Five
Family Strategies and Economic Transformation in Rural China: Some Evidence from the Pearl River Delta

Graham E. Johnson

The arrangement of familial economic roles such as redistributor, manager or worker and the pooling and redistribution of resources are characteristics of [Chinese] family life adaptable to a great variety of economic activities .
MYRON L. COHEN, HOUSE UNITED, HOUSE DIVIDED

The great majority of the Chinese population lives in rural settlements, and their economic activities are largely agricultural. Rural policies in China were shaped by distinct ideological directions after 1949 and had profound implications for the operation of rural households and rural kinship organization. Chinese rural cultivators were first caught up in land reform and then in the process of the collectivization of production. The fundamental attributes of a peasant economy relate to land, the allocation of household labor to work the land or to meet cultivation responsibilities, and the link with nonpeasants through an elaborate network of marketing. Land reform affected cultivation rights. Collectivization compromised the household allocation of labor. From the mid-1950s, planned purchase and supply of major agricultural commodities transformed marketing behavior. The consequences for the economic organization of rural households were farreaching. In 1979 China embarked on a new developmental course, which was first charted in the countryside. There quickly emerged different possibilities for rural Chinese households and their members to pursue economic and other goals different from those that had prevailed during the first three decades of the People's Republic of China.

There is a consensus that the Chinese peasant household is a corporate entity in which its members cooperate to meet (economic) goals.^[1] That co-

[1] Thoroughly described in Cohen, House United, House Divided (New York: Columbia University Press), 57-85.

operation is reinforced by religious and ritual solidarities. The intimate linkages between economic requirements and domestic social organization give rise to the pooling of labor and the allocation of labor by household units. In south China, especially Guangdong and Fujian, localized lineages elaborated principles of Chinese kinship and were central features of rural social structure. Administrative change and political leadership after the formation of the People's Republic of China compromised well-understood methods of family and kinship organization. The active administrative interventions from the cooperative movement in the early 1950s up to the formal demise of the commune system in 1983 disrupted traditional methods of household economic organization. Control over decision making by households for the three decades after land reform was lost, not to world economic forces, but to a bureaucratic state and its intervention.^[2] Lineage organization in south China was compromised by land reform and was thereafter ideologically suspect.

This chapter will examine aspects of the characteristics of Chinese households and kin groups in rural areas of the Pearl River delta in Guangdong province in the mid-1980s. The Pearl River delta is a distinctive and well-described cultural setting for Chinese households and kin groups. The economic transformations as a consequence of policy initiatives since 1979 have been substantial in all the coastal provinces of China. They have been especially marked in Guangdong and the Pearl River delta.^[3] The Pearl River delta, more than any other region of China, has become firmly incorporated into the global economy and has assumed a particular role in the new international division of labor.^[4] Major rural economic change has occurred as a consequence of incorporation into the world system. There has been a shift from a relatively insulated, state-dominated economic system to one that is open to outside influence, one in which rural households and the communities of which they form part have assumed, or reassumed, control over production activities. Peasant households in the Pearl River delta have responded with alacrity to opportunities in the wake of reform. In certain regions of the Pearl River delta, and especially those where the Overseas Chinese presence is marked, lineages have been revived and elaborated.

[2] The broad dimensions of the process are most provocatively explored by Vivienne Shue in The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). Some of Shue's arguments are also explored in Helen Siu, Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), which are placed in the historical context of developments in Xinhui in the Pearl River delta. See especially 189-211.

[3] E. Vogel, One Step Ahead in China: Guangdong under Reform (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).

[4] David Thorns, "The New International Division of Labor and Urban Change: A New Zealand Case Study," in Pacific Rim Cities in the World Economy , ed. M. P. Smith, 68-101 (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1989).

Within Third World rural development, the critical social stratum is the peasantry. The sociology of the peasantry is not part of an extensive literature and has assumed major significance only in the modern period.^[5] The analysis of the role of Chinese peasants in development is compounded by three decades of policies that were formulated to create "purposive change."^[6] The best-documented accounts of the transformation of traditional peasantries, and yet ones that have become subject to considerable controversy, are European examples.^[7] The transformation of the peasants of European Russia constitute one example directly comparable to the Chinese case, in which their "awkward" character has been clearly demonstrated.^[8]

The issues in the transformation of Asian peasantries have been explored in the debate between Scott and Popkin.^[9] How peasants react to their incorporation into the world-system is a critical question raised by those discussions. Scott has most recently provided a finely worked case study,^[10] which has gone some way in meeting Keyes's comment that "theories . . . can shape significant questions but answers to those questions if they are to be good answers must take into account not only objective conditions that constrain social action but also the historically situated 'social space' within which action actually occurs."^[11]

Households and the communities of which they are a part are key elements in the "social space" of a peasant social stratum. It is a generally held view that peasant households are adept at meeting threats to the integrity of their basic cultural structures. Peasant households can be

[5] Eric Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1965), remains one of the best general statements. See also his "The Vicissitudes of the Closed Corporate Peasant Community," American Ethnologist 13 (1986): 325-29.

[6] W. L. Parish and M. K. Whyte, Village and Family in Contemporary China (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1978), 8-15.

[7] See T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin, The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

[8] See T. Shanin, The Awkward Class: Political Sociology of a Peasantry in a Developing Society: Russia 1910-1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), and Robert Edelman, Proletarian Peasants: The Revolution of 1905 in Russia's Southwest (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987).

[9] James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); Samuel I. Popkin, The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). See also the provocative arguments in Daniel Little, Understanding Peasant China: Case Studies in the Philosophy of Social Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), and the study by Wan Hashim, Peasants Under Peripheral Capitalism (Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1988).

[10] James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Existence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). See also the examples in Forest D. Colburn (ed.), Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1989).

[11] Charles F. Keyes, "Peasant Strategies in Asian Societies: Moral and Rational Economic Approaches—A Symposium: Introduction," Journal of Asian Studies 42, no. 4 (August 1983): 754.

highly flexible in their responses to new economic and social opportunities. Equally, the communities that groups of peasant households form may become part of a collective strategy in the response to new opportunities implicit in incorporation into the world-system.

It is often assumed in the contemporary period that rural peoples are overwhelmed by the forces unleashed as a consequence of incorporation into the global economy.^[12] Instead of their becoming passive victims of world forces, a community-led response by these peoples to new economic opportunities may create protection against global forces that threaten to disrupt the delicate social fabric of rural areas. Such responses may reveal the resilience of long-established social units, not least family and kin groups, that major theoretical paradigms have argued are readily compromised by major economic transformation.^[13] Peasant kinship structures may not be weakened by new economic forms. On the contrary, they may become spatially more ramified to take advantage of new economic opportunities. Further, the arguments proposed by Skinner that markets and marketing create a major focus for Chinese peasant social existence are sustained as market areas themselves undergo a domestic renewal and form the major link with the global economy.^[14]

The Chinese Case, Guangdong and the Pearl River Delta

The rural sector has been a key element in China's development strategy. The record up to 1979, however, was an uneven one.^[15] In the thirty years after 1949 a collective approach to rural production was created in which the traditional link between peasant households and the cultivation of privately owned land was compromised, and a large state-organized planning apparatus intervened in the Chinese peasant economy.

In 1979 major changes in China's policies began in the countryside. Theories and practices of a thirty-year period were significantly modified. There was significant decentralization of responsibility for agricultural pro-

[12] Peter Worsley has described this as "the undoing of the peasantry." See his The Three Worlds: Culture and World Development (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1984), 61-167; see also William E. James, Seiji Naya, and Gerald M. Meier, Asian Development: Economic Success and Policy Lessons (San Francisco: International Center for Economic Growth, 1987), 157-90.

[13] See the arguments, for example, in Neil J. Smelser, "Mechanisms of Change and Adjustments to Change," in Industrialization and Society , ed. Bert F. Hoselitz and Wilbert E. Moore, 32-54 (Paris: UNESCO and Mouton, 1963).

[14] G. William Skinner, "Rural Marketing in China: Repression and Revival," China Quarterly , no. 103 (September 1985): 393-413.

[15] Nicholas Lardy, Agriculture in China's Modern Economic Development (London: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

duction, and peasant households once again became the focal point of the agricultural sector of the rural economy. After 1979 Chinese peasant households assumed major management responsibility over agricultural production, including both subsistence grain production and economic crops, which became increasingly subject to market forces. At the same time, rural development policy encouraged diversification of the rural economy and promoted a shift away from a central reliance on agricultural production.^[16]

While Chinese peasant households could contemplate new forms of (private sector) economic participation, the major transformation of local economies in some of China's regions was led by a dramatic growth in collectively managed enterprises, the lineal descendants of the commune and brigade industries, whose growth had been severely limited in the period before 1979. The formal demise of the system of the People's Communes is linked to "decollectivization" and the increased ability of peasant households to determine the allocation of household labor.^[17] It is nonetheless paralleled by an intense reorganization of local administration in which the entrepreneurial and business skills of local cadres have become more critical in their judgment of performance than political and ideological accomplishments, which had prevailed for much of the previous thirty years.

