PART TWO
MARRIAGE

Six
Family Strategies and Structures in Rural North China

Mark Selden

Many of the ideas explored here are the product of collaborative research with Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz, and Kay Johnson. For background on Wugong and rural Hebei, see Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden (1991). I am indebted to Richard Ratcliff, who introduced me to computer design and helped conceptualize computer elements of the survey, as well as to Zhu Hong and especially Shih Miin-wen for research assistance in the design and implementation of computer manipulation of the data. Cheng Tiejun, a sociologist, and a native of Raoyang county, who lived and worked in Wugong for several years in the 1970s, has been a source of knowledge, sources, and insight into the issues explored here. Deborah Davis and Stevan Harrell provided insightful critique of successive drafts, as did Edward Friedman, Gail Arrigo, Joan Smith, and an anonymous reader of the penultimate draft.

This chapter explores familial strategies and structures in response to socioeconomic and political changes over two generations in a peripheral region of rural North China. The primary data are household surveys conducted in Wugong village, Hebei, in 1978, at the end of the era of mobilizational collectivism; in 1984, two years after the reform agenda began to transform the village collective structure; and in 1987, when the household contract system had taken root. The surveys, which shed light on familial, demographic, and marital patterns from the 1920s to the 1980s, are supplemented by interviews conducted in the course of more than a decade of fieldwork in this and other villages in Raoyang county and throughout central Hebei. The focus of the study is on familial responses to macro political and economic change over the last half century, notably to the antimarket collectivism and the hukou population control system implemented by a powerful party-state from the 1950s forward, and the contractual and market-oriented reforms and birth control measures of the 1980s.

This study advances and assesses three hypotheses concerning changing familial strategies and structures in rural China in the era of mobilizational

collectivism (the 1950s through the 1970s) and contractual and market-oriented reforms (since the 1980s):^[1]

1. Collectivization, by weakening the household as a productive unit, undermined the economic rationale for the extended family. The result was a sharp reduction in average household size and in the number of stem and joint families as smaller nuclear families became the norm in the years 1955-1980.

2. Collectivization, the suppression of private markets, and restrictions on population mobility from the early 1950s through the 1970s, reinforced village involution in two distinct but intertwined senses. First, the ensemble of policies associated with mobilizational collectivism reversed the historical tendency of progressive expansion of the economic and social world of the peasant from the village to the standard marketing community and beyond. Beginning in the 1950s, the world of rural residents contracted back toward the natural village (see Skinner 1964-65). Second, with extravillage income-earning opportunities reduced or eliminated, with rapid population growth continuing through the 1970s, with expansion in the number of labor days per capita, and with collectives absorbing virtually unlimited supplies of labor, labor input increased substantially while marginal productivity of labor declined (see Geertz 1963; Huang 1985, 7-14; Huang 1990, 11-18; Chayanov 1986). This chapter explores some of the manifestations of village involution at the level of the family, particularly the pronounced tendency toward intravillage marriage, shrinking familial size, and simplification of structure associated with mobilizational collectivism in the years 1955-1980.

3. The resurgence of the household economy and the market in the 1980s reversed a number of trends of the collective era, giving rise to a bimodal pattern in household structures. On the one hand, rural household division accelerated as contracts took effect and the central economic role of households was restored. On the other hand, we observe signs of a resurgence of extended families, notably among entrepreneurial households emphasizing nonagricultural activities, capital accumulation, and expanded access to labor power, in ways that invite comparison with pre-land-reform patterns including the relationship between social class and family size and structure. Both cases suggest the growing autonomy and economic role of the household. At the same time, however, the continued strength and penetration of the state is revealed in the enforcement of the one-child (later the tacit two-child) family planning policy.

These theses are examined in relation to Wugong village, with comparisons to patterns observed in other rural regions and communities.

[1] My approach to mobilizational collectivism and the political economy of reform is spelled out in Selden 1992.

Wugong Village

Wugong, a village founded more than thirteen hundred years ago during the Sui dynasty, is located in Raoyang county in south central Hebei, one of the poorest areas of the North China Plain. Although the village is just 120 miles south of Beijing and Tianjin, throughout the twentieth century Raoyang has remained a poor and peripheral region, whose saline and alkaline soil and dearth of above-ground water sources together with periodic eruptions of drought and flood have proved inhospitable to agriculture. Equally important, its primitive transportation and communications—no railroad, poor highways, and lack of waterways^[2] —left the region beyond the pale of dynamic metropolitan centers of industry, commerce, and modern thought as they experienced capitalist development and incorporation in the global economy in the first half of the twentieth century.

In the 1940s the region was incorporated in the networks of power that eventually brought the Communist Party to power. Its very peripheral character proved advantageous in insulating the locality from Japanese control and forging bonds of nation and community that linked Wugong and Raoyang to the Party and the army. Raoyang was located in the Central Hebei base area, one of the few plains regions to sustain organized resistance throughout the anti-Japanese war. Beginning in 1943 with a four-household land-pooling group, Wugong villagers embarked on a path of cooperative transformation that would eventually transform a marginal and poor community into a thriving provincial and even a national model of cooperation, before receding into anonymity with the resurgence of the household economy and market forces in the 1980s (Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden 1991).

In 1978, when research began, Wugong was a large and relatively prosperous wheat- and cotton-growing village with a registered population of 2,552. With per capita distributed collective income of 190 yuan, it was more than 50 percent richer than the second most prosperous of the ten villages that constituted the Wugong Commune, and three times richer than the poorest village. It was also approximately 50 percent higher than China's average 1978 rural per capita income of 133 yuan (Changes and Development in China , 242). Team Three, the largest and most prosperous of three teams and the focus of our household surveys, had a 1978 population

[2] Until 1954 the Hutuo River was Raoyang's lifeline to Tianjin for several months each year. Damming the river eliminated this connection to the major commercial and industrial center in the region. The state's attack on the market and its controls on population movement reinforced the county's isolation. Raoyang was a major casualty of the general prioritizing of irrigation over transportation and of self-reliant production over market ties that characterized national development from the 1950s through the 1970s. A new Beijing-Guangzhou railroad, in the initial stages of construction, is scheduled to pass through Wugong.

of 232 households and 996 people: 514 females, 480 males, and 2 whose gender was not recorded. This was comparable in size to many brigades in rural China, the size being emblematic of the high levels of collectivization ("advanced socialist production relations") maintained since the 1950s. In 1984, as household- and market-oriented reforms were beginning to take root in a region and a village whose leaders long resisted reform, the registered population of the team was 244 households with 939 people: 480 females and 459 males.^[3] In 1987 its population had dropped to 845 people in 250 households.

As the village that boasted the oldest continuous cooperative in Hebei, the home of national model peasant Geng Changsuo, and, beginning in 1953, the site of a provincial tractor station, Wugong attained national prominence as a large-scale mechanized cooperative. It sustained its status and special access to state resources through the twists and turns of national policy until the early 1980s. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as national policies changed, Hebei province remained a bastion of opposition to contractual and market-oriented reforms. Wugong too stood in the forefront of defenders of the collective road that had brought fame and fortune to a once peripheral community. Thus it was not until 1982, following the ouster of its provincial patrons, that Wugong adopted the contract system, and even then the collective continued to play a prominent role in both agricultural and sideline production. Like many other model villages, such as Dazhai and Long Bow, just across the border in Shanxi, Wugong was the last village in its commune to ratify fundamental changes in the collective regimen (Hinton 1990, 31-47; 124-39). Our data capture familial dynamics spanning the decades prior to land reform, the collective era, and the early years of the contractual reforms of the 1980s.

