1 The Triumph of Statism over Familism and Individualism, 1900–1949

The call for a radical family revolution emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century and, intriguingly, was first introduced by the pioneers of the women’s liberation movement. Jiu Qin, the famous anti-Qing heroine, for example, stated that “revolution must start with the family.” At about the same time, an influential essay called for the rise of female revolutionaries: “Revolution! Revolution! Family revolution first!” (cited in Zhao 2018). In an essay entitled “On Family Revolution,” the author argues that family revolution is a precondition for political revolution because it was familism that prevented the Chinese people from achieving citizenship and therefore destroying the family is necessary for building the modern nation-state (see Deng 1994: 39). Yang Du (1986), a leading intellectual figure who played an important role in early Republican politics, noted that in the era when nation-states were competing with one another, familism had become the obstacle to statism and the key mission of revolution was to turn familial persons into citizens (出于家人登于国民). As David Faure (2007) acutely observes, the emergent modern notions of state and citizen constituted the largest challenge to kinship and familism. Most noticeably, throughout the discourse on the family revolution in the 1910s, statism, as a symbol of modernity, gained moral supremacy over familism, which was condemned as a root cause of China’s backwardness and stagnation in modern times (Deng 1994; Zhao 2018).

Radical reformers in the late Qing and early Republican periods also believed that in order to build a strong nation-state it was necessary to recast the Chinese people into strong and modern citizens who are willing to serve the nation-state and to contribute to the common good of the society. Western individualism, which was widely regarded as the secret recipe to accomplish this, was thus enthusiastically introduced into China. The Western notion of individualism, which was embraced without any reservation, focused on two particular traits of individualism—freedom and equality—and it also emphasized the power of individual will. A large number of educated youth found individualism extremely attractive and applied it to their pursuit of freedom in spouse selection. Unlike the middle-aged radical reformers who promoted the family revolution for a political agenda but never practiced it in their own private lives, the youth put their ideals into action and turned the family revolution in a more individualistic direction of personal happiness and reform in private life. Individualism, therefore, achieved a short-lived primacy over statism in the fight against familism during the peak of the New Culture Movement from 1915 to 1919 (Zhao 2019).

The family revolution was, however, meant to serve the purpose of building the nation-state and thus could not be diverted by individualism. Beginning with Liang Qichao, who was a leading enlightenment figure in modern China, intellectuals increasingly began to place the individual in the larger context of the individual-society relationship. They hoped to recast the individual into a new type of responsible and competitive citizen who devotes her/himself to the greater goal of building a strong and modern nation-state. This was both part of the modernization dream and at the same time a key strategy for modernizing (Schwarcz 1986). Liang was arguably the first to call for the making of a new Chinese citizen (新民), maintaining that the self is divided into two parts—the small self (小我) that is embedded in individual interests and the great self (大我) that only can be realized by serving society or the nation-state. Intriguingly and symbolically important, both Hu Shi, who was a strong advocate of political liberalism and served as Republican China’s ambassador to the United States in the 1940s, and Chen Duxiu, who was a major Communist thinker and founding general secretary of the ccp, played major roles in promoting Liang’s idea of the small self versus the great self from the right and the left respectively. As Duan Lian insightfully notes, although some young intellectuals and educated youth embraced and advocated an individualism that defines the individual as an end in and of her/himself, the majority of the leading political and cultural elite in the 1910s–20s regarded individualism as a means to a higher end, as is vividly captured by the notion of the small self versus the great self (Duan 2012: 165–192).

Soon after taking national power in 1927, the kmt government promulgated the first modern law regarding marriage and the family in its 1930 Civil Code and promoted the May Fourth ideal of a small nuclear family. The new law made monogamy the only legal form of marriage and it regulated family relations, rights and obligations, and property inheritance (Ocko 1991; Watson 1984). Meanwhile the government also launched social campaigns to change traditional customs related to the family, such as group weddings or placing symbols of the state at family rituals. The goal of the government-led family reform, however, was clearly to promote nationalism and patriotism and to solidify the political legitimacy of the kmt, making the state both its leading agent and its major beneficiary (Glosser 2003: 81–133). The political contestation over national power between the kmt and the ccp and later the pressing task of resisting the Japanese occupation rendered the task of nation-building more urgent and demanding. Statism, along with nationalism and patriotism, was eventually adopted as the sole political doctrine and it was used to justify all sorts of authoritarian policies of the Republican government, as illustrated in the infamous kmt slogan “one party, one leader, and one ideology (一个政党，一个领袖，一个主义).² As far as family policies are concerned, by the end of the 1930s the triumph of statism over familism and individualism was ratified at the level of the ideology, law, and elite discourse of family life.