Community control of nonagricultural (and especially industrial) activities was vigorously pursued, which augmented household control over strictly agricultural production. Economic opportunity in nonagricultural production expanded throughout rural China and had major consequences for peasant households, which could deploy their members into an array of decidedly new economic activities. Major changes in China's rural development policies and their impact in a variety of regional contexts since 1979 have been extensively documented.^[18] The Pearl River delta in Guangdong has been favorably located to take advantage of new directions in policy.

Guangdong, located strategically along China's south coast, is a large province of substantial geographic, economic, and cultural diversity. Its economic core is the Pearl River delta, with Guangzhou as its regional center. The delta also contains Hong Kong and Macao and two of the three

[16] Jeffrey R. Taylor, "Rural Employment Trends and the Legacy of Surplus Labour, 1978-1986," China Quarterly , no. 116 (December 1988): 736-66.

[17] A point made by Vivienne Shue, "The Fate of the Commune," Modern China 10, no. 3 (July 1984): 259-83.

[18] See the essays in W. L. Parish, Chinese Rural Development: The Great Transformation (Armonk, N.Y.: Sharpe, 1985); K. Griffin (ed.), Institutional Reform and Economic Development in the Chinese Countryside (London: Macmillan, 1984); E. Perry and C. Wong, The Political Economy of Reform in Post-Mao China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 1-194; Robert F. Ash, "The Evolution of Agricultural Policy," China Quarterly , no. 116 (December 1988): 529-55; Jorgen Delman, Clemens S. Ostergaard, and Flemming Christiansen (eds.), Remaking Peasant China: Problems of Rural Development and Institutions at the Start of the 1990s (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1990).

Special Economic Zones (SEZ) that were located in Guangdong after the promulgation of the new "open door" policies in 1979. Outside the delta, the province is mountainous and therefore relatively poor, with inadequate communications and a pronounced ethnic diversity. Guangdong is one of China's great rural regions, ranking third in terms of the total value of rural production in 1988. Although deficient in grain production, it produces over 40 percent of China's sugarcane and is the largest producer of fruit, fish, and forest products. The province's heavy industrial base is relatively small, although it is an important center of light industry. Only Shanghai produces more sewing machines, and the province leads the nation in the production of electric fans. It is a major producer of bicycles, refined aluminum products, hand tractors, and certain food products, of which refined sugar is most significant. Since 1979 there have been sharp increases in the production of domestic appliances, electronic goods, and cameras. Overall economic growth rates have been especially marked since the middle of the 1980s. Guangdong has consistently attracted the bulk of China's foreign investment,^[19] which has had consequences for the province as a whole but which has been especially marked in the Pearl River delta.

Aggregate statistics for Guangdong province, although impressive, tend to mask the performance of the delta region which, since early 1985, has been designated an "open economic region" (jingji kaifang qu ).^[20] The delta region occupies a commanding position in the Guangdong provincial economy. With less than a fifth of the provincial population, it has built on its advantageous location, closely proximate to Hong Kong and, through it, to the world economy. Guangdong was unable to take full advantage of its long tradition of commercialized production before 1978 but, nonetheless, was the major provincial producer of cash crops such as fish, silk cocoons,

[19] Yang Dali, "Patterns of China's Regional Development Strategy," China Quarterly , no. 122 (June 1990): 248.

[20] The core of the delta is composed of the two "municipalities" (shi ) of Foshan and Jiangmen, which were created out of the former Foshan prefecture, in the early period of reform. The western part of the delta is composed of the four xian (Enping, Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui), from which the bulk of the North American Chinese population traces its ancestry, Doumen and Heshan; the central delta extends from Guangzhou south and includes Nanhai, Punyu, Shunde, and Zhongshan and also mountainous Gaoming and Sanshui. The eastern delta consists of Dongguan and Bao'an, adjacent to the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and Hong Kong. In 1987 the administrative definition of the "Open Economic Area" was expanded up the West River to include Zhaoqing shi , north of Guangzhou to include Huaxian and Conghua xian , and eastward to include much of what had formerly been Huiyang prefecture. Most of these new additions are not strictly delta, are mountainous and Hakka-speaking. They had begun to share in the prosperity of what is known as "the small delta," the original, essentially Cantonese-speaking, core. For a discussion of the "small" and "large" delta, see Guangdongsheng Nianjian 1989 (1989 Guangdong Yearbook), 252-53; 492; 496.

fruit, and vegetables. In the wake of rural reform its agricultural sector flourished under the newly liberalized policies. While sericulture in the central delta declined, the production of fish, fruit, and vegetables expanded dramatically, destined for the domestic market as well as Hong Kong and Macao. The major transformation in the rural sector, however, was not in agriculture. Rapid economic growth occurred as the rural sector shifted to nonagricultural production. Entrepreneurial energies were released in a flurry of industrial growth, concentrated, initially, in certain regions of the delta. The central delta from Guangzhou south to Macao and the Zhuhai Special Economic Zone and the eastern corridor to Hong Kong and the rapidly expanding Shenzhen area comprised the major areas of new economic activity. These developments were possible partly because national policy allowed the province considerable autonomy to pursue innovative measures to seek capital and to retain foreign exchange earnings. The delta was able to mobilize the extensive links it possessed with its expatriate kinsmen who live in Hong Kong, Macao, and overseas.

The entire delta has long been an area of out-migration. From the mid-nineteenth century large numbers of émigrés from south and southeast China met some of the developmental needs of the burgeoning global economy and worked as unskilled laborers in the Americas and in Southeast Asia. The western reaches of the delta have provided the great majority of Americans and Canadians of Chinese origin. Under different circumstances, a large number of delta residents left for Hong Kong in the late 1940s and 1950s, and many contributed to Hong Kong's economic transformation after 1950.

In the 1980s the entreprencurial skills and capital of these émigrés were actively sought. Kinship connections and local loyalties have become a central part of local development initiatives. In the process the delta has become firmly linked to the global economy through its Hong Kong connections. It has thus begun to share with other parts of East and Southeast Asia some of the developmental characteristics that McGee has described as the "desakota process," in which an intense mixture of agricultural and nonagricultural activities stretch along linear corridors between large city cores. The process typically occurs in regions characterized by high population densities and which were formerly dominated by wet rice agriculture.^[21] The Pearl River delta constitutes one of those regions.

[21] T. G. McGee, "Urbanasasi or Kotadesasi? Evolving Patterns of Urbanization in Asia," in Urbanization in Asia , ed. L. Ma, A. Noble, and A. Dutt, 93-108 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989); G. E. Johnson, "The Political Economy of Chinese Urbanization: Guangdong and the Pearl River Delta," in Urbanizing China , ed. Gregory Guldin, 185-220 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1992).

Map 5.1.
The Pearl River Delta

Research Sites

I have been examining the process of rural development within the Pearl River delta since the reforms began. Building on work begun in the 1970s,^[22] I have worked in five sites across the delta. I chose the sites in the 1970s, when each was administratively a commune, because each had some distinguishing characteristics. Duanfen, located in Taishan xian in the western delta, was a center of out-migration to North America. Leliu in Shunde xian , in the central delta, had a distinctive cash-cropping economy and possessed some unique cultural characteristics.^[23] Luogang and Renhe are close to Guangzhou, located in Baiyun qu (formerly the "suburban district"). Although Luogang is mountainous, it is notable for fruit production. Renhe, to the north, was a grain specialist area, known for its radical political character in the Cultural Revolution and coincidentally a major source of migration to Canada. Fucheng, in Dongguan shi (formerly, xian ) is a major source of migrants to Hong Kong, where I had worked in the 1960s.^[24]

The economies of the five units and the villages that compose them have changed substantially since reform got under way in 1979.^[25] One index of the change and the broadly successful response to the reform initiatives that they have enjoyed is substantial growth in per capita income (table 5.1). The opportunities for economic transformation are a consequence of internal factors, of which the indigenous economy and leadership are key, and location. Since initiation of the reforms linkages with expatriates in Hong Kong or Macao or in Overseas Chinese communities have become of increasing importance.

[22] Elizabeth and Graham Johnson, Walking on Two Legs: Rural Development in South China (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 1976).

