Abstract
This study investigates how rapid socio-political-economic change in China since 1949 has affected intergenerational relationships and practices in rural areas, specifically the care provided to elderly parents by their adult children. In this introductory chapter, I map out the background of this study and point out how the approaches taken in this study—social exchange theory, Carol Smart’s personal life approach and David Morgan’s family practices approach—might help advance understandings of changes to intergenerational relationships and patterns of elderly care in rural China over the past half-century. In this chapter, I also introduce my use of ethnographic methods and semi-structured interviews in Dougou village, where I conducted my fieldwork.
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Notes
- 1.
Migrant work or labour migration in this study refers to the phenomenon of rural villagers going away to work and sending back remittances.
- 2.
To take Australia as an example, according to the government aged care website (http://www.myagedcare.gov.au/), there are five types of services provided to elderly people: help in their own home, after-hospital (transition) care, respite care, residential aged care homes and short-term restorative care. Elderly people can choose these services based on their own care needs. Differentiated subsidies for these services are provided by the state.
- 3.
Instrumental care refers to hands-on care-giving tasks and behaviours (Bowers, 1987), such as bathing and shopping.
- 4.
In this study, middle-aged people mainly refers to people in their mid-30s to mid-50s, who are economically active in order to provide for their families. Young villagers refers to people in their 20s and early 30s.
- 5.
Migrant work arose in approximately the early 1990s. Thus, migration era or migrant work era refers to the period since the early 1990s, while pre-migration era refers to the period before the 1990s.
- 6.
China’s transition from a traditional agrarian society to a modern industrial society was a gradual and slow process. Economists generally agree with Chenery’s industrialisation stage thesis (Chenery, Robinson, & Syrquin, 1989) that the last decade of the twentieth century was the milestone in this transition as it was the first time that China’s industrial output surpassed its agricultural output.
- 7.
Yan’s (2003) study of the changes in the private lives of people in Xiajia village from 1949 to 1999 is an exception.
- 8.
For decades, the Chinese family has attracted widespread academic attention from anthropologists, sociologists and sinologists. The study of the Chinese family can be roughly divided into three periods: the early period (pre-1950s), the period dominated by Freedman’s corporate family model/lineage family model (late 1950s to late 1980s) and the contemporary period, starting in the 1990s.
The study of the Chinese family bears the deep imprint of Western anthropological enquiries based on the tradition of fieldwork in rural communities. The disciplines of anthropology and sociology were brought to China from outside. However, the development of anthropology and sociology that had begun before the founding of the PRC was halted during Mao’s high socialism period, because these subjects were regarded as ‘bourgeois’; they only gradually started to recover in the 1980s (Harrell, 2001, pp. 140–141). During Mao’s period, China was closed to international scholars as a fieldwork site, and thus the New Territories of Hong Kong and rural Taiwan became alternative research sites (Harrell, 2001, p. 140; Santos, 2006). The vanishing ‘traditional’ rural communities in Hong Kong and Taiwan came to be regarded as precious resources by European and American anthropologists for understanding China’s late imperialist culture before its disappearance in the fast modernising world (Santos, 2006, pp. 299–300).
Many scholars have argued that the Chinese family, with its emphasis on patriarchy, filial piety and ancestor worship, serves as the basis for the society’s moral, social and political organisation (e.g. Chao, 1983; Fei et al., 1992; Kulp, 1925; Lin, 1988). It has become almost a truism that it is impossible to understand Chinese society without a knowledge of the Chinese family. To quote Roger Ames (2001, p. 1), ‘it is not an exaggeration to say that in the Chinese world, all relationships are familial’. To some, including well-known thinkers Liang Qichao (1873–1929) and Kang Youwei (1858–1927), the major barrier to China’s modernisation was Confucian orthodoxy. For these reasons, the study of the Chinese family in the early stage (pre-1950s) was more often than not incorporated into the studies of the rural communities with their family-based culture and social organisation. Or in other words, most studies of the family in this period were usually part of broader investigations of rural society (see, e.g. Hsu, 1948; Kulp, 1925; Yang, 1945).
As introduced in Chap. 1, Freedman’s ‘corporate family model’/‘lineage family model’ reigned in the field for three decades (approximately from the late 1950s to the late 1980s). Enquiring into why the influence of Freedman’s lineage family model has been so far-reaching, Santos (2006, pp. 299–300) concludes that the timing of his publications was all-important. They coincided with the period when the functional-structural framework heavily influenced anthropology and sociology, when fieldwork in mainland China was inaccessible, and when anthropologists were curious about China’s family-based culture. To them, the localised lineage organisation in rural communities was a welcome representation of China’s family-based culture. However, despite the dominance of the lineage family/corporate family model in this period, there were exceptions which challenged it and studied the Chinese family from other perspectives. Margery Wolf (1972), for example, proposed the concept of the ‘uterine family’ which emphasised the ties between a mother and her children, recognised in later works as ‘informal ties’ (Jervis, 2005; Judd, 1989) in contrast with the formal or ‘official’ ties of patriarchal ‘kinship’ (Judd, 1989).
