1 The Inverted Family

The patriarchal family in traditional Chinese culture features an elaborate hierarchical system wherein individuals were classified and ranked by generation, age, and gender. Power, prestige, and privilege, as well as the flow of material resources, were allocated to individuals according to their hierarchical positions. Among these rankings, the generational hierarchy was the principal category that defined what a patriarchal family was and how it functioned (Baker 1979; Fei 1997 [1942]). The inversion of the generational hierarchy therefore defined the inverted family.

The most widely recognized indicator of the inverted generational hierarchy is the constant decline of parental authority and power and the parallel increase in youth autonomy and freedom in both urban and rural Chinese families. This trend actually began in the 1950s, and by the 1980s it had developed further in the cities than in the countryside (Parish and Whyte 1978; Davis and Harrell 1993; Yan 2003). It has continued in both urban and rural China during the subsequent four decades (see the chapters in Brandtstädter and Santos 2009; Davis and Friedman 2014b; Jankowiak and Moore 2016; Santos and Harrell 2017; Shen 2013). During the reform era, decollectivization, rural-urban migration, and marketization empowered the young in a number of ways, and at the same time, they have further weakened parental power in the countryside. Driven by the ever-expanding consumerism, the skyrocketing housing market, and the increasingly competitive job market, young urban adults have been forced to rely on parental support for both marriage and child-rearing, yet they still enjoy autonomy and choice in terms of their life style. Due to the legacy of Maoist socialism, most urban parents had sufficient resources, such as state-subsidized housing and pensions, to help their adult children but, intriguingly, regardless of the parents’ resources available to their children, few parents could regain their lost authority and power. In my empirical study of parent-driven divorce among urban youth, for example, a large number of urban youth willingly relied on their parents to handle their divorces in terms of the legal and financial settlement because they were free to choose a new spouse and could count on parental support for their second marriage (Yan 2015). By the early twenty-first century, the continued decline of parental authority and power was accompanied by the increased dependence of adult children on their parents; this trend became particularly common in many former rural areas because of the rapid absorption of millions of rural residents into the cities as part of the urbanization process (Yan 2016).

But gaining both power and support from their parents does not, however, make the generation of adult children a take-all winner because they too must forgo their personal desires and pursuit of self-development for the sake of their own child or children. This is the second feature of the inverted family, whereby the child (or children) of the third generation have become the locus of family life and the single most important reason for intergenerational solidarity and mutual dependence. Care, attention, emotional attachment, and material resources all flow downward to the third generation through selfless efforts by the grandparents and parents in each family, a trend that elsewhere I refer to as descending familism (Yan 2016). The practice of descending familism has also shifted the experiential meaning of life from glorifying the ancestors to enabling the grandchildren, a complete inversion of the previous order in family values.

State-sponsored ideological attacks and political campaigns against ancestor worship in popular religion have not only eliminated the ancestors from people’s daily lives but have also brought to an end the Chinese pursuit of eternity. Without the ritual worship of their ancestors, few individuals in the early twenty-first century still believe in an afterlife. With the elimination of ancestor worship, Chinese parents are now forced to focus their spiritual and emotional devotion on to their child or children, so much so that they regard their child or children as an extension of themselves (see Chapter 8 by Shi). As a result, at the level of their spiritual and emotional lives, the more the parents become involved in the lives of their adult children, the more they feel that the two generations are fused together into an integrated whole. The decline of public life during the post-Mao era and the mandatory retirement age (55 for women and 60 for men) have further narrowed the spiritual world of older parents (see Chapter 6 by Huang), leaving their adult children as the only possible hub for their emotional and spiritual attachments. This is why the grandchild is such an irresistible attraction for the love, care and support of their grandparents. Needless to say, the new focus on the grandchild pushes the development of the inverted family to a new stage, whereby, as described by Uncle Lu, “the grandfather is turned into the grandson.

A third feature of the inverted hierarchy across generational lines (and by extension the inverted family) is simply the reverse ratio of elders to young adults and children due to the declining fertility rate and the increasing life expectancy during the past several decades. Life expectancy at birth was 45.6 years for females and 42.2 for males in 1950; by 1980 the two indicators had increased to 69.3 years for females and 66.4 years for males. Meanwhile, the total fertility rate dropped from 5.8 children per family in 1950 to 2.3 children in 1980. China has completed its first demographic transition within thirty years, a remarkable overachievement, as noted by Wang Feng (2011). Translating this achievement to everyday family life, it means that by the end of the 1970s there were already fewer children than adults (parents and grandparents combined) in most families.

Imposition of the one-child policy in 1980 accelerated this ongoing demographic transition, radically reducing the number of children per family, especially among urban families. As a result, as early as the 1990s the singleton child had become known as the “precious little emperor.” The continuing decline of fertility since then has further increased the importance of children. Paternal and maternal grandparents, whose life expectancy has also increased, treasure their grandchildren so much so that parental indulgence of the little emperors pales in comparison. The inverted intergenerational hierarchy is a reflection of the inverted pyramid in the demographic structure and the social consequence of the one-child policy, which has become increasingly common among rural families during the last fifteen to twenty years as a growing number of rural youth choose to have fewer children, or even one singleton child (Shi 2017).

