1 Introduction

Historically parents in China played the central role in arranging a child’s marriage, first by finding a spouse and then by negotiating the financial terms of the union. Because norms guiding the negotiations for marriages were more flexible than those for dividing an inheritance, a child’s marriage offered a particularly important opportunity for parents to strategize long-term benefits for themselves and for their extended families, rather than for the happiness of the new couple (Watson and Ebrey 1991). Guiding the initial search was the principle of “matching doors” (门当户对). Wealthy parents sought daughters-in-law from equally wealthy families and middle-income parents sought in-laws of equal status. Many poor families adopted a young girl to be the future bride of a young, or even future, son so to reduce the costs and to hedge against conflicts with an adult daughter-in-law whose arrival might destabilize the existing household. Moreover, because traditionally wealthy men could have multiple consorts and infanticide of girls masculinized the population, sons in the poorest families were forced to delay or even forgo marriage. Nevertheless, parents of all economic strata could strategize how best to “marry off” a daughter to secure advantages for her natal family, if not necessarily for the young bride herself.

Over time as children were born and parents aged, the ties between husband and wife as well as between adult children and their parents evolved. The power and authority of the elder generation declined and that of the middle generation increased. Yet the principle of filial piety as well as the practicalities of co-residence and the rituals of ancestor veneration reinforced the primacy of vertical loyalty between married men and their parents. Thus, as Margery Wolf discovered in Taiwan during the 1960s, village women concentrated their efforts on strengthening the vertical loyalties with their sons rather than focusing on the horizontal conjugal ties with their spouse (Wolf 1993).

Yet, even as marriage emotionally and economically binds together family members, marriage is simultaneously a public institution through which governments control their citizens and subordinate idiosyncratic family ambitions to national goals (Glosser 2003). In the decades before 1949, both Nationalist and Communist leaders prioritized marriage reform and each passed regulations to reduce parental control and promote monogamous free-choice marriages (Glosser 2003). In practice, however, because neither political party exercised effective control over the country and because most young adults lacked economic autonomy, throughout the first half of the twentieth century parents continued to determine the timing and conditions of their children’s marriages.

However, the first item of official legislation after 1950 was a new Marriage Law. Prohibiting concubinage and child brides (童养媳), requiring registration of marriages, and mandating a minimum marriage age of 18 for women and 20 for men, the legislation directly limited parental interference in the marital lives of their children (Marriage Law 1950). The subsequent collectivization of land and private businesses further reduced parental power and authority. In cities where education was free for both girls and boys through early adolescence and where loyalty to the party determined promotion in the workplace, parents were generally disempowered. Directly arranged matches became rare and parents became less entangled in the marriages of their children (Whyte 1990), or, as Yunxiang Yan (2003) has so succinctly noted: “conjugality triumphed.”

However, recent observations indicate a decided move toward more intense and sustained parental involvement in the lives of adult children, a trend that Yan (2017/2018) characterizes as “descending familism,” whereby a downward flow of family assets from the older to the younger generations both heightens financial and emotional interdependence and disrupts the traditional patriarchal hierarchy. In this volume, Yan elaborates on how, due to the increasing economic and social insecurities, parent-child relations have become inverted and post-patriarchal. Drawing on both documentary sources and fieldwork in Shanghai, this chapter focuses on parental involvement in mate choice and wedding celebrations to ground the conceptual heuristic of “post-patriarchal intergenerationality” in one specific moment in the family life course.¹

2 Matchmaking in Shanghai’s People’s Park

On every weekend since 2005, thousands of parents in their fifties and sixties have gathered in one corner of People’s Park in Shanghai to find a partner for their unmarried son or daughter. When the corner first became a matchmaking venue, parents carried a shopping bag, and later on an umbrella, to which they had attached a summary of their child’s demographic profile: birth date, educational credentials, height, current job, and usually their hukou status (Zhang and Sun 2014). Ten years later, when I was a frequent visitor at the corner, parents had added their child’s yearly salary, and whether or not the child owned a car and/or an apartment.² Most surprising to me was that in such a public space, parents provided a cell number for anyone who wanted to pursue an introduction, and on one occasion, an anxious mother pushed her daughter’s id card and bus pass into my hand.

When my colleague Peidong Sun (2012) analyzed her visits to the corner in 2007–8, she found that most parents displayed the background details of their child so that anyone passing by could collect the information. But in the fall of 2015 and early spring of 2016, I observed two distinct patterns of outreach. About one-half of those in the park sat on a folding stool or a garden wall, with an umbrella opened to publicize the child’s situation. Some were parents, others were acting for an agency or for a friend. Another approach was to circulate along the nearby pathways. Many among those on the pathways circulated as a couple. Also, they were often better dressed than those sitting with the umbrellas. Rarely did they openly display the demographic profile of their child. Instead, they moved slowly, appraising others who passed by, and when they perceived a possible match, they would ask in very low voice, “Is your child a son or daughter?” If they were looking for a daughter and the other parent(s) had a son, they would stop to chat. Although I have no systematic evidence, I sensed that those circulating saw themselves as superior to those who were huddled under the umbrellas.

