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China Providing for the Next Generation
Although Chinese families continue to be marked by respect for
parents and a substantial degree of filial subordination, parents
have weighty obligations toward their children as well. Children
are obliged to support parents in their old age, and parents are
obliged to give their children as favorable a place in the world as
they can. In the past this meant leaving them property and
providing the best education or training possible. For most rural
parents today the choice of a career for their children is not a
major issue. Most children of peasants will be peasants like their
parents, and the highest realistic ambition is a position as a lowlevel cadre or teacher or perhaps a technician. The primary
determinant of a rural child's status and well-being remains his or
her family, which is one reason for the intense concern with the
marriage choices of sons and daughters and for the greater degree
of parental involvement in those decisions.
Urban parents are less concerned with whom their children marry
but are more concerned with their education and eventual careers.
Urban parents can expect to leave their children very little in the
way of property, but they do their best to prepare them for secure
and desirable jobs in the state sector. The difficulty is that such
jobs are limited, competition is intense, and the criteria for
entry have changed radically several times since the early 1950s.
Many of the dynamics of urban society revolve around the issue of
job allocation and the attempts of parents in the better-off
segments of society to transmit their favored position to their
children. The allocation of scarce and desirable goods, in this
case jobs, is a political issue and one that has been endemic since
the late 1950s. These questions lie behind the changes in
educational policy, the attempts in the 1960s and 1970s to settle
urban youth in the countryside, the upheaval of the Cultural
Revolution, and the post-1980 encouragement of small-scale private
and collective commerce and service occupations in the cities. All
are attempts to solve the problem, and each attempt has its own
costs and drawbacks.
Data as of July 1987
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