Social coordination of welfare state, home ownership, family reciprocity and gender division
The system of social coordination
Existing research has noticed the substitution effects between welfare state and home ownership, and between welfare state and family reciprocity. When social protection is not available to the public and the generosity of the welfare state is limited, individual households are motivated to accumulate private assets to offset income uncertainty over the life course (Castles and Ferrera 1996; Kemeny 2001; Doling and Horsewood 2011). A common way for families to accumulate assets is home ownership (Dewilde and Raeymaeckers 2008; Toussaint and Elsinga 2009; Doling and Ronald 2010; Elsinga and Hoekstra 2015; Izuhara 2016). Homeowners can reduce the cost of living (by not “wasting money on rent” and living free of charge once they own the dwelling outright) and ensure a safety net to offset financial risks (by cashing out or using the asset as collateral for loans). There is also a trade-off between state and family as welfare providers. Without or with limited public welfare, individuals have to rely on the mutual support of the families, particularly intergenerational reciprocity, to provide care and offset risks in the long term (Croll 2006; Albertini et al. 2007; Blome et al. 2009; Izuhara 2010a). In developing and underdeveloped countries where the welfare state is not effectively established, extended families in which different generations can help each other are common. And vice versa, in developed countries where intergenerational reciprocity is encouraged in culture, such as in East Asian countries, the development of the welfare state is confined (Croll 2006; Izuhara and Forrest 2013; Jacobs 2000). Family reciprocity also works within one generation, in the form of the male breadwinning model; the incomeless wives use their free labor at home to reciprocate their husbands’ responsibility in providing cash income for subsistence (O’Connor 1993; Lewis 2002) (Fig. 1).
In a little developed welfare state with a high percentage of home ownership, family reciprocity in intergenerational transfers of housing property is important. In a homeowner society, access to alternative tenures is limited and living in an owner-occupied home becomes a social norm (Ronald 2008). A high demand for home ownership coupled with insufficient access to the rental sector may drive up the price of owner-occupancy properties. As a consequence, home ownership is often unaffordable for young households unless they receive support from parents and/or other family members (Izuhara 2010a; Heath and Calvert 2013; Druta and Ronald 2016; Manzo et al. 2016; Deng et al. 2016). Parents are usually inclined to help out, as home ownership is a good investment for the family and their help could evoke reciprocity from their children, which is the major source of support in old age when welfare state provisions are limited (Izuhara 2010b; Zhong 2014, or 2017).
We call the interconnectedness between welfare state, home ownership and intergenerational reciprocity discussed above “social coordination”, as it illustrates how individuals, families, and the state are connected in a society (through the lens of housing).
Home ownership, family reciprocity and welfare state in China
In another publication (the authors, forthcoming), we document how reciprocity works in smoothing the exchange between parental help in accessing home ownership and the children’s support in old age care. The expectation of reciprocity plays a key role in deciding whether an intergenerational transfer takes place. Basically, the parents only make the transfer when they view the beneficiaries as trustworthy providers of old age care. Some adult children, under the purpose of maintaining their autonomy in deciding an acceptable level of filial duty, refuse or avoid asking for support of their parents. The reciprocity expected by the parents can be financial, instrumental, or emotional, depending on the needs of the parents and the availability of the children in due time. This exchange is not to be explicitly discussed during the process of negotiation, but it is well understood and perceived justified by the adult children. We also observed an influence of the welfare state on the motivation of intergenerational transfers. In the current Chinese welfare system, rural residents receive far less state welfare than urban residents. This motivates them to invest more in intergenerational reciprocity, while the urbanites can be more altruistic in the transfer. Households with a rural migration background are more willing and more likely to feel responsible for supporting their children in getting access to home ownership than their urban peers, even though they have fewer resources to do so.
The role of gender
In this paper, our main concern is to add another dimension in the triad of social coordination—gender. Gender divisions are important in the understanding of how individuals, families and the state are organized in a particular society. In most of the preindustrial societies and to a lesser extent but far from extinction in the industrialized societies, production and property ownership are organized along lines of gender. The men work outside the family as the “bread-winner” and represent the household in public. They are recognized by the community and the authorities as the “head of the household” and the owners of family properties. Women, on the contrary, provide services and care within the household without any monetary compensation. They are viewed as dependents of their husbands and fathers, which implies that they cannot hold properties (Engels 1884; Goode 1963; Hareven 1999; Whyte 2003). The gender differences did not disappear when welfare states started to develop and social protection became a civil right. After all, the organization of social protection is often gendered as well. Many modern welfare states (with exceptions in Scandinavia) are still based on the male breadwinner model in which the male workers receive a “family wage” to support their wives staying at home and doing unpaid house and care works (O’Connor 1993; Orloff 1993; Esping-Andersen 1990, 1999; Lewis 2002; Leitner 2003).
After decades of feminist movement and progress in social policies, gender gaps in education and income have in different extents diminished in many developed and developing countries. Yet, the gender gaps in the distribution of property and asset-holding remain persistently large (Deere and Doss 2006; Kennett and Chan 2011). Direct or indirect discriminations affect women in the distribution of proprietary resources in both private and public spheres, such as in inheritance of properties (Kennett and Chan 2011), in registering the ownership of housing, in taking mortgage loans (Izuhara 2015), in the distribution of land (Sargeson 2012b) and in the allocation of social housing (Guo 2011). Female-headed households in particular experience significant disadvantage in terms of accessing and sustaining appropriate housing (Kennett and Chan 2011).
In next section, we will apply the perspective of social coordination and examine how welfare provision, family relations and housing are linked in the context of traditional and contemporary China.