The most telling example in this connection is the 4-2-1 pattern of intergenerational relations whereby a married couple of two singletons has one child and four parents/parents-in-law, dubbed the double-singleton family (双独家庭) among Chinese sociologists and demographers. Given that the one-child policy was strictly implemented during the 1980s and the early 1990s in urban China, the largest cohort of singletons entered the stage of marriage and child-bearing age after 2005 and it peaked around 2015. A number of sociologists and demographers estimate that the peak of the double-singleton family formation will be between 2020 and 2040, when 35–40 percent of urban families will consist of the 4-2-1 structure of intergenerational relations (Ding and Wu 2009; Feng 2015; and Guo et al. 2002).

In addition to state family-planning policies that turned the demographic structure of the family upside down, labor migration in particular and increased social mobility in general have had an equally profound impact on intergenerational relations. Despite the ideological attacks on the patriarchal family and the political campaigns against patriliny in the early 1950s, rural collectivization, the urban work-unit system, and the household registration system that legally banned rural-urban migration had the counter-effects of sustaining certain elements of the traditional family, including the close proximity of the generations in their working, living, and residential arrangements (Davis-Friedmann 1991; Parish and Whyte 1978; Whyte 2005; Whyte and Parish 1984). Starting from the mid-1980s, the state began to relax its tight control over labor migration, allowing villagers to seek temporary jobs in the cities (as so-called “migrant workers”). The registered number of migrant workers reached 4.8 million in 1986 but jumped to 30 million in 1989, representing the first tidal wave of labor migration that attracted the attention of the central government and led to a number of policies aiming to bring it under control. In subsequent decades, the cities were flooded with even more rural laborers, whose population reached 100 million in 1997 and 247 million in 2015. More than 65 percent of the domestic migrants were born after 1980 and more than 70 percent consider themselves to be part of the urban population, even though the majority have yet to be granted an urban residency status by the local governments (N. Zhang 2018).

The flip-side of the increasingly large floating population (or 流动人口as they are called in China) is the separation of generations, which takes several forms. The most common is the left-behind phenomenon (Chapter 4 by Thomason), referring to the elderly grandparents and young children who are forced to stay put in their rural villages while the able-bodied parents in their family seek temporary jobs in the cities. The prolonged separation of parents and children results in a skipped-generation family whereby the grandparents live with and care for the grandchildren and the middle generation of parents works in the cities. To remedy various problems associated with the left-behind phenomenon, an increasing number of migrants have begun to bring their young children with them to the cities, and when they cannot handle work and childcare at the same time, they move their elderly parents to the cities as well, leading to a new pattern of “floating grandparents” (Chapter 5 by Qi).

Regardless of whether grandparents are left-behind or floating around, the previous order of intergenerational relations has been interrupted, Among those left-behind, for example, grandparents assume extra responsibilities when the middle generation in a multi-generational household is absent for most of the time, and they often find themselves inadequate to substitute for the role of the parents, not only in terms of providing care but also in terms of socialization. Yet their positions become even more difficult and more vulnerable when they are uprooted from their rural home communities and become temporary caregivers in their adult children’s home in the cities. In either case, they and their adult children must adjust their behavioral patterns to meet the new challenges so that they can collaborate closely to create the best possible opportunities for the third generation, which brings us to the fourth characteristic of the inverted family, that is, new patterns of conflict, especially across generation lines.

The gradual yet constant development of self-awareness and individual desires in family life from the proto-inverted family of the 1980s (see Chapter 9 by Jankowiak) to the much stronger yet still ongoing trend of individualization at the turn of the twenty-first century (Shen 2013; and Yan 2010) has posed the most serious internal challenge to traditional familism, contributing to disorder in the family and resulting in the previous ranking order of generational relations being turned upside down. The contradiction between individual happiness and family prosperity/continuity constitutes a major thread of neo-familism (Yan 2018; Chapter 6 by Huang). Consequently, an increasing number of individuals have begun to be proactive in making choices about how they want to live their family lives. Prolonged co-residence with parents and delayed marriage seem to work well for some young men and women (Chapter 3 by Fong et al), whereas some parents are determined to intervene in the married life of their adult children when they sense that something is not quite right (Yan 2015). It is therefore much more difficult to pinpoint an across-the-board pattern of intimacy, influence, authority and power in intergenerational relations. When the family is turned upside down, most conflicts in the intergenerational relationship are reflected in a variety of contradictions, such as dependence vs. independence, care vs. intimacy, and so forth.

Last but not the least, the inverted family is also a product of state policymaking. The Chinese state played a decisive role in triggering the initial family-transformation process in the 1950s and thereafter it enacted family policies that were either multidirectional or self-contradictory. The abiding thread, however, has been to make the family institution best serve the interests of the nation-state, a statist model of family policies that I explore in Chapter 10. Under this model, revolutionizing the family to establish and consolidate the political legitimacy of the party-state and to carry out the socialist transformation stand out as the core mission of the majority of family policies from 1950 to the late 1970s. The 1950 Marriage Law, and a number of accompanying regulations and policies, implemented in the context of the full-blown planned economy and the radical ccp ideology, undermined parental authority and power.