There was, however, also a more liberal and individualistic push for family change because the kmt government was competing with the ccp to reform the family to meet the demands of the younger generations that had been awakened by the ideas of the New Culture Movement. In its base areas, the ccp launched more radical campaigns of family reform. In 1931, the ccp promulgated its first marriage law, the “Marriage Regulations of the Chinese Soviet Republic,” establishing the freedom of marriage and divorce (Hu 1974). The accompanying “Decree Regarding Marriage,” which was undersigned by Mao Zedong himself, declared: “In the Soviet districts, marriages now are contracted on a free basis. Free choice must be the basic principle of every marriage. The whole feudal system of marriage, including the power of parents to arrange marriages for their children, to exercise compulsion, and all purchases and sale in marriage contracts shall henceforth be abolished” (Diamant 2000: 341). After the ccp moved to northwest China due to its defeat by the kmt, it continued to carry out family reforms throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s (Zhou 2017). The top priority of the ccp governments in both the Jiangxi liberated area in the early 1930s and the northern China base areas during the anti-Japanese occupation period was to destroy the dominant influence of lineage organizations and the ideology of familism. In both places and during both periods, however, the ccp had to retreat from its initial radical attack on familism and patriarchal power in order to win back the support of male peasants who had lost power and privileges to women and youth. This makes an interesting contrast to the kmt case in which the state had to radicalize its family reform in order to win the support of youth and women (Ouyang 2003). Therefore, balancing the different demands and interests across age and gender lines was an important issue in the state-led family reforms of the 1930s and 1940s, and it remained so from 1949 to the present.

2 Revolutionizing the Family for Socialist Transformation, 1950s–1970s

The kmt’s statist model of family policies and its efforts to promote state-led family reform largely stopped at the level of policy making on paper and it rarely made significant changes to family life among ordinary people in cities, and much less among the vast majority of the population—the peasants in the countryside. In sharp contrast, the ccp was the master of mobilizing and organizing the masses, accumulating much experience during its experiments with family reform in the 1930s and 1940s (Hu 1974; Zhou 2017). More importantly, when the ccp promulgated its 1950 Marriage Law and launched a full-scale offensive to implement the new law and related family-reform policies, it did so as part of its much larger project of land reform, which in turn was supported by a number of political campaigns, including the violent Suppression of Counterrevolutionaries Campaign that resulted in many executions and the ideological attacks on ancestral worship and lineage organizations that shattered the power base of patrilineal kinship and patriarchal authority in the family. Family policies during this period were politically charged, aimed at uprooting familism and shifting individual loyalty from the family to the state.

The single most important family policy is certainly the 1950 Marriage Law, which is widely known for banning parental arranged marriages, concubines, and child marriage, and in their stead, promoting and legalizing a new marriage and a new family form that is based on freedom in spouse selection, gender equality in conjugal relationships, and women’s rights to own and inherit family property as well as rights to divorce. However, Western scholars have different assessments about the effects of the radical marriage and family reform of the 1950s. Whereas feminist scholars measure the state-claimed agenda of women’s liberation against the reality and regard it as a failed attempt due to the continuity of patriarchal power and gender inequality in family life (Johnson 1983; and Stacy 1983), others find that women’s agency played a central role among working-class people in both urban and rural China and thus carried out the marriage revolution to a much greater extent than scholars generally observe based on intellectual accounts (Diamant 2000; Ocko 1991). More importantly, the party-state was able to replace values of familism with values of statism through the implementation of the 1950 Marriage Law and to transfer the authority and power over marriage from the family to the state (Glosser 2003; Chen 2010).

For example, the new legal requirement of civic registration of marriage effectively undermined, if not immediately eliminated, parental authority and power in arranging their adult children’s marriage, and thus it has widely been regarded as a progressive outcome of the 1950 Marriage Law. Yet, the same requirement also empowers the state to be the sole authority to legitimize a marriage, giving the party-state a new power to exercise policies of political discrimination by disapproving of marriage proposals that did not fit the correct political line, such as those between an individual with a good class background and her/his partner with a bad class background. In a similar vein, the 1950 Marriage Law required mediation by the local government for contested divorces, and how liberal the local government approached divorce depended almost entirely on the party-state’s strategic decisions to serve state interests at any given time; hence, the rise of the divorce rate in the early 1950s and its sharp fall in subsequent years until the early 1980s. On both accounts, the 1950 Marriage Law took a much more hardline approach to increase state power over the family in comparison to the 1930 Civil Code under the kmt government (Glosser 2003: 171–174).

In retrospect, we can see clearly that a number of new socialist institutions and policies of the 1950s had more of an impact in changing the Chinese family than the legal text of the 1950 Marriage Law. Chief among them are rural collectivization and the urban work-unit, household registration, the class-label system, and associated policies that integrated the family into these new socialist institutions and dissolved the authority and power of familism in practical details of social daily life. Let me reiterate here that the party-state regarded familism as its enemy, but not the family institution per se. Therefore, the party-state integrated the family into the socialist institutions by formulating specific policies to incorporate and even empower the family so that it could serve as an instrument to realize state interests and the ultimate goals of the state.

Familial ownership of private property and the family mode of social organization were the main pillars sustaining patriarchal power and values of familism in traditional Chinese culture (Cohen 1976; Greenhalgh 1994; Wolf 1972). In studies of family change, particular attention should be paid to the “transformation of the family mode of organization by the proliferation of social structures outside the family that have come to perform or direct many of the activities formerly carried out by family units” (Thornton and Fricke 1987: 749). The socialist transformation of ownership of the means of production began in 1953 and was completed in 1956 with the nationwide establishment of the rural collectives and the nationalization of industry and commerce in the cities. Familial ownership of the means of production was by and large replaced by state/collective ownership, and most of the economic, political, and social functions of the family were transferred to the jurisdiction of the party-state. Consequently, parental authority and power, along with values of familism, were seriously undermined. Through the urban work-unit system and the rural collective system, the state controlled economic production, product circulation, resource distribution, and income allocation, effectively playing the role of the ultimate family head of the entire country, known as the “big socialist family” in its propaganda campaigns (for a detailed description and penetrating analysis, see Davis-Friedmann 1991; Parish and Whyte 1978; Whyte and Parish 1984).