Social coordination in China: from past to present
Social coordination in traditional Chinese society
In traditional Chinese society, the provision of housing (and by extension the ownership of housing property) was always associated with elderly care and generally arranged patrilineally (Logan et al. 1998; Whyte 2003). In a patrilineal society, marriage is normally patrilocal; residing matrilocally is deemed socially undesirable. Patrilocal means that the groom’s parents prepare a space so the new couple can move in with them and become co-resident. After marriage, the bride becomes a member of the groom’s family and will care for her husband’s parents rather than for her natal parents. The children of this couple would also be named according to their father’s genealogy. In this way, a Chinese family is reproduced patrilineally. Housing, both as living space and property, is an important link in this chain of reproduction. A home is both a practical place (for caregiving) and a symbolic space (in which one identifies with a family network). In this way, providing housing, either financially or in-kind, justifies the providers’ rights to care and enables them to receive it (Logan et al. 1998; LaFave 2016).
Consequently, in traditional Chinese society, there is a preference for sons. Only sons are considered permanent members of the family and the source of care. As a result of this, girls receive much less from the family in terms of resources and investment (Song 2008; Li and Wu 2011). They receive less nutrition than boys and they carry out duties within the household from a very young age. They are relatively deprived in terms of formal education and human capital accumulation.
Social coordination in contemporary China
The Feminist movement in the twentieth century campaigned for gender equality and women’s access to civil rights such as freedom of marriage and divorce, right to education and formal occupation, and right to acquire and maintain properties. The Communist regime particularly promoted women’s participation in the labor force and gender equality in allocating job opportunities, as means of mass mobilization and means to facilitate industrialization (Davis and Harrell 1993; Zheng 2005).
Chinese welfare state
From 1949 and onwards, a nationwide welfare system was gradually developed. It started in a very preliminary form, covering only state employees, and gradually expanded into a somewhat more comprehensive system. The current Chinese welfare system has eligibility criteria based on formal employment and benefits based on contribution, which means that women can only gain access to social benefits if they are paid workers and contribute to the social security fund. As a result of lower female participation in the labor force and lower pay scales, only 54.1% of the elderly females in the cities have pension, compared to 79.3% for their male counterparts. In the countryside, the gap is even wider: 38.8% for females and 59.1% for males (ANWU and NSB 2010).
Even though gender equality is still on the official political agenda, state institutions in many domains are suppressing women’s rights toward land and housing, under the assumption that they will get it from their husbands (Guo 2011). Women have been more vulnerable than men to forced acquisition and have had to protect their land rights, though with far less success than men. In 2010, 21.0% of the rural women were landless, 9.1% higher than the rate for rural men (ANWU and NSB 2010). Furthermore, current Chinese laws do not provide mechanisms to distinguish women’s property rights within the household. Therefore, if the marital status of a woman changes, her rights to family property such as land and housing can be easily infringed (Sargeson 2012).
One-child policy and family reciprocity
From 1982 and onwards, China launched the so-called “one child policy”, stipulating that in principle each couple should only have one child. This policy is applied strictly in urban areas but somewhat more loosely in rural areas (Zhang 2007). As a result of the policy, the fertility rate dropped from 2.7 in 1986 to 1.5 in 1997 and has since remained stable (World Bank 2017). A line of research suggests that the one-child policy reduced the number of competitors for a family’s resources and improved gender equality to some extent. Under this policy, single-child girls and girls with only female siblings receive more education than girls with male siblings (Tsui and Rich 2002; Lee 2012). Many families, even from rural background, started to encourage their daughters to pursuit a career and provide help such as child care (Xiao 2014; Ling 2017). However, the improved gender equality is not yet visible statistically in the allocation of family property and assets. Even though the inheritance rights of daughters are written in law, inheritance allocation only to sons still dominates in rural areas (Sun 1996; Wu 2012). A survey from the 1990s showed that only 40% of urban residents and 14% of rural residents agree with shared inheritance among daughters and sons (Sun 1996).
Post-reform policies pay more attention to the protection of individual property rights and interests. Different from family policies in the socialist era which emphasized protection of women, current policies highlight the financial contribution and rights toward the family assets of the breadwinner and loosen the rights of the female homemakers. As divorce rates and disputes over marital property rise, a new judicial interpretation of the Marriage Law was issued in 2011. This new interpretation stipulates that the housing property (or a share of the housing property) paid by one spouse (including parents of the spouse) before the wedding belongs to the payer (Supreme People’s Court 2011) In recent years, with children that are born under the one-child policy reaching marriage age, new dynamics were introduced in family relations and power structures. The existence of families with only daughters challenged the patrilineal family reproduction model, as parents in these families also need care from the daughters and sons-in-law; the parents of the bride and groom have to compete for priority in their children’s future caregiving. Considering the direct linkage between the surname of the grandchild, housing provision and rights to care, some parents of the brides insist to finance the new couple’s home in order the gain the right of surnaming and future care (Qi 2017). If the parents contribute significant amounts to their children’s home ownership, they are not only more likely to arrange a desirable location at which they would eventually receive care but are also holding the moral high ground, either to claim their children’s reciprocal care or to use part of the equity stored in their children’s home to pay for institutional care and health treatment (Zhang 2004; Luo and Zhan 2012; Sun 2012; Zhang et al. 2014). Thus, a gendered relation of housing intergenerational transfer and age support can no longer be automatically assumed. Instead, case-by-case negotiations become the norm. In such negotiations the financial ability of the bride or groom’s parents, the affection between adult children and parents, and the geography of their residence, play a crucial role.