Love and marriage in the 1980s

Bright Gold (born in 1962) is the male head of one of the households I know best in Harmony Cave,Footnote ¹⁵ a small lineage community in northern Guangdong where I conducted 14 months of field research between 1999 and 2001, returning for short visits in 2005, 2008, 2009, and 2012. I know Bright Gold's family particularly well because I lived in his household for about six months—between July 1999 and January 2000—during my first stay in the village. At the time, the household included Bright Gold, his wife, and their four young children (three sons and one daughter). Bright Gold has no brothers, and his parents passed away in the 1980s. As to his four elder sisters, they were no longer living in the village when I arrived. They had long since married out of the village, and were living in neighbouring lineage communities. According to local customs, village girls cannot marry men from the same lineage community, and are expected to move to the family/community of their husbands immediately after marriage.

Bright Gold was the only one in the family to go to school, graduating from a locally operated senior middle school in the late 1970s, a rare accomplishment at the time. In 1981 he married an illiterate girl from a neighbouring lineage community whom he first met while working in the rice fields of an affinal relative (his third sister's husband). He and his wife, Full Elder Sister (born 1963) told me proudly that theirs was not an arranged marriage as in the ‘old society’ (gau se-wui, 舊社會).Footnote ¹⁶ There was, of course, a matchmaker, and their parents did have a say on the marriage, but the choice of marriage partner was not imposed on them. It was only after they met each other in the context of a matchmaking visit to Bright Gold's that they agreed to initiate the formal marriage negotiations. A key part of these negotiations focused on the contents of ‘corporeal body money’ (yuk-san-chin, 肉身錢), a ‘traditional’ form of bridewealth payment given by the parents of the groom to those of the bride.

These bridewealth negotiations usually involve a series of mutual visits, but back in the 1970s and 1980s, such visits did not allow much space for the development of intense premarital contact between groom and bride. In those days, youngsters did not really engage in what today is called ‘dating’ (paak-to, 拍拖); and premarital sex had yet to become a subject of public discussion. Most importantly, romantic love was not considered a key factor when choosing a marriage partner. Social background, labour skills, and class label, to give a few examples, were far more important. The fact, however, that youngsters did have a say on whom they married represented an important departure from earlier practices. For those married in the 1930s and 1940s, parents dictated the choice of marriage partner (quite often at a very young age), and courtship did not involve any kind of face-to-face contact. It was only possible to have one legal wife, but it was not uncommon for wealthier households to establish polygynic households involving the cohabitation of a ‘big wife’ (daai-po, 大婆), the official wife, with a ‘small wife’ (sai-po, 細婆), a second, unofficial wife with a lower status. Starting from the 1950s, these intimate structures were significantly transformed, in large part due to the impact of important nationwide reforms such as the New Marriage Law of 1950 and various mass campaigns aimed at promoting ‘free monogamous marriage’ in the context of a socialist framework of national development.Footnote ¹⁷

This commitment to ‘free monogamous marriage’ and to developing an active programme of modernization of rural intimate practices was not discontinued after decollectivization and economic liberalization in the late 1970s, but a new model of harmonious, stable marriage and family life emerged. A key aspect of the new family policy of the post-reform period—as Deborah Davis has recently suggestedFootnote ¹⁸—was a turn towards the privatization of marriage, that is, the redefinition of marriage as a voluntary contractual relationship grounded in individual emotional satisfaction; but this turn towards a more liberal regime of intimate relationships was only partial and went hand in hand with the development of a very powerful globalized state programme of birth planning and population control. I use the term ‘globalized’ here because this programme was not just the outcome of domestic processes; there were also important global forces and exchanges at play.

Historians of demography have traditionally framed population control as quintessential nation-building biopolitical governmentality, where the state is invested in shaping the quality, quantity, and mobility of the population. Recently, however, scholars of population movements have begun to analyse the various mobilizations around population issues as transnational movements rather than on a nation-by-nation basis.Footnote ¹⁹ During the mid twentieth century, neo-Malthusianism in particular transformed into a global biopolitical enterprise concerned with world population and with building its own version of modernity transnationally. It was a movement that did not necessarily have the state at its centre, but operated through dispersed actors, including philanthropists, scientists, government agencies, and non- and inter-governmental organizations that created a network of public and private agencies which constituted a novel form of global governance.Footnote ²⁰ Reform-era China made an important contribution to this global movement,Footnote ²¹ but this engagement with global biopower did not come at the expense of state authority, as it is often assumed in writings about neoliberal governmentality.Footnote ²² On the contrary, as we shall see, this engagement with the global helped consolidate state spatialization. As early as 1979, two years before the marriage of Bright Gold and Full Elder Sister, the central government announced a nationwide policy—the Birth Planning Policy ([M] jihua shengyu zhengce, 計劃生育政策)—which would have a profound impact on rural intimate practices. To be sure, there had been previous efforts to promote global neo-Malthusian forms of birth planning on a national scale, but never before had birth planning been presented as a central component of national policy. When a revised version of the New Marriage Law of 1950 was announced in 1980, four years after the death of Mao, the new law included a reference to (neo-Malthusian) birth planning as a national duty. We shall return to this birth planning ‘civilizing mission’ in the next section.

