Prelims

Half Title

Chinese Families

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CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVES IN FAMILY RESEARCH

Series Editor: Sampson Lee Blair

Recent Volumes:

Editorial Page

EDITORIAL BOARD

Anja-Kristin Abendroth

Bielefeld University, Germany

Clarence M. Batan

University of Santo Tomas, Philippines

Eli Buchbinder

University of Haifa, Israel

Yu-Hua Chen

National Taiwan University, Taiwan

Patricia Neff Claster

Edinboro University, United States of America

Teresa M. Cooney

University of Colorado-Denver, United States of America

Rosalina Pisco Costa

University of Évora, Portugal

Alda Britto da Motta

Federal University of Bahia,

Brazil

Olufemi Adeniyi Fawole

University of Ilorin, Nigeria

Ana Josefina Cuevas Hernandez

University of Colima, Mexico

Bryndl Hohmann-Marriott

University of Otago, New Zealand

Man-Yee Kan

University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Timothy Madigan

Mansfield University, United States of America

Marion Müller

University of Tuebingen, Germany

Josip Obradović

University of Zagreb, Croatia

Christina L. Scott

Whittier College, United States of America

Ria Smit

University of Johannesburg, South Africa

Heidi Williams

Virginia Tech, United States of America

Title Page

Contemporary Perspectives In Family REsearch  Volume 16

Chinese Families: Tradition, Modernisation, and Change

Edited by

Man-Yee Kan

University of Oxford, UK

Sampson Lee Blair

United Kingdom – North America – Japan – India – Malaysia – China

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The State University of New York (Buffalo), USA

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2021

Copyright © 2021 Emerald Publishing Limited

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-80071-157-0 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-80071-156-3 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-80071-158-7 (Epub)

ISSN: 1530-3535 (Series)

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

About the Editors

Prof. Man-yee Kan is Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Oxford. Her research interests are gender inequalities in the family and the labour market, and time use research. She is the principal investigator of the European Research Council funded project GenTime - Temporal Structures of Gender Inequalities in Asian and Western Welfare Regimes (2018-2023).

Dr. Sampson Lee Blair is a family sociologist and demographer at The State University of New York (Buffalo). His research focuses upon parent-child relationships, with particular emphasis on child and adolescent development. In 2010, he received the Fulbright Scholar Award from the U.S. Department of State, wherein he studied parental involvement and children’s educational attainment in the Philippines. He has examined a wide variety of relationship dynamics within families. His recent research has focused upon marriage and fertility patterns in China.

He has served as chair of the Children and Youth research section of the American Sociological Association, as senior editor of Sociological Inquiry, Guest Editor of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, and on the editorial boards of Asian Women, Journal of Applied Youth Studies, Journal of Divorce and Remarriage, Journal of Family Issues, Marriage and Family Review, Social Justice Research, Sociological Inquiry, International Journal of Criminology and Sociology, and Sociological Viewpoints. He also serves on the international advisory board of Tambara, which is based at Ateneo de Davao University, in the Philippines. In 2018, he was elected as Vice-President (North America) of the Research Committee on Youth (RC34), in the International Sociological Association.

He is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching, and has taught abroad as a visiting professor at Xavier University (Ateneo de Cagayan) in the Philippines, Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, and at East China Normal University (Shanghai) in China. Since 2011, he has served as the editor of Contemporary Perspectives in Family Research.

About the Authors

Ruby Chui Man Chau is Associate Professor in Public and Social Policy in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham. Before joining the university, she was a Marie Curie Research Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Sheffield. Her main research interests are women and welfare, comparative welfare policy in East Asia and Europe, ageing and life course, culturally sensitive health and social care. In her recently completed EU funded project, she studied the social investment perspective on work–family reconciliation policies in seven East Asian and European countries (SIPEA, 708305). Her work has been published in various international journals and refereed books. Her areas of teaching include welfare policy, policy analysis, research methods and research management and ageing and global policy responses. She is the currently a member of the Executive Committee of the Social Policy Association and a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Women and Aging, International Social Work and Social Policy and Society. She has a professional background in social work and still plays an active role in community development. She is currently a Consultant of the project ‘Leading the Way – Towards an Ageing Friendly Sheffield’ funded by the Age Better in Sheffield.

