Ten
Cultural Support for Birth Limitation among Urban Capital-owning Women

Hill Gates

The sky is bright and the earth is bright.
We have a baby that cries at night.
If the passerby will read this right,
He'll sleep all night till broad daylight .

POPULAR SICHUAN CHARM OF THE 1920S, PASTED ON WALLS, AND EFFICACIOUS WHEN READ OR WHEN THE SUN SHINES. (DAVID C. GRAHAM, RELIGION IN SZECHWAN PROVINCE, CHINA)

"You like this baby a lot. How about I give him to you? I already have these two boys, and they're too active. We don't need any more. I'm too busy to take care of this one. I don't want any money for him—I'll just give him to you."

It is awkward to refuse the gift of a healthy, pretty, month-old infant whom one has too enthusiastically admired. I have had to do this several times in my career as an anthropologist in Taiwan; usually the proferred child is a girl. Now, with three sons under five, this young mother clearly had too much of what is always assumed to be a Chinese woman's ultimate Good Thing—sons. Her oldest, at five, was already capable of taking numbered tickets in return for bags of clean laundry, enabling his mother to make daily dashes for the take-out food the family mostly ate. Soon he would be able to make change and fold clothes, giving her real help. But now, the commotion of four automatic washing and drying machines, of the television in the family's only other room, of the pachinko games in the shop next door, and of the boys' baby martial arts on the tatami bed was driving her near the brink.

"My husband helps with the boys after work, but he can't do laundry properly. The customers get mad, so I don't ever leave him in charge. This is a good business, but the noise really makes me tired, and now there's another child to listen to! I wish I'd stopped after the first one!"

The "family strategy" that most affects contemporary Chinese families is the decision to rear fewer children than Chinese families have historically

wanted. This strategy is especially favored by women who own substantial capital in a household business. Analyses of peasant and petty-commodity-producer households have generally treated households (or coresident families) as molecular units that single-mindedly pursue a joint family fertility strategy, with all members in agreement about what is best for the group. Feminist critics of this conflict-free image have alerted us to the differing goals sometimes pursued by female versus male, or young versus old members of the household.^[1] In the negotiations that result from their different interests and structural positions, there are both winners and losers. Winners control the group strategy, sometimes against considerable opposition. These might be called "directed family strategies," dependent on a special (and perhaps fragile) imbalance of power. I will argue that certain Chinese and Taiwanese women can obtain that power under economic conditions that obtained in the 1980s, and that they are likely to use it to lower their own fertility.

It is well known that in many societies, complex combinations of lowered infant mortality, higher participation in the female labor force, urbanization, and increased time spent in school, combined with good contraception, result in women's bearing fewer children—often only one or two. My focus here is on a much narrower point: that even in a culture often singled out as extremely pronatalist, women as childbearers are often eager to take advantage of new opportunities for limiting births, and they find considerable support for this in some versions of Chinese culture reproduced by women.

The women who I believe are most likely to find such cultural support for birth limitation are women in what I call the petty-capitalist class, most especially petty-capitalist women who are the principal owners of the capital that founded their small businesses. The communities with many petty-capitalist households studied by Harrell and by Johnson (this volume) may owe some of their demographic distinctiveness to the special opportunities that private ownership of means of production offers to Chinese women.

Since birth limitation has been a frequent, if not consistent, state policy in the People's Republic for at least two decades, especially in cities and among state workers, fertility has declined dramatically. This was especially true under the one-child policy of the early 1980s. In Chengdu in 1981, total fertility fell to 1.88.^[2] (In Taibei in the same year it was 2.20.)^[3] But fer-

[1] E.g., Winnie Lem, "Gender and Social Reproduction in Petty Commodity Production," in Marxist Approaches in Economic Anthropology , ed. Alice Littlefield and Hill Gates, 103-18 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1991).

[2] Liu Gongkang, ed., Zhongguo Renkou, Sichuan Fence (Zhongguo caizheng jingji chubanshe, 1988), 95. Note that this and the following figure for Taibei are total fertility, not total marital fertility rates (the statistic used in the remainder of the chapter), the latter being unavailable for Chengdu.

[3] Directorate-General of Budgets, Accounting, and Statistics. Statistical Yearbook of the Republic of China , 1986. Supplementary table 12.

tility continues to vary considerably in different segments of the population. It is of both theoretical and practical importance to determine what factors operate to make the universal, abstract, national strategy into the specific, concrete, family strategy.

In this chapter I explore the mind-set that women of culturally optimal childbearing age bring to their childbearing choices. Put most simply: young Chinese women, when they do not fear want in later life, and where they have the social power to choose alternative uses for their time and energy, often willingly and voluntarily limit their children to one or two. This attitude is a response both to the practicalities of daily life and to a complex cultural pattern that structures kinship ideology in ways that are sometimes supportive of birth limitation.

While industrialization and urbanism generally condition voluntary reductions in the number of children women bear, urban Chinese women and their Taiwanese sisters have downsized their families with unusual alacrity, given the strongly pronatalist ideology and practice of the very recent past. Their speed in responding to the changed conditions that make a one-or two-child family the rational choice is not often braked by nostalgia for the good old days of six, eight, or fourteen children, by ambivalence about the utility of abortion, or even by the pressures for more grandchildren that some parents-in-law continue to apply. Women spoke to me as if they had internalized virtually nothing of the philoprogenitiveness on which much of Chinese culture is widely assumed to be based. This is perhaps the most important point of this study because it helps to contradict the widely held notions that there is a single normative Chinese kinship model, and that men and women are equally responsive to its imperatives.^[4]

My data derive in part from field experience since 1968 with urban women in Taiwan, but especially from systematic interviews in 1988 there and in Sichuan—seventy-five in Taibei, and one hundred in Chengdu. They, and most of their families, are part of a petty-capitalist class—which I describe more fully below—because in nearly all cases the largest part of the household income comes from family business. Many of the women run the business as its principal manager and supplier of capital, while others have invested less than half, or even none, of the capital with which they work. These subsets of women in petty-capitalist families differ substantially in fertility, as will be shown. The data indicate—though with samples of this size, they cannot prove—that within the wider petty-capitalist context, women who have capital invested in their household enterprises negotiate down the number of children they bear for their husbands' families.

