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China Family and Household
In past Chinese society, the family provided every individual's
support, livelihood, and long-term security. Today the state
guarantees such security to those with no families to provide for
them, and families and work units share long-term responsibility
for the individual. The role of families has changed, but they
remain important, especially in the countryside. Family members are
bound, in law and custom, to support their aged or disabled
members. The state, acting through work units, provides support and
benefits only when families cannot. Households routinely pool
income, and any individual's standard of living depends on the
number of household wage earners and the number of dependents. In
both cities and villages, the highest incomes usually are earned by
households with several wage earners, such as unmarried adult sons
or daughters.
In late traditional society, family size and structural
complexity varied directly with class. Rural landlords and
government officials had the largest families, poor peasants the
smallest. The poorest segment of the population, landless laborers,
could not afford to marry and start families. The need to provide
for old age and the general association between the numbers of sons
surviving to adulthood and long-term family success motivated
individuals to create various nonstandard family forms. Couples who
produced no sons, or no children at all, adopted or purchased
infants outright. Families with daughters but no sons tried to find
men willing to marry their daughters and move into their families,
abandoning their original families and sometimes even their
original surnames. Families with daughters but no property to
attract a son-in-law were sometimes forced to sell their daughters
as concubines or prostitutes. The variation in family size and
complexity was the result of variation in class position and of the
dual role of the household as both family and economic enterprise.
In contemporary society, rural families no longer own land or
pass it down to the next generation. They may, however, own and
transmit houses. Rural families pay medical expenses and school
fees for their children. Under the people's commune system in force
from 1958 to 1982, the income of a peasant family depended directly
on the number of laborers it contributed to the collective fields.
This, combined with concern over the level of support for the aged
or disabled provided by the collective unit, encouraged peasants to
have many sons. Under the agricultural reforms that began in the
late 1970s, households took on an increased and more responsible
economic role. The labor of family members is still the primary
determinant of income. But rural economic growth and
commercialization increasingly have rewarded managerial and
technical skills and have made unskilled farm labor less desirable.
As long as this economic trend continues in the countryside in the
late 1980s, peasant families are likely to opt for fewer but better
educated children.
The consequence of the general changes in China's economy and
the greater separation of families and economic enterprises has
been a greater standardization of family forms since 1950. In 1987
most families approximated the middle peasant (a peasant owning
some land) norm of the past. Such a family consisted of five or six
people and was based on marriage between an adult son and an adult
woman who moved into her husband's family. The variant family
forms--either the very large and complex or those based on minor,
nonstandard forms of marriage--were much less common. The state had
outlawed concubinage, child betrothal, and the sale of infants or
females, all of which were formerly practiced, though not common.
Increased life expectancy meant that a greater proportion of
infants survived to adulthood and that more adults lived into their
sixties or seventies. More rural families were able to achieve the
traditional goal of a three-generation family in the 1980s. There
were fewer orphans and young or middle-aged widows or widowers. Far
fewer men were forced to retain lifelong single status. Divorce,
although possible, was rare, and families were stable, on-going
units.
A number of traditional attitudes toward the family have
survived without being questioned. It is taken for granted that
everyone should marry, and marriage remains part of the definition
of normal adult status. Marriage is expected to be permanent. That
marriage requires a woman to move into her husband's family and to
become a daughter-in-law as well as a wife is still largely
accepted. The norm of patrilineal descent and the assumption that
it is sons who bear the primary responsibility for their aged
parents remain. The party and government have devoted great effort
to controlling the number of births and have attempted to limit the
number of children per couple
(see Population Control Programs
, ch.
2). But the authorities have not attempted to control population
growth by suggesting that some people should not marry at all.
In the past, kinship principles were extended beyond the
domestic group and were used to form large-scale groups, such as
lineages. Lineages were quite distinct from families; they were
essentially corporate economic-political groups. They controlled
land and, in some areas of China, dominated whole villages and sets
of villages and held title to most of the farmland. Like most other
late traditional associations, lineages were dominated by wealthy
and educated elites. Ordinary peasants paid as much of their crop
to their lineage group as they might have to a landlord. The
Communists denounced these organizations as feudal systems by means
of which landlords exploited others. The lineages were suppressed
in the early 1950s and their land confiscated and redistributed in
the land reform. Communal worship of distant lineage ancestors lost
much of its justification with the dissolution of the lineage
estate and was easily suppressed over the next several years.
Domestic ancestor worship, in which members of a single family
worshiped and memorialized their immediate ancestors, continued at
least until 1966 and 1967, in the early stages of the Cultural
Revolution, when Red Guards destroyed altars and ancestral tablets.
In 1987 the party was still condemning ancestor worship as
superstitious but had made little effort to end it.
Data as of July 1987
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