Bright Gold and Full Elder Sister had their four children during the first ten years of their marriage. The first child (a boy) was born in 1982, the second (a boy) in 1984, the third (a girl) in 1987, and the fourth (a boy) in 1991. This was the very period when Deng Xiaoping's economic reform programme was launched at full speed in Guangdong, and when significant technological and infrastructural developments (for example, electricity) were introduced in the village area. This was also the period when Bright Gold's parents died (his father in 1983 and his mother in 1985), leaving the couple with no options in terms of childcare support in case they wanted to engage in what was then becoming a popular livelihood strategy—labour migration to the neighbouring Pearl River Delta region. By the late 1990s, when I first arrived in the Harmony Cave region, labour migration had already become the most popular livelihood strategy in the local countryside, and there was already a clear-cut migration pattern. While unmarried youngsters (both boys and girls) favoured working as unskilled wage labourers in factories, married couples favoured becoming self-employed vegetable gardeners.

When I first moved into the house of Bright Gold and Full Elder Sister in July 1999, it quickly became obvious that they were struggling financially, but their problems were not just economic. They were also having frequent domestic quarrels, the origins of which went back to the early 1990s, soon after the birth of their fourth child (their youngest son). This was the moment when their disagreements about what should be their main strategy of livelihood started to become more open. In clear contrast to Bright Gold, who believed that they should remain at home and lead a quiet life farming the land and taking care of the children, Full Elder Sister thought that they should adapt to the spirit of the new times—the times of ‘getting rich first’ ([M] xian-fu-qi-lai, 先富起來)—and focus on ‘earning money’ (wan-chin, 搵錢) not ‘ploughing the fields’ (gaang-tin, 耕田). In her view, there was no future in staying at home and farming for a living, and they should try their luck in the Pearl River Delta region, like most of their close village relatives. Because their children were still too small, and Bright Gold's parents had already passed away, only one of them could go (ideally the man). The other would stay in the village doing agricultural work and taking care of the children. For Full Elder Sister, this was the best way to rise above the poverty line and make enough money to provide a basic education for their children. With a bit of luck, they would make enough money to build a new, fully autonomous house made of solid industrial materials and move out of the decaying ‘clay-brick’ communal housing complex where they had been living since the early 1980s.

After several years of quarrels, some of them quite ugly, Full Elder Sister's decision in 1997 to leave the village with their eldest son (then 15–16 years old) to seek work in the Pearl River Delta region was an act of domestic rebellion. Divorce was not really an option for her,Footnote ²³ so she decided to go to the city in order to rebel against what she considered to be her husband's unreasonable refusal to come to terms with the spirit of the new times. This was not just an act of domestic rebellion; it was also a gesture that reflected her strong personality and echoed important changes in local society. Twenty years earlier Full Elder Sister would never have been able to leave her husband on his own to seek work away from the village—the political environment did not encourage migration, married women did not really venture outside the village area except during ritual festivities, and there was little infrastructural support (roads, buses, et cetera) for those seeking to move out. Her decision to leave the village was by no means easy (many women would not have dared to make such a choice), and she would never have been able to do it without the support of her husband's close patrilineal relatives in the village. They, too, thought that Bright Gold's failure to ‘assume responsibility’ (fu-jaak-yam, 負責任) as the breadwinner of the household was unacceptable. In their view, Full Elder Sister was right in leaving Bright Gold in the house with the young children, as this was the only way to make ends meet. Sure enough, this move proved an important turning point in terms of power relations in their household (she became the family's breadwinner and took full control of the household finances), and this did little to improve their conjugal interactions. By the end of her first year away from the village, Full Elder Sister often referred to Bright Gold as a loser in front of their children, and this behaviour only echoed the attitudes of close village relatives. Faced with mounting pressure to change his behaviour, Bright Gold succumbed to illness in late 1998.

I first heard about this illness soon after moving into Bright Gold's home. I was told that it was serious enough to keep him in bed for several weeks, and I heard Full Elder Sister on the phone complaining about the money she had to spend on doctors. However, it was only a few months after my arrival that I began to realize that there was more to this illness than met the eye. One morning, after checking the water levels in the rice fields, Bright Gold and I set out to the surrounding hills to herd his cattle. One of the main topics of conversation that morning was sexuality and the resurgence of female prostitution in the local countryside (a popular subject of discussion at the time), and he ended up confiding that he and his wife (despite their young age—they were in their late thirties) had not had satisfying sexual relations since the early 1990s. This was the first of a series of discussions—some of them in the presence of his wife—that fundamentally changed my views on local family life.