Determining whether women have capital invested in the household business, and how much that capital might be, is not simple. Government

[4] See, for example, the sections on Chinese kinship and gender in Jack Goody's The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

figures separating women (or worse yet, households) into categories such as "self-employed," "unpaid family worker," and the like, can be very misleading. Women frequently assign "ownership" of their businesses to their husbands when talking to strangers; capital for such firms may come from a woman's wedding presents or premarital savings; an unemployed "housewife" may profit from rental properties or run a substantial, though officially invisible, money-lending operation. A woman's economic clout in her own household is carefully screened from public view. Careful interviewing of known subjects in a social context with which the analyst is familiar produces reasonably reliable data on such matters, but at the cost of small sample sizes.

The principal argument of this chapter applies well to the family strategies directed by the Chengdu women, but the argument itself is best made and most clearly illustrated by the use of data from both Chengdu and Taibei. With extremely able assistance in each place,^[5] I queried small-business women of a wide range of ages about their business practice, their fertility histories, and their thoughts about childbearing and work. I asked them about their sources of capital, including the gifts (often of money) made at engagements and weddings. These descriptions of marriage exchanges often revealed perceptions of their childbearing obligations. While my colleagues and I attempted to obtain complete information on these four areas from each woman, we left our questions open-ended, with ample scope for thoughtful response.

Many of the Taibei women I had known previously; I had seen what they did, as well as what they said. Here I draw also on a set of thirty-five women's life-history interviews conducted in and around Taibei in 1986. In Chengdu, in addition to the core sample of one hundred subjects found through a Women's Federation's introduction to the Chengdu Small Business Association, I interviewed an additional dozen women outside these channels. Some of the Chengdu women I have now visited repeatedly. In both Taiwan and China, my associates and I encountered women who refused to be interviewed, or who gave grudging and uninformative responses under gentle pressure. But in both places we were sometimes received with genuine enthusiasm. The question we were asking: "How do you run a

[5] Chen Xiaowei and Lu Hana helped in Taibei; Hua Xinghui, Jiang Yinghong, and Li Jufang of the Sichuan Provincial Women's Federation assisted in Chengdu. Each of these contributed very substantially to clearer formulation of problems and more effective fieldwork. I am grateful for their work and their companionship. I gratefully acknowledge too the necessary support given by the Rockefeller Foundation's program in Women's Status and Fertility; the many kindly "extras" supplied by Women's Federation workers at many levels; the collegial atmosphere of the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, where I had the status of a Visiting Scholar; and the generous flexibility of my colleagues at Central Michigan University, who carried my teaching load while I worked on this project.

business and a family at the same time?" was, of course, the central question of their lives. When they had time enough to do so, they were usually eager to talk about it. One of the things they clearly said, over and over, was that childrearing was a burden to be limited as much as possible.

Chinese women do not choose to limit this burden only because childcare and childbearing are sometimes uncomfortable, painful, and exhausting, and at worst fatal. They do so as well because they have access to a secondary model of kinship relations that is submerged within a more visible kinship ideology. This model, especially clear among petty capitalists, rationalizes childbearing as a measurable contribution made to meet a specific obligation, and also rationalizes its limitation. The view men typically take is often quite different, but the two kinship models I will present here are specific, not to gender, but to mode of production.

Petty Capitalism and Kinship

Where commodity production is common, social arrangements and ideological responses form that reflect and enable it. In Chinese societies at least, people who are deeply engaged in petty-capitalist production (petty-commodity production by firms organized by kin ties) experience and re-create kinship differently from those who are not simultaneously capital owners and labor providers in an active market. The ideologically more salient model of "traditional Chinese kinship," or "the Confucian family," differs in a number of ways from petty-capitalist versions of kinship. The idealized model, which I will refer to as "the tributary kinship model," is derived from the operation of a tax-and-tribute sphere of production and circulation that in late imperial times assumed most of the population living an uncommoditized, agrarian life. This assumption was wrong for most Chinese even in late imperial times; it is certainly wrong for people living in contemporary Taiwan and urban China. But tributary kinship continues to be reproduced in partial form through a variety of practices.^[6] The very considerable continuities in Chinese kinship observable throughout China's experiment with socialism and Taiwan's engagement with capitalism have been generated by these practices. Commoditization, where and when it has been strong, encourages people to act out a much wider range of

[6] Tributary kin relations are still maintained in China through such legal requirements as that obliging adult children and grandchildren (since the Marriage Law of 1980) to support their parents economically; through the inheritability of state-sector jobs; during the period of People's Communes, through the frequent congruence of production teams and brigades with lineage segments; and by a number of other mechanisms. In Taiwan, the Guomindang government has consistently made its version of neo-Confucianism central to education, and has done mothing practical to discourage strict patrilineality in inheritance. This complex issue is discussed further in my manuscript "China's Motor: The Petty Capitalist Mode of Production."

kinship behaviors, many of them considered heterodox outside the communities that develop them.^[7]

Petty-capitalist kinship behavior remains partially constrained within the limits of the tributary model. The latter has greater prestige and more legal protection and is continuously re-created by households in some other classes. Like tributary kinship, petty-capitalist kinship is thus organized around patri-corporations made up of a line of male agnates working and transmitting a body of productive property. It stresses hierarchy, patrilineality, and partible equal inheritance of means of production. Kinship behavior that departs from these principles has been punished historically by colluding officials and patriarchs whose interests lie with the continued congruence of patriliny and control of major means of production.^[8]

People immersed in highly commoditized environments, however, constantly manipulate tributary constraints. The selling of goods, of labor, and occasionally of people influences decisions about marriage, divorce, adoption, and child rearing; the constant calculation of costs in the marketplace accustoms people to, obliges, and ultimately legitimates the calculation of costs within the household. Popular morality comes to commend the accumulation or maintenance of productive "capital" even at the expense of household members not essential to the preservation of the agnatic line.

Where petty capitalism is strong, households are shaped by contracts and market transactions, not only by "blood and bone." Those seeking heirs buy sons when agnatic nephews are not available, and sometimes when they are. Men, at times, transform kin ties into the cement of great landowning and trading corporations, or, lacking the appropriate kinsmen, construct lineages by agreeing to be coparceners in a joint estate.^[9] Daughters, and women generally, are especially likely to be commoditized, marriages take many forms, and brideprices may come to wholly outweigh dowries. Women may long to bear many sons who will later support them, or may prefer only one or two children so that they may better support themselves. The connection of individual family members with the wider political economy can differ greatly. A woman may be a wage-earning silk-reeler or factory worker; a homebound mother, housekeeper, and unpaid hand in a family shop; or the owner-manager of a frame-knitting factory or a restaurant. Each job will position her differently in her household, espe-

[7] A good prerevolution example of heterodox but locally normative kinship behavior is what Janice M. Stockard calls delayed transfer marriage in her 1989 book, Daughters of the Canton Delta (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

[8] Judith Stacey (Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China , Stanford University Press, 1983) and Margery Wolf (Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China , Stanford University Press, 1985) have argued this case convincingly for the post-1949 period.