However, there are also state policies and regulations that reinforced intergenerational dependence and patrilocal residence. During the early stage of the economic reforms (1980 to the mid-1990s), the party-state regulated the family through various pragmatic policies in order to carry out the national project of the four modernizations. Chief among these policies was the one-child policy that sought a radical reduction in the national birth rate. The challenge of urban unemployment and social mobility compelled the party-state to promulgate family policies that were in the best interests of the nation-state, especially when the party-state had to deal with pressing issues such as the return to the urban areas of the sent-down youth (see Chen 2015) or the influx of rural-urban migrants. Beginning in the late 1990s, the state shifted the responsibilities of social welfare provision to the family institution and, consequently, issued policies and launched ideological campaigns to strengthen the family for the construction of a harmonious society. Filial piety, a cornerstone of Confucian ethics and traditional familism, was recalibrated as part of the socialist core values and intergenerational solidarity was promoted through new laws and government policies. What remains clearly unchanged among state family policies from 1949 to the present, however, is the statist model (see more detailed discussion in Chapter 10 of the present volume). The state has indeed made pragmatic concessions and arrangements to deal with the family institution, such as regulating intergenerational relations, but all of these must serve the interests and ultimate goals of the state. In this connection, the inverted family is best viewed as the result of both planned and unexpected consequences of state family policies.

Admittedly, the image of an inverted generational hierarchy, or a family being turned upside down, is derived from the perspective of those who grew up under the former family script, such as Uncle Lu who was born in the late 1920s and socialized under traditional patriarchal culture. In contrast, for Chinese youth who were born after the radical one-child policy of 1980, the inverted Chinese family is the normality in their daily lives. In a similar vein, to what extent patriarchal power in intergenerational relations has declined or has been retained only makes sense to those who are familiar with the former family script and lived through the former patterns of family life. The younger generations born in the 1980s and 1990s are often clueless about this hierarchy and about such power relations as they have grown up with tremendous space and freedom to negotiate with their parents and grandparents every aspect of family life. Nowadays, the intergenerational relationship between young adults and their parents and/or grandparents has become a working relationship wherein the involved individuals must constantly and consistently work on it so that they can benefit from it. This brings us to the notion of post-patriarchal intergenerationality.

2 Post-Patriarchal Intergenerationality

As Santos and Harrell lucidly delineate (2017), in the classic sense patriarchy refers to the prestige and power of the senior generation over the junior generation, which is institutionalized through patrilineal descent, patrilocal post-marital residence, and patriarchal ideology and practice in family life. Expanded by feminist theory, patriarchy in a broader sense is also manifested in the gender axis of power and inequality, that is, male dominance in both the public and private spheres. Based on an extensive review of the existing scholarship as well as new research findings, Santos and Harrell contend that Chinese society has moved away from the classic type of patriarchy because the generational axis of prestige and power has been “weakened in some ways, flipped in others, and twisted its lineality in still others.” (2017:32) However, although the patriarchy of male dominance has been transformed, it still remains intact (see the chapters in Santos and Harrell 2017).

Focusing on new developments in the generational axis of patriarchy and building on the scholarly consensus, I propose the notion of post-patriarchal intergenerationality as a new conceptual tool to deepen our understanding of Chinese family life. With respect to the dominance of the senior generation, Chinese family life has arrived at a post-patriarchal era, yet the significance of intergenerational relations has not been altered. On the contrary, because of the decline of patrilineality, patrilocal residence and patriarchal religiosity (i.e., ancestor worship), a new type of multigenerational family, with flexible residential patterns and financial arrangements, has emerged as the dominant household configuration. This form operates by new, often contested, ethical norms and behavioral patterns that cannot be fully understood in terms of conventional conceptual tools such as filial piety. As will be shown below, post-patriarchal intergenerationality captures these new developments and meanings of intergenerational dynamics in the era of post-patriarchal family and kinship.

In part, I have been inspired by the early discussions on intergenerational geography, primarily among British social geographers. Hopkins and Pain (2007) advocate a relational approach to study age groups, proposing intergenerationality, intersectionality, and life course as the key conceptual tools and calling for a relational geography of age that examines the elderly and the children in relation to each other. In their responses to critiques from Horton and Kraftl (2008), Hopkins and Pain reconfirm that they regard “intergenerationality as both a descriptive tool and part of a broader apparatus for explaining social and cultural processes and phenomena” because it “helps to dismantle rigid categories such as childhood and old age, exposing their porosity and cultural specificity while being open to the same critiques” (Hopkins and Pain 2008: 289–90; see also Vanderbeck 2017 for an overview of the relevant scholarship on the geography of intergenerational relations).

The novel attempt by Hopkins and Pain shifts the exclusive focus on a particular age group in cultural geography, such as the elderly, to relations between two age groups, such as the elderly and their adult children. This has always been the case in anthropological studies on the Chinese family and thus can hardly be considered particularly new. What inspired me, however, is to consider intergenerationality as a conceptual tool to describe actual changes in family life as well as to theorize new patterns of intergenerational interactions. Here the saliency of intergenerational interactions, as opposed to intergenerational relations, is the defining feature of intergenerationality. To take a closer look, the notion of post-patriarchal intergenerationality consists of the following advantages.

First of all, intergenerationality is a neutral term that has no preconceived meanings and thus may widen our vision. Most studies of intergenerational relations in Chinese family life employ the notion of filial piety, which, as a cornerstone of Confucianism and Chinese familism, presumes the senior generation’s moral authority, social prestige, and political-economic power over the junior generation. It is part and parcel of the patriarchal system. This is perhaps why the inversion of the generational hierarchy in the Chinese family is often presented as a crisis of filial piety, with a strong sense of moral judgment. In a similar vein, the notion of intergenerational solidarity, one of the most commonly used concepts in American family sociology (Bengtson and Roberts 1991) adopts Western individualism and emphasizes the balanced flow of rights and obligations. In light of this perspective, family relations tend to be easily reduced to pragmatic functions. In contrast to both filial piety and intergenerational solidarity, intergenerationality does not take any ethical or ideological position nor does it place a priority on the perspective of any one generation.

