Family, with Chinese Characteristics

1
Family, with Chinese Characteristics

• Anth 130
• Kin, Kith and Community

2
Context of Research

• Classic family studies before 1950s, F. Hsu
• Redirection to Taiwan, Margery Wolf, House of Lim
  
• Rare studies in PRC such as Hintons Fanshen and
  Shenfan

3
Post Cultural Revolution

• Post 1985 studies such as Jankowiaks Sex, Death
  and Hierarchy, feminist explorations by Stacey,
  Martin, Honig, Hershatter
• Shift to urban work, tracking migration,
  increasing marketization and family, Mayfair Yang
• Focus on the One Child Policy

4
Hua Hans Baifu

• 1978 rural collective production reformed
• Villages
• Baifu (more decentralized)
• Nanyi (still practicing some collectivization)
• Both have substantial state jobs and wage labor

5
Production

• (PCMP) Petty capitalist mode of production
• Extending back to Song (960-1127) kin
  patri-corporations
• Produce market commodities
• Exploit wage labor and family members

• (TMP) Tributary mode of production
• Use non-market mechanisms to get surplus from
  PCMP
• Rests on Confucian logic

6
Village Commonalities

• Patrilocality
• Village exogamy
• Orthodox kin behaviors such as bufafang (sexual
  taboo in womans natal house)
• Adoption rare
• Dowry common

7
Kin Implications

• PCMP supports uterine family (womens calculated
  exchanges)
• In Baifu farming broken into smaller
  patri-businesses
• More relaxed, willing to comply with one child
  limit
• Hukou registration looser

• TMP supports culture of relatedness
• Nanyis bureaucratization in land use, birth
  control

8
One child one family

• Early 1980s (in Baifu)
• Birth control officer less formal relation to
  other women through petty capitalism

• Nanyimore formal, more institutionalized
  enforcement

One child, but in rural areas and ethnic areas?
Jural and practical ways out. As you go south,
more female infanticide
9
Town-ization of villages

• Pan lives in area that was village turned
  suburb
• Pan, temporarily disabled, lives with techie
  husband from Shangdong

10
Father, husband, son

• This is my son who will have to play a key role
  in my future life. My son is my master reward
  though it costs me a lot to raise him up. But I
  think the joys and surprises that he has brought
  to me are much more valuable than those costs
  that incurred in raising him. My son is
  kind-hearted and he also has a mild nature. I
  believe that my son would offer me and my husband
  a happy old age life. Besides, I will pay
  attention to choose a daughter-in- law that both
  my son and I are satisfied with. Pan 2008

11
City roles, country roles

• Several years ago, my husband and I still lived
  in Jinan. We used to go out with our son who was
  a little baby then so that we have to hold him in
  our arms. My husband would quickly give our son
  to me if we met with some of our acquaintance.
  And I found out finally that he was too
  embarrassed to be seen holding his boy in the
  arms, since holding kids is a traditional female
  task in rural China. Pan 2008

12
Rural Sichuan

• Early decollectivization
• Factory workersfemale migrants
• Which gender, which generation stays at home?
• Now only old women are left in most families.

13
Kin time

• Planting trees
• long-distance parenting by mobile phone between
  teachers and migrant parents

14
Colonialism and Inheritance

• Three waves of British acquisition
• New Territories 1898
• British administer Chinese traditional law
• 200K Women cant inherit fathers real property
• Contested in mid-nineties
• Heung Yee Kuk workaround