[9] See Jack Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive , 52-92, for a recent and hardheaded summary of the literature on Chinese lineages.

cially if members of that household have already accustomed themselves to market models of capital and labor.

The petty-capitalist model of kinship is characterized, then, by its subordination to the patrilineal principles of tributary kinship; by looser criteria for adoption; at some times and places by the development of large and economically powerful lineages; by the contractualization of relationships; by wide variation in treatment of women and forms of marriage; and by market-driven demographic tendencies. To survive and flourish in such a social environment, women obey its rules when they must, but are sharply attuned to what is negotiable in the bundle of kinship rights and duties incumbent on a daughter, a daughter-in-law, a wife, a mother.

Particularly important for this study was the assumption I shared with many of my subjects that ownership of means of production creates power within the sphere of kinship in a commercialized environment. Women who owned most of the capital that founded their businesses had very considerable decision-making power vis-à-vis relatives who might also be shareholders. Such women actively sought to limit their childbearing and childcare tasks, and used the cultural patterns discussed below to rationalize and legitimize birth limitation to their husbands, their parents-in-law, and themselves.

Implicit in women's statements about childbearing are two expectations. The first is that if a woman marries, she agrees at least to try to have children, preferably a boy. The bearing of children in return for a permanent home is the core of tributary Chinese kinship for women; a relationship of long-term generalized reciprocity is assumed to exist among family members. A woman's principal contribution to the family is the children she bears.

The second expectation relates to the role of kin seniors in childcare; it assumes that family members have rights based not on kin position, but on direct contribution to the household. It assumes as well that, to some degree at least, money and children are interchangeable contributions. Many women feel that their duty to bear children is a contingent one. Women working to earn income cannot bear and care for many children alone. If Mother-in-law wants lots of grandchildren, she must help care for them. If she will not, the working daughter-in-law's duty is fulfilled after one child or one son. A daughter-in-law can expect a direct, immediate return—the mother-in-law's work in childcare—for what the younger woman gives to her husband's agnatic line through her earnings. Short-term exchanges evaluated in terms of the known costs of childcare characterize kin relations.

These two expectations are contradictory. They speak to the operation in Chinese life of two concurrent models of kinship expressing different economic logics. These models are based on and congruent with the two historically significant modes of production that have governed relations of

production and distribution in Chinese life for many centuries. In Taiwan, and in China for the class of women I interviewed, the petty-capitalist mode was much emphasized in the 1980s. Implicit bargains within the family were struck not only on the basis of kinship status—daughters-in-law sometimes obey mothers-in-law because of their positions in a kin hierarchy —but also on the basis of precisely quantifiable contributions, because mothers-in-law will contribute childcare .

Power over material resources was always a principal source of patriarchal and parental authority in China, along with the law and custom that enforced filiality. The greatest prerevolution enemy of that authority has been expansive commoditization, which sometimes enabled women and the young to slip the leash by supporting themselves and families of their own choice. Two informants, a Shandongnese in her sixties and a Taiwan Hakka in her forties, told me recently of literally buying themselves free of their father's power by paying their own brideprices to him. Wages from a Qingdao textile mill and earnings from tailoring bought these women a chosen life rather than a dictated one.

We should remember that the Chinese economy has encompassed both a long secular trend toward commoditization since the Song, and many temporary or regional bursts of commoditization that bloomed and faded over that time. Taiwan's unusual developmental history and the 1949 revolution in China brought women more income-earning possibilities than ever before because of their regular and systematic inclusion in the agricultural work force and their more limited participation in large-scale enterprise and, when policy permitted, in petty capitalism.

Fujianese petty capitalists pioneered the commodity production of rice, sugar, tea, forest products, fertilizers, and timber in Taiwan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the early 1990s, small-scale family firms are still immensely important in its highly productive and only partially capitalist economy. In China, the official post-1949 position on petty capitalism (seen inaccurately as capitalist by Stalinist theoreticians) has oscillated wildly from the limited acceptance of the early fifties and early sixties to the near-extirpation of the late fifties and sixties to the Dengist free-for-all that began in 1979 in Chengdu and lasted until July 1989—the month after Tiananmen.^[10] Experience and memory have maintained the assumptions and expectations of the market as elements in kinship practice in Taibei and Chengdu. Nearly ten years of observing or participating in private production had taught or reaccustomed the women I interviewed in 1988 to an increasingly classical market. Such women bargain hard, in kinship as in sacks of Sichuan pepper or bolts of polyester suiting.

[10] For a post-Tiananmen follow-up on the women petty capitalists of this sample, see my "Eating for Revenge: Consumption and Corruption in Chengdu," Dialectical Anthropology 16, nos. 3-4 (1991): 233-50.

Charlotte Ikels's chapter for this volume explores intergenerational contracts in reform-period China; Susan Greenhalgh has argued for the utility of positing an implicit family contract that explains differential parental expectations of their daughters' and sons' contributions to their natal families in contemporary Taiwan.^[11] According to Greenhalgh, parents characteristically require that daughters turn over more of their premarital earnings than sons because (a) children should repay parents for the expense of rearing them, and (b) daughters have only the years until they marry to repay this debt. Sons will remain with parents for life and can thus be given more leeway in repayment. The distinction points up the precise calculations made possible and then smuggled into kin relations by immersion and participation in a thoroughly commoditized economy. Her position complements a view of implicit intrafamilial contracts derived from petty capitalism.

Informants from both Taibei and Chengdu often described their childbearing plans, or their experiences with children, in what can only be described as highly economizing ways. A young Taibei fish-stall keeper rejected further childbearing on the grounds that one loses at least two months of work time after a birth, which is a lot of income to forgo. A Chengdu mother wanted a boy because "it's easy to find work for them. Only one-quarter of girls find suitable work." Some reasoning was convoluted: a Taibei flower-arranging teacher was pressed by her mother-in-law to have a third child (after two sons) to give to her husband's childless brother. Because the brother was rich, and they themselves had become poor, she refused "because I didn't want to be accused of doing it so our family could make a claim on his property."

The women I interviewed in 1988 were directly exposed to a secondary model for kinship because of their occupations. They illustrate petty-capitalist influence well, metaphors and explanations deriving from its logic flowing trippingly from their tongues. They plan their childbearing with care (now that contraceptive methods are available). They abort frequently and pragmatically. They often calculate precisely the costs of bearing and rearing children, seeing them as trade-offs against other purchasable satisfactions or uses of time. Their discussions of their marital obligations to bear children are grounded on the idea that other things—the income from a flourishing business, for example—can substitute for a large number of children in the eyes of their husbands' families. And women attribute their ability to resist pressures for more children to money that is absolutely their own.