The construction and exercise of privilege, prestige, and power across generational lines are still centrally important, but the dynamics should not be reduced to a story of generational winners and losers. Taking the downward intergenerational transfer of resources as an example, new studies show that urban parents regard their financial aid to their adult children as a moral obligation but they also genuinely feel the emotional rewards of continuing to show their love of their children and their strong sense of personal achievement (Zhong and He 2014). In contrast, adult children define their subjective happiness in terms of their emotional closeness with their parents or grandparents, even though they often must work far away from their hometowns and they often must receive financial aid from their parents (Hsu 2019). An intergenerationality perspective enables the researcher to go beyond the dichotomy of winners and losers in intergenerational contestation and conflict to uncover the underlying premises that tie together the members of the different generations in the endless process of family politics.

Moreover, the notion of intergenerationality draws our attention to interactions instead of relations across generational lines. The difference lies in the dynamic nature of real life and the agency of individuals from different generations in any given interaction. Focusing on intergenerational relations, one may implicitly assume a more or less generational position and project it onto the subjects under study, often offering a static portrayal of the relational patterns.

Constrained by such a structural perspective of intergenerational relations, most existing studies tend to focus on the interlocking generations, such as parents and children, while overlooking the intersecting generations, such as grandparents and grandchildren, in a multi-generational household. One of the most important new features of family life, as indicated above, are the rapidly increasing interactions between grandparents and grandchildren. Intergenerational interactions may occur in the context of multiple generations, such as child-rearing that involves the child, the parents, and the child’s maternal and paternal grandparents. This complexity tends to be obscured or overlooked when we emphasize only the dyadic interactions between two generations. The notion of intergenerationality, in contrast, emphasizes the agentic contribution of all intersecting and interacting generations in any given situation, and, by definition, it locates grandparenting at the core of contemporary intergenerational dynamics.

Furthermore, the notion of intergenerationality highlights individual agency and thus does not overlook the subjective aspects of intergenerational interactions, such as intimacy, affection, and moral reasoning, which may counterbalance the existing bias in favor of the economic and political aspects of intergenerational relations in the literature on family studies. This is particularly important for studying post-patriarchal intergenerational dynamics in the much more open and affluent Chinese society, in which individuals pay much more attention to and negotiate with more emotional and psychological issues, as evidenced by the concurrent rising importance of intimacy in family relations and the recent boom of family psychotherapy and counselling services (Hizi 2017). A newly added dimension to the subjective domain is the individual desire for self-development and, when it clashes with one’s family duties, the associated conflicts, confusion, and compromises across generational lines. Such conflicts, confusions, and compromises may lead to an intergenerational trauma that in turn affects everyday life interactions across generational lines and reshapes the psychological and emotional lives of all the individuals in a given family (Shen 2013).

The increasing importance of self-development highlights another important aspect of the subjective domain in family life, that is, the focus on individual identity, or the social site of the construction of personhood. Chinese personhood is known to be relationally constructed and it is presented as a lifetime process of becoming, in the form of cultivating one’s humanity (做人 in Chinese) instead of a structure being endorsed by a set of individual rights given at the moment one is born (see Yan 2017). The primary, and arguably the most important, relational thread in the process of making oneself a decent person is the vertical intergenerational relationship, which goes beyond the simple parent-child bond to include the grandparents, the grandchildren, and the other relatives across generational lines.

So much so that individuals of different generations constitute each other; for example, parents regard children as part of themselves and vice versa. I call this the intergenerational integration of personhoods or the integration/wholeness of parents-children in terms of personhood and self-identity. It is the locus of the meaning of life that has to do with an extension of one’s own life, a sense of eternity (more of the parents than of the children), and, in comparative terms, the marker of one’s life achievements among one’s peers. A striking example of the intergenerational integration of personhoods is found among those who lived their lives through the imagined eyes and experiences of their lost single children (see Chapter 8 by Shi). This aspect of intergenerational interactions was previously obscured by the patriarchal hierarchy but it has become increasingly visible and important as individuals gain more freedom and choice to deal with intergenerational relations.

In short, as a value-neutral, interaction-focused, and subjectivity-sensitive conceptual tool, intergenerationality allows us to reexamine both classical issues and emergent challenges from a new perspective. For instance, instead of lamenting the crisis of filial piety, one can delve deeper to analyze how two or three generations in a given family negotiate and redefine the moral responsibilities and practical work for elderly support, child-rearing, and individual self-development. More importantly, exploring post-patriarchal intergenerationality allows one to catch up with and make sense of the latest developments in Chinese family life, especially the inverted yet still significant generational axis of family relations that has given rise to a set of new topics waiting to be explored and analyzed.

3 Neo-Familism

The abiding theme running through the present volume is that intergenerational dependence and solidarity have regained so much saliency that the family institution has been reconfigured in innovative ways. The vertical parent-child relationship is outshining the horizontal conjugal tie and redefining the meaning of family life in a great number of families. Concurrently, the century-old pursuit of a small romantic family and individualism (Glosser 2003) has been sidetracked, the national project of a family revolution has long been aborted (Deng 1994; Stacey 1983; Zhao 2018), and the grand theory of the global modernization of the family (Goode 1962) has been found to be misleading (see Cherlin 2012 for the challenge to Goode’s model in the global context). Yet, the new centrality of intergenerational relations does not indicate a simple return of parental power and authority; instead, it is part and parcel of the rise of neo-familism (Yan 2016, 2018), an important new social trend that is changing the identity of the individual, family life, and individual-state relationship in contemporary China.