If the initial exchange of pleasantries went well, parents would share photos on their phones and inquire more about the lives of their children. If after twenty minutes of conversation, they felt that the other parents were sincere and a match seemed promising, they might exchange phone numbers, which they would later pass on to their child. It was then up to the young man or woman to set up a meeting.

On a short visit in September 2019, I met two men who were watching the crowds drift past in the park. When they saw me read a notice in Chinese, they called out and engaged me in conversation. They assumed that I was a curious tourist who would benefit from their local knowledge and, given that travel guides now list the corner as one of the top ten tourist attractions in Shanghai, their assumption was not far-fetched (https://www.travelchinaguide.com/attraction/shanghai/marriage-market.htm, accessed January 15, 2020). After we briefly exchanged travel experiences, theirs in the United States and mine in China, the younger man volunteered his assessment of the small dramas unfolding before us in the park: “These are parents looking for a family like their own; they are not searching for an ideal daughter or son-in-law.” The older man agreed.

In addition to the men and women crouched under their umbrellas or slowly circulating along the pathways, there were clusters of semi-professional matchmakers displaying large laminated booklets or charts with fifty or more potential mates. Periodically suppressed by city officials, these semi-professionals were present during about one-half of my visits in 2015 and 2016, but they were largely absent when I returned in 2019. These matchmakers often charged for an introduction, but most only received their fee if an introduction resulted in a date.

I have never found official estimates of the success rate, but whether they exchanged phone numbers while sitting under an umbrella or met while circulating through the crowds, all whom I interviewed reported that successful matches were extremely rare. Nevertheless, one colleague reported that his son had recently married a woman whose father he had met at the corner. Stories such as his encouraged others to return to the corner week after week in the hope that they and their child would be another such lucky exception.

When Peidong Sun and Jun Zhang analyzed Sun’s 2007–8 fieldwork at the marriage corner, they characterized the parents as individuals on a “historical mission” (Zhang and Sun 2014: 133) who were driven by their sense of duty and responsibility to help their children find a suitable spouse. In terms of their emotional affect, they also exemplified Yan’s new form of filial piety where the emotional core of enduring family obligations centers on the parents’ “undying devotion” to their children’s happiness rather than on their children fulfilling obligations to their parents (Zhang and Sun 2014:137).

During my conversations in 2015 and 2016, most mothers and fathers stressed that marriage was necessary and remaining single was not normal (不正常). In some cases, the parents emphasized the necessity of a grandchild and that without a grandchild their own lives would be incomplete. But equally often parents prefaced their remarks about the necessity of marriage in terms of the universal need for someone to provide care in old age. If their child did not marry, they asked who would provide care in times of sickness or in times of need after they themselves had passed away. Furthermore, because in China childbearing outside of marriage is stigmatized and legally problematic, arguing for the necessity of children is equivalent to arguing for the necessity of marriage.

Although Hangzhou, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Shenyang, Suzhou, Luoyang, and Ji’nan have had similar matchmaking corners, most people I met in Shanghai consider matchmaking in a public park to be aberrant as well as embarrassing. We certainly cannot presume that the parents whom Sun and I interviewed were statistically representative; they were more desperate as well as more fearless than most. But in terms of age, education, and occupations, these parents were not exceptional. Moreover, the current popularity of the television show, “Chinese-Style Matchmaking” (中国式相亲), launched in December 2016, suggests that parental participation in matchmaking, although a source of entertainment, remains an accepted practice.

In “Chinese-Style Matchmaking,” five young people accompanied by two family members interview a possible spouse. The young man or woman first lists the qualities they most prize in a mate, followed by their accompanying parents also presenting a list. After the five young adults depart to a nearby room from where they can see possible choices and they can confer by phone with other family members, the potential candidate appears on a small stage. Each of the families then pose questions, and the audience watches the reaction of the five young adults who are sitting off-stage. I do not know how contestants are selected or coached, but in the opening minutes of the February 16, 2019 show, the master of ceremonies announced that thirty-seven participants had married since the showed first premiered (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaTt7KL8sUk, accessed January 15, 2020).

