Family Relations in Contemporary China

Abstract

Across different time periods and regions the Chinese family displays a variety of forms, functions, and relationship dynamics. The pre-1949-era Chinese family was an economic, political, and jural unit. This type of Chinese family was organized in accordance with patrilocal residence and patrilineal descent and based in patriarchal authority. Elderly males, especially fathers, had authority over the entire family. Socialist policies (1949–19?) that created the hukou system (household registration system) resulted in profound rural-urban differences. Urban areas become the centers of industry, commerce, and political governance, whereas rural areas, which, until the 1980s, made up 80 percent of Chinese society, engaged primarily in agriculture. Given these institutional changes, Chinese families began to diverge along urban-rural lines. The rural Chinese family continued to carry on more or less the patriarchal tradition whereby parents arranged marriages, women were the “inferior” gender, and daily life was largely improvised. In contrast, urban areas were divided into self-contained work units (danwei) that strived to combine residence with employment. In the work unit era (1950s–1990s) the urban family was organized in accordance with neolocal residence rules and the de facto practices of bilateral descent, or equally valuing the husband’s and wife’s families. Moreover, males’ authority, especially fathers’, was eliminated. In post-reform China (1980s–early 21st century), owing in part to China’s modernization policies, such as dismantling of the work unit and institution of the one-child policy, the Chinese family was gradually transformed. Research on the transformation is ongoing and, in the early 21st century, is in its initial stages. So far, no firm consensus has been reached. In China, family increasingly serves as an umbrella term for an array of connective relationships. The Chinese family evolves not only across historical periods; like all families, it also goes through different developmental stages, ranging from courtship, to marriage, to parenting, to eldercare. The sections follow the developmental sequence of the Chinese family, covering the time period from pre-reform to early-21st-century China.