Chinese Marriages in Transition is a book everyone interested in the Chinese family will want on their shelf. It is a tight, compact, nuanced study that is a thoroughly researched overview of the findings and analytical trends that have shaped the Chinese family's configuration and reconfiguration across several historical decades.
The researchers draw upon China's Chinese General Social Survey 2010–2017 to analyse changing patterns of gender, marriage, fertility and family. The authors, who know the culture under study, want to understand how the transformation of the Chinese family converges with, or diverges from, Western patterns. Their analytical focus is longitudinal and highlights, amongst other things, the historic shift in gender ideology as a formalized belief and in actual behaviour.
They note that the second demographic thesis holds that as a society is “modernized” there is an inevitable shift toward late marriage, low fertility and preference for a nuclear family. In addition, individuals increasingly prioritize pursuing more individualistic and expressive fulfilment over family duties. They ask if this “worldwide” demographic trend applies to China, where Confucianism, the society's embedded folk morality, continues to exert a persuasive influence. They find that China, on the one hand, appears to be undergoing a similar demographic transition – increased divorce rate, more cohabitation and an increase in remarriage – while noting there are also persistent patterns that are inconsistent with the second demographic transition thesis: marriage, with women marrying earlier, remains a vital and central institution with childbirth linked to it. However, they point out that any discussion of family variation depends upon which setting and social class is the investigator's analytical focus: a rural or urban setting, college-educated or primary school-educated?
They discuss, as others have, that the Confucian tradition, state control and market transformation have created a new hybrid or neo-family that consists of a commitment to a filial piety ethos, family co-dependency, sexuality constrained in marriage, a declining emphasis on male supremacy, adherence to a legal marriage and an increase in tolerance for variation in family formations.
Still, regional and class differences persist – rural women agree that marriage is more important than career and that the division of domestic labour is reasonable. College-educated women hold more egalitarian views. Although women pursued their self-interest and empowerment in the 1980s, the authors find that by the 2000s, college-educated women's pursuit of self-interest had substantially increased, with college-educated men in agreement with women's embrace of an egalitarian ethos (pp. 64–66).
The rise of white-collar occupations and the expansion of educational opportunities incentivized women to pursue higher education and paid employment. As a bundle of duties and responsibilities, marriage, as an ideal, has fallen out of favour among highly educated people who increasingly see marriage as being about more than childbearing and caring for children, doing housework and tending to in-laws. Increasingly, college-educated women want something more from their marriage.
One of their core findings is that better-educated individuals hold more influence in marriage, with college-educated women significantly shaping family life (p. 165). This cultural shift has resulted in an ethical paradox: urban-educated Chinese live in family systems that resemble Western formation while continuing to accept and embrace a Confucian moral system that prioritizes family responsibilities to both natal parents and in-laws.
The authors conclude their analysis by noting that a trend in Chinese studies to blend rural and urban research as a coherent whole tends to dilute the salient regional and social class distinctions. They point out that if the analytical focus is on family values and future expectations, then there continue to be two Chinas – a rural society that fully embraces a filial piety ethos that maintains sexual conservatism, with a pronounced son preference, and an urban culture that increasingly is open and accepts non-traditional ideas regarding women's social status, life-orientation and role in society, which is remarkably consistent with the second demographic transition thesis.