Later, during the radical years of the Cultural Revolution, the attack on familism advanced to a new and irrational high, whereby even emotional attachments among family members were condemned as corrupt bourgeois thoughts to be eliminated (see a case analysis in Meng 2008: 136–138). Individuals were mobilized to report on suspect family members to the state authority if they believed the interests of the state were at risk. In a published confession, Mr. Zhang recalls how, at the age of 15 in 1970, he had beaten up his mother and reported to the government when his mother went insane and denounced Chairman Mao during a family conversation. His mother was soon found guilty and executed, leaving Zhang in endless remorse and sorrow in subsequent years (Hannon 2013). By the late 1960s, the party-state had nearly destroyed familism, seriously weakening parental power and to a great extent redirecting individual loyalty from the family to the state through a combination of direct and indirect Maoist family policies.

At the level of everyday practice, however, the party-state was also limited by its own capacity and thus had to rely on the family institution for the operation of many of the new socialist institutions, effectively retaining the family as a key unit to receive distributed resources and provisions of public goods as well as to support individuals in family life. The household, for example, continued to be the unit of accounting and redistribution in the rural collectives. The urban work-unit system provided its employees with many benefits in addition to secure employment, but housing, arguably the most important resource next to wages, was allocated by either the work-unit system or the local government based on family need, which was measured by family size and structure. More importantly, the household registration system, established in 1958, defined the identity of Chinese individuals in terms of their family of origin (i.e., urban vs. rural residents) and they were subjected to differentiated social rights and family policies, such as pensions, medical care, childcare, education, travel privileges, and quantity and quality of consumer goods through the rations of the supply system. The class label system that divided people into politically good and bad classes was based mainly on the political and economic standing of the family head at the time of the victory of the revolution, but it also classified other members of a given family into the same class. During the subsequent three decades, various types of institutionalized discrimination were imposed on families of bad classes and they were even expanded to the second generation of bad-class families, as the political outcast label was hereditary through the patrilineal line (while household registration status was hereditary through the matrilineal line). These policies created inequality in spouse selection whereby rural women married less desirable urban husbands and bad class families married their daughters up into good class families (see Davis-Friedmann 1991). In these cases, the family became the inescapable “iron cage” that to a great extent defined and determined an individual’s life chances; yet, this seeming return of familial authority/power was actually part of the statist model of family policies.

However, the same social institution could have produced a diametrically opposite impact on the family. Take the household registration system and state-controlled employment as an example. While fixing Chinese individuals to, or at least close to, their family of origin, the combination of these two systems also separated numerous couples from each other and from their family of origin for prolonged periods of time because the work-relocation of one spouse, urban workers marrying rural wives, or professionals and cadres being sent to the May 7 Cadre Schools, was all carried out through the work-unit system, yet their spouses and children were fixed by the household registration system to the original place of birth or initial work assignment. This is known as the problem of a living-apart-family (两地分居家庭问题) that involved more than 10 million people by the end of the 1970s (see Chen 2015: 177). Again, this was done in the name of the interest of the state, and individuals and families were taught to accept the state determination of their fates without any complaints or critical opinions. For example, my co-author and I closely examined 264 letters between a couple who had to live and work apart for sixteen out of the twenty-five-year span of writing these letters. In a few letters, they did complain about the hardships of a living-apart-family, especially missing their children, but they also constantly criticized themselves for having incorrect thoughts of putting the interest of the family above that of the state (Li and Yan 2019). Intriguingly, when the party-state decided to help families reunite in the early 1980s, it cast the new policy as a great favor to families in need and demanded gratitude from the latter, which in turn reinforced the supremacy of statism instead of discrediting it.³

The party-state also made implicit policies to make the family an important bearer of state responsibility and financial burdens. For example, about 17 million youth were sent to the countryside in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the state tried to resolve the unemployment problem in the cities, thus affecting about one-third of the urban families by separating parents and their adult children. However, family ties were also strengthened by the same state policies in an unexpected way. A large number of these sent-down youth relied on parental support to survive the harsh life in the impoverished countryside, and the parents were asked to decide which one of their adult children could stay in the city while the others were sent to the countryside to meet the policy requirements. In the late 1970s, the state began to change its policy by allowing the sent-down youth to return to the cities, but the precondition was the provision of housing by their families. When the state could not provide enough employment opportunities to the returnees, a new policy, known as the “replacement policy” (顶替政策), forced the parents to retire and to pass on their employment to their adult children returning from the countryside. These policies tied together the parents and their adult children and even made employment in a work-unit a hereditary resource passed down through the family institution (for an excellent study, see Chen 2010 and 2015).

Overall, family policies during this period were formulated mainly based on the party-state’s political needs of state-building and they were also driven by the ideological commitment to eliminate familism and the family mode of social organization as well as to shift the political loyalty of Chinese individuals from the family to the state. Some policies, however, ended up strengthening family ties or seemingly empowering the family as an agent of the state. Yet, we must bear in mind that these specific policies still served the statist agenda and prioritized state interests over those of the family, thus constituting an integral part of the statist model of family policies. This model remained intact during the subsequent four decades, but it took different forms due to the changing focus of the party-state’s national agenda.