[23] The distinctive ecological features of Shunde (and of Leliu in particular) are described in Kenneth Ruddle and Zhong Gongfu, Integrated Agriculture-Aquaculture in South China: The Dyke-Pond System of the Zhujiang Delta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

[24] For much of the 1980s I interviewed cadres at a variety of administrative levels associated with the units. In the summer of 1986 I selected five villages from among the units, based on my general knowledge of them. Using the household records I drew random samples of village households and administered a standard questionnaire. Much of the information that follows comes from this survey. The survey was funded by a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences gave me every assistance. In Guangdong I was greatly helped by the Guangdong Academy of Social Science and by the Department of Sociology at Zhongshan (Sun Yat-sen) University. I express my thanks to Li Ruichang and Chen Daojin and to Professor He Zhaofa. Mr. Tan Xiaobing assisted me in collecting the survey data and doing a great deal of coding, data cleaning, and analysis in Canada. His efforts are greatly appreciated.

[25] Some general findings are indicated in the following: G. E. Johnson, "The Production Responsibility System in Chinese Agriculture: Some Examples from Guangdong," Pacific Affairs 55, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 430-52; "1997 and After: Will Hong Kong Survive? A Personal View," Pacific Affairs 59, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 237-54; "Rural Transformation in South China? Views from the Locality," Revue Européene des Sciences Sociales 27, no. 84 (1989): 191-226.

Duanfen, located in southern Taishan, has benefited the least of the five units from the opportunities of the reform period. It is distant from Guangzhou and Hong Kong and its prospects for growth and development were, until recently, hampered by inadequate communications. As an Overseas Chinese area it suffered disabilities from almost the moment of its incorporation into the People's Republic of China. The overseas connections and linkages were political liabilities for much of the three decades from 1949 to 1979, which were especially marked during the period of the Cultural Revolution. It remained a subsistence economy with a substantial dependence on remittances from abroad. Per capita income in the middle 1970s was below a hundred yuan.

After 1979 the overseas linkages were viewed in a positive light, and many of the harsh political judgments that had colored local policy options were reversed. Although the economy has remained agricultural and firmly based on grain production, its base has diversified. Cash crops, such as fruit and sugarcane and the raising of poultry, have become widespread. Duanfen has prospered since reform, but its incorporation into the world-system has not occurred on the same scale as other units in central and eastern portions of the Pearl River delta. The question is partly one of location but also one of the particular nature of Duanfen's linkages to the global economy.

Leliu lies in Shunde in the central region of the delta. It enjoyed a distinctive economy based on fish farming and silkworm cultivation. There are no rice paddies in Leliu, and its commercialized (and export-oriented) agricultural production allowed its peasant cultivators to enjoy relative prosperity even before the reform period. It was an area of extensive out-migration to Hong Kong before 1949, and the linkages with its expatriates were vitalized in the wake of reform. A young and dynamic leadership sought to in-

volve the entrepreneurial energies of Hong Kong in its economic transformation. Its agricultural economy, especially fish farming, has remained buoyant, although sericulture has been eliminated as a consequence of pollution and low prices for cocoons. Dramatic growth in nonagricultural production has overwhelmed its agriculture. The market towns of Shunde have become the centers of light industrial production, which has allowed its households to enjoy the highest per capita incomes in rural China.

Luogang is located off the main highway that links Guangzhou to eastern Guangdong at the eastern edge of Baiyun qu of Guangzhou municipality.^[26] Formerly part of Panyu xian , it has a long history of specialization in fruit production. Changes in pricing policies and release from the highly bureaucratized purchase and supply of fruit has allowed peasant cultivators to increase household income. The region did not have a history of extensive out-migration, and the local economy has seen no growth in its small-enterprise sector since the reform period began. Its villages remain firmly agricultural, although their proximity to major markets (and especially Guangzhou) has allowed them to take full advantage of its new commercial opportunities and profit from high prices paid to fruit growers. Grain production remains important. Proximity to centers of labor demand (especially in construction) has allowed members of peasant households to seek employment opportunities outside agriculture.

Renhe is located at the northern edge of Baiyun qu . The large and dense population is largely engaged in grain production. Renhe lies beyond the zone of intense vegetable cultivation that has developed to meet the needs of the Guangzhou market, and has relatively little involvement in cash-cropping, although it has had some success in raising poultry. Outmigration was substantial in the past, and there are significant numbers of its natives overseas and in Hong Kong. Its industrial capacity at the zhen , village, and individual levels has grown since the reform period, often in cooperation with Hong Kong entrepreneurial interests. Yet, the degree of Renhe's incorporation into the broader economy of the delta is less extensive than that of other units in the central delta or of those closer to Guangzhou or Hong Kong. The capacity of the local economy to absorb surplus labor is limited. Large numbers of men, especially those under forty years of age, have left the area to seek work in Guangzhou and elsewhere in the delta, leaving the management of the agricultural economy in the hands of women and older men.

Fucheng extends in a wedge to the south and east from Dongguan city. The economic growth of Dongguan since the reform period got under way has been remarkable. Fucheng has fully shared in the transformation of the

[26] For a broad account of Baiyun qu (formerly the "suburban district"), see Guangzhou Nianjian 1989 (Guangzhou Yearbook) (Guangzhou: Wenhua chubanshe, 1989), 487-89.

entire shi .^[27] Dongguan has benefited from its close proximity to the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ) and Hong Kong. It has fully utilized investment resources and skills of its expatriates in Hong Kong who have provided much of the capital for an extensive array of enterprises, both industrial and agricultural, which have transformed the rural economy of Dongguan. Fucheng has over four hundred enterprises, whose foreign exchange earnings in 1987 were over $HK50 million. They include plastics, garment manufacture, electronics, and toys, virtually all destined for the would market as subsidiaries of Hong Kong-based manufacturers; they also include large shipments of vegetables for the Hong Kong markets and fruit for both Hong Kong and domestic markets throughout China.

The five units are broadly representative of the Pearl River delta. They extend across the delta, representing differing production regimes, which are historically determined but also a consequence of different leadership strategies and different developmental possibilities in the wake of rural reform after 1979. The villages within the five units and their constituent households have responded with alacrity to the new possibilities. I will first outline the consequences for peasant households in general and then discuss peasant household strategies in the central and eastern delta (what Vogel calls "the inner delta").^[28] I will finally give an account of household strategies in the distinctive western reaches of the delta, in which overseas-Chinese connections are a dominant characteristic.

Pearl River Delta Households: A Descriptive Profile

Households in the sample population had a mean size of 5.1, not dramatically different from household size in other national rural samples in the 1980s,^[29] from the 1970s estimate of 5.0 for Guangdong by Parish and Whyte,^[30] or from the 1930s figure for Guangdong of 5.2.^[31] Household size ranged from single individuals to an enormous household of 26. There were

[27] The performance of Dongguan is detailed in Zhonggong Zhongyang Bangongting, Dongguan Shi'nian: 1979-1988 (Dongguan Ten Years: 1979-1988) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1989). Fucheng's performance is detailed at pp. 219-20.

[28] Ezra Vogel, "Guangdong's Dynamic Inner Delta," China Business Review , September-October 1989, 56-62.

[29] Household size from a national sample of rural households in 1986 was 5.07, cited in Zhongguo Tongji Nianjian 1988 (Statistical Yearbook of China 1988) (Beijing: Zhongguo tongji chubanshe, 1989), 822; Guangdong samples indicate a decline from 5.74 in 1978 to 5.12 in 1985, cited in Guangdong Tongji Nianjian 1988 (Statistical Yearbook of Guangdong 1988) (Beijing: Zhongguo tongji chubanshe, 1989), 415.

[30] Parish and Whyte, Family and Village , 134.

[31] Irene B. Taeuber, "The Families of Chinese Farmers," in Family and Kinship in Chinese Society , ed. M. Freedman, 71 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970).

26 single-person households (5.0 per cent), 18 (older) women and 8 men. The modal household as in the 1970s was nuclear in structure. There were relatively few joint households, though a large number of stem or broken stem households (table 5.2). Family relationships in the sample of households are similar to the patterns detailed by Parish and Whyte in their study of Lingnan villages in the 1970s (table 5.3).