[11] Susan Greenhalgh, "Sexual Stratification . . . in East Asia," Population and Development Review 11, no. 2 (1985): 265-314.

How Many Children are Enough?

Do petty-capitalist women who own their own means of production differ from women of other classes in their actual fertility? At present, this question cannot be answered definitively. Demographic information is almost never categorized on the basis of ownership (or secure control) of means of production, whether by household, individual, or gender. Many rural as well as urban households in China and Taiwan are petty-capitalist, engaging in the production of commodities with household labor. But many are not, especially in mountainous regions distant from markets for their potential products. Peasant households, which produce principally for taxes and subsistence and in only tiny quantities for local exchange, engage with the wider economy differently from petty capitalists, whose production for exchange sustains the household. Determining which rural and urban households make up the petty-capitalist class thus requires data on production for exchange and on ownership or control of means of production—data are obtainable only through direct fieldwork.

The fertility of women in petty-capitalist households depends too on whether they are majority owners in an enterprise, or merely unpaid family labor. In most rural petty-capitalist households in China, women cannot contract independently for land with local authorities; rural petty-capitalist women in Taiwan almost never inherit land. The principal means of agricultural production are thus rarely in women's hands. Their negotiations with family members over the number of children they will ideally bear are conducted without the power given by ownership of capital. A class analysis of petty-capitalist fertility based solely on commodity-producing households (urban and rural) would be seriously incomplete without specifying capital ownership and thus the very varied degree of power held by women in petty-capitalist households. Such data are expensive to collect and virtually nonexistent. For Taiwan, however, we can piece together some information that supports the contention that petty-capital-owning women have low fertility.

In Taibei, I divide my field sample of women along two dimensions: age, and degree of ownership. Because the total number of women is small, only two possibilities in each dimension are considered. The age cohorts are women born in 1950 and before, and those born after 1950. This is a natural break. Younger women who reached childbearing years in late 1960s Taibei had ready access both to effective methods of birth limitation and to a flourishing market for their own skills. Older women, born prior to 1950, had few means of birth control and faced a labor market that generally excluded married women.

Cross-cutting the two age cohorts are two capital-ownership sets. I

divide the sampled women into majority owners, who contributed half or more of the founding capital for their family businesses, and minority owners, who contributed less than half. I calculate total marital fertility rates for four subsamples: younger majority owners, younger minority owners, older majority owners, and older minority owners.

In Taibei, twenty-four younger majority owners have noticeably lower total marital fertility rates (4.300) than twenty-one younger minority owners (5.066). Twenty-one older majority owners also have lower total marital fertility rates (6.497) than four older minority owners (8.311).

This last figure, predictably, is the highest, perhaps even too high because of small sample size. It conforms, however, to my expectations for older minority-owner women in petty-capitalist households. In the economic environment of their childbearing years, their husbands and kin seniors wanted large numbers of children who could be flexibly employed in the family enterprise, or as outside wage labor. They themselves, with only a small share in the business, were both motivated and obliged to bear many children. Women of the same-age cohort with majority capital ownership had fewer children.

The drop in fertility among younger women in both ownership sets results from changing expectations on the part of society and entire households (due to changed economic environment, lowered infant mortality, higher participation in the women's labor force, increased years of schooling, etc.). But the differences between "majority owners" and "minority owners" in both age groups suggest a genuine power differential between women thus situated.

Total marital fertility for the Taibei ward of Guting (in which most of these seventy women lived) as a whole for 1986 was 6.160. Guting is heavily populated with petty-capitalist households, only a minority of which are run on women's capital. Such heavily petty-capitalist wards as Guting compare predictably with Nangang ward, where concentrations of wage-workers lowers the total marital fertility rate to (1986) 4.300.^[12]

Because private commodity production has been sharply restricted for most of the postrevolution period in China, parallel comparison among Chengdu petty-capitalist households can only be limited. Nine older majority-owning women from the Chengdu sample had a total marital fertility rate of 4.202, compared with the rate of 5.807 for sixteen minority owners. These women had their children before the birth-limitation program began and, for many of them, while private production was a legitimate part of the urban economy. Even the younger women, some of whom

[12] Taiwan, Republic of China, Taiwan-Fukien Demographic Fact Book (Taipei: DGBAS, 1986), table 15.

have not completed their childbearing, but who live under Chengdu's still-strict one-child policy, differ when we take ownership of means of production as a variable: forty-four majority owners had a total marital fertility rate of 2.258, while the five minority owners had a rate of 4.583. To attach social-class meaning to the published fertility data on Chengdu—or China—as a whole would require far more fieldwork than I have done there. The total marital fertility rate for Sichuan in 1985, however, was 3.224.^[13]

As in Taiwan, I infer that petty-capitalist households tend to have more children than average unless the childbearer is a majority-capital-owner—in which case, they tend to have fewer than average. The sample—large in respect to the detailed fieldwork necessary to assemble it—is small by demographers' standards. Statistical tests would supply only spurious measures of significance and are thus inappropriate. That differences in marital fertility among the subsets of the sample conform so closely to the model is persuasive, however, if not definitive, that the logic of petty capitalism is employed by childbearing women.

Behind fertility figures lies a complex of behavior and belief through which political-economic pressures are translated into action. Understanding that complex requires careful attention to what women do in changing circumstances. Women's desire for children to meet affective needs and to care for them in old age is a central assumption in studies of Chinese kinship. Margery Wolf makes it the keystone of her analysis of women and the family: emotional and economic countercurrents in patrilineal households are generated by women seeking security through the birth of sons and through their emotional attachment to the mother.^[14] Chinese patriarchy, past and present, offers only the most marginal economic and social support to women except in their role as mothers. Until recently, sons were the essential hedge not only against neglect and loneliness, but against immiseration and premature death. While conditions for women have altered significantly for Chinese women in both Taiwan and China in this century, many women still fear sonlessness.

But fear that one will starve without a son is not evidence for a love of either children or childbearing. Young women seem often to approach their need to become mothers much as many people approach the need to earn a living: start early, work hard, get it over with, and hope the investment of effort will suffice for its purpose. Of villagers in Zengbu, Guangzhou, Sulamith Potter says: "Objectively, care is needed both in childhood and in old age, but . . . in China, the moral emphasis is on the importance of caring

[13] Computed from Wang Jichuan, "Determinants of Fertility Increase in Sichuan," Population and Development Review 14, no. 3, table 6.