Intimate troubles in the 1990s

Their troubles started soon after the birth of their fourth child in 1991. At the time, a number of birth planning regulations were already in place in the local township. As noted above, China's Birth Planning Policy was launched in 1979, as the party-state started to engage more fully with the neo-Malthusian idea that fertility reduction must be an integral part of any project of modernization. The policy stipulated a system of birth quotas which aimed at reducing the total number of births and increasing the number of one-child families. There were significant variations in policy implementation, including significant differences between Han Chinese and ethnic minorities, between rural areas and urban areas, and between central and peripheral areas. In Han Chinese-dominated affluent urban areas, the policy usually took the form of a very strict ‘one-child policy’, but this was not the case in rural areas, where there were significant variations.Footnote ²⁴

In the Harmony Cave area, the policy was not vigorously enforced until 1988 and initially only as a relatively flexible ‘two-to-three children policy’. From the very beginning, local birth planning regulations assumed that the insertion of an intrauterine device (that is, the medically assisted insertion of a ring-shaped intrauterine device—otherwise known as an IUD, or coil—which cannot be easily removed by the user without professional aid) and sterilization (meaning surgical procedures of male and female sterilization) were the only 100 per cent effective birth control technologies. Induced abortion was also considered effective, but in this article the events reported are primarily concerned with intrauterine device insertion and sterilization. In addition to these three officially favoured means of birth control (both of them regulated by medical experts), there were alternatives such as condoms and contraceptive pills, but it was assumed that these would be completely ineffective because local people were strongly motivated to have many children. The same could be said of birth control methods such as urban-style ‘birth planning certificates’, wherein the bearer of the certificate pledges not to give birth to ‘unplanned children’. It was assumed that these certificates would be completely ineffective because local people wanted many children and would find it very hard to honour their pledge. Moreover, the penalties for failing to honour a birth planning pledge (including withdrawal of employment rights and benefits) would have little effect on a population that at the time—the late 1980s and early 1990s— was still living largely outside the formal economy.Footnote ²⁵

Returning to the story of Bright Gold and Full Elder Sister, in 1991, when their fourth child was born, the local Birth Planning Policy allowed village couples to give birth to two children, but stipulated the payment of a compulsory ‘above quota fine’ (chiu-saang-fai, 超生費) for any extra births. The policy also stipulated the mandatory sterilization of one of the parents after the birth of a fourth child. The only exception to this rule—given the local emphasis on the importance of patrilineal heirs and the idea that sons are a kind of old-age insurance—were couples that had still not had a male child after their fourth attempt. This was not the case for Bright Gold and Full Elder Sister, so they did not qualify for exemption.

When their fourth child was born in 1991, they were not trying to have a first son—they were trying to have a third male child. This desire to have a third male heir was not unusual in the local context, but not all families could afford to pay the requisite ‘above quota fines’. The only reason why Bright Gold and Full Elder Sister managed to have so many ‘unplanned children’ without putting themselves in significant financial trouble was because they did not have to pay significant fines for their third and fourth children. At the time, the responsibility for collecting ‘above quota fines’ was still in the hands of lower-level village/brigade officials, and it happened that Bright Gold had a close relative who was well positioned in the local political hierarchy and managed to reduce the size of their fines. In those days, getting these kinds of favours was not very difficult. What was really difficult, if not impossible, was to obtain exemption from mandatory sterilization after the birth of the fourth child. A key factor here is that the responsibility for this aspect of policy implementation was in the hands of higher-level township officials, with whom villagers had limited connections.

How did officials implement mandatory sterilization? The usual procedure at the time was to make a surprise household visit. This is precisely what happened in the case of Bright Gold and Full Elder Sister. Township officials warned them during a surprise visit immediately after the birth of their fourth child that one of them had to be sterilized or else their family property would be destroyed or confiscated. Bright Gold and Full Elder Sister offered little active resistance, as they had heard many stories of family property destruction. Township officials also told them that they were free to choose who should be sterilized, and they decided that Bright Gold should be the one to ‘dung-leung’ (棟樑, literally ‘ridgepole and beam’), that is, the one to bear the heavy responsibility. This choice was not unusual. At the time—the period between the late 1980s and the mid 1990s—a significant number of couples opted for male sterilization (vasectomy)Footnote ²⁶ because this surgical procedure was considered less irreversible than female sterilization (tubal ligation),Footnote ²⁷ thus leaving open the possibility of having more ‘unplanned children’. Women only started to become the main target of local sterilization procedures from the mid 1990s onwards, when surgical procedures for male sterilization became more effective and policy implementation less permissive when it came to ‘unplanned children’.Footnote ²⁸ We shall return to this point in the next section.

Bright Gold's vasectomy was performed that same day at the local township clinic. Before the procedure, birth planning officials lectured him on the gravity of the country's population problem while praising him for his patriotic willingness to be sterilized for the sake of the nation and the ‘quality’ of the population. Bright Gold told me that these officials were very insistent, admitting that their repeated drilling convinced him that he was doing something ‘righteous’, something important for the ‘good’ of the country. Bright Gold did return to the village a few hours after the procedure, as the doctors promised, but the pain in his testes did not go away as quickly as he expected, and it soon started to become clear that the procedure would have a lasting negative effect on his health.

One should note at this point that this experience of ‘patriotic sterilization’ is not exceptional in the local context. From the very start of its implementation, the Birth Planning Policy generated significant popular discontent, and the vegetable gardens of local migrants working in the Pearl River Delta region played an important role in local responses to this state-driven ‘civilizing mission’. These vegetable gardens offered a safe refuge to escape annual birth planning inspections, and they allowed local women to give birth to ‘unplanned children’ away from the controlling eyes of birth planning officials. These gardens also allowed village families to earn enough money to pay for ‘unplanned births’, delay the timing of sterilization, and have more than the usual two or three children.

