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Patrilocality and Early Marital Co-residence in Rural China, 1955–85

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

William Lavely  and
Xinhua Ren
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Extract

The story of the rural Chinese family household in the post-Mao period is generally told in one of three ways, which might be labelled modernization, tradition restored, and demographic determinism. Modernization parallels the family theories of classical sociology: economic development and education tend to undermine extended family living arrangements by instilling nuclear family preferences, while the relaxation of migration restrictions allows young men to seek their fortune away from home. “Tradition restored” sees collectivization as having undermined the foundation of the extended family household, the family economy. The return of family farming has, in this view, restored the conditions under which the extended family can flourish. The demographic determinisi view assumes that family preferences persist but that demographic structures change. Rising life expectancies and declining fertility should increase rates of family extension, since smaller families mean that there will be fewer brothers available to live with a surviving parent. Thus as the birth control cohorts come of age, the prevalence of extended households should increase.

Type
A Symposium on Rural Family Change
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 130 , June 1992 , pp. 378 - 391
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1992

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References

1. Yi, Zeng, “Changes in family structure in China: a simulation study,” Population and Development Review, Vol. 12, No. 4 (12 1986), pp. 683–85 and 691–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar, offers a clear statement of each of these cases (although not with the same labels).

2. Fenjia is a general term with a range of practical meanings. The division of a conjugal unit from the family is a process that may occur in stages, involving separate family budgets, the legal partition of family property, and finally the division (actually, the reproduction) of spirit tablets facilitating separate commemoration of ancestors. The actual stages will depend on the circumstances of the family. The decision by a junior conjugal unit to establish a separate family budget, reflected in separate cooking facilities, is more technically known as division of hearths (fenzao), distinct from division of property (fenjiachan), but both are commonly subsumed under fenjia. See Cohen, Myron, House United, House Divided: The Chinese Family in Taiwan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976)Google Scholar, and Greenhalgh, Susan May, “Demographic differentiation and the distribution of income: the Taiwan case,”Google Scholar unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, 1982.

3. See Freedman, Ronald, Moots, Baron, Sun, Te-hsiung and Weinberger, Mary Beth, “Household composition and extended kinship in Taiwan,” Population Studies, Vol. 32, No. 1 (03 1978), pp. 65–80CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Freedman, Ronald, Chang, Ming-cheng and Sun, Te-hsiung, “Household composition, extended kinship and reproduction in Taiwan: 1973–1980,” Population Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3 (11 1982), pp. 395–411Google ScholarPubMed; Weinstein, Maxine, Sun, Te-hsiung, Chang, Ming-cheng and Freedman, Ronald, “Household composition, extended kinship, and reproduction in Taiwan: 1965–1985,” Population Studies, Vol. 44, No. 2 (07 1990), pp. 217–239CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Yi, Zeng, Xiaoli, Li and Zhongdong, Ma, “The trend and the model schedule of leaving the parental home after marriage in China,”Google Scholar Yale University Economic Growth Center Discussion Paper No. 616 (1990); Yi, Zeng, Family Dynamics in China: A Life Table Analysis (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).Google Scholar

4. For an account of the World Fertility Survey, see Cleland, John and Hobcraft, John (eds.), Reproductive Change in Developing Countries: Insights from the World Fertility Survey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).Google Scholar

5. State Statistical Bureau (SSB), Department of Population Statistics, China In-Depth Fertility Survey Phase I: Shaanxi, Hebei, Shanghai (1986).Google Scholar

6. Some of the characteristics of the Phase II sample procedure are unclear. For example, more than half the Shandong sample is urban, which is anomalous.

7. Marriage type here is defined strictly by the co-residence pattern of husband and wife at the time of marriage. If a respondent reported that she and her husband resided with her own parents after marriage, the marriage is counted as “uxorilocal.” The use of the term is not intended to imply a traditional uxorilocal marriage designed to produce a successor for the wife's family. A respondent residing with her own parents after marriage could be in a de-jure duolocal marriage. This typically results when a man with an urban registration marries a rural resident. Such split registration households are not uncommon in peri-urban areas. The IDFS questionnaire does not distinguish variants of this kind, which would probably be classifed as uxorilocal in our scheme.

8. The data were grouped into two-year marriage cohorts in an overlapping fashion, e.g. 1961–62, 1962–63, etc., as a simple smoothing technique.

9. Skinner, G. William, “Regional urbanization in nineteenth century China,” in Skinner, G. William (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

10. Freedman, Ronald et al. , “Household composition and extended kinship in Taiwan.”Google Scholar

11. Yi, Zeng, “Changes in family structure in China”Google Scholar; Zhigang, Guo, “Guanyu jiatinghu yanjiude jige wenti” (“Some questions about the family household”), Renkou yanjiu, No. 2 (1987), pp. 10–17.Google Scholar

12. See Lavely, William and Freedman, Ronald, “The origins of the Chinese fertility decline,” Demography, Vol. 27, No. 3 (08 1990), pp. 357–367.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

13. Evidence on the emergence of core-periphery differentials in fertility is presented in Lavely, William, “The spatial approach to Chinese history,” The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1 (02 1989), pp. 100–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Parish, William L. and Whyte, Martin King, Village and Family in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 131–38.Google Scholar

15. These changes are described in the series of anieles by Ronald Freedman and colleagues cited above.

16. See, for example, the study of specialized households in Sichuan cited by Yi, Zeng, “Changes in family structure in China,” p. 693.Google Scholar

17. Bernard, and Gallin, Rita S., “Socioeconomic life in rural Taiwan,” Modern China, Vol. 8 (1982), pp. 205–246Google Scholar; Lavely, William, “Industrialization and household complexity in rural Taiwan,” Social Forces, Vol. 69, No. 1 (09 1990), pp. 235–251.CrossRefGoogle Scholar