Feinian Chen is a Professor of Sociology and a Faculty Associate at the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland. Her work has been published in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Demography, Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Journal of Marriage and Family and Sociological Methods and Research. She is actively engaged in research in family transitions, gender dynamics and their health implications in the diverse contexts of China, India, the Philippines and the United States.

Manting Chen received her DPhil from the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, where she studied as a China Scholarship Council Scholar. Her research focusses on gender identity, marriage and fertility and work and family formation of women from East Asian societies. Her thesis, titled ‘Marriage and Fertility in China and Japan’, analyses women’s marriage and fertility in China and Japan from various perspectives, including individual preferences, labour market conditions and matching. She has co-authored studies that have been published on journals such as Demography. She now works as an Academic in China.

Fang Fang received her Ph.D. in Sociology and a Master’s degree in Data Analysis and Applied Statistics from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Her research interests include the interdependence of adult children’s marriage and their relationships with parents among Chinese families, and cultural differences in marriage and family relationships and their implications for gender relations and aging. Currently, she is a Post-doctoral Associate at the University of Pittsburgh, studying psychosocial risk factors and mental health of older adults.

Chengming Han is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology Department, Case Western Reserve University. Chengming’s research interests involve aging and the life course, the State theories, health disparities in the U.S. and rural society in China. Chengming has participated in the project of the life space among the old-olds, gender inequalities in functional limitations among older adults in China, the oral health disparities between Whites and Minorities (e.g. Hispanics and/or Asians). Before the Ph.D. program, Chengming has been a volunteer Teacher for migrant children in Beijing for two years, after acquired MA in sociology in Peking University.

Guangye He is Associate Professor at Nanjing University, Department of Sociology. She earned her Ph.D. from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2016. Her research focuses on family sociology, social stratification, and quantitative method. She has published in Social Science Research, Social Science and Medicine, Chinese Sociological Review, China Review, Journal of Contemporary China and so on.

Omkar Joshi is a doctoral candidate and a Graduate Assistant in the Department of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Broadly, his research revolves around issues in the area of social stratification and social changes, family demography, gender and labour market and development in Asian countries. Specifically, he is interested in exploring the links between economic inequality, labour market and family structures. He combines econometric methodology with sociological theory to study research topics that are relevant to Economists as well as Sociologists. Before joining the Sociology department, he was working as a Consultant at National Council of Applied Economic Research with the India Human Development Survey team, focussing on Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, a large public employment programme in India, and its household welfare impacts. He has a diverse professional experience in research, data analysis and project management from corporate, government and developmental sectors. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Statistics and master’s degree in Economics from the University of Mumbai and master’s degree in Sociology from University of Maryland.

Man-Yee Kan is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford. Her research interests are gender inequalities in the family and the labour market, marriage, the gender division of labour, time use research, welfare and public policy regimes in Western and East Asian societies. She is the principal investigator of the European Research Council funded project GenTime – Temporal Structures of Gender Inequalities in Asian and Western Welfare Regimes (2018–2023).

Kamila Kolpashnikova is a Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of British Columbia. Her research interests are time use, gender and housework, North American and Japanese societies and ageing in East Asia. She also holds an M.A. in Socio-informatics from Tokyo University. She is a former recipient of the Japanese Government Monbukagakusho Scholarship at Tokyo University (2006–2011), the Rotary Foundation Ambassadorial Scholarship to Japan (2004–2005) and the Taiwan Government Fellowship (2018).

Iris Po Yee Lo is a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) candidate at the Department of Sociology, the University of Oxford. Her research interests include family, gender, sexuality and social policy. She has published articles in several journals, such as Archives of Sexual Behavior, International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy and Journal of Sociology.