This transgressive approach to local birth planning regulations remained quite widespread, even when the policy started to become very costly in terms of fines from the mid 1990s onwards. There are many factors behind this pattern of ‘collective transgression’, but I would like to single out the influence of a strongly pronatalist system of family and lineage organization which favoured the birth of many male heirs. When decollectivization was initiated in the late 1970s, local reproductive practices remained strongly pronatalist and male-biased. This was still the case in the 1980s and 1990s when, despite the rising costs of living, children (especially sons) continued to be widely regarded as major economic assets.Footnote ²⁹ The best way to illustrate the power of these earlier reproductive ideals is to note that, without exception, all village couples in their forties and fifties—the age cohort of Bright Gold and Full Elder Sister—chose to transgress birth quotas up to the point that the husband or the wife had to face compulsory sterilization, and they all did it knowing or at least suspecting that this surgical procedure could have a negative impact on their well-being.

In standard biomedical textbooks written for users based in affluent countries and cities, both vasectomy (male sterilization) and tubal ligation (female sterilization) are usually regarded as common, low-risk surgical procedures.Footnote ³⁰ I have not undertaken a detailed medical study of all villagers who reported suffering from post-surgical complications, but my observations suggest that such complications (for both men and women) are not as uncommon locally as biomedical textbooks suggest. The problem with textbooks is that their descriptions of sterilization procedures fail to take into account issues of social context. They assume, for example, that surgery is voluntary and that patients are always advised to consider how the long-term outcome of a vasectomy or a tubal ligation might affect them both emotionally and biologically. This is certainly not the case for people like Bright Gold who were sterilized under significant pressure from state officials. Textbooks also tend to assume that the quality of medical services is high and equally available to everyone. However, the average quality of rural clinics such as the ones in the Harmony Cave area leaves much to be desired in terms of medical service provision, and if villagers face any post-surgery problems they will not receive any medical assistance unless they pay for it (and they often do not have enough money to do so).

Bright Gold's descriptions of his symptoms seem to fit what standard biomedical textbooks often refer to as post-vasectomy pain syndrome—a poorly understood post-surgical complication leading to constant or occasional pain in the testes—but this is not the way Bright Gold described his condition to me. He agreed that his condition was the product of post-surgical complications, but his explanation was more meticulous. He said that in contrast to earlier vasectomy procedures that simply used a string or a clip to squeeze shut the flow of sperm, his involved the cutting of the vas deferens.Footnote ³¹ This practice of cutting the vas deferens would later become standard in the region, but back then it was still a technical novelty. Referring to this surgical wounding, Bright Gold told me on several occasions that it affected his capacity for bodily development (faat-yuk, 發育) very negatively. His descriptions of this process drew heavily on language taken from local traditional Chinese medicine, a popular indigenous system of authoritative knowledge with strong links to Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist moral philosophy and religious spirituality.Footnote ³² According to traditional Chinese medicine, a vital energy or life force called qi—usually inherited from one's patrilineal ancestors—circulates in the body through a system of pathways called meridians. Health is an ongoing process of maintaining balance and harmony in the circulation of qi (氣 [M]); and this requires a balanced interaction between two opposing, yet complementary, forces (yin-yang [M], 陰陽) that are seen to structure all life. Just as the human body requires balance in order to achieve harmony and stability, the same can be said of wider social and cosmic bodies.

In a similar vein, Bright Gold told me that the surgical procedure imposed on him by local officials provoked a dangerous polarization in his bodily equilibrium in terms of yin–yang interactions, hence the pain in his testes and his overall lack of energy and explosive strength. He also believed that this dangerous polarization spilled over to other realms of his life. He started feeling depressed about the idea of being ‘sterile’, and his sexual performance was negatively affected. He told me that the pain in the testes was strongest when engaging in sexual intercourse or upon ejaculation, and also that he could no longer achieve a strong erection very easily. In his view, this loss of energy—or virility—created a further imbalance in his household because, in addition to all the existing disagreements, their sex life was affected and they could no longer look forward to the possibility of having more children. Like most villagers, Bright Gold usually talked about sexuality (especially issues related to sexuality within the family) primarily as a reproductive duty, not as a pleasure activity,Footnote ³³ but his remarks on the possibility of having more children reveal important disagreements with Full Elder Sister with regards to reproductive ideals.

Both agreed that success in life was also evaluated in terms of reproductive achievements, but when their fourth child was born in 1991, their ideas of what counted as an acceptable reproductive achievement were very different. Full Elder Sister thought that four children were enough, but Bright Gold disagreed because—like most men of his generation—he was more committed to the logic of predatory expansion of local reproductive ideologies. These ideologies bear striking resemblances with Marxian/Maoist conceptions because they approach economic growth as a sustained process of demographic expansion in which more children (especially male heirs) mean more family/lineage members, which mean more resources, more labour, and thus more power and wealth. For Bright Gold, children meant power. Four was good, but he wanted to have another. Full Elder Sister did not share this opinion. Her position was closer to the neo-Malthusian calculus associated with local birth planning regulations. She told me during a conversation in 2001 that when their third child was born in 1987 she accepted being fitted with a non-removable intrauterine device, despite painful side effects like heavy bleeding and cramping, because she was not keen on having a fourth child. In 1991, when their fourth child was born, she told her husband that she did not want to have more children because it would only bring more poverty to the family. She was, of course, against the practice of mandatory sterilization, but she told me during a conversation in 2005 that her husband's sterilization did help her to achieve the goal of not having any more children. Had she given birth to a fifth child in the mid 1990s, she would never have managed to challenge her husband and leave the village in 1997 to work in the city.

