413 million women aged 15-64, of whom 62% are rural. Thus 5% would be roughly 13 million. For China's population, see http://www.china.org.cn/baodao/english/newsandreport/2001may/new10-1.htm and http://www.unicef.org/inforbycountry/chin_statistics.html#.
44. Lavely, 'Marriage and mobility'.
45. Ibid., p. 294.
46. Ibid., p. 291; see Table 1.
47. Ibid., pp. 295-296. Lavely's finding of a lower rate of out-marriage might be caused by less consistent recording of out-marriages. It seems unlikely that Nanch'uan commune, with 52 women's origins recorded (Table 9.4) for in-marriages in 1978-1980, would have only 18 women's out-marriage destinations (none of them to areas at a distance of 120 kilometres or more). A skewed ratio of in-marriages to out-marriages (350-266) implies a net marriage gain of 84 women for 1978-1980. Where do they find husbands? Unless daughters' out-marriages are undercounted, one would expect an increase in male in-migration to supply enough husbands. Instead, the records show a net out-migration of 62 people of undetermined sex in Table 9.2 (p. 293). An alternative is that significant numbers of unmarried women migrated out of the community to seek employment. Although female out-migration became widespread in the 1990s, the data come from a relatively early period when outside employment opportunities for women were probably less common.
48. Consistent with Lavely's model of female marriage migration, Josephine Smart reported the desire of female migrant workers from distant, poorer regions of China to marry into Henggang, a rural market town about 20 kilometres outside Shenzhen (Special Economic Zone) in Guangdong Province, whereas women from Henggang seek to marry men from Hong Kong. See J. Smart, 'The impact of foreign direct investment on gender relations in the Pearl River Delta (PRC) since 1978', paper presented at the North American Chinese Sociologist Association conference on Gender Issues in Contemporary Chinese Societies, Miami, USA, 11-12 August 1993, p. 12.
49. C. Cindy Fan and Youqin Huang, 'Waves of rural brides: Female marriage migration in China', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88(2), (1998), pp. 227-251.
50. Norma Diamond, 'Collectivization, kinship, and the status of women in rural China', Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 25-32.
51. Harrell, Ploughshare Village, pp. 126, 176-177.
52. Davin, Internal Migration in Contemporary China, pp. 147-148.
53. See also J. Tyson and A. Tyson, Chinese Awakenings: Life Stories from Unofficial China (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), pp. 199-201.
54. It is difficult to evaluate the concept of being 'sold' because bride price and fees to matchmakers are also paid in marriages in which women consent to the marriage. In both cases, villagers may use the term 'sold' to describe the transfer of money as part of the marriage agreement. For the Anhui survey, see Min Han, Social Change and Continuity in a Village in Northern Anhui, China: A Response to Revolution and Reform (Osaka, Japan: National Museum of Ethnology, 2001), pp. 168-170. The survey was an 'unpublished internal report of the Xiao County Women's Association' on out-of-county wives from 1980 to 1987. The officials of the association believe their sample was only a fraction of the real total. The total county population in 1985 was 987,000, with 941,600 registered as rural (see p. 13).
55. 'Attribute matching' refers to a situation in which a better-educated woman in a remote community may be considered equal to the composite qualities of one of the less desirable men who reside in a more desirable location. The woman's relatively better education (in terms of her natal community but not necessarily the community of her husband) becomes a trade-off against the husband's better location.
56. See Paul Pickowicz and Liping Wang, 'Village voices, urban activists: women, violence, and gender inequality in rural China', in P. Link et al., eds, Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizaing Society (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), pp. 57-89
57. Elizabeth Rosenthal, 'Harsh reality feeds a black market in women', New York Times, (25 June 2001), available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06025/world/25BRID.html
58. and Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
59. See M. K. Whyte, 'The perils of assessing trends', in Entwisle and Henderson, eds, Re-drawing Boundaries, pp. 157-167 at p. 163.
60. Research in China was conducted during numerous fieldtrips between 1987 and 2004, and funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, and the Québec fonds pour la formation de chercheurs et l'aide à la recherche (FCAR). I thank these organizations and countless colleagues, friends and assistants, as well as the Henan Academy of Social Sciences, the Yunnan Academy of Social Sciences, and the Henan Women's Federation for their help.
61. M. Han reports that Xiao county, Anhui, also on the North China Plain bordering Henan, had similar high rates of migrant wives from western China. From 1980 to 1987, out of 4,106 out-of-county wives sampled, 22% were from Sichuan and 20% were from Shaanxi Province. See Han, Social Change and Continuity, p. 168. Fan and Huang show that the largest flows of inter-provincial female marriage migration are from poorer western provinces to more developed eastern provinces. See Fan and Huang, 'Waves of rural brides', p. 242.
62. Davin, Internal Migration in Contemporary China, p. 145.
63. In interviewing out-of-province wives, I found it interesting that my local Chinese assistants would generally begin to inquire and to look for explanations for the matches, anticipating the men's deficiencies. Were they old, widowed, or divorced? Were they lame? Did they come from especially poor families? Not infrequently, they uncovered such reasons.
64. Tyson and Tyson, Chinese Awakenings, p. 200.
65. See L. Bossen, 'Land and population controls in rural China', Bulletin of the National Museum of Ethnology 30(3), (2006), pp. 421-449. While skewed infant and child sex ratios have been attributed to female infanticide and infant abandonment up to the 1980s, in recent years with the spread of ultrasound machines for sex detection, sex selective abortion, or female foeticide, seems to be the most common method for ensuring sons under the state family planning policy.