The sociological concept of familism refers to the value system and social practices of the family in many traditional societies. It emphasizes the primacy of family interests over the interests of individual family members and of loyalty to the family over allegiance to any outside social organization. Ethically, familism is constructed through a discourse on obligations and self-sacrifice rather than through a discourse on personal rights and self-realization (Garzón 2000). In familism, the individual is defined as a means to a higher end, i.e., the continuation and prospering of the family group, and thus it antithetical to individualism. As a social practice, familism is manifested in the family as a cooperative organization dedicated to the survival and flourishing of the family as the basic building block in a given society that plays crucial economic, socio-cultural, and political functions. For both ideological and practical reasons, familism relies on a hierarchical arrangement of gender and generational relations, and it exists in opposition to equality and intimacy in family life. In traditional China, familism served as both the primary principle of association in social life and the foundational ideology of the imperial state (Fei 1992 [1948]).

The notion of Chinese neo-familism refers to the new discourses and new practices since the early 2000s that invoke familism as the primary strategy to pursue both individual happiness and family prosperity through the collective efforts of a multi-generational domestic group. As such, it demonstrates both similarities to and differences from traditional familism. The similarities focus on the foundational idea that the interests of the family take precedence over the interests of the individual family members, but the balancing of family interests and individual interests diverges across generational lines that is a nuanced difference. The differences between traditional familism and neo-familism become much more apparent in social practices because many people who claim to be followers of traditional values actually find themselves in today’s competitive and risky social environment unable to practice what they believe, whereas many others employ familism merely as a resource to pursue their individual happiness. Most intriguingly, the party-state has been proactively evoking the political aspects of traditional familism, advocating integration of the family and the state, incorporating familism into patriotism, and drawing on the family as a means of governance (Chapter 11 by Yan). In this connection, the rise of neo-familism is also indicative of important social and political developments far beyond the boundaries of the domestic group.

Elsewhere, I sketched the contours of Chinese neo-familism and offer a detailed ethnographic account of certain practices of neo-familism in the everyday life of ordinary people (2015, 2016 and 2018). Here suffice it to list only the main features of neo-familism in social practices (cf. Harrell and Santos 2017: 31–32 for a number of similar findings in their framework of the new patriarchy):

1. (1)The focus of family life has shifted at both the spiritual and material levels from glorifying one’s ancestors to enabling the youngest generations; consequently, the continuity of the descent line has lost its spiritual significance and the core value of filial piety no longer demands self-sacrifice by the junior generations.
2. (2)The patrilineal principles of Chinese kinship, which had already been undermined to a great degree in previous decades, and the newly surging centrality of children have led to bilateral arrangements in post-marital co-residence and child-naming practices, leading to diverse ways of forming one’s own family.
3. (3)Intergenerational dependence and solidarity have gained a new saliency in both the pragmatic and emotional aspects of family life, so much so that a new intergenerational identity is in the making. The identity ties parents and adult children together as a unified whole, known as the “integrated oneness of parents and children” (亲子一体) in family discourse as well as practice (Liu 2016)
4. (4)An “intimate turn” has occurred in family life. An increasing number of people across generational and gender lines assert that familial emotions (亲情) are the most important value in one’s life (Hsu 2019), and expressions of intimacy through communications, gifts, and shared leisure activities have gained popularity among both urban and rural families. With the redefinition of the traditional virtue of filial piety, the development of intergenerational intimacy is especially noteworthy (Evans 2008; Wang 2014; Zhu and Zhu 2013).
5. (5)The strong social pressure to achieve family prosperity constitutes the fifth feature of neo-familism practices; most people are compelled to show off their material wealth and, more importantly, the success of their children in education and career development, through circles of social media. As family prosperity is perceived as the visible and quantifiable measure of family happiness, this feature of neo-familism has hijacked hundreds of millions of Chinese to the run-away train of hyper-materialism.
6. (6)There are tensions between individual interests and family interests in the new patterns of family life because neo-familism recognizes the value of the individual while also emphasizing the priority of family interests, a paradoxical development that is replete with tensions but also new possibilities.

Under neo-familism, the conventional family script has disintegrated and a variety of new family scripts are in the making. Chinese individuals have to mobilize whatever resources available to them and to improvise their family life creatively, flexibly, and persistently on an ad hoc basis. Indeed, how people improvise neo-familism is the key to understanding the seemingly endless variations of household formation, the creative reinterpretation of structural principles, and a re-thinking of family values such as filial piety. This is precisely the major reason that I propose the notion of post-patriarchal intergenerationality as a conceptual tool for analyzing new intergenerational dynamics under neo-familism.

This conceptual tool would not be useful under traditional familism because the institutionalized inequality and hierarchy to a great extent exclude the possibility of generational interactions on an equal footing. Filial piety, for example, preemptively regulated the patterns of family relations and everyday life interactions; individual deviance from this prefixed model did occur but it was regarded as abnormal, unacceptable, ethically wrong, and socially punishable. Since the collapse of generational hierarchy, intergenerational interactions have become contingent on individual agencies rather than on established rules. This does not mean the achievement of equality among generations; on the contrary, in some cases this has led to a reversal of the previous generational hierarchy or the exploitation of one generation by another in a given family. Yet, it does open possibilities of all sorts, which often produce unexpected consequences.