Jiehua Lu, Ph.D., is a Professor of Department of Sociology, Peking University, and also a Deputy Director of Center for Healthy Aging and Development Studies, Peking University. He now serves as the Vice President of China’s Population Association and of China’s Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics. His research areas include demography, gerontology, economics of population and interaction between population and environment. He has been the principal investigator for more than 10 key projects and published more than 70 academic papers, including ‘Chinese Women’s Family Status: Analysis of Chinese Decennial Survey, 1990–2010’, ‘Associations of Chronic Conditions, APOE4 Allele, Stress Factors, and Health Behaviors with Self-rated Health’, ‘ Patterns of Living Arrangements of the Elderly in Mainland China: Changes, Consequences and Policy Implications’, etc.

Timothy Madigan is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Mansfield University of Pennsylvania where he has been teaching a variety of courses for two decades, including one on the sociology of China. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology and a Minor in Statistics from Pennsylvania State University. In addition, he studied mandarin Chinese at Penn State and abroad. Before becoming a Professor, he directed the office of institutional research at Shippensburg University. Before that he worked as a Demographer and Statistical Consultant at both the US Census Bureau and the National Center for Educational Statistics in Washington D.C. There he tracked, analysed and reported on the condition of education in the United States. He is a member of the American Sociological Association, the Eastern Sociological Society and the Pennsylvania Sociological Society, the latter of which he was Past President. He specialises in the sociology of education and quantitative research, fielding a series of state-wide policy surveys over the years while at Mansfield. He has taught, researched and travelled extensively across China and Taiwan. His latest research focusses on the attitudes and behaviours of Chinese and American college students towards dating, marriage and the environment.

Ke Shen is Associate Professor of Demography at the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University in China. Her research interests include population aging, generational economics, family structure and population policy. Her research has appeared in Population and Development Review, Demography, Social Science & Medicine, Demographic Research, BMC Geriatrics, Chinese Sociological Review, and The Journal of the Economics of Aging.

Ting-Yu Su is a junior high school teacher and a doctoral programme of gender education student, Graduate Institute of Gender Education, National Kaohsiung Normal University. She is deeply aware of the importance of gender education in junior high school. Thus, she devotes herself to the promotion of education on gender equality in Taiwan. ‘Multigenerational Experiences of Women in Taiwanese Families’ is adapted from her master’s thesis. It is about the story of two generations of women. When writing her master’s thesis about her grandmother, she was facing some difficulties in marriage. Her grandmother’s story gave her strength and inspiration. Although her grandmother was illiterate, she knew a lot of Taiwanese proverbs. Her proverbial language is simple, and she can express true feelings and life’s wisdom. However, because it is difficult to translate Taiwanese proverbs into English, the author deleted most of the proverbs, while still conveying the overall meaning of the work.

Wei Wang is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford. She is also affiliated with Linacre College. Her research interests include family and marriage, gender and comparative studies.

Xiaogang Wu is Yufeng Global Professor of Social Science, the Founding Director of the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) at New York University Shanghai, and a Professor of Sociology at New York University (since Sept 2020-), and Chair Professor in the Division of Social Science and Division of Public Policy, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. His research interests include social stratification and mobility, social demography, gender and family, urban sociology, survey and quantitative methods. His previous work has appeared in Annual Review of Sociology, American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces, Demography, Social Science Research, and other leading journals in area studies. He is the President of International Chinese Sociological Association (ICSA) (2018-), the editor-in-chief of the Chinese Sociological Review (CSR).

Brin Xu is a Ph.D. student in the Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a student affiliate of Maryland Population Research Center. She studies economic inequality along gender, racial, ethnic and class lines. Her work has been published in academic journals such as International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship. She also contributes a book chapter for Case Study on Inclusive Finance in China.

Sam Wai Kam Yu is Associate Professor in the Department of Social Work at the Hong Kong Baptist University. He teaches social work and social policy. His research interests are social exclusion and defamilisation.

Foreword

Over the last half of a century, Chinese societies have undergone a tremendous amount of social, cultural, and economic changes. Although Chinese family structures and norms have been established over thousands of years, economic developments, expansion in education, global trade, and migration have resulted in substantial changes to those structures and norms. In particular, families and marriages have experienced several rapid changes in Chinese societies over the last three decades: marriage rates have declined, gender gaps in education have been narrowed down or closed, the age of first having a child has increased, and non-traditional forms of family trajectories, such as pre-marital cohabitation have become increasingly common. Yet, Chinese families have also become more diverse, both culturally and geographically, as they have been under varying historical and political influences and different public family-related policies within Greater China.