Love and marriage in the twenty-first century

I recently (February–March 2012) had the opportunity to discuss these issues with Bright Gold and Full Elder Sister, and confirmed this analysis. Bright Gold is now a 50-year-old grandfather who prefers to describe his sterilization experience in terms of its negative effects on his energy levels and on his ability to work hard and earn money—the main measure of success of the reform era. In 2003, after years of family quarrels, he finally agreed to join Full Elder Sister in the suburbs of the provincial capital, Guangzhou, to help her run a small-scale vegetable gardening business together with their three sons. Like many other migrant families from their home township, they live in a large wooden hut built inside the space of their market garden and return to the village several times a year, especially for festive occasions. Bright Gold is still capable of agricultural labour, but he does only very light work. His wife and children often mock him, saying that he went to school for many years but is largely useless when it comes to basic things like selling vegetables and getting the numbers right. They also mock him for not being able to ride a motorcycle (a basic male skill in the countryside) and for being afraid to venture by himself anywhere outside the space of their market garden. Bright Gold still insists—to the despair of his wife and children—that he would prefer to return to the village to lead a peaceful life of farming, but his worries and energies are now focused on his wife's increasingly poor health and his eldest son's bachelor condition (he is approaching 30 years old and has no marriage prospects).

Bright Gold's younger children have slightly better prospects, but they do not entirely fit the image of China's second generation of migrant workers reproduced in state media. Plum Blossom, their only daughter, is closer to this idealized image of a new generation of rural migrants trying to become more connected to urban society and urban lifestyles, but her case is somewhat unusual because she is one of the few youngsters from her home township to have made it to university, with the help of relatives and sponsors. Most local youngsters—including her second elder brother and her younger brother—tend to drop out of school either towards the end of primary school or the end of junior middle school in order to make a living as migrant workers. They usually start working in factories to earn money to get married, and it is quite often in these sweatshops that they meet their future wives/husbands (usually girls/boys from the same home township or from neighbouring townships). Most get married in their early or mid twenties and plan to have their children in the first ten years of marriage, while continuing to engage in labour migration. For them, labour migration has become a way of life, and they would not be able to integrate this mobility with the procreative duties of family life without the support of the senior generations, usually only from the husband's side.Footnote ³⁴ They are very critical of the two-tiered hukou household registration system which denies them full access to public services and job opportunities in the city, but they are very realistic about their possibilities. They like living in the city, but they see themselves as sojourners living in the suburban margins. They are no longer as tied to their native village and township as their parents’ generation, but they continue to participate in various kinds of social and ritual activities back home.

This new generation of migrants is constructing a very different experience of love, marriage, and family life. Money is an important aspect of this experience. Marriage for this new generation remains firmly rooted in local ritual traditions, but these traditions have been subject to a dramatic process of monetization. ‘Old-style’ ritual protocols like paying ‘corporeal money’ to the bride's family, or throwing a banquet at the groom's village continue to be practised alongside official procedures, but it all comes down to money as regards the expression of ‘human feeling’ (yan-ching, 人情). Throwing a marriage banquet is very costly, and not everyone back home can afford to pay the standard 12,000 RMB (€1,200) for bridewealth, an amount that is ten times higher than that paid in the 1980s and which corresponds to many years of savings for a migrant couple working in the city. Some manage to avoid the performance of certain ritual procedures, but this is generally perceived to be an indicator of low economic status and/or poor cultural quality, and there is strong pressure to conform to ritual expectations. At the same time, as Bright Gold's second son, Buddha Cassia, put it during an interview in March 2012, ‘young people nowadays do not follow as many rules as in “old times”. Contemporary rules are simpler and more flexible.’ Marriage for Buddha Cassia's generation remains to some extent a series of communally shared procedures that require a significant effort of coordination between ritual experts, family relatives, lineage communities, and official authorities, but there seems to be a generalized trend towards ritual individualization which allows for greater strategic flexibility.