Changing Patterns in Family Size and Structure

Land reform, collectivization, and market closure led to village involution and to important changes in household size and structure. The most important of these changes were the reduction in average household size and

[3] The 1978 officially registered Team Three population was 232 households with 1,053 people. This number included, however, 53 women who had left the team, in most cases by marriage, and in many instances 30-40 years earlier. Our data indicate that they neither contributed financially nor had husbands or children residing in Team Three. We have excluded such individuals from our sample, while retaining others who lived and worked or studied outside the village. These include spouses who work outside and provide financial support to family members in the village, and youth who were studying or serving in the military. All of these maintain important local ties and most are expected to return to the village. In 1978 there were 49 individuals working outside the village, 32 holding jobs in factories, as teachers or cadres, 11 in the army, and 6 studying in universities or technical schools. All of these are included in our Team Three sample.

number of generations, and the rise to dominance of smaller nuclear families. Data on other communities and regions suggest that many of the demographic changes described below for Wugong reflect broad tendencies found in villages across North China. Our discussion differentiates outcomes specific to a model village from more representative patterns.

Rural surveys of four Hebei villages in the vicinity of Beijing compiled by Sidney Gamble, a large North China sample of 17,581 households studied by John Buck, and Chi-ming Chiao's North China sample of 28,738 households, provide baseline data on household size and structure in rural North China (table 6.1). Gamble found average household size to be 5.1 members, Buck 5.3 members, and Chiao 5.5 members in the 1930s. In Gamble's 1933 sample, 26 percent of households had 7 or more members and 9 percent had 10 or more members (Gamble 1954, 26-27). Twenty-

seven percent of Buck's North China households had 7 or more members, including 8 percent with more than 10 members (Buck 1937, 368). Chiao found that 29 percent of households had 7 or more members, including 10 percent with 10 or more members (Chiao 1933, 17).

In the 1930s, household size correlated closely with landownership and wealth. The large household was economically advantaged, and it was only the prosperous that could sustain large households. Greater size facilitated division of labor, diversification, and accumulation. In his 1927 survey of 400 Dingxian farm families, Sidney Gamble found that those with farms of less than 10 mu had an average of 3.8 members, those with 21-30 mu averaged 6.2, and families with over 100 mu averaged 13.5 members. Per capita landownership and wealth increased with size of farm. For example, there was 1.8 mu of land per person in farms of less than 10 mu, 4.1 mu per person in farms of 21-30 mu, and 9.1 mu per person in farms of over 100 mu (Gamble 1954, 84). In his 1929-33 national survey of 16,786 farms, Buck found that in the winter-wheat gaoliang areas that included Hebei province, the small farm had an average of 4.7 household members, whereas medium-sized farms had 6.0 members, large farms 8.5 members, and very large farms 10.7 members (Buck 1937, 278).

Comparing Wugong's Team Three in 1978 (table 6.2) with North China in the 1930s, we note the much smaller average household size, just 4.3 members, compared with approximately 5.3 members in the earlier period. By 1978 the number of large households with 7 or more members was small despite the fact that a prosperous village like Wugong could sustain relatively large households compared with poorer communities. In 1978, 11 percent of Team Three households had 7 or more members, the largest being 9 members. By contrast, 26-29 percent of North China households in the 1930s samples had 7 or more members, including nearly 10 percent with 10 or more members. By 1978 household size no longer correlated with wealth measured by per capita household income. Size was above all the product of life-cycle timing. Neither labor power, land, capital, nor special skills were any longer decisive factors in determining household opportunity and income. This meant that there was a close relationship between the ratio of labor power to dependency and per capita household income, but virtually no correlation between household size and per capita income. Households with large numbers of young children had low per capita incomes, but as these children moved into the labor force per capita incomes rose. With marriage and household division, the cycle repeated. We hypothesize that this pattern was widespread throughout rural China in the era of mobilizational collectivism.

In 1978, 25 of Team Three's 232 households boasted three generations, and 2 others had four generations. The 5 largest households had nine members, and just 6 others had eight. The four-generation households were

those of the deputy Party secretary of the commune and the leader of Team Three. These four-generation households reveal leading Party families living out a contemporary version of the big-family Confucian ideal.

The dominant trend from the 1950s forward, consistent with the logic of collectivization, was from larger to smaller and from complex to nuclear families. The social and economic logic favoring stem and joint families was weakened in a collective milieu. Collectivization reduced the power of the family head over sons once control over land and labor passed from the family to the collective. Stated differently, after 1955 the fortunes of adult males no longer rested as heavily on the goodwill of a father who could assure their incomes and their future. Moreover, the advantages of the large household for achieving prosperity, by facilitating both accumulation and a complex household division of labor, were irrelevant in the collective era. Young men working in the collective earned as much as their fathers through work-point allocations from their teenage years, and there were few outlets for household investment. In short, the economic logic of household accumulation and the extended family was irrelevant in the era of collective agriculture.

To be sure, the collective paid income earned by all members in a lump sum directly to the household head, not to individual earners, perpetuating certain forms of intrahousehold dependency on the family head.^[4] The household also remained the primary consumption unit. But sons no longer depended on fathers to provide a share of household land and other property or to organize the household division of labor. Dependence on parents to assure a marriage and provide a home was also reduced if not eliminated in the collective era. In addition, a portion of welfare for the elderly and ill passed from household to collective responsibility, thereby further weakening intergenerational bonds. All these factors strengthened tendencies toward smaller and less complex households, toward reduced intergenerational dependence, and toward earlier household division. This was particularly true in a model village where household production for the market was tightly restricted and the range of collective economic and cultural activities was broad. The fact that model Wugong achieved notable success in birth control by the early 1970s, a decade before most rural communities, strengthened this tendency to reduce household size and complexity.^[5]

How widespread was the tendency toward smaller and less complex household structures in rural China in the collective era? Fruitful comparisons in the changing patterns of household size and structure can be made between Wugong in the 1970s and Parish and Whyte's 1973 findings for Guangdong. First, no significant change in household size occurred in Guangdong as a result of collectivization or other factors. Average household size in South China in 1930 was 5.0 members compared with 4.8 members in Guangdong in 1973. By comparison, we have hypothesized that significant reduction in household size in Wugong by the 1970s was a product both of collectivization and of unusual rigor in implementing birth control guidelines in the model village. Why the difference? One important reason is that birth control was not widely propagated or practiced in Guangdong and in much of rural China at the time of Parish and Whyte's 1973 investigation. This situation would change dramatically across the countryside from the late 1970s, bringing north and south into close alignment with respect to fertility. What had changed in Guangdong by 1973 was the fact that both the nuclear family (50%) and the single-person family (12%) had increased sharply in number, improved health care and nutrition reduced mortality, and the number of stem and joint families

[4] A fruitful area for future research is control of the family purse along both gender and generational lines, including savings to assure proper marriages and funerals.

[5] The population of Wugong village increased from 1,700 in 1955 to 2,413 in 1969, a 42 percent increase, or 2.8 percent per year. Between 1970 and 1975 population increased at a rate slightly less than 1 percent per year, from 2,426 to a peak of 2,567, before declining slowly but steadily to 2,533 in 1979. Wugong's 1984 population of 2,552 remained below the 1975 peak level, and population has subsequently remained stable.

plummeted. Compared with 63 percent in the 1930 South China sample, in 1973 in Guangdong only 39 percent were stem and joint families (Parish and Whyte 1978, 132-36).^[6] As in Wugong, we hypothesize that the shift to collective agriculture and the declining role of the family as an economic unit was the primary reason for the change in family structure leading to earlier division and reduction in the number of stem and joint families. At the same time, household size did not change significantly, because of continued high birth rates together with mortality rates substantially lower than those prevailing in the 1930s.