Certain kinds of household relationships that existed in the past—and were familiar in the studies of household and family in the peripheries of Hong Kong and Taiwan in the 1960s^[32] —either are nonexistent in the contemporary period or are extremely rare. Polygyny became illegal in 1950 as a result of the Marriage Law, and its economic possibility was compromised by land reform and later collectivization. Plural wives are a characteristic of the past. "Minor" forms of marriage, such as "small daughters-in-law," once common throughout the delta, become impossible in the context of a legally enforceable age of marriage,^[33] and certainly the logic for most forms of minor marriage is less compelling than in the pre-Liberation context.^[34] Households are no smaller than they were in the past, although they were likely to be somewhat larger in the late 1970s, but they are less complex. There are fewer members of senior generations than there were in the past, and there is an almost total absence of father's brothers and father's brothers' wives. Similarly, there are only few siblings (and their wives) and a virtual absence of kin outside direct lines of descent.^[35]

One of the more obvious elements of continuity is patrilocal marriage.^[36] The dominant form of postmarital residence is firmly patrilocal. A close adherence to well-defined areas from which to draw brides is clearly appar-

[32] Summarized most effectively in Maurice Freedman, Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung (London: Athlone Press, 1966), which inspired the first generation of anthropological fieldwork in Chinese settings after the formation of the People's Republic of China.

[33] This is not to suggest that all unions occur only upon the assumption of legal age. There are ways that socially recognized marriages can occur regardless of formal legality. See Parish and Whyte, Village and Family , 164-66.

[34] See, for example, the arguments in James P. McGough, "The Domestic Mode of Production and Peasant Social Organization: The Chinese Case," in Chayanov, Peasants and Economic Anthropology , ed. E. Paul Durrenberger, 183-201 (Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press, 1984).

[35] There is a virtual absence of unrelated kin. There was one (legal) household of unrelated men (in the Shunde village). The villages did contain substantial numbers of individuals who were unrelated by either kinship or marriage to the indigenous people of the villages. They were not living in legal households with formal registrations. I could not discover any way to interview such individuals, who generally appeared to be non-Cantonese-speaking males working as day laborers. The situation had changed by the end of the decade when non-Cantonese-speaking households began to contract land for two- and three-year periods and build houses and small hamlets in styles distinct from those of the indigenous delta villages.

[36] It is not easy in survey situations to distinguish minor marriage or distinctive local customs. Divorce appears to be very low. The three cases of divorce in Naamshui (Leliu, Shunde) were sought by men from women who had refused to consummate their marriages and move from their natal households. See Janice Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), for a discussion of marriage patterns in Shunde, which were anything but "major." In the Leliu village of Naamshui I also came across a household headed by an unmarried sister well past marriage age, who was keeping house for her younger brothers, had engaged special tutors for them, encouraged them to study hard, and was delighted to find two of them at university. The commitment of Shunde women to their natal homes is a very strong one.

ent. Village endogamy is uncommon in all but the large multiple-surname village of Wantong in Dongguan. The marriage area may be somewhat more tightly drawn than in a previous generation. More spouses and daughters-in-law tend to be from the same xiang than are mothers. The most common provenance for wives is within the bounds of the production unit (the former commune, now typically called zhen ) and rarely extends beyond the adjacent administrative entity (table 5.4).

The coincidence between former commune boundaries and standard markets was very close.^[37] Marriage relations were most intense within the bounds of the market area. It was a pattern reinforced by administrative practice during the commune period and has not been compromised by new administrative arrangements, which in the Pearl River delta have seen few shifts in administrative boundaries, although much confusion in changes of name.^[38] Administrative and other changes in the 1980s have only reinforced traditional boundaries that have salience for rural households.

[37] This was first detailed in G. W. Skinner, "Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China: Part III," Journal of Asian Studies 24, no. 3 (May 1965): 363-99.

[38] Rural Guangdong has a distinctive administrative structure, which is a consequence of its particular characteristics and historical developments. The basic unit of local government is called the zhen (market town) and is equivalent to the former commune. The former brigade, which was based on the pre-Liberation xiang (village alliance) became a unit of government for only a brief period in the mid-1980s and paralleled the creation of "township governments" (xiang zhengfu ) in most other Chinese provinces. It is now officially referred to as the "village" (cun ). The former production team, which may have formed a natural village or a village neighborhood during the commune period, is called the "village small group" (cun xiaozu ).

Marriage is central to family continuity. The patrilocal system of marriage has been little affected by the dramatic changes of forty years. Brides are sought from other villages, which have tended over a long period of time to be linked in a system of bridal exchange. Administrative practice during the commune period likely contained and intensified the long-established system of marriage exchange. The renewal of the system of periodic markets has only reinforced the long-established contexts within which marriage occurs. To be sure, marriage is no longer "blind," and individuals have choice in the matter of whom they will marry. The decision to marry, nonetheless, occurs as part of clearly understood family consequences and is arranged in consultation with members of the kin group. Go-betweens make connections between families with eligible children. Their provenance is the area served by the periodic market, and their sphere of operation is the market town on market day.^[39]

Demographic changes over the past forty years have had some major significance for rural household structure. Infant mortality rates have fallen progressively since the 1950s and especially after the Great Leap Forward.^[40] Hence, rural households have more surviving children than was the case for rural households in the republican period. This likely has had effects for adoptions and other forms of incorporation into the household of individuals outside the direct line of patrilineal descent.^[41]

There are more female heads of household (16.9 percent) than at earlier periods. If single-person households are excluded (the majority of these are elderly widows) the proportion of households headed by women is 14.1 percent. There is some regional variation. In the Overseas Chinese areas, households are much more likely to be headed by women. Women are least likely to head households in the two wealthy areas of Shunde and Dongguan.

The incidence of (recent) household division is substantial. While 30.0 percent of households remain undivided, 41.2 percent have divided since the beginning of reform. Households are most likely to have remained undivided in the Overseas-Chinese-dominated village of Kongluen in Duan-

[39] Margery Wolf makes similar arguments. See her Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 167-68.

[40] Judith Bannister, China's Changing Population (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 103-20.

[41] Parish and Whyte, Family and Village , 136, reported a virtual absence of adopted sons (except among households headed by women) and an absence of adopted daughters and "small daughters-in-law." This is also the observation of Sulamith H. Potter and Jack M. Potter, China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). They note in the Dongguan village where they worked, which is adjacent to the one I surveyed, but in a different administrative unit, that "adoptions are rare" (220).

fen (Taishan). Division has been most marked in the fruit-growing village of Tsimkong in Luogang, Guangzhou. It was also high in Wantong in Fucheng (Dongguan) as the reform period got under way. I will offer an explanation below.

The past four decades have been characterized by dramatic shifts in economic and political organization in rural China. Rural households in the Pearl River delta are caught up in late-twentieth-century change. Although the context has changed, household structure at first appears to be characterized by continuities. Households are not immune to what occurs beyond their bounds. Change is, however, kept at arms length, and peasant families have devised strategies to deal with the economic and political threats to their integrity. The patrilineally structured rural household has not merely maintained its corporate character but has also used its intrinsic flexibility to meet new possibilities in the 1980s.

Changing Economic Characteristics of Households

The elaboration of the global economy and the creation of a new international division of labor has had sometimes catastrophic consequences for economic management by peasant households. There is a general assumption that in the twentieth century rural cultivators (peasants) have become less able to meet their own (or local) needs as their production activities become overwhelmed by the need to meet the demands of markets they do not control and participate in only indirectly.^[42] As rural production becomes increasingly capitalized and incorporated into the world-system, nonsubsistence production and wage labor become increasingly important. Maclachlan has commented on the consequences of global economic change for rural households in the Third World. He has noted:

In most cases of the capitalization of the countryside, the grounds for divorcing the needs of all or part of the peasantry from production decisions depend upon the character of intruding market forces, while the settlement, the division of costs and benefits, depends heavily on property institutions which prevail at the time of divorce. The role of judge in the whole process is played by government policy. . . . It makes a great deal of difference whether the agricultural sector is commercialized to produce export crops, or whether it is used to provide food and a source of labor for an urban industrial sector. It also makes a great deal of difference whether land tenure features powerful landlords or freeholding peasants. And it likewise makes a difference to know

[42] This is an explicit part of the argument in Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), esp. 276-302.

if a government's chief aim is the acquisition of foreign exchange, or import substitution, or the feeding of its people.^[43]

The economic responses of peasant households in the Pearl River delta to the domestic and international pressures to which they have become subject in the 1980s are varied. There would seem to be three broad responses for those households that are economically active: (1) to remain in essentially subsistence production; (2) to become predominantly cash-cropping households; (3) to endeavor to place one or more members of the household in nonagricultural production. Peasant households will therefore fall into the following categories: subsistence, cash-cropping, multisector. The three types of economic households are to be found in all the villages I surveyed. Given the characteristics of the Pearl River delta, it would be expected that households engaged in other than subsistence production will be most numerous. The region has a highly commercialized agricultural sector, and the growth of the rural-enterprise sector has been marked in the 1980s. Table 5.5 indicates the distribution of household types, classified by their production orientations, in the five villages I surveyed.