A good example in this connection is the emerging practice of dual-local post-marital residence in both urban and rural areas among couples who are singletons. As both the singleton husband and singleton wife prefer to live close to his or her parents, they do not establish their own residence per se; instead, they have their own living quarters inside the home of their respective parents and they travel back and forth between the two homes (两头走). In the cities, the young couple stays with one side during the weekdays and then moves to the other side for the weekends (Shen 2013). In the rural areas, the young couple may alternate their primary residence to correspond with the busy and slack seasons in their work schedule or with the farming schedule of their respective parents. All else being equal, most young couples spend more time with the parents who can offer substantial help in their daily lives, such as child-rearing (Gao 2018; Wang and Di 2011). Yet, all such arrangements are derived from intergenerational negotiations on an individual basis. The dual-local residence provides strong support for Santos and Harrell’s observation about the “hollowing out” of patriarchal kinship (2017:19). An associated change is the growing practice of combining the surnames of father and mother as the surname of their child, known as double-surname system (复姓制, for more details see Qi 2018; and Yan 2018:193–194).

In the context of post-patriarchal intergenerational dynamics, individuals define their own positionality and functional role in accordance with their own life situations and personal capacities. One telling example in this connection is the redefinition of motherhood in many multigenerational families, especially among the urban middle class. A number of recent studies have shown that the mother has assumed the role of manager in leading the entire family in the competitive enterprise of raising the perfect child. A good mother must be proactive and effective in obtaining the best education for her child, supervising her child in school work and all extra-curricular activities, and building a strong career path for her child from kindergarten through college. This managerial role is so demanding that the mother must shift most care-giving duties to her own parents or parents-in-law, effectively making the latter the de facto care-givers in family life. The father’s role is affected as well because he must work harder to earn more money to support the family and, under the new idealism of child-rearing, he must also find time to play with his precious child (Yang 2018; and Chapter 7 by Xiao). In other words, because the new intergenerational dynamics occur in both intersecting and interacting generations, a change in the role of one person in family life alters the respective roles of all the other family members as well.

There is no secret recipe of doing neo-familism except for improvisation. Chinese people from all walks of life must find their own way to maximize their chance to reach to the ideal of happy family life by improvising what resources they have under specific circumstances, such as adopting the dual-local post-marital residence or redefining the motherhood. Indeed, improvisation seems to be the key to understand the seemingly endless variations of household formation, creative reinterpretation of structural principles, reinterpretation of family values such as filial piety, and pragmatic arrangement of power and hierarchy in intergenerational relations. Given its ubiquitous application across the boundaries of socio-economic standings, improvising family life is also a social phenomenon at the level of group behavior that is deeply embedded in the interactions between individual and society, family and social institutions, and social groups and the state (Yan 2018).

4 The Structure of This Book

Looking closely at the concurrent changes of the inverted generational hierarchy and the increased importance of intergenerational dependence, each of the chapters in this book deals with some nuanced issues that have yet to be fully understood or explored in the existing scholarship. The specific studies are anchored in a variety of scales, as far as the object of analysis and the date are concerned. Some of them deal with national trends and historical backgrounds, some make comparative analysis across cities or regions, and others delve deep in case studies of generational groups in rural or urban families or employ the method of person-centered ethnography to explore the lived experiences of key interviewees. By testing some uncharted waters and carrying out their investigation from oblique angles, all the authors of this volume actively engaged with the central theme of post-patriarchal intergenerationality and neo-familism. Except for chapters 10 and 11, they all privileged the everyday life experiences of ordinary people and their point of view on the ground. Collectively, the chapters offer vivid portrayals of people’s efforts to come to terms with the new reality and improvising their responses to it. Most of these people do not have the benefit of hindsight that scholars have, as they are busy trying to make the best out of the rapidly changing, often confusing, life situations they live in; hence the intriguing and often unexpected developments of neo-familism in social practices.

In Chapter 2 Deborah Davis investigates the renewed parental commitment to and their large investments in the well-being of their adult children, primarily through financial investments in the latter’s marriage formation and dissolution. This is a reversal of the urban practice in the 1970s–80s (Davis-Friedmann 1991; Whyte and Parish 1984) when, with the support of the work-unit and the influence of Maoist ideological socialization, urban youth in the 1970s–80s were mobilized to reject their parents’ rather old, or at least non-revolutionary, mentalities and behavior. The intergenerational dynamics at that time were characterized by the young generation’s reformist actions, such as collective weddings, the rejection of bridewealth and dowries, and the rejection of highly politicized standards of spouse selection. However, these have been replaced during the last four decades with some new developments, such as parent-driven divorces among urban youth. In searching for the causes for such a U-turn, Davis highlights the interplay between decisive state interventions and the emerging intergenerational dynamics among urban families.

The extent to which the return of parental commitments and contributions to their adult children’s marriage and divorce will modify the inverted generational hierarchy or create a new dynamic remains an open-ended question. My early study shows that parental divorce arrangements among some urban youth indicate the strength of intergenerational dependence but not necessarily the return of parental authority (Yan 2015). Two chapters in this volume, by Vanessa Fong et al. and by Erin Thomason respectively, also implicitly show that receiving parental support does not change the inverted generational hierarchy.