A similar process of individualization is taking place at the level of matchmaking procedures and courtship practices,Footnote ³⁵ but one should be careful not to overstate the extent to which these procedures and practices have become disembedded from broader moral and normative structures such as the (joint) family.Footnote ³⁶ Arranged (non-forced) marriage is still common, but youngsters have more freedom to get to know their future partners before marriage. Most youngsters nowadays only agree to get married after a process of getting to know each other, not just after a ritual of meeting each other. This process of getting to know each other—also called ‘dating’ (paak-to, 拍拖)—involves intense face-to-face contact, but it also includes ongoing online contact. Most youngsters today have mobile phones, and these gadgets have already become an important tool of romantic attachment. Premarital sexual contact is also not uncommon in the context of ‘dating’, but this issue is usually not openly discussed, even with members of one's close network. Getting the agreement of one's parents and relatives is still very important when it comes to the choice of marriage partner, but marriage is increasingly depicted—as in urban contexts—as a voluntary relationship grounded in individual emotional satisfaction.Footnote ³⁷ Love is an important component of this sense of emotional satisfaction,Footnote ³⁸ but as Plum Blossom put it in a recent interview, also in March 2012:

Birth planning regulations remain a central component of this shift towards a more sentimental, more individualized regime of love, marriage, and family life, and the latest revision of the Marriage of Law of 1980—the Revised Marriage Law of 2001—continues to refer to (neo-Malthusian forms of) birth planning as a national duty.Footnote ³⁹ To be sure, the standardization of birth planning as a national duty was not the main goal of the Revised Marriage Law of 2001. This law was above all a contribution to the development of a more liberal legal regime of love, marriage, and family life, but this legal turn away from close surveillance of sexuality and marital relationships was not accompanied by a comparable move away from close surveillance of reproduction.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Revised Marriage Law of 2001 approaches marriage as a voluntary contractual relationship based on individual emotional satisfaction and advocates a legal-administrative framework that favours a deferral to individual preferences when regulating marital sexuality and conjugal property. However, this law continues to support the monitoring of reproductive practices as a state prerogative, while still maintaining that the only legitimate arena for reproduction is ‘free monogamous (heterosexual) marriage’.Footnote ⁴¹ When the Birth Planning Policy was launched as party policy in the late 1970s, it was envisioned as expiring 20 years later.Footnote ⁴² Today, more than 30 years later, there has been a significant decrease in the ferocity with which the policy is enforced, but the state continues to retain the role of social engineer.Footnote ⁴³ As Michael Palmer notes, writing about the Population and Family Planning Law of 2001 and other legal developments, the state continues to treat reproduction and marital fertility as ‘a demographic problem to be dealt with by bureaucratic regulation, rather than an issue of reproductive rights’.Footnote ⁴⁴

In rural areas like the Harmony Cave region, this approach to intimate relationships is particularly visible because there is still a significant mismatch between local expectations and policy stipulations. This was true for the generation of Bright Gold and Full Elder Sister, and it is still true for the generation of Plum Blossom and Buddha Cassia, even though this generation likes to represent itself as being less antagonistic to the Birth Planning Policy. For the generation of Plum Blossom and Buddha Cassia, the obligation to beget children and male heirs in the context of a regime of ‘free monogamous marriage’ remains a central value, but they no longer want to have as many children as their parents. One reason for this has to do with changes in local reproductive ideals resulting from broader social, economic, and cultural changes. For most villagers born in the 1960s or before, the minimum acceptable offspring set was two sons and one daughter, but this ideal is no longer attractive to the younger generations. Today most young couples want to have two children, ideally one son and one daughter, or else two sons. This change in reproductive ideals was an important factor leading to a gradual fertility decline from the mid 1990s onwards (most young couples nowadays tend to have no more than two children, not three or four as with the generation of Bright Gold and Full Elder Sister). However, there was another equally important reason: the fact that the local Birth Planning Policy became less permissive.

Starting from the mid 1990s, the birth quota was reduced to two children—not three as in the early 1990s—and the fines associated with extra births started to undergo a dramatic process of inflation.Footnote ⁴⁵ At the same time, a new fine was introduced. All couples failing to comply with the official four-year birth-spacing interval would have to pay a ‘birth-spacing fine’ (gaan-gaak-fai, 間隔費). To promote compliance, more efforts were placed on trying to get local mothers to insert an intrauterine device (daai-waan, 帶環) for a period of four years after childbirth, but enforcement remained uneven. These changes in policy implementation were meant to reduce the number of couples having more than two children, but this is not what happened, and the changes introduced (including the inflated birth planning fines) generated significant popular protest with villagers accusing local officials of corruption.

Starting from the early 2000s, policy enforcement was completely transferred from lower-level ‘village/brigade’ officials to higher-level township officials based in a completely independent unit, the ‘birth planning office’ (gai-saang-baan, 計生辦). This was the moment when the present-day configuration of the local Birth Planning Policy started to take shape. Instead of relying on a system of pecuniary fines aimed at penalizing transgressors and discouraging infraction, the local birth planning office started regulating reproductive practices by means of a compulsory system of birth registration and gynecological examinations involving the issuing of various kinds of permits and certificates, including ‘birth planning permit’, ‘planned birth certificate’, ‘sterilization certificate’, and ‘IUD insertion certificate’. Some of these permits and certificates were already in use, but they were not very effective. This only started to change when the local township government started to require the presentation of these permits and certificates for undertaking basic administrative procedures such as registering children in a local school.