[14] Margery Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972).

for the old. Child care is a means to an end, a form of long-range self-interest."^[15]

A desire to bear enough children to provide support in later life for propertyless farm wives tells us nothing at all about what young women might do if they had a choice of careers. One of the many things that makes contemporary small-business women in Taibei and Chengdu so very interesting is that they do, in fact, have a choice.

What we know of Chinese attitudes toward motherhood comes largely from people who cannot, or no longer must, bear and care for children: from men and from older women. "Duo zi, duo fu" (the more children, the more prosperous) is elliptical in a classic Chinese way: it is agentless. "The more I bear children, the more the family prospers" may often be the real meaning of the proverb. I have never heard a woman, in China or in Taiwan, present this bit of folk wisdom to me as a speech out of her own mouth. "Parents say" (or "parents-in-law," or "everyone"; or "in traditional society they say") "duo zi, duo fu." Women themselves say, "I didn't calculate [infertile days], I just had what came," or "I just gave birth until I was all birthed out," or "I had no right to object, and no means to prevent it," or, most simply, "I didn't dare resist." A vision of the past in which only "others" emphasize the advantages of many births is as common in Taibei as in Chengdu, where women have been exposed to much more, and more authoritative, birth-limitation propaganda.

A woman who has ruined her health and used up the energy of her youth and middle years in childbearing and childcare is likely to die prematurely—as Chinese women statistically did. Life expectancies for Chinese women were lower than those for men;^[16] it is probable that deaths in childbirth were in part responsible for this. Women being interviewed often spoke of relatives or friends who died in childbirth. The reality was recreated in horripilating stories such as the one told by an elderly Chengdu wine brewer:

Lots of women died in childbirth. Or the placenta didn't come out, so they would die. The husband's family would bury such women quickly [such women leave very dangerous ghosts]. In one case, blood leaked out of the coffin so an official saw it and thought it was a murder. He had the coffin opened, and the woman was alive, trying to scratch her way out! Having heard such stories, we women were all afraid of childbirth.

Those for whom maternity did not become a fatal condition often took years to recover their energies from as much as two decades of serial births.

[15] Sulamith Heins Potter, "Birth Planning in Rural China: A Cultural Account." Working Paper no. 103, Women in International Development, Michigan State University, 1985.

[16] State Statistical Bureau, PRC, 1985. Table/Average Life Expectancy at Birth in Selected Areas, 211.

For them, the promised "prosperity," if it materialized at all, came at the expense of their bodies. Women are not unaware of this; compulsion was and is often brought to bear on them to sacrifice leisure, health, and life itself for their principal family duty.

From my first fieldwork in Taiwan in 1968, I have been struck with the open unhappiness of young mothers in the Taibei working-class neighborhoods I frequent. They are outspoken in their distaste for the boring, tiring, dirty job of caring for a baby or toddler, and thought me a bit bizarre for the attention I paid to their infants. A Chengdu dye-worker who bore seven children before contraception was available added a much-needed laugh to a painful interview with her description of locking her young children up when she went to work, and returning every day to a house full of puddles.

Let me suggest, before anyone else does, that American mothers also often find childcare tedious and fatiguing. American culture, however, discourages such admissions—maternity is so sentimentalized that an outburst of irritation with the mother's daily grind is sufficient to create the uneasy, counter-to-expectation "joke" of many cartoons and situation comedies. American culture instead encourages the expression of positive sentiments toward the very young, and the open enjoyment of the immediate rewards of motherhood—the pleasures of nursing, of cuddling, of infant smiles and baby's first words.

Chinese culture offers much less encouragement to manifestations of maternal pleasure. In popular iconography, healthy boy babies are frequently depicted, but mothers nursing or tending children are rarely shown. Birth-assisting goddesses (such as Taiwan's Zhu Sheng Niangniang) are almost never represented with a child. Chinese mothers enjoy their babies, especially the first child (or first boy), in the same restrained and private way they are culturally permitted to express other feelings. They speak more than middle-class Americans do, however, about the unpleasant parts of their relationships with infants, just as they are far more direct in making negative comments about older children. By the time Old Three, Four, and Five come along, mothers have little time or energy for tender moments.

For several months I once slept on the same tatami platform with a Taiwan couple (divided from them by a thin plywood wall) who had just had their fourth daughter. When tiny Zhuzhu awakened her weary mother, she was gently fed, but also roundly and regularly (if tritely) cursed as a "loving-to-be-beaten wanting-to-die slave." Women burdened with the hand-washing of clothing, daily marketing, and numerous other chores of pre-1980s Taibei and present-day Chengdu are simply being honest when they consistently describe childcare as "excessively hard/bitter/demanding" (tai ku ), or, simply, "exhausting" (xingku ).

Though women are often direct in unguarded moments, they are usually unwilling to articulate negative attitudes toward mothering in response to direct questioning. Many veil their responses in deferential discourse guided by powerful state and family ideologies. The persistent Guomindang emphasis on a Confucian role for women as wives and mothers, and on the sanctity of families pivoting around self-sacrificing, home-loving women frames and constrains Taibei women's descriptions of their feelings. So do the power and opinions of their husbands and parents-in-law. China's one-child policy and its inconsistently enforced but widely known position that women have both a right and a duty to gain greater independence through work "out in society" send the opposite message to the women of Chengdu. Comparison of the two sets of women enables us to shovel away at least some of the hegemonic overburden, revealing the behavioral content of their choices.

In 1988, I asked women to tell me about their childbearing choices and about who had attempted to influence them. Parents-in-law and husbands naturally predominate. Predictably, the Taibei sample contains not a single example of a man who wanted fewer children than his wife. Many agreed with their wives on the number they wanted; a few wanted more than the woman herself wished to bear.

In both cities, women claimed that parents-in-law were the most frequent source of pressure to bear more children. If we include mothers as well, kin seniors account for 52 percent of that pressure in Taibei and 7 percent in Chengdu, in contrast to 10 percent brought by husbands in Taibei and none in Chengdu. Women agree better with their husbands than with kin seniors on this matter; women are also motivated to blame kin seniors rather than husbands.

Sixty-eight percent of Taibei women said they were under no pressure from others, as did 92 percent of Chengdu women. Fifty-seven percent of Taibei and 66 percent of Chengdu women's answers indicated satisfaction with number and sex of the children they had borne. The degree of satisfaction Chengdu women feel is clearly overstated among younger women who are mandatory one-child mothers. In more informal discussions, they very commonly prefer two children, one of each sex. The lower rate of satisfaction by Taibei women may result from the greater pressure they feel from family members or from simple accidents of birth. Their responses suggest considerable similarity between the two groups, and a general preference within them for approximately two children.