This volume of Contemporary Perspectives in Family Research aims at comprehending the various changes, continuities, and diversities in Chinese families. There are 10 chapters focussing upon families in Greater China, including the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. These chapters address a wide array of topics, including education and cohabitation, rural–urban variations in family structures, gender attitudes, fertility aspirations, spousal relationships and marital quality, and intergenerational relations. The first five chapters are about the People’s Republic of China and address topics on cohabitation, mother-and-daughter relationships, gender division of labour, and marital satisfaction. The last four chapters each focusses on a particular Chinese society: one on Shanghai, two on Taiwan, and one on Hong Kong. The final chapter takes a comparative perspective about China and the United States. These chapters altogether provide a rich set of data to show the variations and commonalities among contemporary Chinese families.

In Chinese societies, premarital cohabitation is still not common. However, this practice is increasing over time. From experiences of several Western industrialised countries, highly educated people are the foremost group to cohabit before marriage and cohabitation will diffuse to all educational groups over time. In ‘Changes in the Association between Education and Cohabitation in Post-reform China’, Wei Wang and Man-Yee Kan analyse data from the China Family Panel Studies (2010–2016) to examine how premarital cohabitation is associated with educational qualifications across different marriage cohorts in China. They find that, unlike the experiences of Western industrialised countries, the positive association between education and premarital cohabitation has not decreased, but instead has increased across the cohorts.

Education plays a key role in transforming gender and family norms. The gender gap in higher education has been closed in China in recent years. How might the educational mobility of women be influenced by their mothers? In ‘Like Mother, Like Daughter? Mother–Daughter Educational Mobility in Rural China’, Manting Chen analyses data of the China Family Panel Studies 2010 to investigate the association between mothers’ and daughters’ educational attainments in rural China. Her findings suggest that mothers’ educational attainment is positively associated with their daughters’ one. Moreover, the association between mothers’ and daughters’ educational attainments is stronger than those between mothers and sons, fathers and daughters, and fathers and sons, especially among the most highly educated groups. Mothers’ higher education also mitigates negative effects of the daughters being born at an older age and having brothers.

The home is where modern and traditional behaviours often conflict with one other. It is also where gender is performed, reinforced, and challenged in daily activities, especially in housework. What determines the gender division of domestic labour and what are the implications for marital satisfaction? In ‘Satisfaction with Family Status and Housework Participation in Modern China’, Man-Yee Kan, Guangye He and Xiaogang Wu analyse data of the Women’s Status Survey 2010 to look into how the division of housework between husbands and wives is associated with the satisfaction with family status. They find that both husbands and wives are less satisfied with their family status if they do more housework than their spouses. What is more, relative housework contribution is more significantly and negatively associated with family status satisfaction than absolute housework time. Their findings also highlight differences between urban and rural areas. Housework is negatively associated with women’s and men’s satisfaction with family status in urban area but not in rural area when endogeneity between these housework and satisfaction is taken into account.

Furthermore, intergenerational support is a key characteristics of Chinese societies. How might this affect the domestic division of labour at home and marital satisfaction? Fang Fang’s paper ‘Satisfaction of Division of Household Labour in China’, based on analysis of the Women’s Status Survey 2000 data, examines how satisfaction with division of household labour between spouses is associated with economic resources, gender ideology, time availability, and domestic help from parents and parents-in-law. Her findings show that intergenerational relationship is intertwined with the gender dynamics between spouses in families in China. Only married women’s satisfaction, but not married men’s, is shown to be associated with domestic help provided by parents or parents-in-law.