The contrast between “Chinese-Style Matchmaking” and the equally popular but longer running “If You Are Not Sincere Don’t Bother Me” (非诚勿扰) on Jiangsu television is revealing. In “If You Are Not Sincere Don’t Bother Me,” which was launched in 2010, one man interacts with twelve young women who stride down a runway in revealing ensembles before standing behind a podium. In addition, two commentators, referred to as “teacher” (老师) provide commentary on the performance of the young man and his ranking of the young women. During its first six years, the show was quite raucous, but after one female participant rejected a poor but sincere young man by saying she would rather be unhappy riding in a bmw than sitting on the back of a bike, the show was rebooted to stress more wholesome values. Most importantly, “If You Are Not Sincere Don’t Bother Me” in contrast to “Chinese-Style Matchmaking” features only unattached young men and women. No parents or grandparents appear on stage.

Reality lies somewhere between the hype of both shows. Thus, for example, in a 2013 survey of married men and women born between 1980 and 1989 who were living and working in Shanghai, Felica Tian and I found that 55.8 percent of the women and 53.5 percent of the men had met their spouses on their own and 24.2 percent of the women and 26 percent of the men had met their spouses through introductions by friends or a dating organization (Tian and Davis 2019). However, 19.9 percent of the men and 20.5 percent of the women had met their spouse through an introduction through their parents or other close kin. The key predictor of independence from one’s parents was graduation from a four-year college. By contrast, a local Shanghai hukou, which aligns with geographic proximity to one’s parents, reduced the self-reliance among women but not for men. Whereas for men, but not women, having a father who was a ccp member, an indicator of parental prestige and local social capital, inclined a child to turn to his/her parents to find a spouse. Because the median age of our married respondents was 28 and most people assume that finding a mate after the age of 30 becomes increasingly difficult, particularly for women, Tian and I hypothesize that the percentage who ultimately rely on their parents will rise above 20 percent, and that this increase will be particularly marked for women in families where both parents and daughter have a Shanghai hukou and for men without college degrees whose fathers are ccp members.

Yet, at the same time as our survey documented that only a minority had met their mate through a parental introduction, these percentages, surprisingly exceed those Martin Whyte reports for Chengdu women who married between 1958 and 1987 (1990: 184). Moreover, recent qualitative research confirms the current centrality of what Sandra To (2015) identifies as “marital filial strategies,” whereby parents establish criteria for an acceptable mate and rarely will adult children marry someone whom the parents do not explicitly endorse. As a result, few men or women are willing to marry someone of whom their parents strongly disapprove. Thus, even if individuals report that they found their spouse on their own, it is unlikely that the parents were totally excluded from their mate search. Arranged marriages are extremely rare, but many parents will guide a search and some will exercise veto power.

In summarizing recent trends in Chinese family relations, and specifically in his exchange with Uncle Lu, Yunxiang Yan foregrounds the emotional dimension of “inverted” family relations. During my initial visits to People’s Park in fall 2015, I too was impressed by the strong emotions that surfaced during even short conversations; they were not primarily expressing love, affection, and devotion, but rather anxiety, fear, and in some cases anger. I also was impressed by the gender distinctions. When mothers were looking for a match for a daughter, they more often expressed guilt than did fathers. Yet both expressed regret (后悔)that when their daughter was younger, they had pushed her to focus on her schoolwork and had discouraged, or even prohibited, her from dating. In addition, mothers, more often than fathers, more directly expressed shame when a daughter whose superior performance in school had been a source of constant pride had subsequently fallen behind her peers in terms of reaching the next life milestone. When the unmarried child was a son, the mother’s emotions were more muted than when the child was a daughter; strikingly, many fathers but no mothers overtly expressed anger, and several times the fathers, but not the mothers, made direct comparisons between the son’s failure and their own success.

To explore these initial impressions of emotional variation by gender, Peidong Sun recruited twenty-five university students to interview parents at the park following a script of fifteen questions that probed expectations of marriage and experiences in searching for a mate for their son or daughter at the corner.³ During a period of six weeks in November and December 2015, the students spoke with thirty-three mothers searching for a mate for a daughter, nineteen mothers searching for a mate for a son, twenty-three fathers searching for a mate for a daughter, and twenty fathers searching for a mate for a son. In addition to transcribing the answers to the specific questions, the students were asked to describe the interviewees’ varied emotions.

Overall, the students confirmed my initial impressions, but they also offered important corrections. First, anger was not restricted only to the fathers. Second, both the mothers and the fathers connected their anxieties over their child’s marriage prospects to broader fears that both they and their child would be cheated in the turbulent urban society that no longer observed the more predictable norms of earlier decades. Such fears resonated with the results from focus groups that I coordinated in 2004, 2006, and 2008 in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing (Davis 2010), where in response to questions about the use of prenuptials, men and women with and without college degrees who were born in the 1950s or after 1980, consistently emphasized that the primary attribute of a good spouse is one whom they can trust in this era of instability. Parents seeking a match at the corner did not as overtly articulate the need for trust as did the participants in my focus groups, but their repeated concern about avoiding a man or woman who would cheat their child reflected the same priority.