It can be argued that data from Chengdu, where a carefully supervised one-child policy was implemented during the 1980s, is of little worth in determining what women would choose to do. I cannot absolutely refute such a contention. When we put the Chengdu sample beside that from Taibei, however, we find strong similarities. And when the women speak—whether

in the neutral or slightly pronatalist atmosphere of Taibei, or the one-baby-maximum world of Chengdu—they say the same things.

A twenty-six-year-old owner of a Chengdu film-processing shop and a growing retail clothing business wanted to delay having her child into a clearly distant, perhaps unreachable future, when she would have built an empire solid enough for even her incompetent husband to manage. "Then I will retire and have a baby." A thirty-two-year-old Taibei hairdresser did not want to have children immediately, perhaps not at all. "But my mother-in-law cried and cried, so I gave in and had my son. My parents-in-law and husband want me to have another. I won't until my business is more stable. A woman has to have her own business or she will be looked down on; she should be economically independent so her husband's family will respect her." Two shopkeepers, one in each city, both had such difficult first births that they have decided one was enough. A Chengdu restauranteur in her late thirties stopped with one daughter in 1974, long before policy required it. "I believed in birth control very strongly. So, as soon as I had passed the month, I took my husband to the hospital for a vasectomy, one of the first in the city." An equally strong-minded Taibei fish seller opposed family pressures to have more than two children by insisting on condoms, saying, "I can decide whether I want to have another child or not. A mother has to earn money. She has no time to take care of too many children." A seller of sweet snacks much enjoyed in Chengdu, who bore two boys to a dissolute man in the hungry sixties, told me, "I didn't want a lot of kids, and wasn't pressured into it. Children are a burden. These days, two people caring for a baby are tired, all the more me alone with two to care for. When the babies cried, I sometimes just threw the quilt over them to stifle the sounds of their crying." A woman with a small Taibei shoe store was unable to resist her parents-in-law's demand for three children (though she aborted a fourth). Since she had to have them, "I wanted to bear the three children as quickly as possible so I could take care of the store. My first and second children were brought up by my mother," and they now help her with Number Three. Over and over, from women in both cities: "Two is best, a boy and a girl; then you have insurance if one of them dies"; or: "One or two is enough. In today's society, parents don't need children to support them in old age. I can earn enough myself." "People always want boys, but girls are better to their parents," "are more obedient," "but have to be protected more."

Parents in both cities referred obliquely to changing social mores in their frequently expressed concern for successfully developing filiality in their children. A young Chengdu couple running an outrageously successful restaurant were perfectly satisfied with their one boy, although they could easily have had a second, back in the mid-seventies. "I was too busy [working in a factory days and making clothes to sell at night] to have a second,

and we really didn't want the expense of another," said the wife. Her husband agreed: "Today's children are too bad. It's meaningless to have a lot. They might go bad, and end up in jail." Many women stressed the importance of obedience, and thus the special advantages of small families and of having daughters. But daughters are not always obedient: a sixty-five-year-old clothing wholesaler complained that "my second daughter has been useless to me, so one would have been enough. I'm not feudal."

Occasionally, I heard a more "traditional" voice. Both a Taibei and a Chengdu woman said they wished to have lots of children because they like children, and so do their husbands. Said a Chengdu knitwear producer whose daughters were grown by the time it became possible to start businesses: "I had four, which is a lot by today's standards. Still, if I could have managed one more, we'd have another helper and not need to hire one." But this is retrospect, which just as often looks in a different direction, as in this comment by a former dyeworks co-owner: "I was sorry after Liberation that we had had so many [five], because then our business was collectivized" (so they couldn't use the labor). And women in both cities often stated that one was the absolute minimum: "You can't not have any ! Then why marry at all?"

Like other women who earn cash incomes, petty-capitalist women wish to have, and indeed do have, relatively few children compared with their mothers and grandmothers. They are sometimes also seen as having earned the right to do so. "In former times," said a woman whose family business before Liberation was a Chinese medicine store, "women worked only at home, and so should have more children. Now, they also work outside, so they can have fewer." Speaking of her sister-in-law's numerous progeny, a Chengdu woman said, "She kept having them because she lived in the country and work-points weren't worth much, so her husband made her have them all. If she had worked for money, she could have refused on grounds of her work." The forty-eight-year-old wife of a Taibei car-repairshop owner, whose fecund mother-in-law (thirteen live births) had shown little sympathy for her ten births and one abortion, saw clearly the value of one's own income. "Women who work after marriage absolutely won't have so many. It's not necessary and it's too hard on you. But women couldn't go out to work in my time, and so we didn't have the opportunity to have fewer." Three or four, she thinks, would have been plenty. Taibei women often make the same point more succinctly: "Shei you qian, shei jiu shi lao da" (Whoever has the money is number one).

Coping with Childcare

A strong cultural imperative gives mothers the primary responsibility for their children's care and rearing. Under the Qing, women could be

punished by the state for neglecting to train children (especially daughters) properly;^[17] custom certainly holds them responsible, at least for children under five or six years. Women continue to accept this without question. A Chengdu clothing wholesaler with a boy and a girl was pressured by her husband to have a third child to give to the husband's elder brother. She refused, pointing out that "caring for and bearing children is mine to do, so you keep out of it."

Despite the heavy and essential emphasis on women as mothers, Chinese culture also encourages and enables women to escape the burden of childcare. They do this in several time-honored ways: adopting out or otherwise disposing of babies, especially girls, when their care would especially tax a woman who already has young children; putting children into school/daycare arrangements as early as possible; turning children over to household members, including other very young children; leaving children with relatives in other households, often at a considerable distance.

It is well known that infanticide and the selling of children, particularly girls, were common in China in the past,^[18] and recur occasionally in the present.^[19] Even in Taiwan some poor families sell boys.^[20] That children have often been sold, and sometimes killed, is part of people's daily understandings. Whether such events are viewed with horror or merely ruefully, everyone knows that, not long ago, babies could be disposed of with little likelihood that punishment would ensue for their families. Happily, these events now are rare; the more commonplace practices described below are far more significant in maintaining the unsentimental approach to child rearing I am asserting.

Adoption

Out-adoption as a solution to the problem of too many children faded very quickly in Taiwan with the advent of reliable contraception and abortion in

[17] For a particularly horrible example, see Gary Hamilton, "Patriarchalism in Imperial China and Western Europe: A Revision of Weber's Sociology of Dominance," Theory and Society 13, no. 3 (1988): 393-425.