Characteristics such as traditions of local production and location are important elements in determining why a village and its constituent households will likely shift from a subsistence to a nonsubsistence orientation. Given policy shifts, the cash-cropping tendencies of villages with well-established traditions of commercial production are intensified, and the proportions of cash-cropping households will therefore likely increase. Similarly, villages close to urban settlements will be subject to more extensive flows of information and capital, and both cash-cropping and multisectoral

[43] Morgan D. Maclachlan, "From Intensification to Proletarianization," in Household Economies and Their Transformation , ed. M. D. Maclachlan, 15 (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987).

households will be greater. Finally, political leadership, the ability of leaders to establish connections and create entrepreneurial opportunities (for village- and community-based enterprise), will have consequences for economic diversification, a feature of rural development throughout rural China during the reform period.^[44]

Both the size of household and its internal structure, in particular the number of adults, have consequences for labor-force attributes and the ability of households to meet productive goals. The resources a household has, such as the amount of land or available capital, determine the ability to expand productive horizons. Social (class) status and the assumption of administrative or political roles, as cadre or Party member, by household members can augment the ability of households to respond to the changing economic and social options.

Chayanov argued that peasants were adept at devising coping strategies and could utilize control over the deployment of household labor to meet new opportunities. Opportunity for Chinese peasant households was substantially restricted under conditions where collective structures took the major decisions for labor allocation. In the reform period, the devolution of responsibility for production decisions generated greater flexibility and greater possibilities to deploy household resources. If land parcels become small and the number of adults is large, households may pursue a strategy of moving some of their members into other sectors and, if it seems essential and possible, away from the local economy and into economic niches elsewhere.^[45]

The capacities of peasant households to create strategies to meet (changing) economic and political challenges will be determined by internal and external factors of the kind outlined above. In the wake of reform policies, opportunities for delta peasant households have varied from locality to locality. The reform process has turned on "openness," and the external connections that villages possess have had a critical kinship dimension. The presence or absence of kinsmen outside of the village and the broad communities that villages form have been decisive for the development process in general and the kinds of strategies that village households have adopted. Kinsmen have become sources of investment and entrepreneurial skill. Yet, it is important to distinguish between the effects of kinsmen who are resi-

[44] Jean Oi, State and Peasant in Contemporary China (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989).

[45] The very largest household in my sample had seven marital units: parents, five married sons, and a married grandson. In addition to contracting fishponds and cane lands in the natal village, the family corporation had contracted fishponds in the adjacent zhen , had further contracted fishponds in Dongguan, 100 kilometres away, and had assumed management responsibility over a brick kiln in Shaoguan, in northern Guangdong. Family income was in excess of 40,000 yuan in 1985.

dent in Hong Kong or Macao and those who are Overseas Chinese. Unquestionably, the areas in the western delta have benefited from extensive Overseas Chinese linkages. The substantial (and growing) funds that have flowed into the region from North America and elsewhere have been channeled, however, into projects such as roads, bridges, and public buildings, of which schools and hospitals are most common. Investment funds and entrepreneurial energies that have derived from Hong Kong and Macao, by contrast, have been directed toward the creation of productive enterprises and have had a major and direct effect on local systems of production. The consequences for household strategies in the eastern and central delta, where the presence of kinsmen based in Hong Kong and Macao is proportionally large, can be readily contrasted with those in the western delta, where the proportion of Overseas Chinese kinsmen and Overseas Chinese households is larger. Fundamental economic change, as a consequence of the entrepreneurial activities of Hong Kong—based kinsmen, has been greater in the central and eastern delta. The greater the degree of incorporation into the global economy, the greater will be the effect on household strategies and the greater the implications for changes in household structure. The extent of change will vary from village to village, depending on the extent and nature of the expatriate involvement in the local economy. The corporate kinship structures of the delta are the buffers that allow a highly flexible response to the dramatic possibilities of the reform period.

The Central and Eastern Delta: Hong Kong Connections

The central and eastern delta areas have been most advantageously located in the 1980s to take advantage of new policy options. The region was historically highly commercialized and open to a variety of external linkages. The assumptions of development policy for much of the thirty years after 1949 compromised the operation of local economies, which turned inward under intense pressure from the Chinese state.^[46] Peasant resistance was substantial, but the degrees of maneuverability were highly constrained.^[47] The possibilities for household economic behavior changed dramatically after 1979.

[46] Helen Siu, Agents and Victims , decribes the consequence of state policies from the 1950s for citrus and fan-palm production in Xinhui. Xinhui is on the highly commercialized eastern edge of the western delta. Her field sites are in and around the xian city. The arguments that she makes for Huancheng can be appropriately made for much of the central and eastern delta. Even where cash-cropping was extensive, its development was compromised by the emasculation of peasant marketing after 1956, and especially after the Great Leap Forward.

[47] See David Zweig, "Struggling Over Land in China: Peasant Resistance After Collectivization, 1966-1986," in Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance , ed. Forrest D. Colburn, esp. 153-62 for an account of peasant resistance to collectivist policies in the Lower Yangzi region.

The large multisurname village of Wantong in Fucheng, Dongguan, which had been a brigade during the commune period, responded with alacrity to the changed circumstances after 1979. It had responded well to collectivization, and a dynamic and highly respected leadership had organized major land reclamation during the Great Leap Forward, which resulted in high grain yields and relatively high per capita incomes even before 1979. Its Party secretary was transferred to the commune level shortly before the reforms got under way. Working closely with a xian leadership committed to exploring new economic relationships, he argued for mobilization of the capital and entrepreneurial resources among the substantial number of expatriates in Hong Kong. The success has been dramatic. It was helped by its proximity to the growing Shenzhen SEZ and the dramatic improvement in road communications with Hong Kong.

The consequences of local economic transformation have been major. There has been little mobility of local labor away from Fucheng as the village economies have intensified.^[48] Only 34 percent of the indigenous labor force is engaged strictly in household-managed agricultural production. The rest works in enterprises, the bulk of which are run by the village as collective entities. There is no single lineage base to the village (as in neighboring Zengbu),^[49] but there is an intense local loyalty, a loyalty that was furthered during the period of intense agricultural collectivism in the 1960s and the 1970s. It has been heightened with the extensive involvement of Hong Kong—based expatriates in the village economy in the 1980s. The links to the global economy are direct. Much of the production of the village-run enterprises, such as garments and plastics, is destined for Hong Kong and for reexport to Europe and North America. Not all the village-run enterprises are industrial. Vegetables are cultivated year round for the Hong Kong market by an enterprise that works jointly with a Hong Kong—based expatriate; it employs wage workers, the bulk of whom are villagers. The local economy is thus closely integrated with the world-system through Hong Kong.

The consequences for village households are various. In terms of economic strategies, none of the economically active households are engaged in subsistence production, and most are multisector households. Rapid economic advance has given rise to increased demand for household division, hence the number of nuclear households is higher than in all other villages,

[48] On the contrary, growth in the number of enterprises in the zhen as a whole (there were 346 enterprises in 1987, of which 118 were wholly engaged in the processing of materials for the international market [wailai jiagong ]) has resulted in the recruitment of several thousand workers from outside the area, many of whom are not Cantonese speakers.

[49] See Potter and Potter, China's Peasants , esp. 251-69. Zengbu is across the river from Wantong, the village I surveyed in Fucheng, and draws the bulk of its brides from the village.

except for the fruit-growing village of Tsimkong (in Luogang), where rapid economic growth has also been marked.^[50]

Management of the household (dangjia ) is least likely to be in the hands of the household head (40.3 percent) than in the other sample villages and is almost as frequently (38.7 percent) in the hands of the spouse of the head. There are proportionately fewer female household heads in Wantong than in the other villages. Women in south China have long been noted for a high degree of economic independence. It is tempting to conclude that increased economic participation of Wantong women in wage labor has enhanced their importance as family managers. There is a common argument that women are increasingly marginalized as incorporation into the global economy grows.^[51] The impact of incorporation into the world-system has been very dramatic for Wantong. It has not been at the expense of marginalizing women indigenous to the area.^[52]

The fruit-growing village of Tsimkong (in Luogang) has prospered in the reform period but not as a consequence of global incorporation. Its major comparative advantage is a long history of growing fruit (oranges, lichee, and pineapple). Reform of the price system and the resurgence of private marketing have caused rapid increases in household income. Household economic strategy is less elaborate than in Wantong; it involves maximum allocation of household labor in highly commercialized agricultural production. There are only a few multisector households and none involved in subsistence production. There is little out-migration and a virtual absence of kin abroad or in Hong Kong or Macao. Household division in the wake of heightened economic opportunities has been marked, and the number of nuclear households is proportionately large. Household management, however, is typically in the hands of (male) household heads who both allocate household labor and retain control over its financial resources. The intensification of agricultural-sector activities, driven as they are by domestic

[50] Margery Wolf, Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China , discusses the issues of household division based on observations she made throughout China in the early 1980s, which, given earlier work in rural Taiwan, are instructive. See esp. 224-26.

