The traditional Confucian family stressed patrilineality, virilocality, patriarchy, filial piety and the importance of lineage. The family was multigenerational. Its members were expected to suppress personal interests and desires for the sake of their family. Intra-family relationships were largely role- and duty-based. How have these features been transformed by China's dramatic changes in the past century? In this book William Jankowiak and Robert Moore address this question through a “historical and ethnographic overview.”
The authors provide a comprehensive overview of Chinese family life – both historical and contemporary – by drawing on extant literature, including their own research. They mainly write about urban families among the Han majority but also provide brief overviews of several ethnic minorities. Themes covered in the eight chapters include kinship, family structure, parenting, intergenerational relationships, gender relations, courting and marriage, and emerging adulthood today.
The book covers familiar recent trends. Family forms have diversified while the conjugal, neo-local family has become dominant (especially in cities). Affective bonds have largely replaced roles and duties as the glue in husband–wife and parent–child relationships. Filial piety has become more based on emotional ties rather than awe for, and duty to, parents. Women and girls have gained power in family relationships, and children and adolescents even more so. These changes are in line with trends in many other societies with a longer history of urbanization and industrialization. However, the Chinese pattern is also due to strong state intervention, particularly Maoist socialism and the post-Mao one-child policy. Some traditional cultural elements in a reinterpreted form continue to influence family life: the centrality of the family and the emphasis on harmony and filial piety. There are also generational differences in mores and practices and an uneasy coupling of filial duty expectations with young people's own life aspirations and ideals.
Chapter one consists of short sections on features of the traditional family, historical changes and current trends as a result of reconfigurations of “old cultural ideals and new cultural realities.” This overview sets the stage for more detailed examination in the subsequent chapters of some of the “more significant trends and changes that have shaped and are continuing to shape the Chinese family as a conceptual form and as a lived experience” (p.16). A section in this chapter entitled “Rituals as devices for family stability” lacks congruence between title and contents.
Chapter two argues that the insights from both a “corporate model” and a “private-life model” are necessary for understanding Chinese private life today. The former views the family as an economic entity whose members act rationally to advance the family's economic interest as defined mainly by the parents. The latter model emphasizes the rising importance of affective ties among family members and friends. It assumes that individuals now act in pursuit of personal goals. The authors note that the only-child policy has intensified grandparents’ child-centeredness.
Chapter three is a descriptive summary of family research on certain minorities: Uyghurs, Tibetans and Mosuo, with some description of how they differ from the Han majority. Chapter four is a descriptive historical account with illustrative cases of the 20th-century transformations in courtship and marriage. While Confucian norms and practices of arranged marriages remained dominant, there was long parallel existence of ideas celebrating love-based relationships. The decline of arranged marriages started during the Republican era. The Maoist revolution further weakened, and proclaimed the end of, arranged marriages. However, a dating culture is more recent and has mainly occurred among youth in the post-Mao era.
Chapter five notes that the rise of affection-based marriage ideals is an international phenomenon and that its Chinese version includes caution, restraint and propriety as core values for dating and parental involvement in young persons’ love affairs. The chapter goes into considerable depth in describing current practices. Chapter six concludes that China, like other societies, evinces a trend towards greater emotional expressiveness in family relationships. The only-child policy has intensified emotional expressiveness in parent–child relationships, more dramatically for fathers than for mothers. The authors observe that urban fathers too have become intensely nurturing and child-centred in relating to their one-and-only child. One might have added a point not made in the book that increasingly the urban fathers of young children now were themselves once the one-and-only child when they were young.
Chapter seven centres on relations between parents and their adolescent or young adult offspring. It argues that Chinese youth now have to negotiate two competing social and ethical “universes”: one concerning self-development, the other concerning the aspirations which parents have for them. They describe young people's dilemmas and responses to these competing “universes.” A wider review of existing research on Chinese youth and gender could have made the section on gender relations more nuanced and comprehensive.
The concluding chapter repeats intergenerational contrasts and intra-generational variations. Since only two chapters have their own conclusion, in a book on this timely topic one would have expected a more overarching and converging concluding analysis here. Instead, the book's Conclusion provides a scatter of questions and insights.
The anthropologist authors’ knowledge of China is evident in the ease and flow of the text, and not least in the confidence with which they talk about Chinese family life. Sometimes, the authors seem to adopt a story-telling genre which may have the advantage of making the text as a whole quite accessible to a non-academic audience. However, this reviewer cannot help wondering how some generalizations and conclusions have been generated. There are long textual sections without reference to documentation. Some passages seem impressionistic or too categorically formulated, e.g.: “Women and men expect and desire that their marital bond is anchored in mutual regard and affection” (p. 130).
The authors tend to treat contemporary parents too much as a homogeneous group, writing, for example, that parents of young Chinese today “matured under the authority of a very intrusive Maoist state in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s” (p. 158). This neglects the fact that present-day young people's parents did not all come of age under the Maoist state. Parents born in the 1970s spent only part of their childhood during Mao's era. Moreover, many only-children have themselves become parents.
Despite these weaknesses, the book deserves wide attention as it contains useful information for non-Chinese readers interested in China and contemporary family life.
