Abstract
With the collapse of danwei system in the 1990s and the development of an urban economy, migration and urbanization have brought many people upward mobility. Wang’s fate changed as her father’s military career advanced. But the abundance of economic opportunities also created fertile soil for corruption among those who had power and status. Her mother’s suffering in domestic violence and suicide attempts were a wake-up call for Wang to rise from her comfortable life to depend her mother. This experience also left her with an emotional phobia toward men that lingered for the next decade. Wang’s conversion narrative shows how deeply meaningful conversions through unplanned encounters in the transient urban space often carries that sense of divine providence. The mother-daughter bond became a channel of grace when her mother also became a Christian believer.
Narration by Wang (age thirty eight, translator)
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Notes
- 1.
In China, since 1958, hukou (or household registration system) identifies an individual as a resident of either in the agricultural or non-agricultural category. It became a rigid form of social control over residential and labor mobility. It is also an inherited class status. In the 1970s, the only way to upgrade from an agricultural hukou to a non-agricultural one is through entering into college, marrying an urbanite or joining the military.
- 2.
Experimental schools are usually the best schools in urban China.
- 3.
Plaza dance (guangchangwu) is the most common leisure exercise in urban China.
- 4.
After 1978, accompanying the One-Child Policy, China had a “Late Marriage and Late Child-Rearing” (wanhun wanyu) campaign.
- 5.
The Chinese have a culture of “face-keeping,” which means a communal preservation of a family’s reputation or prestige. To cause someone to lose face means to deprive them of a sense of pride or respect.
- 6.
Victor Nee, “A Theory of Market Transition: From Redistribution to Market in State Socialism,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 54, No. 5. (Oct., 1989), pp. 663–681.
- 7.
Yanjie Bian, “Chinese Social Stratification and Social Mobility,” Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 28 (2002), pp. 91–116.
- 8.
Li Ma, The Chinese Exodus: Migration, Urbanism and Alienation in Contemporary China (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018).
- 9.
See Chapter 10 “Marriage” in Li Ma and Jin Li, Surviving the State, Remaking the Church (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2018).
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Ma, L. (2019). Upward Mobility. In: Christianity, Femininity and Social Change in Contemporary China. Palgrave Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31802-4_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31802-4_6
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