Family Management and Family Division in Contemporary Rural China

The China Quarterly

Volumn 130, Issue , 1992, Pages 357-377

  Cohen, Myron L ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84972474672     PISSN: 03057410     EISSN: 14682648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0305741000040777     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. Women's private funds, known in standard Mandarin as sifang qian, comprised a traditional form of property distinct from that owned by the family as a unit. See Myron L. Cohen, House United, House Divided: The Chinese Family in Taiwan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 178–190.
2. My use of “traditional” is with reference to continuities with late imperial (Qing) culture and society.
3. Cohen, House United, House Divided.
4. Classic representations of this position include Olga Lang, Chinese Family and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946);
5. Marion J. Levy Jr., The Family Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1949;
6. Maurice Freedman, “The Chinese domestic family: models,” and “The family in China: past and present,” in G. William Skinner (ed.), The Study of Chinese Society: Essays by Maurice Freedman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979), pp. 235–254.
7. The important contributions include Burton Pasternak, Guests in the Dragon: Social Demography of a Chinese District, 1895–1946 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)
8. and Pasternak, “On the causes and demographic consequences of uxorilocal marriage in China,” in Susan B. Hanley and Arthur p. Wolf (eds.), Family and Population in East Asian History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985);
9. Arthur P. Wolf and Chieh-shan Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845–1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980).
10. Wolf and Huang, Marriage and Adoption, refer to what I have called “standard” marriage as “major marriage”; it involves providing at least the minimum required ritualized transfer of the bride from her natal home to that of the groom. With “little daughter-in-law marriage” (“minor marriage” for Wolf and Huang) the transfer occurs during infancy or early childhood; ritual is either greatly reduced, postponed or absent altogether.
11. Wolf and Huang, Marriage and Adoption, refer to what I have called “standard” marriage as “major marriage”; it involves providing at least the minimum required ritualized transfer of the bride from her natal home to that of the groom. With “little daughter-in-law marriage” (“minor marriage” for Wolf and Huang) the transfer occurs during infancy or early childhood; ritual is either greatly reduced, postponed or absent altogether. p. 72.
12. For descriptions of family division practices in north China see Shūzō Shiga, “Family property and the law of inheritance in traditional China,” in David C. Buxbaum (ed.), Chinese Family Law and Social Change in Historical and Comparative Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979), pp. 109-150;
13. R. F. Johnston, Lion and Dragon in Northern China (London: John Murray, 1910), pp. 149–153.
14. For eastern China (Jiangsu) see Tadashi Fukutake, Asian Rural Society: China, India, Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), p. 86;
15. Hsiao-tung Fei [Fei Xiaotong], Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1939), pp. 65–69.
16. An account of family division in south-eastern China (Fujian) is in Lin Yueh-hwa, The Golden Wing: A Sociological Study of Chinese Familism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), pp. 122–28.
17. For the expression of these ideals among the scholarly elite see Charlotte Furth, “The patriarch's legacy: household instructions and the transmission of orthodox values,” in Kwang-Ching Liu (ed.), Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 187–211.
18. Examples of popular antipathy towards family division are in Hsiao-tung Fei [Fei Xiaotong] and Chih-i Chang, Earthbound China: A Study of Rural Economy in Yunnan (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), pp. 114-115;
19. Margery Wolf, The House of Lim: A Study of a Chinese Farm Family (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969), pp. 141–48.
20. This point is developed in Cohen, House United, House Divided.
21. See, for example, Wolf and Huang, Marriage and Adoption, pp. 352–53.
22. On land distribution procedures see Reeitsu Kojima, “Agricultural organization: new forms, new contradictions,” The China Quarterly, No. 116 (1988), pp. 706–735.
23. As in Fei Hsiao Tung [Fei Xiaotong] et al., Small Towns in China: Functions, Problems, and Prospects (Beijing: New World Press, 1986).
24. Among some of the contributions to the rapidly expanding literature on family-run and other private enterprises in post-decollectivization China are Elisabeth Croll, “Some implications of the rural economic reforms for the Chinese peasant household,” in Ashwani Saith (ed.), The Re-emergence of the Chinese Peasantry (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 105-136;
25. Nicholas R. Lardy, “State intervention and peasant opportunities,”
26. and Victor Nee, “Peasant household individualism,” both in William L. Parish (ed.), Chinese Rural Development: The Great Transformation (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), pp. 33–56, 164-192;
27. two other articles by Victor Nee are “The peasant household economy and decollectivization in China,” Journal of Asian and African Studies, Vol. 21, No. 3–4 (1986), pp. 185–203
28. and “Peasant entrepreneurship and the politics of regulation in China,” in Victor Nee and David Stark (eds.), Remaking the Economic Institutions of Socialism: China and Eastern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).
29. Reeitsu Kojima, “Agricultural organization.”