Although tied closely to his wider circle of kin, this father deliberately no longer sought help from those who best knew him and his daughter. Rather, like the other parents I met at the park, he felt an intensified sense of individual responsibility to resolve his child’s marital status on his own.

3 Nuptial Celebrations

In 2014 the average cost of celebrating an urban wedding in China was 200,000 yuan (about $33,000), a sum almost ten times the per capita disposable income (Davis 2019). Moreover, 200,000 yuan is the national average; in Shanghai, recently married college graduates estimated they spent closer to 300,000 yuan (about $50,000). Some have hypothesized, and one of my respondents confirmed, that the celebrations have become increasingly elaborate and costly because the turbo-charged industry of wedding planners play on the parents’ need to match or exceed the displays at the weddings of children of relatives or colleagues. Several also admitted that they believed that the larger their investment in the public celebration of the wedding, the more likely the couple would be to escape the trend toward ever higher rates of divorce.(see Figure 2.1). However, in this chapter I do not highlight increased financial investments by parents, but rather I focus on the emotional and performative dimensions that distinguish contemporary wedding practices from those when today’s parents were married during the 1980s.

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Number of Shanghai marriages and divorces, 1980–2017

Sources: Shanghai Statistical Yearbooks 2010–18

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In Shanghai, a couple is officially married when they register at a district office. The process is an entirely bureaucratic transaction that requires that the two parties appear in person and submit copies of their identity cards, household registrations, a health certificate, and two color photos of standard size.⁴ If the office is not busy, the procedure takes no longer than twenty minutes. When I observed more than 100 couples registering their marriage during the spring of 2016, the lines moved rather quickly. Most surprising to me was that I rarely saw a couple kiss or even embrace during or after the registration. In fact, one couple seemed most preoccupied that their illegally parked bmw would be towed, with the groom stepping out in the middle of the registration procedure to confirm that the car had not been ticketed. Most arrived without parents or friends. And when I asked my respondents if anyone had accompanied them when they had gone to register their marriage, most were surprised by my question. However, the behavior of couples in the registry did not indicate that parents did not play any role in the nuptial celebrations. Rather, registration recognized marriage in the eyes of the state; the real celebration and the socially significant confirmation of this major life transition occurred when the parents hosted an elaborate and highly choreographed banquet before as many as two hundred guests. Typically the ceremonies begin when the father of the bride enters the banquet hall leading his daughter, dressed in a white gown and with a veil, to meet the groom waiting on a raised stage. A master of ceremonies, supplied by the hotel or wedding planner, then leads the couple through an exchange of rings and at many weddings the master of ceremonies helps the couple cut a multi-tiered wedding cake that is placed on the edge of the stage. After completing these rituals, the couple will exit, while the guests might eat a first course and the master of ceremonies will engage them in various guessing games. Shortly thereafter, the bride reappears in a full-length evening gown. However, for this second segment of the ceremony, the parents as well as the new husband will join the master of ceremonies on the stage. The respective fathers then speak about the bride and groom, after which the children often present gifts to their parents and thank them for their life-long love and care. After completing these exchanges, the couple exits, and when the bride returns, she will be wearing a third outfit, often a red brocade qipao, and will circulate through the banquet room with her husband and both sets of parents to toast the guests. After the couple toast each table, the guests depart (Davis 2019).

Prior to this highly choreographed evening banquet, most couples and their parents had celebrated the nuptials with tea ceremonies at the home of each set of parents. During this ceremony, preceded by elaborate teasing of the groom at the entrance to the home of the bride’s parents, the couple would kneel before the parents and the parents would present the couple with substantial cash gifts. As in the case of the banquet rituals, the wedding planners directed the participants through the sequence; they also directed a professional videographer to record the event (Davis 2019). Most of my respondents who married after 2005 said that they would have preferred a destination wedding or a small celebration for a few close friends and relatives. But because a large and elaborate wedding banquet is essential for their parents to demonstrate to their relatives and colleagues that they are successful parents, none of my respondents hosted a banquet with fewer than eighty guests. For the couple to have spurned a banquet would have hurt or humiliated their parents. As one 2014 working-class bride (Mrs. W. below) commented: “I guess I would have preferred a simple ceremony with friends, but the wedding was so important to my parents and I had to think about them because their feelings, not mine, were most important” Similarly, when I asked an office worker, who married at the age of 30 in May 2015, about the significance of weddings and marriage, she replied: “A wedding represents your love and your relationship with your parents. Marriage is evidence that you have grown up and now have adult responsibilities.”

