Changes in Family and Marriage in a Yangzi Delta Farming Community, 1930-1990

Abstract

This article explores how marriage patterns and practices changed over the course of 60 years in Willow Pond Village (a pseudonym), a rice-farming community on the Yangzi Delta, 50 km west of Shanghai. Data gathered during eight months of fieldwork in 1990 reveal the intimate relationship between marriage and changes in the local political climate and illustrate the ways in which marriage reflects and reproduces the local social hierarchy. (Marriage, family, kinship, social stratification, China) ********** By late imperial times, China's highly elaborate system of stratification had developed an extraordinary degree of social mobility (Ho 1962; Fei and Chang 1945; Yang 1945; Hsu 1948), owing in part to the virtual absence of legal restrictions on intermarriage or movement between strata. Ironically, the permeability of the strata may have allowed the system of stratification to persist. As long as upward mobility remained a possibility, albeit requiring several generations, and as long as a few families served as examples of mobility, non-elite strata were likely to accept the legitimacy of their positions. The social order itself was a process of anfractuous reconstruction whose shape is described by the calculus of families striving for material and symbolic benefit. And in no domain of rural Chinese social life is this calculus more apparent and more determinative of the social order than in the decisions surrounding marriage. These decisions, as Bourdieu (1977:70) points out, belong to the system of reproduction strategies.... [E]very marriage tends to reproduce the conditions which have made it possible. PREREVOLUTIONARY WILLOW POND On the eve of the Communist victory in 1949, what is now the administrative village of Willow Pond was the site of two villages with a combined population of roughly 245. On small plots of generally fertile land, some 60 households cultivated a main crop of summer paddy rice and some winter wheat or barley. Although all families worked in the fields, marked social differences are evident in older informants' descriptions of village life during the 1930s and 1940s. About 60 percent of families lived at the margins of subsistence, with half their crop extracted as rent by absentee landlords. Most owned no draft animals or only a share in one, and either rented the pumps of wealthier neighbors or paid for itinerant pump-boat operators to irrigate their fields. They frequently hired out themselves or their older children as laborers to others. Another 20 per cent of village families fared little better. They were driven less frequently to sell their labor to others, but they controlled no surplus land, and could not afford the tools and means to maximize yields. The top strata of village society, perhaps 20 per cent, had landholdings that exceeded their own subsistence needs, derived a significant portion of their income by renting this surplus to others, but worked in the fields themselves, also employing one or more long-term laborers. The very wealthiest families derived most income from renting land, and owned one or more oxen and perhaps a windmill for irrigation; although their primary business was agriculture, some of their children were involved in nonfarm pursuits, like extended education or apprenticeship to a skilled craftsman. One family briefly owned a rice mill until it was lost to fire in 1946. Wealthier families were far more likely than others to have reserves of capital that allowed them to buy land, goods, and services when the prices were at their lowest, and to acquire some of the trappings of the elite lifestyle they tried to emulate. Thus, land, labor, capital, and access to irrigation, tools, and agricultural inputs--the means of production--were one dimension along which village families were stratified. The social relations of production comprised another dimension and included the division of labor within the production unit (the family), the network of alliances a family could depend on for support, and its accumulated symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1977). …