66. According to the census, the sex ratio for Henan was 105 males per 100 females in 1990. The sex ratio at birth was 117 males per 100 females for rural Henan in 1989 whereas the sex ratio at birth in rural Yunnan was only 108 males per 100 females. See Statistical Bureau of China, Zhongguo Tongji Nianjian [China Statistical Yearbook ] (Beijing: China Statistical Publishing House, 1992)
67. and E. Croll, Endangered Daughters: Discrimination and Development in Asia (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 27. By the 2000 census, the ratio of males to 100 females, aged between one and four years old, had risen to 135 in Henan Province and to 114 in Yunnan.
68. See China Census (National Bureau of Statistics, China Data Center, University of Michigan, 2003), available at: http://chinadataonline.org/ member/census2000/ybtableview.asp?ID10725.
69. James and Ann Tyson quote a Henan village man who 'bought' a Sichuan wife (whose willingness or opposition was not discussed in the text) as saying 'She's pretty, she can till the land better than a northern man, she's a good housekeeper, and she saved me a lot of money' (Tyson and Tyson, Chinese Awakenings, p. 200).
70. Zhang, Chinese Economic Reforms, pp. 92-100.
71. Min Han similarly described a Shaanxi wife in rural Anhui as unhappy 'particularly because she could not understand the local dialect'. See Han, Social Change and Continuity, p. 167.
72. Min Han gives examples where outside wives were judged mentally unbalanced, were beaten, and ran away. See Han, Social Change and Continuity, pp. 166-167.
73. For examples of prejudice against different rural and minority dialects, see Susan Blum, Portraits of Primitives: Ordering Human Kinds in the Chinese Mind (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001)
74. and Liyi He, Mr. China's Son.
75. See Du Shanshan, 'Chopsticks Only Work in Pairs': Gender Unity and Gender Inequality among the Lahu of Southwest China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 81. Du writes the name as 'Na Meiq' in her text, using the 'q' to indicate tone.
76. For the impact of long distance marriage migration on the Lahu minority, see Ma Jianxiong 'Nayue he ta de jiemeimen - hunyin kunjing zhong de Yunnam Lahuzu cunzhuang' [Nayue and her sisters - marriage difficulties in a Yunnan Lahu minority village] Nanfangchuan electronic journal (in Chinese) www.nfcmag.com April 2, 2006, 5 pages,
77. and Ma Jianxiong, 'Sex Ratio, Marriage Squeeze and Ethnic Females' Marriage Migration in China: A Case Study on the Lahu and the Va', Journal of Guangxi University for Nationalities (Philosophy and Social Science Edition), Vol. 26, No. 4, July 1, 2004, Nanning, Guangxi, China, pp. 88-95.
78. See Tyson and Tyson, Chinese Awakenings, p. 199.
79. See X. Liu, In One's Own Shadow: An Ethnographic Account of the Condition of Post-reform Rural China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 52-53, Table 1, which shows the bride's place of origin from the 1940s to 1992. Out-of-province wives came from Henan, Gansu, and Shandong.
80. Tyson and Tyson, Chinese Awakenings, p. 200.
81. Huang Tu village is a pseudonym for a village studied in 1989 and revisited in 1993 and 2004.
82. For reports of similar cases in rural Anhui, see Han, Social Change and Continuity, pp. 166-167.
83. Up to the 1990s, official village registration entitled members to a per capita share of village farm land at periodic redistributions. In some villages, new wives had to wait several years until a full redistribution according to household registration, or recognized village membership, entitled them to a share. During this time, closeexogamous wives might retain access to land rights in the natal villages, but distant-exogamous wives could not effectively maintain such access. Although land redistributions have been officially discontinued according to national policy, my visit in 2004 revealed that readjustments continued in some areas of northern Henan, while in villages of northern Shanxi, incoming wives did not gain access to land. See also, Bossen, 'Land and population controls in rural China'.
84. Han, Social Change and Continuity, p. 162.
85. The practice of the deceased husband's agnatic kin (brothers, step-brothers, and uncles) depriving widows, as outsiders, of their land rights is certainly not unique to Chinese villages. Donald W. Attwood in Raising Cane: The Political Economy of Sugar in Western India (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), p. 130, has pointed out similar practices in rural Maharashtra.
86. The Chinese census confirms that Sichuan indeed raises far more pigs per capita than other provinces, and almost four times as many pigs per capita as Henan (see Statistical Bureau of China, Zhongguo Tongji Nianjian, 1992, pp. 79, 372). This is consistent with the Henan village stereotype of Sichuan wives being accustomed to a diet with more meat, and with the statements of the Sichuan woman I interviewed. See also The Economic Atlas of China.
87. Han, Social Change and Continuity, p. 169, cites a 1987 county survey of 4,106 distant wives in Anhui showing that only 20% had officially registered marriages.
88. Dowry goods in rural China generally consist of bulky furniture items that would be too costly and risky to transport across country by train. The out-of-province wives whom I interviewed generally brought very few goods and considered their train fare and travel expenses as too exorbitant to leave much money for furniture. However, in some cases, the husband provided money to the out-of-province wife to buy a modest amount of furniture for or after the wedding.
89. The help of brothers is not necessarily restricted to upholding their sister's rights to keep their former husband's lands, but may also include helping her to plough or accomplish other tasks that traditionally require male assistance.
90. Han, Social Change and Continuity, p. 169.
91. Xu, 'Intra-family gender relations', p. 218.
92. Hong Zhang, Department of East Asian Studies, Colby College, personal communication.