Chinese Marriages in Transition documents the nuanced and multidirectional nature of the transformations in Chinese marriage, gender roles, and family. Using complex and large-scale historical national data as well as comprehensive data from multiple countries, Xiaoling Shu and Jingjing Chen demonstrate that Chinese new familism consists of values both old and new.
This Handbook advances research on the family and marriage in China by providing readers with a multidisciplinary and multifaceted coverage of major issues in one single volume. It addresses the major conceptual, theoretical and methodological issues of marriage and family in China and offers critical reflections on both the history and likely progression of the field.
The challenges for young people making the transition to adulthood are greater today than ever before. Globalization, with its power to reach across national boundaries and into the smallest communities, carries with it the transformative power of new markets and new technology. At the same time, globalization brings with it new ideas and lifestyles that can conflict with traditional norms and values. And while the economic benefits are potentially enormous, the actual course of globalization has not been without its critics who charge that, to date, the gains have been very unevenly distributed, generating a new set of problems associated with rising inequality and social polarization. Regardless of how the globalization debate is resolved, it is clear that as broad global forces transform the world in which the next generation will live and work, the choices that today's young people make or others make on their behalf will facilitate or constrain their success as adults. Traditional expectations regarding future employment prospects and life experiences are no longer valid. Growing Up Global examines how the transition to adulthood is changing in developing countries, and what the implications of these changes might be for those responsible for designing youth policies and programs, in particular, those affecting adolescent reproductive health. The report sets forth a framework that identifies criteria for successful transitions in the context of contemporary global changes for five key adult roles: adult worker, citizen and community participant, spouse, parent, and household manager.
This book explores changing concepts of marriage and gender relationships and attitudes toward sex in a rural Chinese community over the past five decades. The book is based on a study of an industrialized peasant village in Guangdong Province from 1994 to 1996 and subsequent visits from 2000 to 2002. According to the authors, the rural economic reforms of the 1980s in southern China have challenged and reinforced the deep structure of Chinese familism and this has lead to tensions between tradition and modernity. The first section of the book explores how attitudes toward marriage and courtship have changed over the past fifty years through personal accounts of three different marriages from different generations. In Part II, the transition from a traditional to a modern society is discussed from the perspective of several women from different generations. The third section focuses on sexual relationships and the growing sex trade in the village. Part IV includes updates to the original survey and takes a look at village politics.
This book examines the changing nature of dating and mate selection in contemporary China, and addresses a wide array of both causes and consequences concerning mate selection, including economic change, traditional cultural norms, evolving gender roles, and both marriage and fertility aspirations.
This book documents and analyses fertility and demographic trends in China since the early 1950s, focusing particularly on previously undocumented provincial and rural-urban diversities; it also analyses China's current reform on population control together with future developments. Previous investigations of fertility transitions in the People's Republic of China have almost all been carried out at a national level. The author of this book, however, is a Chinese citizen and has had access to local data not available to foreigner researchers. This study will be of interest to demographers, scholars in population studies and Chinese studies.
What is the state of intimate romantic relationships and marriage in urban China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan? Since the 1980's, the character of intimate life in these urban settings has changed dramatically. While many speculate about the 21st century as Asia's century, this book turns to the more intimate territory of sexuality and marriage—and observes the unprecedented changes in the law and popular expectations for romantic bonds and the creation of new families. Wives, Husbands, and Lovers examines how sexual relationships and marriage are perceived and practiced under new developments within each urban location, including the establishment of no fault divorce laws, lower rates of childbearing within marriage, and the increased tolerance for non-marital and non-heterosexual intimate relationships. The authors also chronicle what happens when states remove themselves from direct involvement in some features of marriage but not others. Tracing how the marital "rules of the game" have changed substantially across the region, this book challenges long-standing assumptions that marriage is the universally preferred status for all men and women, that extramarital sexuality is incompatible with marriage, or that marriage necessarily unites a man and a woman. This book illustrates the wide range of potential futures for marriage, sexuality, and family across these societies.
In the era of the global village, intercultural marriage between different races and nationalities is frequent. The existence of intercultural marriages and intimacy between Chinese and Westerners is evident and expanding in societies throughout both China and the Western world. Although marriage is a very private affair for the individuals who participate in it, it also reflects and connects with many complex factors such as economic development, culture differences, political backgrounds and transition of traditions, in both China and the Western world. As a result, an ordinary marriage between a Chinese person and a Westerner is actually an episode in a sociological grand narrative. By employing a three-dimensional, multi-level theoretical framework based on an integration of theories of migration, sociology and gender and adopting a qualitative research paradigm, this book aims to present a true picture of Chinese-Western Intercultural Marriage with a focus on the Chinese perspective, and the main body of this study combines three theoretical approaches in order to explore the intercultural marriage fully using a panoramic view. By examining the history, reality and the conflicts of Chinese-Western intercultural marriage, this books tries to find the connections between the micro private affairs and the macro national power, and seeks the possibilities to construct the explanatory mechanism from macro reality (nation, state & race) to micro variables (intercultural marriage). It provides an academic perspective of producing the general knowledge on the basis of constructing a local knowledge. In this way this study will provide more than an anecdotal description of Chinese-Western Intercultural marriage, but will present a profound analysis of the forces underpinning this cross-cultural phenomenon. Dr. Qin Bo obtained his PhD in Sociology from the University College Cork, National University of Ireland in 2012. He is a lecturer at the Party School of Sichuan Committee of the Communist Party of China in Chengdu and a Post-doctoral Fellow of Fudan University in Shanghai.
Based on China’s recently released 2010 population census data, this edited volume analyses the most recent demographic trends in China, in the context of significant social and economic upheavals. The editor and the expert contributors describe the main features of China’s demography, and focus on the details of this latest phase of its demographic transition. The book explores such striking characteristics of China’s demography as the changing age and sex population structure; recent trends in marriage and divorce; fertility trends with a focus on sex imbalance at birth; the demography of the ethnic minorities and recent mortality trends by sex. Analysing China's Population: Social Change in a New Demographic Era examines and assesses the impact of changes that in the coming decades will be crucial for individuals, and the larger society and economy of the nation.
