Confronting puzzles in understanding Chinese family change: A personal reflection

Abstract

I present an overview of selected findings from four major research projects I conducted earlier in my career that were designed to describe and explain the patterns of continuity and change in family patterns in the People’s Republic of China: an examination of rural family patterns carried out through refugee interviewing in Hong Kong in 1972–1974; a parallel examination of urban family patterns carried out through Hong Kong refugee interviews in 1977–1978; an examination of the transformation from arranged to free-choice marriages conducted through a survey in Chengdu, Sichuan, in 1987; and an examination of patterns of intergenerational relationships carried out through a 1994 survey in Baoding, Hebei. The latter two projects included comparisons with the findings of earlier surveys of family behavior in urban Taiwan. Each project yielded findings that did not fit prevailing theories of family change, and in my efforts to explain puzzling findings, I ended up emphasizing the impact on families of the specific local institutions produced by China’s socialist transformation in the 1950s. Even though many of these institutional arrangements have been altered in the reform era, I argue that in certain realms of family life, the impact of pre-reform decades can still be seen in family patterns in recent times.