This volume grew out of the two-day conference entitled “The Rise of Neo-Familism in China: Reflections on Anti-Traditionalism in the May Fourth Movement on Its 100th Anniversary,” held at the University of California, Los Angeles, on May 3–4, 2019. The paper presenters at the conference were (in alphabetical order) Vanessa Fong, Sarah Friedman, Becky Hsu, Claudia Huang, William Jankowiak, Jun Jing, Tianshu Pan, Lihong Shi, Charles Stafford, Erin Thomason, Wei Wei, Yunxiang Yan, Kuang-Hui Yeh, and Xiang Zou. Deborah Davis, James L. Watson, and Rubie Watson read all the papers before the conference and played key roles as discussants during the session.
At the end of the conference, we participated in a group discussion on publication plans, deciding the central theme of the edited volume would be neo-familism from the perspective of intergenerational dependence. To produce a well-focused and cohesive volume, I took pains to reduce the final volume to six papers. The eight other excellent papers are certainly worthy of being published in professional journals; nevertheless, it is a great loss to have had to omit them from this final volume. I want to take this opportunity to thank Sarah Friedman, Becky Hsu, Jun Jing, Tianshu Pan, Charles Stafford, Wei Wei, Kuang-Hui Yeh, and Xiang Zou again for their invaluable contributions to the conference. To cover some important topics, I reached out to Deborah Davis, Xiaoying Qi, and Suiwei Xiao and they graciously responded by submitting contributions after the conference, for which I am most grateful. I also owe a special thanks to Deborah Davis, William Jankowiak, Charles Stafford, James L. Watson, and Rubie Watson for their insights, experiences, and wisdom while walking me through the process of editing this book, and to Dr. Li Tian, of Anhui University, China, for his untiring and generous help on my research project on Chinese neo-familism.
Chapter 5 by Xiaoying Qi and Chapter 7 by Suowei Xiao are revised versions of articles previously published in International Sociology 33:6 (2018) and The Journal of Chinese Sociology 3:18 (2016), respectively.
The 2019 conference and the subsequent work in preparing the present volume were generously supported by funding from ucla’s Asia Pacific Center, Office of Interdisciplinary & Cross Campus Affairs, Division of Social Science, Division of Humanities, and private donors. I am very grateful to Director Min Zhou, Vice-Provost Timothy Brewer, Dean Darnell Hunt, Dean David Schaberg, Mr. and Mrs. Howard Lee, Ms. Jenny Cheng, and Professor Emerita Agnes Lin. I would also like to thank Ms. Esther Jou at the ucla Center of
All of us benefited greatly from the two anonymous reviewers for Brill, whose detailed and insightful comments guided us through the revision process and helped us to strengthen the final product. As in nearly all of my published works, Ms. Nancy Hearst edited all the chapters in this volume and transformed our writing to a higher level. I also owe special thanks to senior editor Qin Higley and associate editor Elizabeth You at Brill Academic Publishers and book series editor Rana Mitter for their help.
With the support of all the authors and other paper presenters at the 2019 conference, I respectfully dedicate this book to James J. Watson and Rubie Watson.
Yunxiang Yan
Los Angeles, August 2020