Transitions to partnership and parenthood: Is China still traditional? (original) (raw)
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Is universal and early marriage still true in China after decades of dramatic socioeconomic changes? Based on the 2005 Population Survey data, we find that by age 35-39, almost all women are married and less than 5% of men remain single with the singulate mean age at marriage (SMAM) in the country at 25.7 and 23.5 for men and women respectively. There are notable regional variations in marriage prevalence and timing across China, likely due to economic development, migration, and cultural norms particularly for ethnic minorities. Those who live in the East and in urban areas tend to enter marriage later. Universal and early marriage is particularly true for women with no education, and least so for men with no education. College education delays marriage for both men and women, but most of them eventually marry. We discuss the implications of findings for highly educated women and poorly educated men.
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Journal of Family Therapy, 2017
Using retrospective life history data from the 2008 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) and discrete time event history analysis, this study investigates the transition to parenthood of adult males and females for the 1965 to 2004 marriage cohorts. We find that Chinese people generally prefer to become parents soon after marriage. We also find that more recent marriage cohorts are less likely to become parents compared to earlier cohort for males, but this is not the case for women. This indicates that economic or role incompatibility in general does not prevent women from becoming mothers, which in general supports the idea that there are alternative resources available for women to balance the role incompatibility in China's context. The extended family is an important resource for married couples to rely upon to raise young children. This study sheds light on China's family therapy practice, which should take into consideration the demographic trends and cultural factors in understanding the role conflict within the family, such as intergenerational relations and gender ideology. Practitioner points • Role incompatibility of having children can be relieved by extended family, so therapy programmes dealing with intergenerational relationship should be developed • Family therapists should consider the pace of gender ideology change in child rearing during negotiation of the husband-wife relationship • Training programmes can be more specific to the extended family for dealing with child rearing skills and potential conflict resolutions.
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Caught in the context of a highly competitive development process, within the framework of a policy which limited their reproductive capacity to a single child, PRC urban families have, in recent decades, attached growing importance to their child's education, aiming to lead them to professional and personal success. This, however, also had an impact on the capacities of many young adults to marry early. In this context, the phenomenon of “marriage corners” mushroomed in large cities all over China beginning in the mid-2000s. Within China, this new practice generated criticism. These markets are seen as displaying conservative forms of marriage arrangement, the disregarding of romantic love, and forms of intergenerational power organization that may be considered backwards. However, by the criticisms it generates but as well the forms of relationships that it displays, the phenomenon can allow for a better understanding of the transformation of inter-generational relationships a...
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This paper studies the marriage timing decisions of young men and women in China. The data set is a sample of Chinese couples with ample variations in marriage market features, personal characteristics, and regional patterns of growth. Exploiting the differences in marriage timing among the couples in our data set, we find empirical results that are largely consistent with the notion that marriage gains, search costs, and job complexity determine the timing of marriage. In particular, marriage is likely to be delayed for urban (but not rural) men and women with higher wage. Regional economic growth appears to slow down the tendency to get married for both men and women and in both cities and the countryside. Access to network of young people (via the Communist Youth League) facilitates marriage for all young people. Better-educated young people tend to get married later in life.
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This chapter explores new expectations of marriage from the parents’ perspectives, revealing parental concerns, anxieties, and frustrations about the marriage market in a changing urban environment. Some of our evidence comes from secondary sources and census figures, but most comes from hundreds of hours of fieldwork in the matchmaking corner of Shanghai’s People’s Park from September 2007 through June 2008, with follow-up interviews conducted in 2009. Our fieldwork reveals that parental matchmaking is less a residue or revival of traditional practices and more a response to contemporary demographic and economic pressures and to the parents’ strong connections to the socialist past, albeit re-articulated through the language of market. A focus on parental matchmaking therefore enables us to explore how marriage practices have been influenced by such forces as the intense inter-generational ties created by the one-child policy, the uncertainties of market-oriented economic reforms, ongoing contestation over gender paradigms, and the ideological legacies of a socialist and revolutionary past.
China Review, 2020
China’s total fertility rate (TFR) has been below replacement level since the 1990s and below 1.5 since the 2000s. To address the issue of low fertility and rapid aging, the Chinese government replaced the strict one-child family planning policy with the selective two-child family planning policy in 2013 and then the comprehensive two-child family planning policy in 2015. However, a strong baby boom did not ensue, and births hit a record low in 2018. It is thus vital to understand fertility motivation among younger generations of women. Collecting qualitative data in a small city in the Yangtze Delta, we found that the high costs of current practices of child raising and education are prominent factors in women’s mind-sets, and that bilateral family support, including but not limited to help with finances and care, is the cornerstone of this expensive, modern child raising model. A complex, bilateral family model has gradually grown out of the patriarchal system. Grandparents on both sides collaborate with the mother at different times of the day and in different stages of children’s development. A familial relay race of child care reduces the mother’s work-family conflicts. ¬e sustainability of mosaic familism, the gendered intergenerational collaboration following bilateral family lines, is questionable, particularly when raising children comes into conflict with caring for the elderly. We suggest that future policies pay sufficient attention to the needs of women who are embedded in the bilateral extended family.
Introduction to the special collection on life course decisions of families in China
Demographic Research, 2020
BACKGROUND The economic reforms of the last thirty years have produced a dramatic improvement in the standard of living in China. However, the concurrent social transformation has also created both stresses and challenges for Chinese families. While researchers have paid considerable attention to the headline demographic statistics accompanying these economic and social transformations, the nuanced ways in which Chinese society has changed and continues to change since the reforms are less understood. CONTRIBUTION This special collection uses the life course framework, which has emerged as an important organizing concept within demographic studies, to examine constancy and change in Chinese society since the reforms of the late 1990s. By framing life events as the result of decisions that are influenced by and sometimes are direct responses to China's modernization, and investigating how these decisions collectively affect and reshape Chinese society, the papers in this collection provide a rich way of interpreting and understanding demographic changes in China.
What Do Parents Want? Parental Spousal Preferences in China
Economic Development and Cultural Change, 2022
In many societies, parents are involved in selecting a spouse for their child, and integrate this with decisions about migration and educational investment. What type of spouse do parents want for their children? We estimate parents' spousal preferences based on survey choices between random profiles. Preference data are elicited from parents or other relatives who actively search for a spouse on behalf of their adult child in Kunming, China. Economic variables (income and real estate ownership) are important for the choice of sons-in-law, but not daughters-in-law. Education is valued on both sides. We simulate marriage outcomes based on preferences for age and education and compare them with marriage patterns in the general population. Homogamy by education can be explained by parental preferences, but not by age: parents prefer younger wives, yet most couples are the same age. Additionally collected preference data from students can explain age distributions. Survey data from parents suggest that while they prefer younger wives, they also accept wives of the same age. Overall, marriage markets have a likely positive influence on education investments for both boys and girls.
Complexity of Chinese Family Life: Individualism, Familism, and Gender
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As market reforms and socioeconomic development have transformed the Chinese economy, family life in rural and urban areas has also been directly and indirectly altered. Yet demographers who observe the rise of singlehood and sub-replacement fertility find confirmation of the universal application of theories in support of the Second Demographic Transition (SDT), while others find that high rates of marriage, near absence of births outside of marriage, and continuing centrality of intergenerational aid flows call for a more nuanced approach in China. In response to the still limited research on this rising diversity of contemporary family life in China, this special issue provides both theoretical insights and empirical evidence to examine how individualistic and familial values coexist, clash, and interact in different aspects of family life, and how gender relations and intergenerational politics have evolved at the same time.