On Changes in the Chinese Family Structure; (Speech to the International Cultural Society in Japan, March 1982)

Abstract

Originally published in a new social science journal from Tianjin, at least two other abridged versions of this article have been published in Chinese and English.[1] Here, Professor Fei, China's most eminent living sociologist, discusses his hypotheses on recent changes in the structure of the Chinese family in both the countryside and the city. The findings for rural China are based on studies which he carried out in 1936 and again in 1981 in his village, Kaixiangong in Jiangsu Province, just south of the Yangtze River. He does not mention his visit to the site in 1957, nor the findings of Australian anthropologist W. R. Geddes in 1956.[2] Here, Fei's comparisons are explicitly dichronic and he offers some tentative explanations on a seemingly contradictory finding, namely that both nuclear families and larger "joint" families have increased in number over the span of forty-five years. He emphasizes that the data is yet incomplete, but we can expect future studies to clarify these and other broader aspects of social change and their underlying reasons because this village is now the site of a permanent research field station where he and a younger generation of Chinese sociologists will continue to carry out longitudinal studies.