3 Regulating and Privatizing the Family for the Four Modernizations, 1980 to the mid-1990s

By the late 1970s, the ccp had begun to shift its top priority from the radical Maoist project of revolutionizing China to the pragmatic pursuit of the Four Modernizations (i.e., modernizations of industry, agriculture, national defense, and science and technology). The strategic goal of four modernizations was first formulated by Mao Zedong in 1959 but in subsequent years, until Mao’s death in 1976, it was overshadowed by the political line of radical Maoism. On December 22, 1978, the ccp announced to the world in the “Communiqué of the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party” that beginning in 1979 the focus of the ccp work would shift from political campaigns to the construction of socialist modernization (ccp 1978). The significance and impact of this ccp document can hardly be overstated as it effectively opened up a new era in which economic growth gradually replaced Communist ideology as the ultimate criterion to guide and measure the party-state’s national agenda and policy making, including policy making related to family policies.⁴

It is in this context of the shifting focus to the four modernizations that family policy making changed its priority from revolutionizing the family as the building block of socialist society to regularizing the family as the agent of economic growth. The first and also the most radical step toward this new goal was one-child policy that was supposed to boost economic growth by creating a more rational ratio between population size and economic resources. Intriguingly, the ccp, not the government, took the lead in formulating and implementing the one-child policy. It was first clearly stated as a mandatory policy in the ccp’s open letter to all members of the ccp and the Communist Youth League on September 25, 1980, and subsequently it was confirmed as China’s primary national policy (基本国策) at the ccp’s Twelfth Party Congress in September 1982. Three months later, the policy was written into the revised Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. In the 1980 open letter, the ccp stated that the one-child policy is an important action that “determines the speed and future of the construction of the four modernizations, is related to the health and happiness of our descendants and fits the long-term and short-term interests of the Chinese people.” The open letter stressed the benefits of the one-child policy for the country and for every family, clearly stating: “The Party requires that all members of the Communist Party and Communist Youth League, especially cadres at various levels, must care about the future of the state, be responsible for the people’s interest and for the happiness of our descendants, thoroughly understand the meaning and necessity of this important and major action, lead [the masses] to follow your good example” (ccp 1980).

The impact and implications of the one-child policy is the most-studied topic in the existing literature on Chinese family policies and thus need not be explored here. But actual implementation of statist family policies is another story, in which urban and rural families had differing experiences. Strong resistance from rural China, for example, forced the party-state to retreat and rectify the radical assault on natalism, one of the core elements in traditional familism (see Greenhalgh 1993). I will omit this and focus on the 1980 open letter because it, together with the initial steps of making it a primary national policy, vividly demonstrates the determining role of the party-state, and the party-state’s statist ideology in making family policies and the party-state’s power to carry out its statist agenda regardless of the specific content of the family policies (or for that matter of any policy in the country).

Unlike the unfriendly one-child policy that regulated the most intimate part of family life—child bearing and the size and structure of the family—the party-state issued a number of family-friendly policies and regulations between 1977 and 1986 aimed to undo the Maoist policies of incorporating the family into the state and to normalize family life, such as uniting couples who had long been separated by work assignments, restoring the policy of annual family visits with full pay, and allowing overseas Chinese to visit their relatives. Chinese sociologist Chen Yingfang has collected a total of forty-six such policies to examine how the party-state used this cluster of policies to normalize family life, to bring the individual back to the family, and, at the same time, to emphasize the responsibilities of the family to build the four modernizations (Chen 2015: 174–183). In a similar vein, in the early 1980s Deborah Davis noted that, despite the reform policies of the 1980s that changed certain constraining parameters in the development of the family under Maoism, the urban family remains “a supplicant to a socialist state” (Davis 1993: 76).

Since the mid-1980s, an enduring thread in family policy making has been to expose the family to the emerging market competition so that it may become a productive agent for the nation-state. Such a new direction derives from the party-state’s new national agenda to promote economic growth and to realize the goal of xiaokang shehui (小康社会), which compels the party-state to shift more responsibilities and financial burdens to Chinese individuals and their respective families, encouraging them to realize their full potential in economic activities. This change has been characterized as a neo-liberalist invasion of China (Rofel 2007) or “privatization and neo-liberalism without political liberty” (Ong and Zhang 2008). My approach to understanding this new trend in the 1980s and 1990s is to adopt Ulrich Beck’s individualization theory, but with important modifications in accordance with Chinese social practices (Yan 2009 and 2010).

As in Western Europe (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002; Bauman, 2001), detraditionalization, disembeddedment, the creation of a life of one’s own by a do-it-yourself approach, and the pressure to be more independent and individualistic have all been experienced in China.⁵ In Western Europe, the individualization process has relied on what Beck calls “cultural democratization,” meaning that democracy was widely accepted as a principle in everyday life and social relations for so long that it became part of the culture rather than merely a part of the political regime. Individualization also relies on the systems of education, social security, medical care, and employment and unemployment benefits that are backed up by a welfare state (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, 22–29 and 204–205). In China the absence of cultural democracy and the provision of comprehensive welfare has resulted in major differences in the Chinese path to individualization (Yan 2010).