When the parents of today’s brides and grooms married in the 1980s, the celebrations were far less elaborate. At that time, there were no wedding planners and no multiple changes of clothing. Nor were there professional masters of ceremonies. However, it is not the case that Shanghai weddings in the 1980s were small gatherings at the workplace where the couple distributed wedding candy. On the contrary, among my ten respondents who married in the 1980s all had invited at least forty guests to dinner at a restaurant where each table cost approximately one month’s wage. Moreover, unless the parents were deceased, the parents usually paid for the banquet. However, in other ways the parents were far less the focus of attention. For example, at the dinner the couple would ask a favorite teacher or supervisor to say a few words of welcome; the fathers, not to mention the mothers, would rarely speak. The couples did not offer gifts to their parents, and the parents did not present any large gifts of cash at a tea ceremony.

To illustrate the new centrality of parental roles in marriage, below I present my interviews with either a parent or a newly married child in four cases drawn from among twenty-four weddings celebrated between 2013 and 2016. In two cases (Mrs. D. and Mr. S.) I also watched professionally edited videos that followed the couple through the entire wedding day. Without a representative survey, such as that Felicia Tian and I used to analyze mate selection, I cannot identify any specific characteristics of either the parent or the child that increased the degree of parental investment. But demography is clearly consequential. Whether from the perspective of an only child or from the perspective of a parent with only one child, a child’s wedding is a once-in a lifetime event for both generations. Also, when one contrasts the socio-economic status of the parents, it appears that the downward flow of resources and control from the parents to the children is more pronounced when two wealthy families “match doors” than when the parents are from poor working-class families or are migrants from rural Anhui or Fujian.

Mrs. T.

I interviewed Mrs. T. (R# 20154a) in March 2016 in the small apartment she rented with her husband and her eight-week-old son. Dominating the crowded rooms were two large wedding photos. In the photo displayed over the folding table in the outer room Mrs. T. is seated in a bright red formal gown and is wearing a tiara. In the second photo, in the bedroom, Mrs. T is wearing a white wedding gown and the couple is posing on a bridge. Mrs. T. tells me that she is imagining they are visiting Paris, the original destination for the honeymoon, which was delayed because of her pregnancy.

Mrs. T. was born in rural Anhui in 1993 and raised by her paternal grandmother after her parents migrated to Shanghai to run a breakfast cart. She joined her parents and two younger siblings when she entered junior high school; she later completed a vocational high school with a major in accounting, and for several years she kept the books for several small companies before joining the family restaurant. Her husband was born in 1991 in Fujian province. His father emigrated to Shanghai and worked as a middle-man in Baoshan. Mr. T. and his two older brothers joined their father when they were in their late teens, and he met Mrs. T. when they were junior high-school students. They began to date in 2012 after both already had full-time jobs. Mrs. T. said that they became romantically involved after he asked her to take care of his dog. When she became pregnant, they decided to marry.

Unlike his wife, Mr. T. had completed senior high school and had an associate post-secondary degree. He had initially worked for a company in Baoshan, but he later started a delivery business with one of his brothers. At the time of the interview, he was working in Mrs. T’s parents’ restaurant. Mrs. T, is already planning to start a mail-order business that she can run from their home.

Once they announced their plans to marry, her husband accompanied her father to her natal village to present engagement gifts to her paternal grandmother. Later that day, her entire family, including her great-grandmother, drove to Kunshan where her fiancé’s father had already purchased apartments for each of his three sons. Two weeks later, his father drove the couple to his natal village to register the marriage. They had originally planned to register on May 20, but because her husband’s paternal grandmother had said that date was unlucky, they moved it up one day. In June they took the photos (described above) and used two of the shots to send slightly humorous invitation cards for the wedding celebration to their friends; in contrast, the parents sent traditional invitations. As Mrs. T. commented when I expressed surprise: “Our tastes (品味)are not the same.”

They held a fourteen-table wedding banquet on the National Day holiday at a Shanghai hotel; each table cost 5,000 yuan, and for an additional 10,000 yuan the hotel supplied make-up, decorations, and a video service. By 2014 standards, 5,000 yuan represented a budget choice. Nevertheless, she chose Tiffany blue as the thematic color for the decorations and the candy boxes. The hotel objected, but she insisted, and then paid an extra fee. There were also several other ways in which Mrs. T. maximized her options but minimized the costs. She decided that there would be cigarettes only at the tables occupied by his family and she bought the bridesmaids’ dresses on Taobao (an on-line discount service.) Each family paid for the tables where their family or friends sat. Mr. T.’s family only had three tables, Mrs. T. said, because his village was farther from Shanghai. It is also the case that his mother had remarried and his father had several girlfriends.

On the morning before the banquet, the couple held two tea ceremonies, first at her parents’ home and then at the home of his father. At each home, the couple paid their respects to the elder generation, and the parents presented red packets of monetary gifts. During the banquet, however, the parents did not appear on the stage at the front of the banquet hall. Nor did the couple ask either parent to come forward to speak. However, Mrs. T.’s father did lead her into the banquet hall and later he offered a few words of welcome.