The study of the Chinese family has undergone a paradigm shift since the 1990s, from the unifying lineage model to a refreshing diversity of approaches and methodologies (Santos, 2006). Freedman’s narrow lineage view was challenged as failing to ‘take into account the many and varied ways in which relationships in Chinese society were more complex than the paradigm suggests’, and failing to ‘give weight to non-patrilineal ties of both a kinship and extra-kinship kind’ (Baker, 2009, p. 805). This paradigm shift occurred largely because of the declining influence of the structural-functionalist paradigm in anthropology and sociology, and the reopening of mainland China to international scholars working with such new theoretical perspectives as Marxism and feminism (e.g. Evans, 2007, 2010; Judd, 1989, 1994). Since then, academic attention focused on the family has gradually shifted from ‘traditional’ or ‘late imperial’ culture to contemporary China, with its unprecedented social change and transformative forces (Santos, 2006).
In the contemporary period, an alternative ethnographic model is replacing the older lineage/corporate family model; gender, marriage, reciprocity and young generations are taking centre stage with the patriarchal family line and economic aspects of the family (Santos, 2006, p. 279). Current studies of the Chinese family take account of the effects of broader socio-political-economic changes on the family. There is now a greater diversity of research interests, including mother—daughter relationships, intergenerational exchanges, intimate relationships and China’s singleton generation (e.g. Evans, 2007, 2010; Fong, 2004; Judd, 1989; Sheng & Settles, 2006; Yan, 2003; Zuo, Wu, & Li, 2011).
- 9.
To gain a better understanding of the corporate family model/lineage family model, it is necessary to introduce the concept of ‘lineage’, since the family is situated at the ‘lineage village’. According to Watson (1982, p. 594), a lineage has four features: a corporate base, group consciousness, ritual unity and demonstrated descent. First, a lineage has commonly owned estates, which provide its members with economic benefits such as annual dividends (Watson, 1982, p. 600). Second, group consciousness is important for its members’ identities, limited strictly to males ‘by birth or adoption in infancy’ (Watson, 1982, p. 598). Third, members celebrate a ritual unity in their ‘collectively-owned halls which serve as centres for rituals, banquets and meetings’ (Watson, 1982, p. 596). Lastly, demonstrated descent means that all (male) members can demonstrate that ‘they are descendants of ancestors who were the original founders of the corporation’ (Watson, 1982, p. 594).
Members of a lineage have obligations to meet and, at the same time, they benefit from the lineage. To maintain membership, one must adhere to certain rules including bans on incest, theft and misrepresentation, violation of which leads to formal expulsion from the lineage (Watson, 1982, p. 598). Apart from the economic benefits, the lineage also provides protection and patronage to its members (Watson, 1982, p. 600). For example, ‘The local defense corps protected the property and lives of all members’ (Watson, 1982, p. 601), and the lineage also supports schools which are usually held in its own ancestral halls (Watson, 1982, p. 601). The scope of the ‘lineage family model’, as the name suggests, goes beyond the economic aspects of the family, to include the maintenance of religious rituals (particularly ancestor-worship) and the family’s obligations to maintain the social order of the lineage village (e.g. ensuring the administration of the educational and judicial systems).
- 10.
The phrase ‘spatially ruptured’ is borrowed from Landolt and Da’s (2005) article ‘The Spatially Ruptured Practices of Migrant Families: A Comparison of Immigrants from El Salvador and the People’s Republic of China’.
- 11.
According to Wang and Zhou (2010, p. 258), China’s divorce and remarriage rates have increased significantly and steadily since 1979 (the year that the ‘opening-up and reform’ policy was officially launched, initiating China’s market economy and its participation in globalisation): the remarriage rate, defined as ‘percentage of remarriages among individuals who married each year’, increased from 3.05 per cent in 1985 to 10.24 per cent in 2007. Premarital cohabitation, which was virtually unknown before the 1980s, reached nearly one-third for the most recent marriage cohort in 2010–2012, and cohabitation is much more common in developed coastal regions than in less developed inland regions (Xu, Li, & Yu, 2013, cited in Xie, 2013, p. 6).
- 12.
The first stage of fieldwork took place from January to March 2014, and the second from January to February 2015. I spent the Spring Festivals of 2014 and 2015 in Dougou in order to conduct fieldwork.
- 13.
Yang and Chandler (1992, p. 450) note that although some studies (see Clark, 1989; Clayre, 1985; Cohen, 1966) state that mediation is extensively used in China for solving intergenerational conflicts, they found virtually no evidence of ‘a neutral, third party facilitator, which is used for grievance management’. My study provides a possible explanation for these contradictions: my fieldwork data show that mediation was indeed extensively used in Dougou for intergenerational conflicts in the collective period and the early reform era (the 1980s), always through village cadres or zongguan (总管). However, from the early 1990s onwards, the village committee had largely retreated from villagers’ family lives, and the several zongguan in Dougou also became migrant workers in the 1990s, working outside of the village for most time of the year. The fact that the above-mentioned studies were conducted during different periods thus might explain their contradictory findings.
- 14.
The barefoot doctors programme was launched as a national policy in 1968 to provide quick training for rural paramedics. Most barefoot doctors had finished secondary school education and received only minimum medical training (mostly in local hospitals for 3–6 months). The programme greatly expanded medical services in rural areas. Barefoot doctors received their work points through their medical services. The programme was cancelled by the Ministry of Health in 1985 (Zhang & Unschuld, 2008. pp. 1865–1866).
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Cao, F. (2019). Introduction. In: Elderly Care, Intergenerational Relationships and Social Change in Rural China. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2962-3_1
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