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Table of contents

In a number of places my analysis will differ from those of the Chinese authors, and my citation of their statistical findings does not imply that they are responsible for the interpretations I have placed upon this data. The first sections of the chapter will draw heavily upon the statistics of the five-city survey, to set out the circumstances of families at the opening of the eighties.

The latter sections will refer almost exclusively to other, later surveys. The scholars involved in this project subsequently published two edited conference volumes of papers that discussed the findings: Pan Yunkang, ed. Fei has sent assistants into the field to survey this one village repeatedly. First the simple facts. As of the early s, according to the five-cities survey, some two-thirds of all the households in China's major cities were nuclear in composition: that is, they consisted only of parents and their children.

We often think of Chinese families as including not just a married couple and their children but also one or more grandparents—that is, stem families [5] —and the data showed that, while urban China was largely composed of nuclear families, stem families, too, were indeed commonplace, constituting a quarter of all households. The survey of eight neighborhoods in five of China's major cities revealed that nuclear and stem families combined accounted for more than 90 percent of all households table 2.

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What was the prevalent trend, though? Were increasing numbers of newlyweds setting up their own independent households rather than living with parents-in-law in stem families? Not if we go by the figures gathered by the five-cities survey. These show that prior to the establishment of the People's Republic of China in , the numbers of urban newlyweds who formed independent households were already on the rise, and that this trend had continued into the s, but leveled off and subsequently dipped sharply.

As can be observed in table 2.

One plausible explanation for the earlier shift into independent households is that the first decade of Communist Party rule had witnessed a large wave of immigration of single young adults into China's cities from the. By the latter part of the s the usage of zhugan jiating had prevailed. TABLE 2. They had had no families in the cities to fall back on, and when they married had necessarily set up independent families.

This inflow of migrants was cut off in , and strict controls against new migrants were introduced thereafter. We may presume that for at least the half decade immediately after the inflow from the countryside was halted, large numbers of the young adults who had arrived before were continuing to marry, which would explain the persistence during of a relatively high level of independent households of newlyweds see table 2. But from the mid-sixties onward, the vast bulk of the marriage-age young people were from established urban families and, accordingly, could move in with parents after marriage.


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Notably, it is also evident in table 2. It should be remembered that a large portion of China's urban young people had been shipped off to the countryside to settle as peasants in , when the Red Guards were crushed and the Cultural Revolution violence ended. They were joined in the countryside during the s by a large proportion of the new urban secondary-school graduates, under a government policy of having the villages absorb the great bulk of the urban young people who were surplus to the needs of the urban labor force.

Very few of them married during this decade of enforced rustication, in the belief that married couples would be less likely to receive permission to return to the cities. The wait was rewarded, for between and one province after another abandoned the hated to-the-countryside movement and ordered. One provides contrary evidence, though. In short, the data for the parents' generation are very much in line with that of the five-cities survey; and the Chengdu data for the present generation are very much at odds with the five-cities data.

It seems quite possible that the Chengdu investigators' data for the present generation records as "nuclear" those young couples who initially had resided with parents but who had already moved out of the parents' home. During the succeeding years, covering the period , a large number of this horde of returned young people were not able to secure any regular urban employment nor the wherewithal to obtain separate accommodations when, after so many years of delay, they finally married. Such couples crowded into parents' apartments the bride's if adequate space was not available at the groom's [8] until separate housing became available.

That a temporary lack of alternative accommodations was a fundamental reason for the high proportion of stem families among newlyweds is suggested by the fact that most young couples moved out of the parents' home after only several years. A survey of such multigenerational households in the city of Tianjin nicely illustrates this: 65 percent of the younger couples who had initially participated in stem families had moved out within the first five years of their marriage; and a further 17 percent moved out in the sixth to the tenth year of marriage: that is, in all, more than 80 percent of such stem-family participants moved out to form independent households within the first ten years of marriage.

The consequence was that a clear majority of middle-aged couples, as of the early s, were living in independent nuclear families, not with parents-in-law. Table 2. Demographics alone would dictate that many of these middle-aged couples would by necessity live as nuclear households.

In past decades, from the s through the end of the s, urban families very often were giving birth to three to five children; and with the near-abandonment of the joint-family tradition see below , when these children grew up all but one of them necessarily had to leave the household, either immediately at the time of their wedding or when their next younger brother married. This goes far in explaining the phenomenon, seen above, whereby a high propor-. In the period the ratio stood at 2. The number of individual respondents was not given; the survey covered households.