[18] Infanticide, direct or indirect, and the selling of kinfolk were, of course, well known in many other societies. Their commonplace occurrence in China in recent times leaves a deeper mark on present-day society than parallel but obsolete practices do on Euro-American culture.

[19] See Mary Erbaugh, "Chinese Women Face Increased Discrimination," Off Our Backs 20, no. 3 (Mar. 1990): 9, 33, for a recent and well-informed summary of this problem in China. Simon Long (Guardian , February 2, 1990) reported the freeing in 1989 of more than 7,000 women and children in Sichuan as part of a national campaign against kidnapping, slave-trading, and bride-selling. Poor regions in Sichuan are especially notorious for this.

[20] In addition to the child offered to me by the laundry-keeper, I occasionally hear of such sales in the course of fieldwork. Twin boys had just been sold by a Taibei couple on welfare whom I interviewed in 1985, for example.

the 1960s. While we lack comparable data for China as a whole, I encountered only a few cases of adoption in or out in the Chengdu sample among women who came to childbearing years after the mid 1960s, when contraception and abortion became available to those who wanted them. It is instructive, therefore, to consult the conclusions from Taiwan household-register data drawn by Arthur P. Wolf and Huang Chieh-shan about precontraception adoption.

As a part of a marriage form in which infant girls were fostered by their future parents-in-law, adoption was extremely frequent in northern Taiwan from at least eighty years prior to 1930, when such "minor marriages" radically diminished. For some time, approximately 70 percent of girls were adopted out shortly after birth.^[21] Seeking to account for the timing in a woman's childbearing career of decisions to adopt girl children, Wolf and Huang found that the work load of care for previously born children was important in determining whether a newly born girl would be kept as a daughter or adopted out as some other family's foster daughter-in-law.^[22]

Such very high rates of adoption were unevenly distributed in China, being found mostly in southeastern regions,^[23] and were far from universal. But adoption of girls was widely practiced and probably very frequent throughout China. Demand for girls as daughters, daughters-in-law, servants, and apprentice prostitutes ensured that families that did not choose to abandon superfluous children, or dared not do so, could dispose of them easily in, or under the guise of, adoption.^[24] While much diminished, such practices are known, discussed, and part of the experience of many living women.

Care by Siblings

With the growth of universal education in Taibei and Chengdu, older children are much less available to care for younger ones at home than they once were. As every urban mother knows, the early years of schooling are both obligatory and the time in which a child's future career is adumbrated. Despite the horrendous educational competition, a city child who can easily learn the special skills required for success in Chinese schools truly stands on a golden escalator. For a while at least, Mother will make few demands on her time, including eschewing help with baby. With aston-

[21] Arthur P. Wolf and Huang Chieh-shan, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), 230.

[22] Wolf and Huang, Marriage and Adoption , 290.

[23] Wolf and Huang, Marriage and Adoption , 1-11, especially 6.

[24] See Maria H. A. Jaschok, Concubines and Bondservants: The Social History of a Chinese Custom (London: Zed Books, 1988).

ishing rapidity, families in which older children care for very young siblings have vanished.

Daycare as Education

Childcare even for today's smaller families remains a pressing problem. Daycare that emphasizes the establishment's educational functions is extremely popular in Taibei and increasingly so in Chengdu. Many women meet their own needs for manageable small businesses simultaneously with other women's need and wish for daycare by setting up privately run preschools and kindergartens. A great many women in my sample in both cities put their children in care as early as the "teachers" would take them, usually as soon as they were toilet trained.

Mothers who own and run small businesses, many home-based, often could keep young children with them at work at least part of the time, and many can afford to hire in-home care. The labeling of daycare for very little children as "schools," however, gives mothers a strong rationale for putting their children in outside care. Early socialization to school may indeed make it easier for children to do well in the state elementary schools, as the women say it does. Having their children safely in custody during the workday also makes it much easier for women to work and to enjoy brief periods of leisure. A Chengdu woman employed before Liberation in her family's cloth store thought one of the best reasons to find paid work was that "if you have income, you can put your children in kindergarten."

Schooling for their daughters meant very different things for the wife and husband with whom I shared the sleeping arrangements described above. Xiao Ping, seven and in first grade, was an important role model for her sister, Xiao Cui, five years old and rapidly growing stir-crazy. With four little girls to care for, and not a penny in her pocket, their mother, Lim A-Bi, had not been off the block—hardly out of the apartment—since her marriage at sixteen to a fortyish Hunan bus driver. Xiao Cui was climbing the walls, or at least the furniture.

Lim A-Bi sent for reinforcements. The eldest girl's former daycare "teacher" came to take Cui-cui for a free day's schooling. The child came home enchanted, and spent the next three days writing the half-dozen characters she had been taught, over and over, in her very own little notebook. Her parents spent the next three days arguing about whether to pay for more. The cranky bus driver (wearing an armored orthopedic corset while driving ten-hour days in Taibei traffic, he could hardly be other than cranky) was adamant. "A kid can learn to line up and march in a few days: that's all they really learn in daycare, anyway. I'm not paying money for Xiao Cui to play when she can stay here and play at home for free." A

week later, Xiao Cui was black and blue from forehead to chin from falling off the television onto her neat little nose. Till the bruises faded, her mother would frequently poke her—hard—on the nose, saying, "Hurts, doesn't it?"

Hired Care at Home

Women petty capitalists often say that a principal reason for starting a home business is that it enables them to combine work with childcare. Meeting the demands of both young children and a new business is clearly a strain, however; petty-capitalist women also say they are too busy to oversee their younger children while working, even if the work is done at home.

The Taibei women in my sample, like all but the richest of present-day Taiwan families, can no longer afford live-in amahs. Mothers in Chengdu who earn (at an estimate) over 150 yuan a month find it worthwhile to take in a country teenager for room, board, pocket money, and the implicit promise of bright lights and city boyfriends. But few women outside of a few intellectuals and petty capitalists have such incomes. Laobanniang —"boss ladies"—in both cities often fob their child off on an apprentice or paid worker for part of the workday. Most seem reluctant to hire in a full-time nursemaid, preferring to save the cost of keeping her, to make other use of the necessary sleeping space, and to avoid untoward complications with their husbands.