Attached to these permits and certificates was a system of compulsory gynecological examinations locally known as ‘three yearly examinations’ (yat-nin saam-cha, 一年三查). This system of gynecological examinations has since been transformed into a ‘one yearly examination’ system, but its logic of operation remains largely unchanged. Every local married woman needs to have an examination booklet, where the results of each and every gynecological examination are recorded. This card is compulsory, and the local birth planning office has spent a significant amount of resources to get most local married women under their radar. When this system of gynecological examinations was launched in the early 2000s, important changes were introduced in local birth planning regulations. The new policy still stipulated a birth quota of two children, but it no longer allowed couples to have extra children simply by paying fines. This ‘pay-as-you-go’ system of reproductive monitoring had generated significant popular protest because of its unfairness (only villagers with enough money to pay fines were allowed to have extra children), so the government tried to develop a system that was equally tough on everyone. After the birth of the first child, mothers were expected to carry an intrauterine device for a period of four years. If a second child was born in less than four years, the parents would have to pay a ‘birth-spacing fine’. After the birth of the second child, most couples were expected to undergo voluntary sterilization. There was only one exception—couples who had not managed to have a son after two attempts. No other couples were allowed to have a third child, and in cases where the sterilization procedure was not effective and a third child was conceived, the mother would have to have an abortion. If a mother managed to hide her pregnancy and give birth to a third child, the parents would have to pay a very high pecuniary fine, or else they would have to give the child away for adoption. After this third child, both parents—not just one—would have to undergo voluntary sterilization.

These birth-planning regulations remain largely unchanged. Local married women are still expected to undertake one yearly gynecological examination, and they can only give birth to two children, after which one of the parents—usually the mother—has to undergo voluntary sterilization. The only exception remains couples who have not managed to have a son after two attempts, but there are rumours that this policy will soon be changed. The fact that these rumours are generating significant popular protest suggests that there is still a substantial mismatch between local expectations and policy stipulations, but this mismatch has been significantly reduced. As noted above, most youngsters nowadays do not want to have as many children as their parents’ generation, but the policy continues to allow no space whatsoever for individual preferences, approaching reproduction and marital fertility strictly as a matter of bureaucratic regulation.

Consider the example of Buddha Cassia. His wife gave birth to their first son in 2012, two years after the birth of their daughter. They had to pay a ‘birth spacing fine’ because they failed to comply with the mandatory four-year birth spacing interval. Like most married women from their home township, Buddha Cassia's wife was persuaded to use a non-removable intrauterine device for a period of four years, but it was not effective, so she ended up giving birth to this second child earlier than planned. Buddha Cassia told me during a family gathering in March 2012 that he would like to have a third child, but he knows that one of the two will soon have to undergo voluntary sterilization. He told me that surgical procedures nowadays are better than when his father, Bright Gold, was sterilized, but he noted that he and his wife had already decided that she should be the one to bear that responsibility. When I asked Buddha Cassia's wife whether she was happy with this arrangement, she told me that she was worried about the possible negative consequences of the surgical procedure, but she was happy with the idea that this intervention would allow her to avoid further pregnancies. Unlike Buddha Cassia, she does not want to have a third child, and when I asked her why she thought that two were enough, her answer evoked a calculus that fits both the neo-Malthusian logic of the Birth Planning Policy and the capitalist logic of the new market-oriented society. She told me that earning money was not easy and the costs of living were getting higher and higher, so she thought that having another child would only bring more poverty to the family. It was better to put a stop on the work of reproduction.

Global transformations and the construction of local intimate modernities

Much has been written about economic liberalization, cultural globalization, and the impact of capitalist processes on local intimate structures. In this article, I focused primarily on the intersections between intimate practices of the everyday and large-scale ‘civilizing missions’ aimed at producing ‘modern civilised citizens’. My account has drawn particular attention to the role played by neo-Malthusian state-based forms of globalized biopower—principally the Birth Planning Policy—in the transformation of local intimate structures.

During the last two to three decades, China anthropologists have been particularly attentive to these differential transactions between intimate practices of the everyday and the imagined state and nation. Sara Friedman,Footnote ⁴⁶ in particular, has been explicitly concerned with developing an appropriate analytical framework to understand these intersections. Her work on rural Fujian (southeastern China) focuses on the Hui'an Chinese, a group that officially belongs to the Han nationality but which is well known for its distinctive marriage, family, gender, and labour practices, manifested most dramatically in the different behaviours, activities, and adornment styles of its women. Friedman tracks local cultural practices across decades of state intervention through political campaigns and policy shifts which brought them under close surveillance by the state and made them targets for reform. Her account draws attention to what she calls ‘intimate politics’, a form of embodied struggle in which (post-) socialist civilizing agendas have been formulated, contested, and, in some cases, transformed through the bodies and practices of local people, especially women.

Friedman's work joins the work of Stevan HarrellFootnote ⁴⁷ and others in drawing attention to a long-term mission civilisatrice on the part of the Han Chinese state towards the ‘barbarian’ periphery. This ‘civilizing mission’ should not be confused with another that emanated from the ‘West’ and was directed towards China. I think we need to add a third ‘civilization mission’ to this list. This third mission civilisatrice is also being played out at home but is not directed towards the peoples of the periphery. It is about consolidating the nation-state, and its main goal is to turn ‘backward’ Han Chinese ‘peasants’ into ‘modern Chinese citizens’. A key aspect of this ‘civilizing mission’, I argue in this article, is what I call the ‘techno-politics of intimacy’, that is, the complex processes of negotiation through which local socio-technical modalities of ‘doing intimacies’ are transformed, reconfigured, and in some cases incorporated into larger ‘civilizing’ chains of inclusion, including national and global inclusion. These negotiations can focus on many different issues including, as I show in this article, reproductive practices and technologies, but they are always about linking the instability of individual lives to the trajectories of the collective. These negotiations usually involve the setting up of new standards for what counts as appropriate behaviour; just as they mobilize the usage of what Foucault famously called ‘disciplinary technologies’, operational chains of material and social interaction aimed at controlling behaviour and producing moral regulation.