Between 1978 and 1987 significant changes occurred in Team Three household size and composition as household division accelerated following the implementation of household contracts. The 1984 survey gives years of household division for 83 of 244 Team Three households. Forty-four households divided in the five years 1979-83. By comparison, just 10 of the surveyed households indicated that they had divided in the decade 1966-75. The high rate of household division in the years 1979-83 constituted a response at the household level to the preparations for, and then the actual implementation of, contractual and market-oriented reforms.

Changes in household size and composition in the wake of partial decollectivization were particularly visible and significant among the elderly. Between 1978 and 1984, the average Team Three household size fell from 4.3 to 3.8 persons, and the number of two-person households increased from 9 to 32. Among two-person households, couples aged sixty-two and older increased from four to nineteen. By the mid-1980s, it was common for both spouses to remain alive, active, and self-sufficient long after their fifties, the time when most households customarily divided.

In 1978 fifteen people over age sixty-five lived alone, often in close proximity to sons or other family support networks. These included three women, ages seventy-nine, eighty, and eighty-three, two of whom continued to earn significant work-points permitting self-support with dignity. Their living alone was nevertheless a sensitive issue. Questionnaires repeatedly recorded the unsolicited information that sons performed household tasks and otherwise supported aged parents who lived alone. Responsibility for the aged remained a family affair. But whatever the assistance rendered, if we look at the utterly bare hovels in which some elderly people resided alone, and observe that such people frequently lacked even tea leaves to add to boiling water when serving a guest, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that in rural China as elsewhere the transition to the nuclear family imposes a heavy price on the rural elderly. By 1984 the number of single-person

[6] Sulamith Potter and Jack Potter, China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution , 217, found a smaller percentage of Zengbu brigade (Guangdong) households living in stem families in 1980, 25 percent. The joint family form did not exist in this community.

households of those sixty-two or older had dropped to nine, including one seventy-nine-year-old woman and an eighty-four-year-old man.

Between 1978 and 1984 the number of three-person households virtually doubled while the number of five- and six-person households was halved and those with seven to ten members dropped from 26 to 19. The great majority of household divisions in these years took place within two years of marriage, most often at the time of birth of the first (and in these years only) child. Earlier and more frequent household division, together with effective birth control, gave rise in the 1980s to the new archetypal three-person household composed of parents and one child.^[7]

These tendencies toward small, simpler, and more homogeneous households were carried further in the years 1984-87. By 1987 there were only two single-person households, and the largest household in the team had only seven members. Between 1984 and 1987 the number of households with seven to ten members dropped from seventeen to just one, and the size of the largest household fell from ten to seven. Household division occurred throughout the 1980s more frequently and earlier than in the 1930s or in the collective era. We see this clearly in a pattern that had no earlier twentieth-century precedent in Wugong or, to my knowledge, in most of rural China. Of the sixty-eight two-person households in 1987, twenty-three consisted of childless couples who married in the years 1980-86. This constitutes a break in two important ways. First, prior to the 1980s, it was extremely rare to establish one's own household before the birth of the first child, and frequently it was only after the birth of a second child, if at all, that the household divided. Our 1978 survey indicated no household composed of a recently married childless couple. Two such households existed by 1984. By 1987, twenty-three childless couples who had married within the previous five years had established independent households.

Prior to land reform, the economic logic of the household economy prevented early household division. At the heart of the family compact was the exchange between the care of aged parents by male offspring and the eventual transfer of land.^[8] Collectivization eliminated both the element of land transfer and the household as the organizer of productive activity. The

[7] A return visit in 1991 revealed that Wugong remained a leader in birth control, but with the new relaxed guidelines, more households took the opportunity to have a second child following the birth of a daughter. A second child was permitted four years after the birth of a daughter (or the death of a first child) on condition that one parent accept sterilization. In all but one known case, it was the wife who accepted sterilization.

[8] This formulation of a compact excludes daughters. I tentatively suggest that a weaker and more ephemeral but not insignificant compact rested on parental obligations to nurture and to arrange a suitable marriage for a daughter in exchange for services rendered prior to marriage, after which the allegiance and obligation of a daughter was expected to be to her husband and his family.

household contract system of the 1980s offered young men and women equal and immediate access to their own land—if they established independent households. Moreover, with the village providing land for home construction, growing numbers of young people chose to free themselves from the constraints of parental and mother-in-law authority as quickly as possible following marriage.^[9]

A second significant departure from earlier norms of both the republican era and the collective years is that by the late 1980s many young couples were not producing offspring in the first several years of marriage. By contrast, prior to the 1980s, virtually every couple produced a child within the first year or two of marriage. The changes noted here with respect to small nuclear families, autonomous households, and delayed reproduction bring the family in Wugong in the late 1980s closer to prevailing urban patterns in China, and indeed to norms prevailing in industrial societies elsewhere.

Important dimensions of the 1980s economic and social reforms impinge heavily on household size and structure: The household contract system weakened the former collective structure and strengthened the role of households as productive units both in agriculture and in sideline production and market activity. Between 1978 and 1984 the total number of those listed as working or studying outside the village or serving in the military dropped by nearly half to twenty-seven. Outside employees declined by one-fourth from thirty-two to twenty-four. The largest changes centered on outside study and the army. In 1984 no Team Three member was studying outside the village, and the number of those in the army had fallen from eleven to just three. The changes primarily reflect Wugong's loss of status as a model village coinciding with the opening of alternative channels of mobility associated with the private sector and the market, changes that Wugong people were relatively slow to act upon. The drop in the number of youth joining the army may also be a function of the declining prestige and shrinking size of the military in the 1980s.

The 1984 figures do not, however, suggest a trend toward village isolation, involution, and subsistence farming. Quite the opposite. In 1984, 107 households, nearly half of the households in Team Three, listed one or more members who were engaged in nonagricultural economic pursuits, including teachers, factory workers, and contractors in diverse industrial, craft, commercial, and handicraft activities. In 1978, when the collective

[9] Did accompanying policy changes in, for example, access to land and housing for young newlyweds occur at the village level that facilitated the greater autonomy of young people in the 1980s? This is a subject for future research. Here I wish to observe the limits of the present research, which moves between national policy and household behavior but is unable to clarify the important intermediate range of local-level policies, particularly those at the village and county levels, affecting family decisions. Joan Smith drew my attention to these issues.

still held sway, 50 households, just over one-fifth, listed such activities exclusive of unpaid team and brigade political positions. Compared with 1978, many more people engaged in craft and industrial production, provided services, and produced for and sold in the market. While many of these were listed as living and working in the village, in 1984 their work regularly took them outside for commercial and other economic activities. As in the first half of the twentieth century, the Wugong economy was more fully embedded in a wider economic world extending from the standard marketing community to other parts of North China, including Beijing, Tianjin, and beyond to Inner Mongolia and the Northwest.

By 1984, two years after the implementation of household contracts, we observe a bimodal pattern in household strategies. On the one hand, there was continued reduction in household size from 4.3 people in 1978 to 3.8 in 1984. This was the product of large numbers of household divisions in the early 1980s and the continued effects of birth control. Most people lived in nuclear families, and by 1984 the number of four-generation households had further declined from two to none. In 1978, four- and five-person households predominated, accounting for 48 percent of the 232 households; approximately equal numbers of three- and six-person households made up an additional 31 percent. By 1984 three- and four-person households had become the norm, accounting for 134 (55 percent) of the 244 households. The number of households with six or more members plummeted from 64 (28 percent) in 1978 to 32 (13 percent) in 1984. Likewise, the percentage of households with zero or one registered child increased from 45 to 77 percent while the percentage of households with three or more children dropped from 43 to just 16 percent. The number of single-person households fell from 15 (7 percent) to 12 (5 percent) while the number of twoperson households tripled from 9 (4 percent) to 32 (13 percent).