Mrs. W.

I interviewed Mrs. W. (R#20147a) two years after her June 2014 wedding. Born in Shanghai in 1986, Mrs. W. is the only child of a father who has worked as a security guard since the state shoe factory where he had worked went bankrupt. Her mother recently retired from her job as a cashier at a state food market. Mr. W., also a Shanghai native and an only child, was born in 1983. The couple first met in 2005, when she was 19 and he was 22, during a picnic organized by his cousin. When they met, he had just broken up with his university girlfriend and for the next two years the new couple remained simply good friends. After Mr. W. moved to a job closer to her workplace, they began a relationship, and for nine years they dated on and off. Several times they considered breaking up. He had taken money from his parents to start a company that had failed and he felt they should break up because he had no future. When describing her decision to stay with him and marry, she said: “My mother pushed me to stay with him saying: “You are getting old and you won’t have many more chances to have a healthy baby. I really wanted a baby and I didn’t care about money issues. Also, my Dad was already 65 years old and both he and my husband’s parents really wanted a grandchild. So, at the end of 2013, we decided to marry. We registered in February 2014, but we had to wait until June to hold the banquet because all the good dates had already been taken. We had twenty-five tables, fifteen for my side and ten for his side. The tables cost 5,000 yuan each and his parents paid the entire cost.”

Mrs. W. searched for the hotel online and her primary concern was that the led screen be large enough for everyone to see the videos. She also stressed that she wanted a location that would not require her relatives to travel a long distance. Once she had chosen the hotel, she took her boyfriend and then his parents to assess her choice, and the six ate lunch there to try the food. His parents also paid for the wedding rings, but they allowed the couple select the rings on their own.

After she reviewed all the other choices she had made about the wedding, I asked if there had been any tensions with her in-laws or her parents about the banquet arrangements. She said: “I would go first and review the possibilities, and if my husband agreed, we went ahead. My in-laws had no say. However, when it came to the renovation of the second-hand apartment his parents had purchased, his parents made all the decisions and they also purchased the furniture. The young couple only shared the labor. Mrs. W. finds the two room apartment of 56 square meters completely adequate for a family of three; it also is very close to where her mother lives.

Currently Mrs. W. lives with her husband and six-month-old son. Monday through Thursday, her mother cares for the baby and at night the young couple goes to her mother’s home for dinner and then to bring their infant son back to their apartment. Her mother has six siblings and each day one them goes to care for their blind mother who is 94 years old. On the day her mother goes to care for her mother, Mrs. W.’s mother-in-law cares for the baby.

Mrs. D.

I met Mrs. D. (R# 20141), the mother of a recent bride, at a Shanghai Starbucks in early September 2015. One month later I spent over an hour watching the video of her daughter’s wedding, guided by my 60-year-old research assistant who was a distant acquaintance of Mrs. D.

Mrs. D. was born in 1960 and she married in 1986. When we first met, I presumed she was my respondent; her nails were perfect, she wore a large new diamond wedding band, and her jewelry and tailored suit were understated but exquisite. Mr. D. is a high-level executive in a multinational firm, whereas Mrs. D. no longer works. Their only daughter, born in 1988, studied law in France and then received further legal training in Switzerland. She became romantically involved with her future husband when they both were in Europe. Although the couple had shared a desk at an elite Shanghai junior high school, the mother reported that they only met by chance via an online dating service when working in Europe.

While in Europe, the daughter spoke with her parents every day. When her parents learned that she had met someone who was pursuing her, her parents insisted that she return to Shanghai. Mrs. D. emphasized that this is her only child and that she and her husband wanted her close by. After the daughter returned, she first worked first for a state firm and then transferred to a U.S. firm. The boyfriend also returned to Shanghai and joined a German firm. The couple then dated for one year before announcing their engagement.

Immediately, Mrs. D. said she and her husband started to plan for the wedding. Her husband wanted fifty or sixty tables, but she wanted something smaller and more elegant (精致). In the end, they settled for twenty tables, ten for each side. The parents also chose a date that would not be too close to the holidays in September and October when, Mrs. D. noted, many of their guests would be traveling. They chose November 8 which is also a lucky day. However, she noted that they did not check an almanac or consult the couple or the groom’s parents. However, once they had selected a date and venue, they did need his parents to approve the final plans because his parents were paying for the wedding. Mr. and Mrs. D. had previously bought their daughter an apartment in a building adjacent to theirs where the young couple now lives.

When Mrs. D. described the wedding ceremony, she said that the exchange of rings was held in a chapel-like room that could only accommodate sixty of the two hundred guests. After this ceremony, the wedding party moved to the banquet hall and the other guests filed in, but only after they had been photographed and received a souvenir identity card overlaid on the wedding invitation. Later, there would be a lucky draw and the photo of the winners would be flashed up on the led screen at the front of the banquet hall.