Chief among the differences is that the party-state, to a great extent, has been promoting the process of individualization by sponsoring institutional changes and directing the interplay among the players—the individuals, the market, social groups, institutions, and global capitalism—to maintain its monopoly of power, to modernize the country, and then to improve the living standards of the people. During the peak of the individualization process (1995–2005), the state promoted economic liberalization in order to stimulate individual initiative, creativity, and efficiency. At the macro level of economic reform, during the 1980s the family institution regained certain functions in agricultural and light industrial production through the household responsibility system of the rural reforms and the private household business system (个体户) of the urban reforms.

The party-state continued to shift more responsibilities to the family institution and Chinese individuals throughout the 1990s. During the restructuring of state-owned enterprises between 1993 and 2002, more than 63 million jobs were cut, and workers who were laid off received little or no severance pay (Hurst 2009: 16). Chinese official data recognize that between 1998 and 2003 more than 30 million workers were laid off from state-owned enterprises, and when they lost their jobs and incomes, by default the family became their safety net. Meanwhile, the state also withdrew from the provision of social welfare to reduce its own financial burdens, thus making the family the major provider for elderly care, psychological care, and disability care, known as the familialization of social welfare provision (Tang 2013; Wu 2015). Other major institutional changes that directly impacted the family included the marketization and commercialization of urban housing, medical-care provision, and the education system. The immediate impact was that, all of a sudden, tens of millions of urban residents found themselves at the mercy of the market and they had to pull together family resources to pay for medical care and the education of their children, and to buy their own apartment unit, all of which formerly were generally paid for by the party-state through its all-encompassing work-unit system. To meet these new challenges and to manage the new risks, Chinese individuals and families had to make extra efforts to accumulate wealth, which certainly contributed to the economic miracle at the national level but also resulted in what I call the phenomenon of the “striving individual” and eventually the rise of neo-familism in the twenty-first 21st century (Yan 2013, 2017/2018).

Concurrently, the individualization process also increased the freedom of individuals in the private-life sphere and resulted in some liberal and individualistic changes in family policy making. The best examples of such policy making include the 1980 Marriage Law, the 2001 Revised Marriage Law, and a number of official interpretations by the Supreme People’s Court. Sociologist Deborah Davis generalizes that these new developments represented a “triple turn” by the party-state: a “turn toward” marriage as a voluntary contract between individuals rather than between family groups, a “turn away” from the previous close surveillance of sexual behavior, and a “turn away” from the notion of communal property in marriage (Davis 2014). Among others, the 1980 Marriage Law made a breakthrough by allowing no-fault divorce, and the 2001 Revised Marriage Law recognized both individual and communal property within a marriage, and defined the former as not only property owned by an individual before marriage but also gifts or an inheritance received by just one spouse after the marriage. This new legislation was understood by Chinese scholars as taking a Western individualistic approach to marital property. In a similar vein, Margaret Woo views these changes as a shift toward a “more individualized concept of citizenship” (2003). In response to vigorous criticism from defenders of a more traditional Chinese familial approach and to the confusion generated during the debates, the Supreme People’s Court issued three “interpretations” between 2001 and 2010, clarifying while still upholding the provisions of the 2001 Revised Marriage Law. As Philip C.C. Huang sharply notes, the interpretations are essentially a reflection of the tensions between the individualized market economy and the continuing household economy, and between the imported individualistic legal principles and the traditional moral values of familism (Huang 2011). As Deborah Davis points out, viewed from another perspective this new provision defending individual property in a marriage actually underscores the bond between parents and their married adult children as well as the parents’ investments in their children’s marriages (Davis 2014: 570). More importantly, we must also keep in mind that the party-state, along with the well-established statist ideology, firmly stood above all of these tensions and made strategic choices between familial and individualistic preferences to maximize state interests.

Again, take the 1980 Marriage Law as an example. In addition to almost entirely withdrawing from its formal control over sexuality, marriage, and divorce of Chinese citizens, in the chapter on family relations the law also made important changes with respect to familism. Article 28 prescribes that paternal and maternal grandparents who have the financial ability have a legal obligation to raise their grandchildren in the case that the parents pass away or are incapable of raising the children; adult grandchildren have the same legal obligation toward their paternal and maternal grandparents in their old age. In a similar vein, Article 29 prescribes the mutual obligations of older and younger siblings. From an individualistic perspective, these legal changes actually marked a step backwards by blurring the boundaries of the family and the obligations of the family members because measured by the definition of the conjugal/nuclear family, grandparents and adult siblings are not family members. Yet, in traditional familism the boundary of the family group is almost unlimited, and it most certainly includes grandparents and siblings. In this connection, the statist model of family policies regarding family relations is obviously working against the trend toward individualization and liberalization with respect to marriage and divorce. This is because the practical need to shift more of the welfare burden to the family, as indicated above, is more important to the party-state than is the liberation of the individual from the constraints of familism. In the same legal text, the state chooses alternatively to make an alliance either with individualism or with familism depending on the situation in order to serve its national agenda, thus reminding us that we must read the legal text in its entirety so that we may completely understand the role of statism.