On the other hand, we observe apparently contradictory tendencies at work. Specifically, there was a resurgence of stem, joint, and multigenerational structures as a significant group of households reasserted themselves economically and socially and the reforms stimulated new and diverse individual and family strategies (table 6.3). The striking fact is that in a very brief time, and simultaneous with a sharp drop in numbers of births and in household size in response to the birth control program, the number of stem and joint families nearly doubled from 31 in 1978 to 53 in 1984. Among stem and joint families, the somewhat higher concentration of nonagricultural contracts and members in state-sector jobs as workers, cadres, or teachers underlines a degree of congruence between diversified cashearning economic activity and extended family arrangements. Twenty-seven out of 53 stem and joint families (51 percent) recorded the existence of nonagricultural contracts, extravillage income, or members earning state

salaries. The comparable figure for nuclear and one-person households was 80 out of 191 (42 percent).

Our findings concerning the resurgence of extended families in the early 1980s, consistent with the Davis-Harrell hypothesis in the introduction to this volume, run directly counter to the modernization hypothesis that leads one to anticipate that the growth of the market, commodification, and growing cash income would all contribute to strengthening the nuclear family (Goode 1982).^[10] Rather, with the opening of the household sector and the market, significant numbers of Wugong people, particularly those with an entrepreneurial bent, chose to reconstitute joint and stem families, reversing the pattern of their sharp decline following collectivization. In just six years, from 1978 to 1984, the number of stem and joint families increased from 31 to 53, even as the average size of family dropped from 4.3 to 3.8 persons. Team Three demographic experience in this respect lends weight to the suggestion by Davis and Harrell in this volume that for the 1980s and 1990s we replace the urban-rural dichotomy with a tripartite division between subsistence farmers, urban collective and state employees, and entrepreneurs in both city and countryside.

One interesting example of the trend toward extended families is provided by the sole Team Three family classified as "landlord." Li Maoxiu, the youngest son of a small landlord, was a resistance activist who rose to head the district children's organization in wartime while his brother joined

[10] William Parish and Martin Whyte, in Village and Family in Contemporary China , 137, observe that, contrary to another modernization hypothesis, in Guangdong in the 1970s, no correlation existed between higher education and incidence of nuclear families.

the Party and the army en route to a government career in Shandong. With his father dead and his brother away, Li Maoxiu was branded a landlord in the 1947 land reform. Isolated, stigmatized, and barred from joining a cooperative, in 1952 Li Maoxiu committed the crime of flight, seeking, with the aid of a seal carved out of a turnip, to begin a new life as a teacher in the Northeast. He was caught and jailed for five years, and following his return to the village lived the life of a pariah. The Lis' only child, a son, married in 1964 at age nineteen. During the Cultural Revolution, to insulate the younger generation from the harassment heaped upon "class enemies," the family divided. Fifteen years later, in the early 1980s, the landlord cap having been officially removed, not only did Li Maoxiu initiate several family enterprises, including long distance trade and the opening of a bakery and a plastic workshop, but he also reconstituted a three-generation stem family. In 1984 the family included his wife, his son and daughter-in-law, and their teenage daughter and two sons. In 1990 the family redivided. Li Maoxiu and his wife lived alone in their original, dilapidated home, a grim reminder of their days of opprobrium. Their son and his wife and children moved into a new home at the other end of Team Three.

The 1987 data indicate that some trends already evident in 1984 have gone further. Average size of household continued to drop from 3.8 members in 1984 to 3.4 in 1987. The drop was particularly precipitous among households with 6 or more members. By 1984 such households had already declined to just 13 percent of the total. By 1987 they had dropped further to just 5 percent, and the number of households with 7 or more members fell from nineteen to one.

At the same time, the hypothesized bifurcating pattern in which the majority form small nuclear households while an entrepreneurial minority favors stem and joint households, appears less pronounced in 1987 than in 1984. While the number of stem and joint families increased significantly between 1978 and 1984, the trend reversed between 1984 and 1987 as the number of extended households dropped from 53 to 46 and their size was reduced. Unfortunately, our 1987 data do not permit clear differentiation between entrepreneurial and nonentrepreneurial households. In any event, the hypothesis concerning correlation between multigenerational extended families and entrepreneurship will require testing against the performance of other and larger samples.

Intravillage Marriage

In the decades following collectivization, the shrinking of the world of the villager from the standard marketing community and beyond to the natural village was manifested in the closing off of extravillage economic, social, cultural, and marital ties. Most rural people found their world restricted to

the confines of the natural village. According to the 1978 survey, of the 985 Team Three residents whose birthplace is known, 771 were born in Wugong and 214 were born outside the village, nearly all of the latter being brides who married in. Famine, political turmoil, war, population pressures, and the hope for better opportunities had led millions of Chinese to flee ancestral villages in search of land, food, and work in the century prior to the founding of the People's Republic. Beginning in 1955, and with particular force after 1960, however, powerful institutional mechanisms associated with collectivization, market controls, and rigorous state enforcement of the hukou system of population control kept rural residents in place in the village of their birth or marriage. Village communities attained extraordinary levels of stability. Only a handful of households settled in Wugong after 1945, all of them prior to collectivization, and in every known case they had familial connections. Of 480 males registered in Team Three in 1978, only 11 were born outside the village, including 3 sons born in the Northeast where both parents were factory workers prior to their forced repatriation to Wugong. The repatriates were among the twenty million industrial workers and family members sent back to their villages of origin in 1962 following the failure of the Great Leap Forward. The combination of collectivization, market curbs, and household registration controls put a brake on the dynamic movement of the Chinese population both within China, where millions had migrated to the Northeast and other areas during the late Qing and the Republic, and abroad. This involutionary pattern too was a facet of the growing isolation of village communities associated with collectivization and population controls. In this respect Wugong's experience was representative of that of rural China.

One important change in marital practice in Wugong concerns intravillage marriage. There were deep structural reasons for the trend toward intravillage marriage following collectivization and market closure. Prior to the 1950s, the standard marketing community not only was the primary locus of trade and cultural activities but also defined the terrain within which most marriage contracts were negotiated. Team Three brides of the previous half century who are listed in the 1984 survey came from some forty villages in Raoyang county and sixteen villages in neighboring counties, nearly all within a ten-mile radius of the village. The combination of collectivization and market suppression substantially changed these patterns. With villagers prevented from buying and selling in the few remaining markets, with the closure of rural fairs and traditional cultural events after 1957, with the penetration of party-state networks deep into village life, and with attacks on old culture, customs, and ideas, including the purchase of brides, most people found their world restricted to the natural village. At the same time that extravillage social and economic ties were severed, with activities largely restricted within the team and brigade, the most valuable

alliances for families struggling to survive shifted to within the village. From work assignments to income, from opportunity for higher education, to a place in the army or the right to build a house, villagers depended heavily on the goodwill of team and brigade cadres who ruled the village. This was the socioeconomic and political basis for the rise in intravillage marriage in rural communities during the collective era, a pattern that spread throughout much of rural China in the 1970s. Village involution was reflected in marital patterns as more and more brides were from Wugong.

There were, in addition, special reasons why Wugong, in this as in many other areas, led the way. As Wugong reaped the fruits of its status as a model village, per capita income soared above the levels of neighboring communities. In the process, marital strategies changed and taboos restricting intravillage or same-surname marriage began to erode.^[11] Parents became reluctant to send daughters to live in much poorer villages that traditionally exchanged brides with Wugong. Moreover, with women sharing in the rapidly expanding educational opportunities that made primary school education the norm in Wugong in the 1950s, junior high education in the expanded village school the norm in the 1960s, and even enabled many to graduate from high school in the 1970s (in each instance Wugong was approximately a decade ahead of neighboring communities), young people in the model village had numerous opportunities to meet. Other villages shared in the expansion of education and accompanying social practices, but at a slower pace.