[51] The "classic" study is Esther Boserup, Women's Role in Economic Development (London: Allen and Unwin, 1970); Lourdes Beneria and Gita Sen, "Class and Gender Inequalities and Women's Role in Economic Development: Theoretical and Practical Implications," Feminist Studies 8, no. 1: 157-74; Also, J. C. Robinson, "Of Women and Washing Machines: Employment, Housework and the Reproduction of Motherhood in Socialist China," China Quarterly , no. 101 (March 1985): 32-57.

[52] The same cannot be said of wage-workers who are recruited from outside the area. Large numbers of young unmarried females have been recruited to work in the Fucheng enterprises. They are paid well by local Chinese standards, and their accommodation, though spartan, is adequate. They are provided with subsidized food and have access to modest medical services. They are simply wage-workers. They do not participate in management or decision making. It is expected that they will return to their native places when they reach marriageable age.

market demands, seems to have done little to enhance roles for women in the household.

The other two villages in the eastern and central delta are different. Naamshui is less involved in the economic transformation of Leliu than other villages in the zhen . There has been a persistent inability, however, to develop industrial enterprises and thereby diversify the village economy. As a consequence, a large portion of the labor force remains in agricultural production, but significant numbers (40 percent), and most of the men under forty, have left the village and often Leliu itself. They work as carpenters, decorators, and temporary workers in construction and in commerce and transportation. They regularly return to the village, but they have no continuing role in village-based production activities. The village agricultural economy is dominated by women, despite the demise of sericulture, and by older men who have contracted fishponds, either individually or (which is more common) in cooperation with men from other households.

Village households make a steady living, if not spectacular by local standards (per capita income is about 1,100 yuan, slightly below the level of the zhen ). One reason for the failure to diversify the village economy is that it is in a remote corner of the zhen . Its Hong Kong expatriates are few in number, and the village lacks the "connections" (guanxi ) that have been so critical for the success of other villages in Shunde. There is an intense village solidarity, and the organization of production does not differ dramatically from its practice in the 1960s and 1970s. Fish production is organized about cooperative principles, and income from the contracted fishponds is distributed (fen hong ) on an annual basis. The collective health care system works well, there are pensions, and only two "five-guarantee" households.^[53]

Household economic strategy is to maximize opportunities in the cash-cropping skills that Naamshui has long developed, while placing its younger male members outside the village economy. Household division has been less pronounced than in other villages, which have experienced more dramatic internal change in the 1980s. Leliu has the fewest nuclear households and rather more stem households (35 percent) than others in the sample villages in the central and eastern delta. Household management is disproportionately in the hands of household heads, and only 7.2 percent of spouses assume these duties. It has the largest proportion of households with unusual structures, including a "collective" household of men, two headed by older unmarried women who keep house for their (as yet unmarried) brothers, and the only case in the sample of a household in

[53] Five-guarantee households are those (normally elderly) with insufficient family resources to provide food, clothing, shelter, medical care, and a burial, which are provided (guaranteed) by the collective.

which the wife of the head is working elsewhere. Shunde in the past was distinguished by unusual domestic arrangements, of which delayed-transfer marriage was the most notable. Such distinctive practices are still clearly discernible.^[54]

Ngawu, in Renhe, has also changed less dramatically than some other villages in the delta. It, too, is firmly agricultural and has only a small enterprise sector. A significant proportion of its (male) labor force is working outside the village. Ngawu has large numbers of expatriates abroad. They are, however, Overseas Chinese, many resident in Canada. The impact of Overseas Chinese kinsmen on local economies is distinctive and does not translate into economic transformation of the kind experienced in those parts of the delta where Hong Kong expatriates are numerous. There is a further complication in Renhe: it is a grain area with little commercialized crop production; it is too far away from the Guangzhou market to develop fully a specialization in vegetables; its local leadership also had many reservations about the responsibility system and was very tardy with its implementation.

Ngawu has not been able to capitalize on the opportunities to transform its system of production. A large proportion of the households remain in subsistence production. Household strategy therefore relies heavily on meeting basic grain requirements and in placing household members in nonagricultural production outside the village to augment household income. Only a few village households have members working in the zhen -managed enterprises, and there are only a few enterprises at the village level to absorb local surplus labor. The out-migration of household labor is therefore substantial but predominantly male.

Household division is not marked, and household structure reflects patterns that may have been more typical of a previous generation.^[55] Ngawu has the largest proportion of joint households (9.0 percent) and also the lowest proportion of isolates (7.0 percent). Perhaps because of the frequent absence of household heads, there are relatively more spouses (21.1 percent) or individuals other than the head or spouse of the head (15.8 percent) who assume the role of household manager. The village economy has not been affected by incorporation into the global economy. Out-migration was important in the past as substantial numbers went abroad. Its émigrés,

[54] The distinctive marriage system, which many attribute to its underlying economic base, is outlined in Janice Stockard, Daughters of the Canton Delta , esp. 1-30 and 134-66. See chapter 7 in this volume, by Helen Siu, which deals with this form of marriage and its implications in adjacent Zhongshan.

[55] A 1930s study in the delta indicates rather more complex households (63 percent) and fewer isolates (3 percent) than appears to be the case in the contemporary period. See Lewis S. C. Smythe, "The Composition of the Chinese Family," Chin-ling Hsueh-pao 5, no. 1 (1935), cited in Parish and Whyte, Family and Village , 134.

however, have had little effect on village economic change in the contemporary period. Out-migration, on a temporary basis, is still important as household members find work in the burgeoning economy of the delta. They remain involved in household economic tasks and return at periods of heavy seasonal labor demands in their household responsibility fields. Their contribution of labor and earnings from outside employment is important for the well-being of village households. New economic opportunities appear to have no major effects on household structure in Ngawu.

The Western Delta: The Overseas Chinese Connection

Finally, I want to discuss some of the features of the distinctive western delta, the homeland of North Americans of Chinese origin.^[56] Overseas Chinese have always been deeply conscious of their membership in elaborate kin groups and have remained fiercely loyal to their ancestral points of origin. Chinese communities abroad were constructed, in the past at least, about a set of organizations that had at their core principles of fictive kinship (family or surname associations) or common origin. It is the loyalty to ancestral points of origin on the part of expatriates that calls forth a willingness, even after decades abroad, to donate to homeland projects. It is this understanding that has been so important for local leadership in production units in the Pearl River delta to encourage the involvement of its expatriates in local economic development in the 1980s.

The great majority of households in Duanfen have relatives overseas. They are described as "Overseas Chinese dependents" (qiaojuan ). A small proportion of households do not have kinsmen abroad. Among the qiaojuan households there are those whose kinsmen abroad are distant and others who have close kinsmen with a direct relationship, either through marriage or descent, such as husbands, wives, parents, or children. The closeness of relationships will determine the amount of support that relatives abroad will provide and, in the modern period, the likelihood of obtaining an immigration visa and the possibility of joining kinsmen abroad. In the western delta in the 1980s, family and kinship loyalty has resulted in the creation of distinct household strategies among villagers with extensive overseas link-

[56] I have benefited from numerous conversations with Dr. Woon Yuen-fong of the University of Victoria about the western delta region. She has generously shared her findings from Chikan in neighboring Kaiping xian . See her "Social Change and Continuity in South China: Overseas Chinese and the Guan Lineage of Kaiping County, 1949-1987," China Quarterly , no. 118 (June 1989): 324-44; and her "International Links and Socio-economic Development of Modern China: An Emigrant Community in Guangdong," Modern China 16, no. 2 (1990): 139-72; "From Mao to Deng: Life Satisfaction Among Rural Women in an Emigrant Community in South China," Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 25 (January 1991): 139-69.

ages. It has also resulted in the extensive revival of lineages, which had seemed forever compromised by land reform, collective forms of economic management, and firmly held ideological positions.

In the western delta it is important to distinguish the proportion of households with relatives abroad and, among these, whether their relatives are directly or more distantly related. It is possible to suggest that there are different strategies employed by households in the region, which are determined in large measure by the extent of their links with kinsmen abroad.