When I interviewed Mrs. D., she was vague about the exact role of the parents during different parts of the ceremony, but when I watched the edited video of the wedding day, it was clear that both sets of parents were central participants. For example, after the couple exchanged the rings in the chapel, they turned to the audience and openly thanked their parents. The parents, including both mothers, then came to the front of the chapel and, as featured on the video, they shook hands. At the banquet, all four parents were called to serve as witnesses (证婚人). Although the master of ceremonies orchestrated the movements on the stage, Mrs. D. told me that her husband had written the script for the master of ceremonies. Finally, before the young couple left the stage to toast all their guests, the master of ceremonies asked the parents to join the couple. Mrs. D. wore a red qipao and the groom’s mother wore an elegant red and black cocktail dress. In the background, balloons floated upward on the led screen and the parents again shook hands. The father of the groom spoke first to the guests and then Mr. D. spoke before both set of parents left the stage via a translucent glass runway. From the perspective of the video, the focus was clearly on the parents.

For the third, and final, segment of the ceremony, the hall had been decorated as a night club. The bride and groom in formal evening dress expressed their gratitude to their parents. The bride then read from a letter Mr. D. had sent to her when she was 10 or 12 years old. Overcome by emotions, she started to cry, and then Mr. D. also started to weep uncontrollably. The groom put his arms around his new father-in-law and then both bride and groom embraced her parents. The master of ceremonies then asked Mr. D. to speak about the new couple. Having regained his composure, Mr. D. shared his observation that after two years of watching the couple, he never saw them quarrel, therefore he indicated that he could stop worrying (放心). The video then records Mrs. D. saying: “My work is over; my daughter has grown up.” Nevertheless, until 2016, the couple continued to live in the apartment adjacent to that of the bride’s parents and they ate most of their meals with Mrs. D. and her husband.

Mr. S.

I interviewed Mr. S. (R#20162a) in March 2016 as we viewed the video of his wedding that had taken place the previous month. An only son born in Shanghai in 1988, he was currently working part-time on an mba degree after receiving a bs degree in electrical engineering from one of Shanghai’s top universities. His wife, also a Shanghai singleton, was born in 1994 and was still a college student. Their parents had previously worked in the same state enterprise and the couple had known each other since childhood. He casually noted that in the past the parents had joked that one day their children would marry. But the couple only began to date during the previous year, and when she realized she was pregnant in December, they quickly went ahead with plans for an elaborate wedding. After the baby is born, they plan to leave the child with his parents, and he will accompany her when she goes to the UK for a master’s degree in industrial design.

With money from his parents, they spent over 10,000 yuan on the wedding photos, which were so exceptional that the company asked to use them during their next promotion at the wedding expo. In exchange, the couple received two free copies of the largest portraits. Two weeks later, together with both sets of parents, they registered their marriage in the district where his parents live. Several weeks earlier, the four parents had consulted an almanac to identify a lucky day and after they had chosen several possibilities, they asked the couple to make the final selection. Mr. S. then showed me a picture of the couple (without their parents) holding the certificate at the registry.

One month later, immediately after Chinese New Year’s, they held a wedding celebration at one of Shanghai’s most expensive hotels. Through his parent’s personal connections, they were able to book nineteen tables: nine for his family and ten for hers. This hotel usually does not do weddings, but business was down so it agreed to host the banquet. Not coincidentally, the groom’s parents had married at the same hotel in 1987. They did not use a packaged wedding planner for the banquet, in part because this hotel charges by the guest and not by the table.

The groom, who is also an amateur musician, selected a master of ceremonies whom he knew through his own performances. He also chose the videographer, also someone with whom he had previously collaborated. However, his parents, who hired a wedding planner to direct the two tea ceremonies, covered all the expenses.

During the banquet, the parents were present and frequently played key roles. At the lucky time of 6:28 the bride’s father. led her into the banquet hall and handed her over to the groom. The couple then exchanged rings, after which a witness stepped forward to address the couple, the two sets of parents, and the guests. The witness was a leader in his father’s previous state factory; he also had served as a reference for Mr. S. on his application for the mba program. After changing into an evening gown, the bride returned, and while a ppt telling “their story” was projected behind them, all four parents joined them on the stage and both fathers spoke in praise of their child and new in-law. As we watched the video, Mr. S. was overwhelmed to hear the two fathers speak. In the final segment of the banquet, the young couple, accompanied by their parents, circulated to all nineteen tables.