30. According to a relatively recent statement of this position, “the traditional family structure operated as an obstacle to modernization in China, creating conditions of nepotism or blocking the formation of strong intermediate organizations.” See Gilbert Rozman (ed.), The Modernization of China (New York: Free Press, 1981), p. 384.
31. For a brief summary of the earlier literature which holds Chinese “familism” to be antithetical to modernization see Siu-lun Wong, “The applicability of Asian family values to other sociocultural settings,” in Peter L. Berger and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao (eds.), Search of an East Asian Development Model (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1988), pp. 134–152.
32. In the context of the general reappraisal of the relationship between tradition and economic development in China (and elsewhere in East Asia), Confucianism is now being considered as a positive force for modernization. See Wm. Theodore De Bary, East Asian Civilizations: A Dialogue in Five Stages (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988)
33. and Gilbert Rozman (ed.), The East Asian Region: Confucian Heritage and its Modern Adaptation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
34. See, for example, such classic statements as Maurice Freedman, “The handling of money: a note on the background to the economic sophistication of Overseas Chinese,” in Skinner (ed.), The Study of Chinese Society, pp. 22-26;
35. G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1957), pp. 99–108.
36. Later discussions of the positive role of the Chinese family in development and modernization, based largely on Taiwan research, include Stevan Harrell, “Why do the Chinese work so hard: reflections on an entrepreneurial ethic,”
37. and Richard W. Stites, “Industrial work as entrepreneurial strategy,” both in Modern China, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1985), pp. 203-226,227-246.
38. Also see Justin T. Niehoff, “The villager as industrialist: ideologies of household manufacturing in rural Taiwan,” Modern China, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1987), pp. 278–309
39. and Susan Greenhalgh, “Social causes and consequences of Taiwan's postwar economic development,” in Kwang-chih Chang, Kuang-chou Li, Arthur P. Wolf and Alexander Chien-chung Yin (eds.), Anthropological Studies of the Taiwan Area: Accomplishments and Prospects (Taipei: Department of Anthropology, National Taiwan University, 1989), pp. 351–390.
40. Siu-lun Wang, “The applicability of Asian family values,” considers the importance of the Chinese family for Hong Kong's economic growth.
41. For examples of uxorilocal marriage contracts see Fu-mei Chang Chen and Ramon H. Myers, “Customary law and the economic growth of China during the Ch'ing period,” part one, Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i, Vol. 3, No. 5 (1976), pp. 1–32.
42. See especially Cohen, House United, House Divided.
43. Lang, Chinese Family and Society, p. 160.
44. See especially p. 164.
45. Shūzō Shiga, “Family property and the law of inheritance, p. 122.
46. See Myron L. Cohen, “Lineage organization in North China,” Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 49, No. 4 (1990), pp. 509–534.
47. For a recent study see Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Family and Rural Development in the Yangzi Delta, 1350–1988 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).
48. Surveys of the earlier literature include Susan Naquin and Evelyn S. Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987)
49. and Evelyn S. Rawski, “Economic and social foundations of Late Imperial Culture,” in David Johnson, Andrew J. Nathan, and Evelyn S. Rawski (eds.), Popular Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 3–33.
50. On diversification as a family strategy among the elite during Ming and Qing see Ping-ti Ho, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368–1911 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), esp. pp. 290–91.
51. The importance of this same strategy for ordinary villagers is noted in Martin C. Yang, A Chinese Village: Taitou, Shantung Province (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), pp. 76–77, 84.
52. For rural Taiwan see Cohen, House United, House Divided, where this matter is discussed at length.
53. On the widespread use of contracts in late imperial society see Myron L. Cohen, “The role of contract in traditional Chinese social organization,” in Proceedings VIHth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, 1968, Tokyo and Kyoto, Vol. 2, Ethnology (Tokyo: Science Council of Japan, 1969), pp. 130-132;
54. Fu-mei Chang Chen and Ramon H. Myers, “Customary law and the economic growth of China during the Ch'ing period,” parts one and two, Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i, Vol. 3, No. 5 (November, 1976), pp. 1-32; Vol. 3, No. 10 (December 1978), pp. 4–27.
55. Cf. Shūzō Shiga, “Family property and the law of inheritance,” p. 122.
56. On this matter see Jonathan Ocko, “Women, property, and law in the People's Republic of China,” in Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Buckley Ebrey (eds.), Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 313–346.
57. Arthur P. Wolf, “Chinese family size: a myth revisited,” in Jih-chang Hsieh and Ying-chang Chuang (eds.), The Chinese Family and Its Ritual Behavior (Taipei: Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, 1985), pp. 30–49.
58. Similar findings with respect to a village near Xiamen, Fujian, are discussed in Huang Shu-min, “Re-examining the extended family in Chinese peasant society: findings from a Fujian village,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 27 (January 1992), pp. 25–38.
59. See Cohen, House United. House Divided, pp. 205–210.
60. Cohen, House United, House Divided, pp. 74–75, 213.
61. For examples of Taiwan division contracts pp. 243–253.