The gender dynamics in married couples are not only manifested in domestic labour, but also in other socio-economic characterises. In ‘Couple Similarity and Life Satisfaction: A Study of Young Couples in Shanghai of Mainland China’, Ke Shen, H. Brin Xu, Omkar Joshi, and Feinian Chen examined how life satisfaction of Shanghai young couples is influenced by similarity in each other’s characteristics. They analyse data of the Fudan Yangtze River Delta Social Transformation Survey, which interviewed the first single-child generation youths born in Shanghai between 1980 and 1989, and find that similarity in age, educational levels, and income between married spouses do not have any impacts on the couples’ life satisfaction. The most important factor that explains life satisfaction is the hukou (urban and rural household registration) composition of the spouses. When the husband has the urban hukou and the wife has the rural one, and when both spouses hold the urban hukou, they will be more satisfied with their life, especially for those without college education.

The rural and urban differences in gender attitudes, housework, and their associations with subjective well-being are not only found among younger people, but also among older adults in China. In ‘Gender Egalitarianism and Subjective Well-being Among Older Adults in China’, Chengming Han and Jiehua Lu focus on older adults aged between 63 and 95 and look into how gender egalitarian attitudes and routine housework might affect their subjective well-being. They employ data of the 2010 Survey on the Social Status of Women in China. They find clear differences between rural and urban older people in gender attitudes and housework. Although women undertake much more housework, housework is associated with subjective well-being only among rural women but not urban women.

The gendered division of housework is likely to affect other important family decisions. Will the division of housework between spouses affect their fertility intentions? In ‘Housework Participation and Fertility Intentions: Analysing the Gendered Division of Labour and Fertility in Taiwan’, Kamila Kolpashnikova and Man-Yee Kan investigate this question by using data of the 2007–2016 Taiwan Panel Study of Family Dynamics. They find that married women tend to desire for more children if their husbands undertake more housework. On the contrary, married men’s fertility intention does not seem to be affected by their own or their wives’ housework participation. Such gender imbalance reflects, to a certain extent, that Taiwan is transitioning only slowly from a male breadwinner family model to a gender egalitarian one.

To what extent have women’s experiences in growing up, getting married, becoming mothers, and so on have changed over the last 50 years in Taiwan? Focussing again on Taiwan, and taking a different methodological approach from the previous chapter, in ‘The Multigenerational Experiences of Women in Taiwanese Families’, Ting-Yu Su employs a critical theory framework and provides narratives of stories of a woman’s and her grandmother’s gendered perceptions and experiences in Taiwan. Her research reveals how gendered experiences as daughters and mothers have changed and what traditions are still culturally embedded.

How gender roles and norms have been transformed in Chinese societies depend very much on public policies. Are the policies reinforcing traditional male breadwinner model of families or are they encouraging couples to form dual earner gender egalitarian families? In ‘The Policy Measures Used by the Hong Kong Government to Respond to the Adult Worker Model and the Male-breadwinner Model’, Sam Wai Kam Yu, Iris Po Yee Lo and Ruby Chui Man Chau examine how the Hong Kong government’s policies have responded to these two family models. In particular, they look into policy measures which can support women’s employment, the local work-based pension scheme, and measures that may help full time family carers to secure resources for retirement. Their study is also based on interview findings of a number of professional women about their views of the pension scheme in Hong Kong.

Do young Chinese people hold different attitudes towards marriages and family compared to people from Western countries? In ‘Attitudes towards Marriage among Chinese and American College Students: A Comparative Study’, Timothy Madigan analyses data collected from colleges students in China and the United States about their attitudes towards marriage, age to get married, the number of desired children, the age to have children, divorce, pre-marital cohabitation, and gender division of labour within marriage. He finds that Chinese students tend to support the marriage institution and plan having children a year later in age compared to the US students. Chinese students also prefer having fewer total number of children than US students. Chinese students and US students differ in their attitudes towards divorce and gender division of labour at home, but they shared similar attitudes about cohabitation.

In sum, these chapters showcase how gender relations, family norms, and intergenerational ties are being performed, transformed, challenged, and reproduced in the home and marriages of Chinese families in different regions. They also provide valuable insights into the gender and intergenerational dynamics of modern Chinese families.

Man-Yee Kan

Sampson Lee Blair