The marriage of adult children remains an important life task for the parents, who place all kinds of pressures on the young to marry on time and in style in order to avoid the much stigmatized consequence of becoming older singles, known as left-over women or bare-stick men. In Chapter 3, Vanessa Fong, Greene Ko, Cong Zhang, and Sung won Kim present a radical departure from this well-established intergenerational responsibility or obligation as an increasingly large number of urban youth remain single by the age of 27 and they hope to continue this status quo. Among all social factors contributing to this new development, the comfort zone of living with one’s own parents is particularly noteworthy. Given that the young generation is likely to have different values and life styles from their parents, how is the creation of such a comfort zone possible? Here the notion of intergenerationality is a convenient and useful tool because it requires the collective and combined efforts by both parents and their adult children to make co-residence so comfortable and attractive that no one wants to break it. Note that although parents are pressuring their children to marry, many seem to be reluctant to take radical actions of pushing their children out of the home. Instead, as this chapter shows, some parents simply veto the proposed candidates for their children, even though they themselves were the ones who initially introduced the marriage prospect. The mutual dependence and integration of identities among parents and adult children seem to play an equally important role here, and the two generations work together to de-stigmatize the threshold of an unmarried 27-year-old.

Erin Thomason in Chapter 4 explores how rural grandmothers take up the child-rearing duties from their daughters or daughters-in-law so that the latter are free to work in the cities as migrant workers. This is known as the “left-behind phenomenon,” meaning the old and the very young are left in the village communities to form a de facto skipped generation household. These grandmothers attempt to make sense of their busy and often tiring daily chores in the context of intergenerational dependence and their individual duties to other members of the family group, hence eliciting inquiries about, and the pursuit of, the moral self. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that many of these middle-to-old-aged women belong to a sandwiched generation as they also must take care of their own parents or parents-in-law. Some cases may involve four generations whereby the young-old generation is located on the second tier and must exercise their agency to deal with the old-old, the adult-children, and the grandchildren in accordance with different norms and behavioral patterns. In these cases, intergenerationality not only occurs between any two generations but also cuts through and connects all four generations. The non-intersecting interactions between the grandparents on the one hand and the adult-married children on the other should also be noted.

Chapter 5 by Xiaoying Qi examines the challenges and coping strategies of those migrants who relocated with their grandparents and grandchildren, that is, the mirror image of the left-behind phenomenon. Focusing on the floating grandparents, Qi explores how these grandparents and their adult children reinterpret and renegotiate the intergenerational obligations and behavioral patterns to construct a multigenerational migrant household and to create happier lives in the cities. In so doing, the floating grandparents challenge the widely held individual-centered approach in migration studies because the intergenerational dependence and cooperation of the migrant household is more important than the individual migrant. Moreover, many floating grandparents proactively initiate, reinterpret, and renegotiate the meanings and practices of the multigenerational family, including pre-exchange obligations, emotional attachments, and symbolic values, in the precarious and nonstable migrant world. Together, Thomason’s and Qi’s chapters present a more comprehensive understanding of the latest changes in intergenerationality among migrant families, which account for about one-fifth of all families in China.

As indicated above, the notion of intergenerationality opens up new ways to understand the nuances in current intergenerational dynamics, such as the conflicts between individual happiness and family interests and/or generational duties. In Chapter 6, Claudia Huang highlights this issue by focusing on the conflicting demands between one’s duties as a grandparent and one’s newly gained freedom to live a life on one’s own. The three cases Huang examines in her chapter represent quite different individual strategies to cope with the same challenge. The most intriguing development is that although none of these women, and many others in a similar position, can regain their lost authority and power or avoid their moral obligation to help their adult children in child-rearing, to a certain extent they all manage to find space of their own to seek self-development. It is also interesting to see how these grandmothers interact with their own parents or parents-in-law on the one hand and their adult children on the other. However, the issue of the sandwiched generation is handled differently by urban retirees in contrast to how it is handled by their rural counterparts, as shown in Thomason’s chapter; instead of “uniting to suffer” (to borrow Thomason’s phrase), they choose to organize as group to pursue their own individual happiness. In this connection, these two chapters represent a direct dialogue among themselves.

How to raise a perfect child in the third generation constitutes the eye of the storm in family life where the parents and grandparents from both paternal and maternal lines contribute their love, attention, care and material resources. This is also the most important yet highly sensitive issue that intersects with existing categories of gender, age, generation as well as social-economic class in a given family, often highlighting tensions and intensifying conflicts. In Chapter 7, Suofei Xiao goes directly into the eye of the hurricane to explore the patterns of power relations and the mechanisms of exercising power across generational lines in urban multigenerational families. She discovers a new power structure being made wherein the mother typically leads the enterprise of childrearing and education in an iron-fist and micro-management style, often assuming the role of tiger mom; while the father is on the sideline concentrating on money-making, grandparents become the care-givers in daily practices of childrearing, commonly receiving the mother’s order without much negotiation power of their own. This new pattern of power relations, however, is manifested as the operation of intimate power which contains three dimensions: first, the formation of intimate relations provides the basis for the actual function of intimate power; second, an individual’s exercise power is conditioned by the intergenerational intimacy; and third, overall it is the grandparents who relinquish power contestation for the purpose of maintaining intergenerational intimacy and support in the mission of raising the perfect child in the third generation.