The consequences of extensive out-migration provide a possible explanation for the large (17 percent) proportion of "isolate" family types in the Duanfen village complex of Kongluen. Many are older women who have not yet left to join family in North America or have decided to stay. There is also a disproportionately large number of household heads who are widows (38.5 percent).^[57] The high proportion of widowed household heads is a possible consequence of the high rates of out-migration to overseas settlements. Some men left and never returned or broke contact with their homeland villages. Some may have remarried abroad and established separate families. Contacts between the homeland and the points of migration were frequently disrupted and were severed for almost a decade during the Japanese occupation. Mortality was also very high in Taishan during the Japanese occupation.

Delayed household division (and the out-migration of recently divided families) results in a very small proportion of nuclear households (31 percent). There is a correspondingly large number of stem families (46 percent). Data on responsibilities of household management reflect some of the distinctive features of the consequences of extensive out-migration. There are more heads of households responsible for economic management in Kongluen than in any other village (69.8 percent) and, correspondingly, the lowest incidence of spouses taking on these responsibilities (4.6 percent). This can be partly explained by the large number of isolates and widowed household heads. Equally, household management by other than the household head (or spouse) (26.9 percent) is matched only in Ngawu, where the incidence of complex household forms, as in Kongluen, is high. In both, the numbers of Overseas Chinese households are large.

Among Pearl River delta villages, remittances have a marked significance for household income only in the Overseas Chinese homeland. This is true among households in Kongluen, where remittances are still the major determinant of income disparities. Household income per capita is

[57] For the total sample, household heads who were widowers or widows constituted 19.0 percent. The proportions in the other sample villages are as follows: Naamshui, 13.8 percent; Tsimgong, 18.2 percent; Ngawu, 9.1 percent and Wantong, 16.2 percent. The number of widowers was less than 10 percent of the total number of widowers and widows.

highest among those with relatives abroad and lowest among those who do not have relatives abroad.^[58]

Non-qiaojuan households have the fewest resources and must rely therefore on their own abilities. As a result, these households are more deeply involved in wage labor than are qiaojuan households. Their male members, for example, are the backbone personnel of the construction teams that have become so important for Taishan (and neighboring Kaiping and Enping) in meeting the labor needs of the Pearl River delta construction boom. Such activities take workers away from the villages for long periods, and they may return only infrequently but, as in Ngawu, typically for the busy season of transplanting and harvesting in midsummer. Their wives tend to bear a disproportionate share of agricultural tasks. Those who do remain in the villages and concentrate on agricultural production tend to contract larger amounts of land and to expand into lucrative sidelines, either within the agriculture sector or into transportation or commercial activities. Such households often become "specialist households" of one kind or another.

Distant qiaojuan households have remittances but have little or no opportunity to contemplate out-migration. Such households are therefore also deeply involved in local economic activity. As qiaojuan households they have some advantages when compared with the non-qiaojuan households. They have remittances that can become working capital. They have connections with relatives abroad who can become the source of capital inputs by either bringing in (tax free) or sending items that are unobtainable or in short supply, such as machinery, electric motors or generators, building materials, trucks, or motorcycles.

Changes in policy toward direct qiaojuan families have resulted in the return of confiscated property. In addition, since 1979 direct qiaojuan families have been leaving in large numbers as part of family reunification policies in such countries as Canada and the United States. As a consequence, there is a considerable amount of property standing empty, which is often managed by the remaining (distant) qiaojuan kinsmen. Such properties can be used as an economic resource. Thus, while non-qiaojuan families are typically engaged as wage laborers or on their own account in farm production, distant qiaojuan households are typically engaged in enterprises in the private sector or are in partnership with zhen -run enterprises. The access to capital by distant qiaojuan households has allowed them to contract formerly collectively managed facilities (such as orchards, general stores, or repair facilities) at the village level and therefore augment their participation in agriculture with private production activities in the tertiary sector.

[58] This was also the pattern of income distribution even before the reform in the rural economy got under way, despite the obstacles that sometimes appeared for those households receiving remittances. It appears, however, that income differences have narrowed in the 1980s.

Direct qiaojuan households were the most advantaged in the 1980s in terms of both remittances and their potential ability to leave. As direct qiaojuan they were most severely affected by ideological hostility and the lack of labor power before 1979. Often bitter memories of the past and lack of confidence about the future increase their desire to leave the homeland. This group of households expects to leave, and, despite enjoying all the advantages that their distant qiaojuan kinsmen have in the villages, they are less committed to long-term economic benefit in the homeland. Many, particularly the women, who were left behind at an earlier period, are older, and their only economic activities relate to food production for themselves and whatever dependents remain. Older men who may be waiting for immigration visas spend a great deal of time socializing with their friends in the teahouses. The major concern of younger members of such households is preparing for emigration, and they spend much of their time acquiring a foreign language, typically English, or some other useful and marketable skill. Their levels of education are often high.

The possibility of family reunification abroad and migration away from the homeland has some marked effects on the social structure of villages throughout those parts of the Pearl River delta where direct qiaojuan households are concentrated. In Taishan, as well as other parts of the siyi area of migration to North America,^[59] while the architecture stands as a testimony to foreign remittances in the past, many houses stand empty, some smaller villages are virtually deserted, and there is the constant movement of population away from the area. Over ten thousand people have left Duanfen since 1979, including at least three Party secretaries. There is a curious contradiction. On the one hand, some of the more prosperous residents abroad have returned to the homeland and donated to schools, hospitals, libraries, and other public monuments, often renewing their association with their native places after an interval of decades. On the other hand, there are households who are leaving to join their kinsmen in North America permanently, leaving behind splendid houses, familiarity, comfort, even a modicum of prestige, for an uncertain future in an alien environment.

In the late twentieth century the desire to go abroad is as intense as it was in the earlier part of the century. There is far more contact with a wider range of relatives living abroad, and a detailed knowledge of life outside China is certainly present. There are also visitors, with their obvious affluence and their ability to dispense largesse. There is also television with its seductive images. The direct qiaojuan households are awaiting their

[59] Cantonese: sze-yap , literally "four districts." The four contiguous and culturally distinct xian (Xinhui, Kaiping, Taishan, and Enping) that constitute the ancestral points of origin for the great majority of Chinese in the Americas.

chances to leave, knowing that there is a certain inevitability. The distant qiaojuan and non-qiaojuan households are anxious to marry their daughters to direct qiaojuan or, better, an actual Overseas Chinese. In this way, over time, the entire household can be sponsored and take up residence abroad.^[60]

Lineage Revival

A dominant and distinctive feature of villages throughout the Pearl River delta is that they are lineage villages. Chinese lineages are property-holding corporations that socially integrate groups of households whose male heads trace their descent to an apical ancestor. They may be simple, small, and of only shallow genealogical depth, occupying a hamlet or a village fragment. They can also be large and complex, have a history of many tens of generations, and have a multisettlement character. In Duanfen a third of the households are surnamed Mei. Their development before 1949 was not dramatically different from that of the Guan in Chikan in neighboring Kaiping, as is described by Woon.^[61] In the 1930s they struggled with the Jiang (Cantonese: Kong) who occupy eight adjacent villages (Kongluen) over the control of a major market. In the center of the main Jiang village stand three enormous ancestral halls. There are lesser halls and "study halls" (shushi ) in the satellite villages.

During land reform in Duanfen, as well as other parts of south China, lineage properties were redistributed. At certain points in the history of the People's Republic of China, lineage rituals were attacked as feudal remnants, genealogies were ideologically suspect and hidden away, and ancestral tablets were destroyed—if not in 1958, most certainly in 1966. Ancestral halls, the most imposing structures in many villages, became team headquarters, warehouses, or workshops, and in some instances they were pulled down. Their granite floors and lintels became raw materials to repair village pathways and sometimes to build piggeries. After land reform, the operation of the south China lineage was compromised and its property basis was dismembered. At the same time, collectivization and rural

[60] Some data on American Chinese who take brides from Taishan can be found in Wu Xingci and Li Zhen, "Gum San Haak in the 1980s: A Study of Chinese Who Return to Taishan County for Marriage," Amerasia 14, no. 2 (1988): 32-34. The article emphasizes the desire to leave and the high educational achievement of brides. It also indicates that the SES of the grooms is not high.

[61] In Chikan, the Guan lineages occupied forty natural villages and competed, before 1949, with the powerful Situ lineage to control Chikan zhen , the intermediate market town. See Woon Yuen-fong, Social Organization in South China, 1911-1949: The Case of the Kuan Lineage of K'ai-ping County (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 1984).

development policies kept intact groups of families who were socially integrated by common descent. Old relationships and old conflicts could readily operate even in a changed political environment.^[62]

Village architecture is a constant reminder of the principles of lineage organization, despite the efforts to dismember the lineage as an economic and ritual entity. The carefully crafted policies to destroy lineages in the Overseas Chinese areas (and elsewhere) reflected a sophisticated understanding of the operation of a Chinese lineage. In the revival of many aspects of lineage organization in the 1980s, in Duanfen and elsewhere, the impact of the foreign links are key.