See sources for tables 2. The longer-term stem families usually have comprised the elder couple, the youngest son, and his wife and children. The shift of young married couples into nuclear households may have gone beyond this, however. Chinese statistics suggest that in many cases even the last remaining child moved out, leaving the older couple on their own. This latter statistic must have included a substantial number of women in their forties who were living in a stem family with their own newly married children, rather than living with their old parents-in-law.

In short, the great bulk of the younger middle-aged women were living entirely apart from their elders. Are we viewing here new trends in intrafamily patterns, or instead longtime mores?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This question can be answered by examining the situation of the households of interviewees' parents, on the eve of interviewees' weddings, as observed in table 2. On average, the parents of a groom would have been in their late forties or early fifties and since brides generally have wed at a younger age than have grooms, the brides' parents would have been a few years younger than the grooms' parents: say, in their early to late forties.

It is evident from table 2. Rather, it can be seen from the table that over these decades both forms of family organization had been the beneficiaries of sharp declines in single-member households and of a sharp decline, too, in the incidence of joint families that is, families in which two or more married children and their spouses live together, normally with an elderly parent or parents. Similar trends have been evident in Taiwan. These Taiwan-wide statistics do, however, exhibit trends similar to urban China:.

That is to say, a considerably higher proportion of elderly widows today presumably can count on having one or more grown children who can take them in if the need arises. The decline in the numbers of joint families can largely be attributed to the changed class structure of post China; many of the joint families of earlier times had been built upon and held together by the wealth and property of the paterfamilias. The scarcity of joint families can also be attributed in part to the cramped living conditions that are almost universal in modern Chinese cities, and which preclude the sharing of the parents' meager accommodations by a large number of people.

Whatever the exact factors that have been at work here, the incidence of joint families in a survey in Shanghai ranged from 7 percent among working-class families to 19 percent among the upper classes, [12] whereas quite different figures apply for more recent decades. In a survey by Whyte and Parish of Guangdong urban families as of the mids, joint families constituted only some 2 percent of households. As is seen in table 2.

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In many cases, I would surmise, these are households containing more. Household Composistion, Taiwan percentages based on surveys of for each period. Sun, M. Chang, and R. These Taiwan data show a far sharper rise in the nuclear-family form than was true for urban China. One possible explanation is that there was a far more rapid rural-to-urban migration in Taiwan than was allowed in the People's Republic. This rapid urban expansion resulted in the creation of a great many smaller households in Taiwan, with the younger couples in the cities and the older couple on the land.

Chen Wanzhen, "Wo guo hunyin zhuangkuang de tongji fenxi" A statistical analysis of the state of affairs of marriage in China , Renkouxue kan Journal of Demography , no. Among what types of families do we find the highest proportion of nuclear as against stem families? Are there any "class" differences? The answer to this latter question is yes. The most obvious "class" influence here may relate to geographic mobility. People who have moved into a city from the countryside or have moved from one city to another generally have not been able to bring kin with them because of residencycard restrictions.

These same government restrictions have also more generally limited geographic mobility among ordinary people—the net result being low rates of geographic mobility but high rates of separation of relatives when mobility does occur. The net effect, according to a survey in the mid-eighties of an industrial district in Wuhan, was that, overall, 39 percent of the interviewees in the district lived in a different city or region than their parents, and 12 percent of the interviewees lived in a different city than all of their own children.

University graduates and government officials most frequently have been assigned to jobs away from their place of origin, and this Wuhan survey revealed, not surprisingly, that residence at a distance from one's parents or children or both was highest among intellectuals, then cadres, and was least true of workers. One consequence, the survey indicated, is that a "class" distinction can be found in family composition. A low level of stem-family organization may not just reflect enforced separation, however.

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Surveys show that even when relatives reside in the same city, most interviewees report that they want to live in separate nuclear households. The "class" differences in the above Wuhan survey may therefore also partly reflect the varying abilities of people of different professions to obtain the separate housing needed to set up new households. Certainly, surveys of stem-family participants variously show that somewhere between percent of such families based on interviewing parents and 36 percent based on interviewing married children would want to divide the stem household if additional housing became available.

Qian Jianghong et al. Pan Yunkang and Lin Nan, Overall, attitude surveys of young unmarried adults in the major cities have shown that a very large proportion would prefer to live separate from parents after marriage. A survey of a Beijing district in the first half of the eighties claimed that 88 percent of the surveyed youths felt this way, and that only 12 percent preferred to continue to live with their elders after they married.