4 Recalibrating the Family for the China Dream in the Twenty-First Century

In September 2004, the ccp announced its new goal of building a socialist harmonious society. This was primarily a strategic response to the looming social crisis caused by the rapidly expanding income gap, the striking social inequalities, the widespread official corruption, and the various forms of social injustice. Despite the rapidly growing economy and the improved standards of living since the 1980s, there was a threat that these social problems would result in large-scale social unrest. As expected, family policy making had to be rectified to serve the purpose of building a harmonious society, and indeed, an entire new set of new family policies was implemented to alleviate the newly added burdens of the family and to assist the vulnerable groups in their family life. To do this, the party-state invoked some traditional values and even made friendly gestures to certain elements of traditional familism.

A major concern since the late 1990s has been how to meet the needs of the elderly when the proportion of younger, working-aged people has been shrinking. In 1996, the government adopted a law on the “Protection of the Rights and Interests of the Elderly,” which emphasizes that “the elderly shall be provided for mainly by their families.” The law enables parents over the age of 60 to sue their adult children if the latter fail to provide support. In the countryside, local authorities also ask villagers to sign “family support agreements.” About 13 million rural families were reported to have signed such contracts by the end of 2005 (Chou 2010). In response to reports of a rise in suicides among the rural elderly who suffered both illness and depression as well as poverty in the 1990s, the government established the New Rural Co-operative Medical System in 2003 and the New Rural Old-Age Insurance program in 2005 in an attempt to establish a minimum social-security system. The Minimum Living Standard Guarantee Scheme was widely implemented in urban China in 1999 and in rural China in 2007, aiming to alleviate poverty among China’s poorest families and to reduce the inequality gap. Although the actual effectiveness of these new laws and policies vary greatly (Gao and Zhai 2012), they do indicate that after leaving families at the mercy of market competition for decades, the party-state has turned to helping the family, especially vulnerable families, to regain strength and to develop.

At the end of 2012, the government amended the 1996 law on the rights of the elderly to require adult children to regularly visit their parents. The Chinese government has clearly been energetic in addressing the looming crisis of elderly welfare, yet nearly all of its policies and laws have emphasized that prime responsibility for the elderly remains with the family, not with the state. As Claudia Chang Huang (2019) explains so well, the state also vigorously promotes the idea of active aging and self-reliance as another new policy to address the issue of elderly support.

The second most noteworthy event was the new two-child policy in late 2015. Suffering from the negative consequences of the one-child policy, the party-state had been dealing with the problems of a rapidly aging society and the contraction of the labor force during the previous decade. In 2011, the one-child policy was modified to allow any couples where both spouses were single children to have a second child. Two years later, the policy was extended to couples where only one spouse was a single child. Under a law that took effect on January 1, 2016, all Chinese couples are now permitted to have two children. Despite these measures, however, the overall fertility rate continues to decline. Although the rate of second births has increased slightly since 2014, the first-born rate has dropped, leading to a looming risk of a sharp population shrinkage in the near future (Shen and Jiang, 2018).

Local governments appear to be bolder in addressing this problem. For example, in September 2016, the Department of Health and Birth Planning in Yichang city, Hubei province, posted an open letter on its website, calling on all municipal members of the ccp and the Communist Youth League to have a second child. Literally imitating the party-state’s 1980 open letter but replacing the call for “one-child” with a call for “two-children,” on the surface this open letter may seem hilarious, but a subsequent media interview with the department leader reveals that the local government was politically serious in promoting this as the best way to serve the nation-state (Wang 2016). Taking more pragmatic measures, Liaoning province has proposed income-tax breaks and education subsidies to encourage more births; Jiangxi province has taken measures to discourage abortions; and other provinces have tightened the requirements for couples to divorce, justifying the changes to keep alive the possibility of new offspring (Myers and Ryan 2018). The state media have also embraced this new great cause for the nation-state. The Communist Party’s flagship newspaper, People’s Daily (Overseas Edition), published a lengthy article on August 4, 2018, exhorting people to have more babies. The accompanying editorial proclaimed in unmistakably Maoist tones: “To put it bluntly, having a baby is not only a family matter, but a state affair” (Peng 2018).

A family matter as a state affair is indeed an important message delivered from the party-state leaders, who seem to have assigned a more important role to the family institution for governance, as a vehicle for the new national agenda of the Chinese dream and the harbinger of a happy life. The best spokesperson for the recalibration of the statist model is perhaps Xi Jinping, general secretary of the ccp. On numerous occasions since 2012, he has talked about the importance of the family and family life, the necessity of establishing healthy family ethics, and the party-state’s commitment to family development (more on this in Chapter 11) As expected, Xi’s various speeches on the importance of the family were quickly adopted by government leaders at all levels, thereby increasing the number of new surveys and the amount of research on family policy and family life. One of the immediate effects is that for the first time the central government established a Bureau of Family Development at the national level, which is housed with the National Health and Family Planning Commission. This bureau has published annual reports on the development of the Chinese family since 2014.⁶

With regard to actual family policies, the number of new laws and policies has been consistently growing since the 1990s, marking a sharp contrast with the first three decades under Maoism. In their sketch of Chinese family policies, Xia and her co-authors list only one policy, the 1950 Marriage Law, for the entire Maoist era, four policies for the “recovery and progress” period of the 1980s, and nine policies during the “rapid development and institutionalization” period since 1990 (Xia et al. 2014). Similarly, Liu Jitong records only two noteworthy family policies (the 1950 Marriage Law and the 1958 Regulations on Household Registration) for the entire Maoist era, two policies for the 1980s (the 1980 one-child open letter and the 1985 Inheritance Law), and twenty-one major policies in the years between 1990 and 2016 (Liu 2018: 106). These numbers should not be taken literally because none of the authors conducted a systematic survey of family policies; yet, they may still be indicative of a trend toward institutionalization, professionalization, and specification in family policy making during the last two decades. It is in this connection that the 2015 Anti–Domestic Violence Law is widely applauded as the victory of persistent collective efforts by advocates for the rights of women and children, social-work professionals, family-policy researchers, legal scholars, and sympathetic government officials.