Since 1950 the issue of how to attract investment by ethnic Chinese abroad has been an important and troublesome issue in the formulation of Overseas Chinese policy,^[63] and it readily fell victim to conflicting domestic political currents in the past. After 1979 investment was actively sought abroad, and the involvement of both Overseas Chinese and émigrés from Hong Kong and Macao in the new economic program were important. In the traditional areas of Overseas Chinese migration, the willingness of Overseas Chinese to commit substantial funds to public projects depended on the resolution of some outstanding grievances. The fate of their lineage organizations was one of these.

While the full elaboration of all aspects of the operation of lineages cannot be contemplated, many of them are once again practiced. Graves have been repaired, rituals are performed at the graves of apical ancestors, ancestral halls are being restored, ritual feasts occur in the halls once more, lineage libraries are being refurbished, and lineage officers have begun to act as agents for members of the lineage, similar to the way the administrators of lineage trusts intervened on behalf of members in the period before 1949.

The restoration work that occurs is made possible by donations from local and external contributors. The major donations are from abroad. Funds are remitted through a network that is worldwide but energized from Hong Kong. The network is maintained by a sophisticated and widespread communications system. From the western delta there flows a large stream of local publications that focus on the reliance of local areas on the contributions of kinsmen and fellow countrymen overseas in maintaining local

[62] Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger, Chen Village (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), esp. 16-40; the point is also argued by Potter and Potter, China's Peasants , who state, "A core group of close patrilineal kinsmen has now replaced the collective as the major group larger than the household in the organization of agricultural production" (266). There is no evidence from their account that lineage revival has been carried to quite the same degree in Dongguan as in the western delta regions.

[63] Stephen Fitzgerald, China and the Overseas Chinese (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 121-26.

integrity. Local history and local tradition are emphasized, and while economic advances receive careful attention, they are seen to be in harmony with a local cultural base that is firmly rooted in kinship.

In the Overseas Chinese areas, schools and education funded by the Overseas Chinese speak of upward mobility and lineage integrity. Before 1949 in Taishan, class and kinship were linked to overseas connections. In the thirty years after land reform, those connections were often a liability, although they continued to be of importance. In the past ten years, the liabilities have become advantages and have contributed to a developmental process that reflects national policies but, as a consequence of intense and distinctive patterns of overseas linkages, has developed some differentiating features of its own.

Conclusion

I have outlined in this chapter some of the features of Pearl River delta households and kin groups in the contemporary period. The delta has become caught up in a major rural transformation in the wake of reform efforts that began in the late 1970s. This process of economic change has proceeded further and faster than in any other region in the People's Republic of China.

Part of the explanation for the dramatic economic developments in the delta is its proximity to Hong Kong, which experienced its own transformation beginning in the 1950s. Hong Kong shifted from an economy based on entrepôt trade to become a major manufacturing center and a crucial part of the world system of banking and trade. A population largely of Pearl River delta émigrés, in concert with others from the Lower Yangzi and eastern Guangdong, led in establishing the links with the global economy. When reform initiatives were attempted in China after 1979, the entrepreneurial energies of Hong Kong were actively sought. Guangdong province was given distinctive authority to establish linkages with the world-system. These were developed through Hong Kong. By the late 1980s, Guangdong, and the Pearl River delta in particular, had become firmly incorporated into the world-system.

The consequences of that incorporation for Pearl River delta households and kin groups has been the focus of this chapter. Long an area of intense commercialization, the rural economy of the Pearl River became constrained by the assumptions of development policy for much of the three decades after 1949. The cellular character of rural China was reinforced by a high degree of bureaucratic control. The strategies of rural households in the Pearl River delta until the reform period were compromised by administrative practices that linked them firmly to their villages and to agricultural pursuits. Certain forms of kinship organization, notably lineages,

and their ritual expression, were targets of official hostility. There appeared to be a commonality of structural form for peasant households across the Pearl River delta after land reform, despite some variation in local economic possibilities.

I have examined the effects of recent economic change for rural households in five villages across the delta. I have suggested that the ability of local administrative units to adapt to policy changes has increased economic opportunities for households. The ability to establish linkages with kinsmen abroad has been especially critical in generating local-level economic change and moving a village economy away from a reliance on subsistence agriculture. In those villages where economic changes have been widespread, peasant households have taken full advantage of the local transformation and have allocated household labor among the variety of new opportunities that are contained within the reformed village economy. In the Dongguan village of Wantong, where extensive incorporation into the global economy through the entrepreneurial activities of Hong Kong—based expatriates has been particularly marked, household economic strategy has been characterized by an ability to allocate household labor in a wide array of economic activities. In the Luogang village of Tsimkong, where there are few overseas connections, the impact of global incorporation has been slight. Economic growth has been substantial as a consequence of reform policies. An intensification of the village's commercialized agriculture has seen households committing their energies and maximizing returns by expanding the cultivation and sale of fruit and vegetables. The sources of economic growth in the two villages differ. In Wantong, joint economic enterprise between the village and Hong Kong—based entrepreneurs has added to the economic inventory. In Tsimkong, existing economic capabilites have been intensified, and its increased production meets the needs of the domestic market. In both instances, however, the consequence of rapid local economic growth for household structure has been substantial and has contributed to increased household division, which explains the large number of nuclear households. The issue here is one of a flexible response to economic opportunity, which was articulated by Cohen and specifically addressed by Harrell in this volume. Structural change in a village economy may have important consequences, not merely for the productive role of women but also for their position as household managers. The firm incorporation of Wantong into the global economy has augmented the role of women in household structure. In Tsimkong, where growth has not been a consequence of structural change, the dominance of male household heads as household managers has been maintained.

Where local structural change and economic growth have been less marked, the options for peasant households and the adaptive strategies that they have adopted have been fewer and different. In such contexts, village

economies have been unable to absorb the labor that newer production arrangements in agriculture have released. In the rapidly growing economy of the Pearl River delta in the 1980s, economic opportunities have generally increased. Peasant households in villages in which structural change and economic growth have been modest have deployed their younger male members outside the village to take advantage of economic opportunities that the home villages cannot supply. The degree of change in household structure in such contexts is lessened. Household characteristics such as the incidence of household division or the allocation of responsibility for family management are determined less by change within the village economy than by the inability of the village economy to generate change and sufficient growth to absorb the labor surplus.

In the areas where Overseas Chinese ties are widespread, there are distinctive external linkages. Extensive out-migration has had profound structural consequences for peasant households. Linkages overseas only rarely translate into local economic transformation. Overseas Chinese have close and intense relationships to their ancestral homeland. Gifts by Overseas Chinese to their native places in the 1980s have contributed significantly to the infrastructure but not to major structural changes in the local economy. In contrast to the past, entrepreneurial activities by Overseas Chinese in the homeland are not extensive. The economic impact of Overseas Chinese monetary transfers is indirect. The impact of remittances for households in an Overseas Chinese area is, however, very great. Household strategies among peasant households in Overseas Chinese areas appear to be determined by the presence or absence of overseas linkages and the closeness of kinship to overseas relatives, when they are present. The absence of men has major effects for household form, household division, and household management. The very considerable sentiment for the homeland that exists among Overseas Chinese has led to regeneration of lineages to a degree unparalleled in those parts of the delta where the Overseas Chinese presence is less marked.

Chinese rural households in the Pearl River delta have been caught up in a change of great proportions during the 1980s. The change has been uneven in its effects across the region as a consequence of varying local characteristics, one of the most important of which has been the nature and intensity of relations with their kinsmen abroad. There are many continuities with the past. There is also a striking capacity on the part of peasant households in the Pearl River delta to respond creatively to opportunities and formulate strategies to maximize their possibilities. Households in the villages I surveyed are aware of the implications of the reform period for their well-being and have taken steps to deal with them. Some have been bold and innovative in their response. The local contexts have determined what the nature of their response can be. For delta households the past ten years

have seen their material standard of living improve significantly. They have benefited directly or indirectly from the incorporation of the broad region into the global economy. They do not appear at this time to have been overwhelmed by the negative consequences of globalization, which has led to the undoing of peasantries in some other contexts. Their corporate kinship structures with their instrinsic flexibility have buffered the impact of change. They have been able to hold the world-system at arms length to an important degree and to protect themselves from some of its most pernicious effects.