I have noted earlier that China's Birth Planning Policy cannot be separated from a more general neo-Malthusian project—a global biopolitical enterprise concerned with world population and building its own version of intimate modernity transnationally. This focus on the global is important when it comes to highlighting the place of the Birth Planning Policy in a particular world historical conjuncture, but one still needs to unpack the state-based dimensions of this large-scale ‘civilizing mission’. Many states in the global South have employed some form of population policy as a project for building the nation-state, and China is often recognized as one of the most successful in this respect. As Susan Greenhalgh notes, the 825 million intrauterine device insertions and removals, abortions, and sterilizations which, by the early 2000s, had been conducted on the bodies of women (and, to a much lesser extent, men) are treated as matters of contraceptive prevalence and reproductive health in the medical literature on China's birth control programme, but the larger political significance of this surgical effort should not go unremarked.Footnote ⁴⁸ Each of these state-mandated surgeries is a serious political act that has extended the reach of the state to a place it never entered in the Maoist period, when the state sought to push its tentacles into every corner of Chinese intimate life. With the Birth Planning Policy, the state was able to reach not only into the bedroom, intruding on sexual negotiations and reproductive deliberations that had long belonged to the sphere of the patriarchal family, it was also able to reach into the womb, deemed the wellspring of generativity for the woman, her kin, and the community. With its intervention in population, the state has penetrated to the biological and symbolic core of Chinese society, taking unto itself fearsome new powers that go beyond the remaking of the family—one of the goals of the Maoist state—to the making of life itself.

The ethnographic materials presented here explore this globalized neo-Malthusian state-building project from the perspective of impoverished rural communities in Guangdong province, but my account of the intersections between intimate practices of the everyday and broader social-cultural and politico-economic processes seeks to avoid some of the pitfalls of the master narrative of state coercion and state–society struggle that prevail in international media accounts of the Birth Planning Policy.Footnote ⁴⁹ These accounts tend to overstate the agency of the central state apparatus, highlighting its continuing commitment to unyielding authoritarian political methods. This approach fails to take into account the high levels of regional and local variation in policy implementation.Footnote ⁵⁰ As I argue above, there is no single birth planning policy; there are many birth planning policies. The same can be said of the state apparatus. Instead of a singular state, unified in intent and method, what we find is a state apparatus riddled with internal contradictions and diffuse interests, peopled by multiple institutions and multiple actors, dedicated to what have often been conflicting goals. Thus, rather than viewing the state as a unified entity or agent that exists above society, dictating its every move, it is better to consider the state as a multiple set of normalizing practices oriented towards the production of particular kinds of political subjects. This approach, usually associated with Foucault's later work on governmentality,Footnote ⁵¹ traces the emergence of a distinctly modern form of state power whose mode of governance is still repressive and concerned with sovereignty but operates more and more through strategies of discipline and the inculcation of a sense of individual self-regulation. Crucially, for Foucault and his followers, the power of the state is not just negative and repressive; it is also positive and creative.

This approach to state power is very different from the approach favoured by master narratives of state coercion and state–society struggle that tend to emphasize the negative dimensions of state power. These narratives also tend to assume that the state is the main motor of historical transformation, echoing the general tendency in the humanities and social sciences to favour top-down approaches. In this article, I develop an alternative approach to global intimate transformations. Instead of assuming that changes in local practices follow primarily from the top-down impact of external forces such as state-promoted neo-Malthusian technologies of birth planning, I argue that local practices and global forces co-produce each other through ‘frictions’ of various kinds. Friction in this article is both what makes global forces powerful and effective (as when the interests of Full Elder Sister clashed with those of her husband, Bright Gold, but coincided with those of birth planning officials committed to enforcing the practice of mandatory sterilization), and what gets in the way of the smooth operation of global forces (as when the same Full Elder Sister agreed to have a third and a fourth child, including a third son, at a time when local birth planning regulations stipulated a birth quota of two children). Friction in this article is both what disrupts the motion of power (as when local married women illegally extract their intrauterine devices in order to give birth to unplanned children), and what keeps power in motion (as when local married women agree to use an intrauterine device or be sterilized in order to prevent pregnancy and reduce the number of children). Friction is what generates difference (for example, what explains the particular configuration of the Birth Planning Policy in the Harmony Cave area), but it is not a synonym for resistance. Friction does not necessarily imply resistance, but is always what makes ‘translation’Footnote ⁵² possible and allows the construction of a network of local–global interactions. Much has been written about the impact of global forces on local intimate practices promoting their dissemination, but the idea that global forces—including global forces intertwined with modern state forces—are themselves ‘translations’ of local–global interactions is more challenging. This is the view developed in this article.