Participation in collective labor and group activities organized by the youth league, militia, and the county government provided important venues in which young people could meet and court. These opportunities were especially numerous in a model village whose youth enjoyed disproportionate opportunities to participate in state-sponsored cultural, social, and political activities. Growing numbers of young people took marital choice into their own hands, often enlisting the services of a matchmaker to legitimate and sanctify their choice after the fact.

There were limits to the related trends toward autonomous and intravillage marital arrangements throughout rural China, particularly constraints imposed by poverty. The poor were at times still forced to enter paired marriages. One young woman in a poor Raoyang village in the 1960s, for example, was forced to abandon her lover, an only child, to accept a blind-exchange marriage that simultaneously assured her brother a bride. Such exchange marriages were illegal, and the Women's Federation sporadically sought to eliminate them. Larger multiple marriages sometimes involved

[11] In Wugong and other multilineage Hebei villages, certain kinds of intravillage marriage, including same-surname marriage, had long been acceptable.

package arrangements for six, eight, or more young people. The attractiveness of paired and multiple marriages lay in the fact that they often eliminated or greatly reduced costly brideprice and dowry, thus making it possible for the poor to wed. While frowned on by the state, this remained a recourse for poor rural households, for some their only hope to arrange a marriage.

Our 1984 survey reveals significant changes in intravillage marriage patterns related not only to collectivization and market closure, but also to Wugong's prosperity and prominence vis-à-vis neighboring communities. The year 1970 marked the divide with respect to intravillage marriage, and this tendency grew more pronounced with the passage of time (table 6.4). While examples of Team Three intravillage marriage are found as early as the 1930s, just 31 (21 percent) of the 151 brides marrying prior to 1970 were born in Wugong. By contrast, 48 (45 percent) of the 88 brides who married between 1970 and 1984 were born in the village, and 26 of 38 brides (68 percent) who married in the years 1984 to 1986 were born in Wugong. The pattern of intravillage marriage grew stronger throughout the 1980s, despite the fact that villagers again participated in a wider regional economy.

Many other Chinese rural communities followed Wugong in the shift toward intravillage marriage in the collective era. The literature abounds with examples from South China. Parish and Whyte (1978, 171) found that intravillage marriage in Guangdong increased from 3 percent prior to 1949 to more than 20 percent in the 1950s through the 1970s. Potter and Potter (1990, 217), in their Zengbu brigade research (Guangdong), noted an increase in intrabrigade marriage from 10 percent of the total in 1964-68 to 21 percent in 1979-81. In this single-lineage community, intrabrigade marriage had to overcome the taboo against same-surname marriage, which was considered incestuous prior to the 1950s.

Chan, Madsen, and Unger describe a "marriage revolution" in Chen village, Guangdong, during the Great Leap, when several youths dared to defy the taboo on intralineage (and intravillage) marriage and took local

brides of the same surname. In the post-Leap famine, intravillage alliances became the marriage of choice, involving 70-80 percent of the total (Chan, Madsen, and Unger 1984, 188-91). Jan Myrdal provides an anecdotal example from the Northwest, noting that in the 1960s intravillage marriage was commonplace in Shaanxi's Liulin village (Myrdal 1965, 21).

In the 1980s, with the rise of the household contract system and the market, Wugong, slow to shift gears in step with the times, lost its model status. Within a few years neighboring communities rapidly overcame the income and productivity advantages that the model village had long enjoyed. The relative attractiveness of marriage into Wugong under these circumstances declined. Young people nevertheless continued their efforts to secure control over marriage and choose partners from their circle of local acquaintances.

New marital patterns in Wugong were not confined to intravillage marriage. Some Team Three marriages even began to take place within the narrow confines of the team. In 1978 a local schoolteacher and women's activist married the deputy battalion leader of the militia. Both were natives of Team Three. Some Wugong people privately worried over possible adverse genetic consequences of close inbreeding. Wugong had no historical taboo against intravillage marriage or same-surname marriage; indeed this multilineage village had a long history of such marriages. But the village was divided into four incest-taboo neighborhoods, and strict codes had long prohibited marriage within the neighborhood. Two of these areas eventually formed teams one and two, while the third and fourth, separated by a lane, combined to form Team Three.

Geneticists and demographers with whom I have consulted indicate that intermarriage within a community of 600 households (Wugong village), or even 300 households (Team Three), poses no serious threat of birth defects provided close relatives do not marry. Yet China has serious problems of birth defects, and a rash of articles in the Chinese media in the years 1988-90 warned darkly that rural inbreeding had reached serious proportions in the countryside. On December 6, 1988, and January 2, 1989, the People's Daily (overseas edition) cited surveys by sociologist Gao Caiqin to warn of the debilitating consequences of intravillage marriage. On the basis of a study of 1,441 peasant families in six provinces, Gao concluded that evercloser consanguinity in single-lineage villages was "causing population degeneration and undermining social development." Gao found that 30 percent were marrying within their native villages and 51 percent in the township. On January 30, 1989, People's Daily (overseas edition) reported the existence of more than thirty million Chinese with congenital defects and warned that an important source of the problem in remote mountain areas lay in inbreeding. The Impartial Daily , a Party organ published in Hong Kong, presented even more alarming figures in its edition of April 12,

1990. It claimed that China had some fifty million people who were mentally or physically handicapped and again pointed to intravillage and intratownship marriage as a cause. What none of these sources mentioned was the fact that China's hukou system of population control, together with the antimarket collectivism that prevailed until the late 1970s, had strengthened the tendency toward intravillage reproduction.

By early 1989 the state began to act on findings like those mentioned above. Chen Muhua, chair of the Women's Association, told a symposium that the cost of raising children with congenital defects, which many attributed to close kin marriage, was seven to eight billion yuan per year. Chen announced the promulgation of a eugenics law, "Regulations to Prevent Mental Defectives (chidai sharen ) from Bearing Children" in Gansu province (People's Daily , overseas edition, January 30, 1989). The method: forced sterilization. The May 21, 1990, Taiwan newspaper World (Shijie) cited a People's Daily report that Gansu had already sterilized 5,500 of the province's 260,000 mental defectives. Officials stated that most of the rest would be sterilized within the year, and it seems likely that the Gansu sterilization program is a pilot project preparatory to national implementation. It is difficult to imagine a state program more susceptible to political manipulation and human tragedy. What criteria for "mental defectives" will be applied, and by whom?

Neither the broad marital policies of the state nor youth initiatives to take control of marriage challenged the patrilineal, patrilocal marital traditions that were particularly entrenched in North China. (Uxorilocal marriage had long been acceptable for families without sons in the southeast, east central, and southwest but not in the north; Wolf and Huang 1980, 11-15; 94-107; Goody 1990, 106-7.) Virtually the sole state initiative calling patrilineal, patrilocal practices into question in the People's Republic was the 1974-75 campaign pressed by Jiang Qing, with Xiaojinzhuang village in suburban Tianjin as its model. The campaign encouraged intravillage marriage and marriage into the family of a daughter who was an only child. One young man from neighboring Shen county did marry into Wugong at that time, enabling an only child to remain at home to care for her aged parents. The husband benefited by the move to a prosperous model village, doubtless a step up the economic ladder, but entailing some loss of face. With the end of the campaign, the issues disappeared from the political agenda.

The resurgence of the household economy and the market in the 1980s, and the weakening of restrictions on population movement, should reinforce trends toward extravillage marriage as the social and economic world again opens to marketing communities and beyond. Whether these effects will overcome other factors conducive to intravillage marriage, particularly changing patterns of youth courtship, remains to be seen.

Marriage Age

As the place of origin of Wugong brides changed, so too did age of first marriage. The earliest recorded age of marriage in our 1978 survey is that of an eighty-two-year-old poor peasant who married his sixteen-year-old bride when he was fourteen; one woman then in her fifties also married a middle peasant when she was fourteen.