4 Conclusion: The Inverted Family and Party-State Initatives

In a 2015 essay Yunxiang Yan identifies several state policies that have made parent-child loyalties “the central axis” of Chinese family life. Most decisive for urban residents are the one-child policy, the reduction of enterprise welfare benefits, and the privatization of housing. In this volume, Yan also emphasizes how specific policies interact with the broad economic and political trends to invert the flow of resources along this core vertical axis. Yan even goes so far as to conclude that an increasingly “competitive, precarious, and risky society” threatens the survival of the nuclear family.

The first and most obvious party policy that has inverted urban families is the 1979 one-child policy that has effectively universalized 4-2-1 families among non-migrant Shanghai residents, regardless of a mother’s education or occupation. Furthermore, even if they choose to have a second child, the ratio of adults to children favored, even dictated, a downward flow of resources from old to young.

The second recent state initiative that has inverted urban families is the post-1993 decision to commodify, commercialize, and financialize healthcare, education services, and housing. Most consequential for family life is the decision in 1998 to privatize urban real estate and eliminate further construction of low-cost rental units (福利房) (Davis 2000b 2001, 2003, 2010). Subsequently, sky-rocketing housing prices have made young couples more financially dependent on their parents and in some cases financial dependence has increased co-residence after marriage (Nauck and Ren 2018)

A third state intervention that has increased parental involvement in their children’s marriages arises from several Supreme People Court (spc) interpretations of the 2001 amended Marriage Law and a 2003 State Council decision simplifying registration for marriage and divorce. For example, Provision 22 of the 2003 spc interpretation specifies that absent other arrangements, parental investments before a marriage should be regarded as a gift (赠与) to their child alone (spc 2003). Eight years later, Provision 7 in a third spc interpretation of the Marriage Law states that when parents give their child money to purchase “immovable property” (不动产) after a child’s marriage and the property is registered in their child’s name then according to Article 18 of the Marriage Law, the property is considered a gift to their child alone and the individual property of one spouse (夫妻一方的个人财产). The interpretation further notes that in cases where the parents of both the husband and the wife have invested in the purchase of the home, absent other arrangements, ownership will be apportioned on the basis of the parental investment. Were the lower courts to strictly follow this logic, in the event of divorce they could grant to the parents who had paid the largest share of the down-payment or mortgage a larger share of the marital home than to the co-resident spouse. (Davis 2014a, 2014b)

In addition to these spc interpretations, a State Council regulation (minfa 2003) that eliminates the need for written permission from an employer for individuals to initiate a divorce has indirectly served to increase parental involvement in a child’s marriage. From the view of the state, the core objective of the new regulation is to reduce non-essential burdens on industrial enterprises and to minimize the number of divorce cases in court dockets. Henceforth, when two persons decide to divorce, they need only to swear before a registry clerk that they both desire to end their marriage because of loss of affection, and then they must submit a short document (协议) in which they specify how they will divide their property and provide for any minor children. With no further investigation or any intervention by court officers, the registry clerk may finalize the divorce. Today, 80 percent of divorces are finalized outside of a court (see Figure 2.2).

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Where divorce cases are granted, 1978–2017

Source: 1978–2013 Zhongguo tongji nianjian 2014, at http://www.infobank.cn/IrisBin/Text.dll?db=TJ&no=626026&cs=14782858&str=%C0%EB%BB%E9, accessed April 5, 2015Note: Of the 669,000 divorce cases handled by a court, only 207,000 divorces were granted and 328,000 were rejected. Zhongguo minzheng tongji nianjian 2018.

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Ostensibly, the removal of employers from the divorce procedures should have had no impact on parental entanglements in their adult children’s marriages. Yet, the simplification of government regulations has not meant that decisions to dissolve a marriage involve only the two principles. On the contrary, given the simplified routines to finalize a divorce, the new rules have created conditions for others, aside from the husband and the wife, to dictate the terms of the division of property and compensation. Furthermore, because the parents have become so deeply involved in financing the new marital homes and in providing childcare, the new regulations have inadvertently increased the opportunities for vertical parent-child loyalties to override those of horizontal conjugal relations (Yan 2015).

Parentally arranged marriages largely disappeared in urban China after 1950, and during the first decades of the economic reforms, horizontal conjugal relations were dominant, or at least co-equal with the vertical ties between the parents and their adult children Yet, more recently as marketization and privatization have heightened economic insecurities, urban kinship has been re-verticalized around the parent-child axis. Whether one considers the search for a mate, the elaborate marriage celebrations, or the handling of the divorce proceedings and the division of conjugal assets, urban parents during the first two decades of the twenty-first century have become ever-more deeply involved in the lives of their adult children. The unprecedented one-child policy established the demographic foundation for this re-verticalization of urban kinship, but the ongoing economic restructuring, legal reforms, and cultural shifts continue to create and reproduce a social matrix that routinely privileges parent-child ties over those between the spouses.