Me and my family: Perceptions of individual and collective among young rural Chinese

European Journal of East Asian Studies

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 75-99

  Hansen, Mette Halskov ^a   Pang, Cuiming ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF OSLO   (Norway)

Author keywords

Family; Individual; Individualisation; Rural youth

Indexed keywords

EID: 48849093320     PISSN: 15680584     EISSN: 15700615     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/156805808X333929     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Zygmunt Bauman, in the foreword to Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences (London: Sage, 2003), p. xvi.
2. By 'closest family', we refer here to parents, grandparents and siblings.
3. Yunxiang Yan, Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003).
4. Discussed by proponents of the 'individualisation thesis' such as Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991);
5. U. Beck, Te Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order (Cambridge: Polity, 1997);
6. U. Beck and J. Willms, Conversations with Ulrich Beck (Cambridge: Polity, 2004);
7. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization;
8. Cosmo Howard, 'Three models of individualized biography', in Cosmo Howard (ed.), Contested Individualization: Debates about Contemporary Personhood (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007);
9. Zygmunt Bauman, Te Individualized Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2001).
10. Matthew Kohrman, in an interesting article about smoking in urban China, is one of the few scholars who has employed Ulrich Beck's theory of risk society directly to a Chinese case; Matthew Kohrman, 'Should I quit? Tobacco, fraught identity, and the risks of governmentality in urban China', Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development, June (2004) online at http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0286- 6603468_ITM (accessed 26 February 2008).
11. See Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization;
12. also Howard, Three models, p. 40.
13. E.g. Paul Henman, 'Governing individuality', in Cosmo Howard (ed.), Contested Individualization: Debates about Contemporary Personhood (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007);
14. Howard, Three models;
15. A. Furlong and F. Cartmel, Young People and Social Change. New Perspectives (Berkshire, England: McGraw Hill/Open University Press, 2007).
16. Yan, Private Life, p. 234.
17. Furlong and Cartmel, Young People and Social Change, p. 7.
18. Henman, Governing individuals, p. 183.
19. Furlong and Cartmel, Young People and Social Change, p. 7.
20. Myron L. Cohen, Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).
21. A number of publications have described and analysed changing marriage practices and changes in family law, for instance Elisabeth Croll, The Politics of Marriage in Contemporary China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981);
22. Cohen, Kinship;
23. Yan, Private Life;
24. Deborah Davis and Stevan Harrell, Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).
25. Cohen, Kinship, p. 87.
26. Yan, Private Life.
27. Unlike in rural areas, for instance Zhejiang Province, it was very uncommon in the villages we studied that young people lived together and had children before marriage. It happened in a few instances when families could not afford an appropriate wedding ceremony, and in those cases people largely tried to keep it secret.
28. E.g. Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
29. Couples with rural household registrations were allowed to have a second child if the first was a girl. Due to widespread use of unofficial adoption of girls by relatives or friends, mostly in other provinces, and the use of ultrasound to determine the gender of a foetus, there were in the Shaanxi village about one third more boys than girls. Only six of 150 households had only daughters and no sons, and out of 128 women of the official child-bearing age (up to 49) there were only four who had two girls and who had been sterilised. There were 12 who had only one girl, but none of these were sterilised and they would most likely have one or more children later.
30. Yan, Private Life, p. 234.
31. See also Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), pp. 152-163.
32. The exploitation of migrant workers is not a topic in this article, but it has been thoroughly documented, for instance in Anita Chan, China's Workers Under Assault: Te Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy (Armonk, NY: East Gate Books, 2001); Jonathan Unger and Anita Chan, 'The internal politics of an urban Chinese work community: a case study of employee influence on decision-making at a state-owned factory', Te China Journal, No. 52 (2004), pp. 1-24; and recently in a report from Amnesty International, 'People's Republic of China. Internal migrants: discrimination and abuse. The human cost of an economic "miracle"', online at http://web.amnesty. org/library/index/engasa170082007 (accessed 8 May 2007).
33. During our fieldwork in 2004, villages in Fujian were still under the influence of the 2002 national crackdown on Internet cafés with fewer than 100 computers, and in the villages we studied, access to Internet cafés was only possible by personal agreement and in secrecy during the evenings.
34. Mette Halskov Hansen, 'Organising the old: senior authority and the political significance of a rural Chinese "NGO"', Modern Asian Studies, 42(5) (2008), pp. 1057-1078.
35. Yan, Private Life, p. 234.
36. E.g. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization, pp. 2-3.
37. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization, p. 4.
38. Furlong and Cartmel, Young People and Social Change, p. 5.
39. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization, p. 5.
40. Furlong and Cartmel, Young People and Social Change, p. 9.
41. See Stig Thøgersen and Ni Anru, '"He is He, and I am I": Individual and Collective Among China's Rural Elderly', EJEAS, this volume.
42. Yan, Private Life.