The single most important issue in Chapter 8 by Lihong Shi is the intergenerational identification in the construction of personhood, or the integration of individual selves across generational lines. This would be a latent issue under normal circumstances and often appears in the form of intensive mutuality in protection, care, love, and interference between the two generations. The sudden loss of one’s single child completely radicalizes the person who is left, including the loss of his/her own moral self, which may be considered the deepest and most serious loss. The integration of individual identities also sets the Chinese case apart from its counterparts in the modern West where individual autonomy is the core of identity. As Shi’s ethnography shows, many parents literally hold on to their children’s ashes and refuse to accept that the child has passed on. What makes the situation particularly sad is the absence of religious beliefs among many of these shidu parents, who simply cannot find space to place the souls of their lost children with their own. One possible way out is to turn parental grief into a source of public action, for instance when the parents organize into self-help groups not only to provide counselling to one another but also to seek social justice; hence turning the lost intergenerational bonding into a common good to benefit others. Yet, when doing so some shidu parents have encountered cultural stigmatization due to government hostility to civic engagement (Kong 2018; ).

Chapter 9 by William Jankowiak, offers a rather radical account of the new family configuration and intergenerational dynamics by tracing all major changes back to the 1980s when the Maoist work-unit culture still dominated in urban life. Jankowiak examines five areas representative of the gradual shift from the traditional family to the neo-family configuration: the good marriage, the parent-offspring relationship, the in-law relationship, individual expression and achievement, and residence preference. Based on his longitudinal field research in the northern city of Huhhot, Jankowiak argues that the new family configuration is being shaped by an independent, albeit coterminous, process: a heightened respect for the self as a cognitive and emotional entity. The expansion of an ethics of the self has reinforced support for valuing autonomy and self-expression, but it does not provide complete independence or self-sufficiency as is typically found in the United States. In this setting, emotional connections between spouses or with parents are no longer denied or rejected. In fact, to a large extent they are publicly affirmed. All of the changes that occurred in the 1980s, contends Jankowiak, set the stage for what would later become the neo-family.

Intriguingly, Jankowiak’s historical ethnography also reveals that the early trend of the awakening individual autonomy and self-expression did not develop much further in the subsequent two decades. Many areas of family life in the 2000s appear to be similar to what already existed in the 1980s, and in some areas the early liberating change has been reversed in the 2000s, such as the increased parental power in their adult children’s spouse selection, marriage, and childrearing. Such a trajectory of “two steps forward, one step backward” reflects the defining feature of neo-familism, that is, a rather complex combination of individualistic and familial features in both discourse and practice (Yan 2011, 2015, 2016, and 2018). It follows that the concoction of pursuing individual happiness and self-development by way of invoking familial support is the paradoxical point of entry for a better understanding of neo-familism practices, as evidenced in the ethnographic accounts of preceding chapters.

In the Chinese case of family change, the influence of the party-state can hardly be overstated. As Deborah Davis and Stevan Harrell noted nearly three decades ago: “Clearly, in the People’s Republic of China (prc) state power and policies have been the creators, not the creations, of a transformed society” (1993: 5). Policy making, however, has been a blind spot in English-language scholarship on family change in China. I devote Chapter 10 to fill this gap by examining how family policies have been made by the party-state as an instrument of governance to serve the national agenda from 1949 to the present. My central argument is that, in numerous ways and during different periods, the party-state took a statist approach in the making of family policies and in the reshaping of the Chinese family, and this statist model generated complex, inconsistent, and sometimes even conflicting policy results that affected the family wellbeing. This statist model of family policy making originated with the early attempts to reform the family for the purpose of nation-state building at the turn of the twentieth century, most particularly during the May Fourth New Culture Movement. Eventually, and to a great extent unexpectedly, the convergence of these historical and contemporary policy results contributed to the rise of neo-familism in the early twenty-first century.

Neo-familism also exists in social discourses on family values, behavior norms, the ideal family life, and the conceived relationship among individual, family, society, and state. This is why I conclude the present volume by taking a close look at three prevailing discourses of neo-familism in contemporary Chinese society in Chapter 11. The first is a popular discourse of neo-familism that emphasize the family as the only reliable resource for ordinary people to cope with the increasingly competitive, risky and precarious work place in particular and social life in general. It is highlighted in the motto of “family problems, family solution” and reflected in social surveys and individual testimonies in ethnographic research. The second is the official discourse by which the party-state redefines the family as a site of governance and incorporates familism into patriotism. The intellectual discourse of neo-familism is the third variation that invokes familism as a cultural capital to resist Western individualism and to construct a Chinese path to modernity. Both the official and intellectual versions regard the individual as the means to reach to a higher goal, be it the China Dream or rejuvenation of Chinese culture. Therefore, they merged into a united force through their shared preference of traditional familism and support each other with the common advocacy for some key Confucian notions such as the family-state (家国jiaguo), the sentimental disposition of family-state (家国情怀jiaguo qinghuai), and the isomorphism of family and state (家国同构jiaguo tonggou).

Finally, it is noteworthy that nearly all of the new developments in family life and the emerging neo-familism are closely associated with the singleton generations (namely, those who were born in the 1980s and 1990s) who are taking the central stage in both private and public spheres in Chinese society. Their discourse and practice of neo-familism, therefore, will likely redefine many features and operating rules of the Chinese family and kinship, some of which have been explored in the present volume. Given that the singleton generations have grown up in the era of globalization and information revolution and indeed have stronger self-awareness and determination to pursue individual development and happiness, to what extent their heart and mind can be captured by the official and intellectual discourses of neo-familism remains an open question.