Gamble's study of Dingxian in the 1930s produced numerous examples of much earlier marriages, particularly for boys, than those recorded in Wugong at that time.^[12] In a sample of 5,255 rural families, 169 males and 33 females under age fifteen were married, including 21 boys age eleven and under. Girls married as young as age twelve. All but 5 women in Gamble's sample had married by age twenty-one, but as many as 10 percent of males had not married by age thirty-eight. In another study of 515 families, Gamble found the range of ages for first marriage for males to run from seven to fifty-one and for females twelve to thirty-eight (Gamble 1954, 37-41; 58-59). In Buck's 1929-31 North China rural sample of 1,600 married men and 1,760 married women, 58 percent of the men and 86 percent of the women married by age nineteen, including 12 percent of men and 13 percent of women who married prior to age fifteen (Buck 1937, 380). Comparable results were recorded in C. M. Chiao's 1929-31 survey of 12,456 farm families. He found that in North China 62 percent of men and 80 percent of women married before age nineteen (Chiao 1933, 28, 31).

Gamble's 1930 Dingxian sample of 515 families makes clear the high correlation between male marriage age and wealth, using landownership as a gauge for wealth. Among households with less than 50 mu of land, 33 percent of married males wed by age fourteen, and 11 percent first married between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-five. By contrast, 81 percent of males in households with 100 mu or more of land married by age fourteen and all but five percent married by age seventeen (Gamble 1954, 59).

In another Dingxian sample of 5,225 families, Gamble found that more than 99 percent of females had married by age twenty-one. By contrast, just 60 percent of males married by age twenty-three, and it was not until age thirty-nine that 90 percent of males married (Gamble 1954, 39-40). The great majority of the unmarried 10 percent, virtually all of them males from poverty-stricken families, would never marry. They would face old age without familial support, and their family line would die out, thus violating the filial injunction to maintain the family line.

One measure of the degree of state penetration of village life during the collective era is the success of the campaign to postpone marriage for substantial numbers of rural youth, from the late teens to the early and even,

[12] In the 1930s Wugong was the extreme southwest part of Dingxian prefecture.

for a period, to the late twenties. By the 1960s, early and child marriages were largely eliminated and very late marriages (over age thirty) as well as the number of men who were never able to wed, were sharply reduced in most of rural China. From the 1950s through the mid-1970s, most Team Three men and women married shortly after age twenty as both earlier and later marriages declined in keeping with state directives and in response to changes associated with land reform and collectivization (table 6.5). The pattern shifted dramatically in the late 1970s. Marriage age for women and men increased on average from twenty-one in the late 1960s to twenty-five in the late 1970s. The explanation for the shifts in marriage age in the 1970s lies in the intense campaign to postpone marriage beyond age twenty-five, one of the pillars of China's birth control strategy at that time.

In the late 1970s campaign to delay marriage, as in so many others, Wugong more scrupulously enforced state goals than did most communities. For model communities, their "capital" was political capital. The advantages models enjoyed in higher income, access to state resources, and prestige were mediated through ties to the state, not the market, although the advantages of model status included higher incomes and privileged access to state resources. We hypothesize that the delay of marriage by five years to the late twenties was unusually pronounced in Wugong and other model villages, although the campaign had an impact far beyond such communities. After 1982 the state relaxed efforts to postpone marriage until the late twenties while continuing to control fertility. With partial decollectivization and the resurgence of the household economy, the state's ability to enforce marital postponement—and much else—generally weakened. The result in Wugong was that the norm shifted back to the early twenties, where it had been since the 1960s.

Older women and men in Team Three experienced a much broader range of ages at first marriage than did younger generations. Of 56 Team

Three women who married between 1920 and 1949 and were alive at the time of our 1984 survey, 20 married between age fifteen and nineteen, 26 between twenty and twenty-four, 9 between twenty-five and twenty-nine, and 1 in her early thirties. Out of 60 Team Three married men whose marriage between 1910 and 1949 is recorded in our 1984 survey, 1 married at age thirteen, 13 between age fifteen and nineteen, and 4 in their thirties. By contrast, every one of the 100 women and 100 men who married between 1970 and 1984 married between age twenty and twenty-nine. The data for the years 1970 to 1984 reveal with particular clarity the effectiveness of state pressures to defer marriage in a model village. In the years 1970-74, 15 men and 14 women married between ages twenty and twenty-four, and just 3 men and 4 women married between twenty-five and twenty-nine. But between 1975 and 1979, as the state called for delayed marriage to age twenty-eight for men and twenty-five for women, the pattern shifted sharply. In the years 1975 to 1979 just 5 men and 8 women married between ages twenty and twenty-four, while 25 men and 22 women married between twenty-five and twenty-nine. In the years 1980-84, state pressures for delaying marriage to the late twenties eased, and the focus of birth control shifted from delayed marriage to contraception and abortion. The pendulum then shifted back toward somewhat earlier marriage. Of the 38 men and 38 women who married between 1984 and 1986, just 4 men and 4 women did so at ages twenty-five to twenty-six while the remaining 34 men and 34 women wed between age twenty and twenty-four.

Our surveys of Team Three contain no examples of destitute males who never married. In Wugong village, from the 1940s, apparently every male could afford to marry, and all, even the physically handicapped, did so. It is not of course the case that following land reform and collectivization all Chinese rural males were able to marry. In the early 1960s, males in poorer households and destitute communities faced continued difficulty in securing a spouse. A vivid example is provided by Duankou village, a poor community a few miles north of Wugong that was devastated during the Great Leap. In the early 1970s just 17 out of 80 men age twenty-five to forty-five had been able to marry. In frustration, unmarried males, led by a former war hero, organized a gang that set out to prevent other village males from achieving the marriages they had been denied. Their method was to launch a rumor war, warning of dire consequences for families of prospective brides who were contemplating marrying into Duankou.

Throughout rural China, land reform and collectivization not only eliminated extremes in inequality of landholding and economic opportunity, but also initiated processes that compressed wide variations in marriage age. This pattern of homogenization in which early and late marriages were virtually eliminated, illustrated with particular clarity in model Wugong, may

be seen, if less sharply etched, throughout much of the countryside during the collective years.

The wide dispersion of marriage age, the inability of significant numbers of poorer men to marry at all, and substantial age differences between spouses, characteristic of rural China in the first half of the twentieth century, gave way in the decades following land reform and collectivization to the homogenization of marriage age in the early twenties. However, the hardcore poor, predominantly those living in chronic deficit areas, remained outside this process.

One other distinctive marital pattern in Hebei counties near Wugong bears mention. A popular local saying went: "A wife three years older is like a brick of gold; a wife five years older looks older than your mother." Sidney Gamble documented the predominant pattern of older wives for Dingxian in the 1930s. In a survey of 766 couples in 515 families, he found that wives were older in 70 percent of cases, husbands in 25 percent. In the case of older wives, the largest number were two to three years older, with a maximum difference of eleven years. Older husbands, however, averaged eight years older, up to a maximum of thirty-one years. Most of these cases involved poor males unable to marry until late in life (Gamble 1954, 45-46).

In Team Three, the greatest age disparity revealed in our 1978 survey was that of a male who took a bride eighteen years his junior in a 1932 union. Six other males, ranging in age from sixty-two to seventy-three, had wives ten to fifteen years younger. An additional thirty-one couples differed in age by five to nine years, with the male being older in twenty-six of these cases. In all but three of the forty-three instances in which the age difference of partners was five or more years, the male was above forty-five years of age, indicating that by the 1950s such marriages had become rare. Since the 1960s, all Team Three marriages have joined partners of roughly equal age; in no case did the difference exceed four years. The trend to marriages among people of comparable age coincided with homogenization in the age of first marriage.