A related new development is that, in light of the ccp’s more favorable view toward the family institution, some Chinese scholars have taken a more proactive approach to push for more family-friendly policies and to call on the government to take more responsibility in the provision of social welfare so that the family can be relieved of its heavy burdens that were added in the 1980s and early 1990s. Despite differences in approaches and suggested solutions, most of these scholars advocate the idea of “family problems, government responsibilities” (Tang 2013), asking that the party-state reflect on its inconsistent and family-unfriendly policies in the past, slow down promotion of familialization of elderly support, and provide more public goods to support individuals and families. The core message voiced by many scholars is that the state bears a huge responsibility for the Chinese family and more proactive family policies are urgently needed (Li and Wang 2016; Peng and Hu 2015; Wu 2015).

Once again, when looking at these family-friendly policies we must keep in mind there is another side of the statist model that can be unfriendly, or can be friendly and unfriendly at the same time. Take the shidu (失独) families (those who lose their singleton child) as an example. According to the official and likely the most conservative estimation (National Statistics Bureau 2015), 660,000 families had lost their singleton child by 2010, but a higher estimation is as many as two million families. In comparison to other officially recognized types of “vulnerable families,” such as childless elderly families or families with disabled or mentally ill members, shidu families have received more attention and actual help from the party-state. According to Kong’s study, from 2006 to early 2018 the central government implemented a total of forty-four policies specifically for shidu families; the chief method of help is to provide financial aid (Kong 2018). The latest policy concerns management of a national database of shidu families, issued by the National Health Commission (2018). Yet, the tensions between shidu families and local governments have accelerated over the years, and some parents had taken collective actions to issue appeals to the central government in Beijing. At least three local commissions of health and family planning (the government agency in charge of family affairs and policy implementation) were discovered classifying shidu families, along with families of mentally ill people, as one of the targeted criminal groups in the recent campaign to strike down on criminal society (扫黑除恶). This incident shows that shidu families, while receiving policy support, are seen as a threat to political stability and thus part of the criminal sector of society, again reminding us of the two sides of the statist model of family policies.

The reason why shidu families were seen as politically dangerous is that most shidu parents refuse to accept the official classification that they are merely another group of vulnerable families. Instead, they insist that they have made a huge contribution to the nation-state by answering the call to have only one child and then they suffered after losing their only child. They want the state to recognize their heroic contribution and to compensate them accordingly (Kong 2018: 105).

In a way, their logic resembles the argument of the Shanghai sent-down youth when they initially tried to claim their right to be compensated by the state with relocation back to the city and urban employment. The state could not accept such a claim because, in accordance with the logic of statism, individuals and social groups must yield their interests to the supremacy of the interests of the state. Doing what the state needs them to do is their obligation, and there is no heroic or virtuous sacrifice involved. To challenge such a logic can be compared to challenging the authority of the state, and, conversely, acceptance of such a challenge implies that the party-state admits its previous wrongdoing and its weakness by conceding to the demands of individuals or families. Neither is acceptable in terms of the logic of statism. This is precisely why the sent-down youth initially failed in their collective action, but eventually succeeded when they pleaded that the party-state give them the chance to fulfill their filial piety duty to their aging parents (Chen 2015).

The shidu parents seem to make the same mistake as the Shanghai sent-down youth made in the late 1970s, but they have yet to change their way of dealing with the statist logic. Intriguingly, almost concurrently, during the last decade a grassroots organization of straight parents of gay children in urban China have been successful in negotiating with the state authorities and advocating the social rights of their gay children. This is because they have highlighted the moral capital of parenthood, the virtues of neo-familism, and the incorporation of homosexuality into the normal family structure, none of which can be seen as a threat to political stability or to the authority of statism (Wei and Yan n.d.). These examples illustrate the bottom line of the statist model of family policies, that is, no family policy or familial action that challenges the fundamental interests and ultimate goals of the party-state will be allowed.

5 Conclusions: The Statist Model of Family Policy Making

Three subthemes of the statist model emerge from the preceding sections. First, the party-state did not create its statist approach toward the family and family policy making from scratch. Instead, the party-state inherited it from the radicalism of the family revolution promoted by Chinese elite and educated youth in the 1910s and the 1920s, carried it out to near-perfection through the radical social-engineering projects of the Maoist era, and then recalibrated it in terms of laws, regulations, and policies during the era of post-Mao reforms that is characterized by a diametrically opposite orientation. On the surface, family policies during the past seven decades were made in different, and sometimes conflicting, directions. Some policies were more radical and politically charged than others, whereas others, especially in recent years, were made to protect vulnerable families and to generally strengthen the capacity of the family institution. Although there has been a radical shift from destroying the family for the nation-state (Zhao 2018) to building the family for the nation-state (Yan 2018), the priority of state interests over family interests in policy making has remained intact from 1949 to the present.