Long-Term Care Outside the Home

Chinese mothers often leave children for long periods in the care of relatives or hired care-givers outside their own homes. Young Chinese intellectuals studying abroad, including women, endure (often with much pain) separation from even a very young child, left behind in China with its grandmother. Those who choose such separation justify it in terms of the extraordinary benefits—in which the child will eventually share—of their training, and argue that the child will not suffer, because it remains in a familiar setting with a relative. "After all, we're all one family, aren't we?" Women are thus supported in undertaking independent activities by an attitude that suggests that their care for the child is not essential. It is a task that others could do for her.

Female intellectuals abroad follow a pattern common to many women in Taibei and Chengdu. Working women frequently send their children to live during the workweek or for longer periods with relatives or trusted, paid nursemaids. In Chengdu, the eight-year-old son might sleep on the sofa on weekends, when home from his grandmother's, or the fourteen-year-old

daughter, with her younger sister, when she returned each month from staying with an aunt who lived near her school. A woman who ground medicines in the family shop and cooked for a large household of relatives and employees in the 1940s put the last three of her four children into paid care until each was two and a half. Because she was working, her husband paid part of the cost; the rest she paid herself.

Unsurprisingly, women prefer to put their children in the care of relatives, especially their own mothers or mothers-in-law. Each choice has its advantages. Women generally trust their mothers more not to alienate the child's affections, and to follow child-rearing standards with which they are familiar. Also, a woman may give her mother money "for the child's food" or even as payment for childcare. They thus finesse the problem that husbands, generally, do not want wives to give their own mothers money, while women usually want to or feel they should. A mother-in-law is less likely to receive payments for the work itself: after all, she is caring for her lineal descendant. Sometimes even "money for food" is eliminated, apparently on these grounds. It is thus materially more advantageous, as well as emotionally more comfortable, for older women to take in their daughters' children than their sons'. Much the same can be said for a woman's sisters. Having a child room and board with a woman's relative connects her with what may be her most important relationships, again rationalizing the allocation of childcare duties away from the woman herself.

Taibei women have depended on nonresidential relatives for long-term childcare at least since the 1930s. Guo A-Gui, a sixtyish kitchen worker, told me that she and her sister turned each of their children over to their mother in those years. This enabled Guo not only to work during the day, but also to spend the evenings out at opera performances.^[25] Chengdu women of the same age group sometimes did the same.

In the absence of complete information, I estimate that one-fourth of the Chengdu and one-fifth of the Taibei women had left children in living arrangements with their mothers, mothers-in-law, or more rarely, another relative. "If there is no old person to care for the children, it is hard for women to work," said a sixty-two-year-old Chengdu factory owner. Often this childcare arrangement is interrupted only by the relative's death and may be almost total when the woman has no husband. A forty-two-year-old Chengdu restauranteur widowed after three children has had them all raised by her husband's elder sister in the countryside. "I visit them occasionally on Sundays, and I pay Sister-in-law three hundred to four hundred yuan a month."

[25] Hill Gates, Chinese Working-Class Lives: Getting By In Taiwan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 87-88.

Mothers-in-Law

Of the alternatives available, most women agree that the best solution to their childcare problem is, of course, their own mothers. The second best solution, the mother-in-law as baby-sitter, is more complex than it appears. The economic relations between women and their mothers-in-law offer critical insights into the slippage in Chinese families between two visions of kinship obligation.

Chinese daughters-in-law have often been described as servants of their mothers-in-law: washing, cooking, bringing tea, bearing and caring for the grandchildren, whom mother-in-law can dandle or not as she sees fit. For most families, I doubt that grandmothers were ever so entirely free of obligation, although I have known lazy and exploitative mothers-in-law.^[26] Especially in regard to childcare, older Chinese women in many settings have complained mightily that the leisure they expected from acquiring a daughter-in-law has vanished, because the daughters-in-law have all gone out to work. Some mothers-in-law may well have had an exaggerated view of their future privileges during the years when they were the daughters-in-law. I have interviewed elderly as well as young women whose mothers-in-law did most of the childcare while they themselves worked in the fields or for wages. Taibei women make this especially clear.

A twenty-four-year-old who runs a fish stall with her husband, and has had two children, expects no pressure from her mother-in-law to have more "because Mother-in-law is so tired of taking care of children." A woman, thirty-six, whose small family factory makes noodles, has stopped after a girl and a boy because "I'm too busy, and Mother-in-law won't take care of them for me," though she observes that her mother-in-law could force her to have a third if she had no son. A twenty-seven-year-old motorcycle mechanic had three children, then refused to have any more, despite her husband's wishes. "My parents-in-law couldn't take care of them for me."

[26] It would be wrong to omit from this record the acts of kindness young women often receive from older ones, even in the structurally difficult in-law relationship. In Chengdu, the mother-in-law of a thirty-seven-year-old spiced-goose maker wanted her to wait until she was thirty before having a child, because she herself had suffered so from early and repeated childbearing. The mother-in-law took her to three hospitals to arrange an abortion, but without a certificate from a work unit, she was unable to do so. A young shopkeeper began her business because her mother told her that having no occupation but housekeeping and caring for one child was bad for her. An auto mechanic with three children born before contraception became widely available would have stopped at two; at that time, one needed a work unit's permission for sterilization. After her own daughter-in-law bore a girl, the woman made sure she got a careful tubal ligation. And, in the saddest of the Chengdu cases, a rising state-factory forewoman was advised by her mother to cure the painful and lingering aftereffects of a bad voluntary abortion by having a second, and illegal, child. The pregnancy cured her ills, but lost her her job.

Perhaps most interesting, a forty-year-old restaurant keeper justified having only two children in the face of the generally higher expectations of the 1960s by saying, "My parents-in-law had no influence over how many babies I had because [when we married] they didn't give us anything."

Conclusions

One need not be a reactionary, I think, to see the persistence of many patterns from the Chinese past in contemporary China and Taiwan. Social novelties, however desired and desirable, are likely to be widely adopted only if they find support from existing practice and popular sentiment as well as from state intervention and official ideology. The rapid drop in birthrates in China, even allowing for all their failures, and the even more counter-intuitive drop in Taiwan, which began before the government birth control program, has been facilitated by young women's wish to be free of prolonged childbearing and childcare. Under certain conditions, that wish is supported by petty-capitalist kinship expectations, which encourage women to negotiate and bargain over the children they bear. While they often consider China's one-child rule excessive, urban petty-capitalist women bearing children outside of or before that policy often voluntarily limit births to three, two, or even one child. As a woman from much-commoditized rural Zhejiang said in 1980, reflecting on the newly implemented one-child policy, "Why would we have borne so many children if there had been a way of avoiding it?"^[27]

[27] Arthur Wolf, fieldnotes, 1980 (Zhejiang, Hong Shan, 23). My thanks to Professor Wolf for this quote.