Gamble (1954, 41-43) documented for Dingxian and rural Hebei in the 1930s a class-based pattern of differentiation in which the favored approach for the prosperous was to marry off a son at a very young age, averaging thirteen years for families owning more than 100 mu. Brides in such cases averaged 3.6 years older, to assure that they were ready both to bear children and to care for their in-laws and their child husbands. Wugong data likewise reveal class differentiation in marital patterns, although few men married as young as did Gamble's wealthy scions. The 1978 Team Three survey showed that among surviving couples, twenty-five men who married prior to 1955 had married women five to eighteen years younger. All but

three of these men were classified as poor peasants in land reform (the others were middle peasants). Many of them first married when they were in their thirties or forties, and in one case the groom was sixty years of age. Eleven women married men four to seven years younger. In these marriages, favored by the more prosperous, eight of the husbands' households were middle peasants, and one a landlord. Just two were poor peasants.

Our 1984 survey of Team Three showed that the practice of taking a bride ten or more years younger, which persisted in Team Three into the 1950s, has long since disappeared. On the other hand, forty-three women were two to four years older than their husbands, and thirty-nine men two to four years older than their wives. The pattern of wives two to four years older continued in some relatively recent marriages, including twelve out of twenty-two cases in the years 1974-84. However, in none of the thirty-eight marriages consummated between 1984 and 1986 did the age differential exceed two years. The traditional preference for brides two to four years older appears to have declined. The emerging pattern in the mid- to late 1980s is one of close age parity and a preference for intravillage marriage, with husband and wife of similar age in their early twenties.

Marriage Age and Class

The Team Three survey data provide striking confirmation of class-based differentiation in marital patterns prior to land reform. Wugong was part of the central Hebei base area during the anti-Japanese resistance. Landlord power in this region, with initially very low tenancy rates, was further reduced as a result of wartime reforms prior to the 1947 land reform. Consequently, when class labels (chengfen ) in this village were fixed in 1947, the Party based them on politicized memories of landownership and social relations that purportedly existed in 1936, more than a decade earlier. Only in that way could the Party assure the existence of class enemies to target for struggle and expropriation. The labels nevertheless provide certain clues concerning differential marital patterns among the poorer and more prosperous in the years prior to land reform.

The sample is of twenty-seven males classified as poor peasants, twelve as middle peasants, and one as landlord who were either age sixty by the time of the 1978 survey or had married by 1947. The marital data for the middle peasants and landlords displays the preferred regional pattern of early marriage: eleven of thirteen men married between ages fifteen and twenty to women who were two to five years their senior. By contrast, only four of twenty-seven poor peasants were able to marry by age twenty. Thirteen others were unable to marry until age twenty-five or later, including eight who first married after age thirty. Only four of twenty-seven poor peasant men married an older woman. Sixteen out of twenty-seven of these

poor peasant men married women five or more years younger, including four wrose brides were ten to eighteen years younger.

The 1978 survey data reveal the expected correlation between class designation and marital patterns in Wugong in the years prior to land reform. By contrast, those who married in the 1970s and 1980s display no significant differences based on class designation, for all hewed to state guidelines for marriage in their twenties regardless of class origin or income.

Marriage Age and Party Membership

Marital patterns for male Communist Party members differ significantly from those of non-Party members before and during the era of mobilizational collectivism. The 1978 survey reveals that all fifty-nine male Party members married between ages fifteen and twenty-nine. By contrast, the range of non-Party marriage ages spans the entire spectrum from age fourteen to sixty, with twenty-nine taking place after age thirty. The crux of the issue is the generation that included people who were in their sixties to their eighties at the time of our 1978 survey, since it was among them that later marriage, or no marriage, frequently occurred. Eight of the eleven male Party members age sixty and above had married by age twenty-four, and the remaining three married between twenty-five and twenty-seven. By contrast, the thirty-seven non-Party males for whom marital data is available included ten who married for the first time in their thirties, two in their forties, two in their fifties, and one at sixty. The fact that male Party members who reached marriage age prior to the 1947 land reform all married by age twenty-nine strongly suggests that in Team Three the Party did not recruit extensively from the very poorest strata, that is from marginal households whose sons could only marry very late if at all. Historical research documents the significant role played by prosperous peasants and landlords as well as independent cultivators in the anti-Japanese resistance in Wugong and throughout central Hebei. Such people had the resources to marry at relatively early ages. The Party also recruited among the poor, but rarely from the ranks of the utterly destitute and marginalized.

Party members responded only slightly more loyally than others to the campaign to delay marriage in the years 1975-84. Five of the six Party members who married in the years 1975-80, including two women, waited until ages twenty-five to twenty-eight. The remaining Party member, who was serving in the army, married at twenty-four. Of the eighty-nine non-Party members who married in those years, fifteen men and seventeen women, over one-third of the total, married prior to age twenty-five. Within the context of significant marriage delay for all, Party members tended to hew slightly more closely to state guidelines. But in a model village, nearly everyone conformed to state demands to delay marriage.

Conclusion

This chapter has highlighted changes in family size and structure, marriage age, location of marital partners, and the locus of marital decision in response to powerful state initiatives. Of particular importance are the following: collectivization and population control leading to village involution in the era of mobilizational collectivism, and market-oriented contractual reforms and rigorous birth control measures since the 1980s. The changes associated with the collective era in Wugong and in much of rural China led to homogenization in age of marriage in the range of twenty to twenty-four, a marked shift toward intravillage marriage, shrinking family size, and predominance of nuclear families long before the state succeeded in reducing fertility. Comparative data strongly suggest that these patterns, documented here with respect to Wugong, were widely shared throughout the Chinese countryside. Many trends, particularly delayed marriage and later reduced fertility (the one-child family), constitute direct responses to state policies and priorities. But others reveal the striving of rural inhabitants, and particularly rural youth, to expand opportunities to make autonomous decisions concerning marriage, family, and family division. Certain outcomes, such as the unusually early and high response rate to the state's delayed-marriage campaign, the early and rigorous implementation of birth control, and the trend to intravillage marriage, reflect Wugong's model status, a factor that peaked in the 1950s to 1970s before declining in the early 1980s.

The survey results suggest that the household contract system and expanded opportunity for market and mobility since the 1980s produced significant changes in family and individual marital strategies, including further shrinkage of family size, the existence for the first time of substantial numbers of new couples forming independent households prior to the birth of a child, and the decision to postpone conception for at least several years after marriage. Finally, we note signs of the emergence of a bimodal familial pattern that can best be understood in terms of new class divisions. At one pole we observe small nuclear farm families and at the other a significant number of joint and stem families, many of them engaged in significant entrepreneurial activity.

Seven
Reconstituting Dowry and Brideprice in South China

Helen F. Siu

This chapter is based on fieldwork conducted periodically from 1986 to 1990, funded by the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People's Republic of China and Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I am grateful for the comments from Deborah Davis, Jack Goody, Stevan Harrell, and participants in the conference on Family Strategies in Post-Mao China, June 12-17, 1990, Roche Harbor Resort, San Juan Island.

The recent decade of reforms in the 1980s brought drastic changes to Nanxi Zhen, a market town with a rural hinterland.^[1] Situated at the heart of the Pearl River delta, connected by easy road and water transport to Guangzhou, Macao, and Hong Kong, it has enjoyed an unprecedented boom.^[2] Rows of new houses have mushroomed on the landscape. Some are funded by relatives living in Hong Kong and Macao. Many are built by local entrepreneurs themselves. There is also the ever-growing number of rural enterprises employing young migrant workers on the town's outskirts, accompanied by the bustling businesses on the roads and in shops and restaurants, by the common sight of color television sets, washing machines, hi-fi systems, and videos in private homes, and by the lavish rituals at funerals and weddings.^[3]

Family dynamics have taken a sudden turn. Nearly everyone I encoun-

[1] All the local place names in this chapter are pseudonyms. Nanxi Zhen went through a few administrative changes after the revolution. It was an administrative town after 1923, headquarters for the third district of Dagang county. It maintained a market-town status in the 1950s. In 1963 it was made into the Nanxi Zhen Commune. In 1987 it merged with the surrounding Nanxi Rural Commune to become a zhen .