Second, a closer look at the discourse on and the practice of the family revolution and family policies during the last century reveals that it was traditional familism and the patriarchal extended family, instead of the family institution per se, that was targeted during both the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and the1920s and the party-state–sponsored family reform from the 1950s to the 1970s. The party-state, however, differs from the radical advocates of the New Culture Movement in one critically important aspect, that is, while the early elite reformers invoked individualism to fight against familism, the ccp has regarded individualism as its enemy from its founding years to the present. Yet, to build a strong state and to pursue its modernization goals through economic development, the party-state has had to make use of the family institution and to tackle individual agency. Therefore, the second abiding theme in the operation of the statist model of family policy making has been how to fight against both familism and individualism on the one hand and to encourage and rely on contributions from the family and individuals on the other hand. This also explains the coexistence of the processes of individualization and familialization under state sponsorship (Yan 2010 and 2018).

Third, the construction of a new type of small nuclear family, known as xiao jiating (小家庭) that is based on free-choice marriage and that functions mainly as a private haven of the personal lives of couples with children was long proposed as both an ideal of modern family life and a pragmatic solution to end the tyranny of familism by the radical advocates of the family revolution during the New Culture Movement. This ideal was subsequently put into practice by the kmt and the Republican state in the 1930s and the 1940s because a small nuclear family would not be the breeding ground for the traditional and oppressive familism and thus could be a positive asset to the nation-state (see Glosser 2003). The ccp accepted the small family ideal and, unlike the kmt which was unable to carry it out in real life beyond the educated urban elite, actually made it part and parcel of everyday life among ordinary people in waves of both radical and modest family policies (Yan 2003, 2011). Chief among these is the radical one-child policy in the 1980s that drastically limited the size of the family and consequently simplified the family structure. The rise of neo-familism, which is a hybrid of traditional familism and modern individualism, however, twists the party-state’s original agenda of limiting the family on behalf of the nation-state by reconstructing a new type of multigenerational family organization featuring intergenerational intimacy and a malleable ad hoc family structure (Yan 2016, 2017/2018). Yet, the party-state has shown the flexibility to incorporate neo-familism into its latest agenda of strengthening the family for the nation-state by readjusting family policy making and implementing a set of new family-friendly policies. The resilience of both the Chinese family and the party-state constitutes the third subtheme sustaining the statist model of family policies.

In the present study, I have used the concept of the statist model in two ways. At the level of ideology and value orientation, I examine the interplay among individualism, familism, and statism, noting that the party-state has been hostile toward both individualism and familism but for different reasons. From the statist perspective, familism is an obstacle to building a strong nation-state because of its emphasis on family loyalty, political apathy, and suppression of the creativity of youth. Yet, the primacy of the family interests over those of the individual, the principal value of familism, can be incorporated into statism. Indeed, by way of the ethical discourse on the division between the small self and the great self, the state eventually replaced the family to become the representative of the great self whereby individuals could find their belongingness and true identity. This is why the party-state began to show more tolerance toward values of traditional familism, such as filial piety, in the twenty-first century and seems at least to be sympathetic to the rise of neo-familism. Individualism, however, offers no commonality to statism and thus it must be harshly suppressed and stigmatized as an unhealthy, selfish, and anti-social value system. In short, as value systems, statism dominates familism and individualism in family policy making, suppressing both familism and individualism on most occasions but on some occasions making an alliance individualism.

The second way I use the statist model of family policies is to explore how the party-state makes pragmatic concessions and arrangements when dealing with the family institution and the individual at the level of social practice. The family institution has always been used by the party-state as a strategically important medium to link the individual and the state and, on many occasions, to provide protection and welfare to the individual so that the state can relieve itself of its responsibilities. Yet, the party-state has also sponsored institutional changes to encourage the individualization of the social structure and has rewarded individual creativity and capacity for competition (Yan 2010, 2013), which are also reflected in family policy making.

The statist model enables us to better understand the complexity and flexibility of family policy making from the statist perspective and thus make sense of the seemingly self-contradictory, inconsistent, and vacillating family policies over the last seventy years. Focusing on the most important interest and ultimate goal of the party-state, we will not be easily misled by its rhetoric or strategic policy changes. The radical start and conservative end of the marriage revolution in the 1950s actually served well the party-state’s ultimate goal of solidifying political legitimacy and building a strong state, instead of half-failing due to resistance by male cadres at the grassroots level. The obvious evidence is that the approach of radicalism-to-revisionism in the marriage revolution was experimented with twice in the ccp-controlled areas during the 1930s and 1940s, and the party-state certainly knew what it was doing in the 1950s. The state, in other words, was firmly in the driver’s seat all along throughout the Maoist era.

The introduction of the market economy and the influence of global capitalism, however, have begun to break the monopoly of the statist model of family policy making to a certain extent. Domestic migration, social mobility, a consumerist culture, and the individual pursuit of happiness have all had profound impacts on the previous hegemony of statism at the level of ideology and have affected the implementation of state policies at the level of practice. Professionalism and a more developed division of labor to address the new social needs in an open and mobile society, such as the rise of social work as a profession, also cracked open the statist model of family policy making. More calls for family-friendly policies, family-centered approaches, and individual-based welfare policies are signs of these new waves of change. Yet, it remains unclear how far this trend toward diversity can develop because, to date, no one has been able to successfully challenge the statist model of family policy making.