[2] This prosperity has been partly brought about by investments from natives who emigrated to Hong Kong, Macao, and Southeast Asia in the first half of the twentieth century and who have become successful businessmen and industrialists. The particularly successful counties in the delta are Nanhai, Panyu, Shunde, Dongguan, and Zhongshan.

[3] See Helen Siu, "Socialist Peddlers and Princes in a Chinese Market Town," American Ethnologist 16, no. 2 (May 1989), for the economic changes.

tered in town with grown children complained that the young people of today are drunk with the new wealth. They are desperately energetic, but they are also said to be brash, uncaring for their parents, vulgar in their conspicuous life-styles, and lacking moral restraint. Surprisingly, the young people who show little knowledge of the Chinese cultural tradition eagerly participate in lavish funeral and wedding rituals and shoulder most of the expenses themselves.^[4]

Town residents also complained that the escalating dowries, some reaching over 10,000 yuan, are ruining those who have daughters to marry off, and that sons and daughters keep most of their wages and bonuses for their own future homes instead of paying for their keep. With an average monthly income of 200-300 yuan, young workers give at the most 40 to 80 yuan per month to their parents. Although the payments from the groom's side averaged 1,000 yuan in cash, the demand on the groom's family to provide a new house for the young couple puts a considerable strain on relationships within the family and leads to intricate maneuvers with town cadres to obtain building sites and materials.^[5]

In the villages surrounding the town, which represented an impoverished area in the prerevolutionary and the Maoist period, a similar lavishness is now displayed in the provision of new houses by the groom's side and large banquets.^[6] Dowry from the bride's family remains small compared with that of the town, but contributions from the groom's side have increased several times, reaching an average of 2,000 yuan. Poor males are said to have resorted to taking in migrant women from Guangxi province because the amount demanded for marriage to local women has become unaffordable.^[7]

Have the terms of marriage gotten out of reach and out of control during

[4] See Helen Siu, "Recycling Rituals: Politics and Popular Culture in Contemporary Rural China," in Unofficial China: Essays in Popular Culture and Thought, ed. Richard Madson, Perry Link, Paul Pickowicz (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989), for the analysis of why young people are actively engaging in ritual activities.

[5] In this area where properties belonging to emigrants had been confiscated in the Maoist era, one strategy today is for the emigrants to claim the properties back for their relatives. Cadres in Nanxi have expressed concern for such a trend because the town government has no resources either to compensate for these properties or to relocate those who are made to vacate.

[6] See also the chapter on marriage practices in a rural community in the eastern part of the Pearl River delta, in Sulamith and Jack Potter, China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

[7] In the 1980s, Nanxi Zhen hired thousands of migrant laborers from other provinces, especially Jiangxi, Guangxi, and Hunan. They filled the lowest level of town factories and also became sharecroppers in the villages. Employment peaked in 1988 with over 15,000. For the pattern of migration, see Helen Siu, "The Politics of Migration in a Market Town," in China on the Eve of Tiananmen , ed. Deborah Davis and Ezra Vogel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

the recent decade of prosperity? Why do people feel compelled to pursue these ends? What do the marital transfers today tell us about family strategies four decades after the revolution? In addition, the different emphasis on contributions from the bride's and groom's sides in town and village is striking and requires our analytic attention. In pursuing these questions, I aim in this chapter to address theoretical debates in anthropology with regard to marital exchanges, and to use the debates to highlight the complexity of family dynamics and cultural exigencies as several generations of local residents experienced major transformations in the political economy during the last half-century.

Most scholars who work on dowry and brideprice would agree that marital transfers affect and reflect relationships between the generations and between families. Jack Goody starts out arguing that dowry, which establishes a conjugal fund, is a form of "diverging devolution" common to complex stratified societies in Europe and Asia. For purposes of maintaining economic standing, families find it important to advance the status of daughters as well as sons, and so to allocate them a share in the parental estate. He contrasts dowry with bridewealth, a circulating fund common in classless societies. Bridewealth is an exchange among senior men used to establish future marriages, especially for the sibling of the bride. Wealth goes one way, and rights over women another.^[8] In Chinese studies (as elsewhere in Europe and Asia), the term "brideprice" applies to that portion of the marital transfers provided by the groom's kin; it is usually part of a wider set of transactions that includes the dowry, the contributions made by the family of the bride and normally destined for the daughter or for the married couple. Goody suggests an alternative phrase, "indirect dowry."^[9] Here the term "brideprice" is retained for transfers from the groom's side, whatever their destination. What usually changes is the different weight given to one element as against the other, with higher status groups tending to stress direct dowry and lower ones brideprice, or indirect dowry.^[10]

[8] The term "brideprice" has been used to cover two different types of marital transfer. In Africa, it was earlier used for the transaction that passed from the family of the groom to that of the bride, where it was available for the marriage of her brothers or other male kinsfolk; the word was generally abandoned in favor of "bridewealth," since nothing like "price" in the usual sense of the word is involved.

[9] Whether the former gifts are passed on to the daughter or used in the marriage festivities themselves, they constitute even less of a "price" than African bridewealth. However, among some lower-status groups, part or even all of these transfers may be retained by the bride's kin, possibly in compensation for the gift they have provided, possibly as a reserve on which the daughter can draw, possibly for their own use. See Jack Goody and S.J. Tambiah, Bridewealth and Dowry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).

[10] Although I have sometimes indicated the element of endowment, it is essential to recognize the above complications and bear in mind that "brideprice" in the wider sense is rarely an alternative to direct dowry, but rather a counterpart.

Stressing prestige building rather than status maintenance, Harrell and Dickey refine Goody's original formulation by underscoring the social meaning of dowry.^[11] They expect dowry to be a prominent feature of socially differentiated but openly competitive societies with urban commercial wealth. While recognizing that dowry also involves an economic transaction between families that reflects how woman's labor is calculated and valued, it is more important as part of a cultural, symbolic complex, a social statement for the upwardly mobile classes.

Before the revolution the marriage transfers of rural China usually consisted of indirect dowry; that is, the groom's family made a contribution, which was returned with the bride as part of the dowry. Only among the very poor would it be retained by her kin.^[12] Maurice Freedman suggests that brideprice payments signify the superiority of the groom's family vis-à-vis the bride's, while Patricia Ebrey sees dowries in historical times as used by the upwardly mobile for purposes of status enhancement.^[13]

Both claims are true in specific circumstances, but dowry is used in a much wider range of situations than social mobility alone, and brideprice is used for more purposes than affecting superiority, since they are elements in virtually all marriages. This point is made by Goody in his recent book where he refines his earlier analysis by arguing that in traditional China, the incorporation of women by their husbands' families was never abrupt or complete. She and her natal family maintained multiple ties through life. He sees only a limited role for marital transfers as a payment for the right to women's labor in the strict sense, but allows analytical room for the role of dowry as a means of prestige building. In the economics of status maintenance, he stresses the cultural and social importance of a woman to both her natal and her affinal kin in providing for "the continuation of the house," to which process the creation of conjugal funds was central. This was evident in China, where most scholars intuitively assume otherwise. Both families contributed to this fund. Direct dowry was the main instrument used by high-status families to endow the new conjugal units, and indirect dowry (or brideprice in the wider sense) by lower-status families for similar purposes.^[14]

This theoretical material is useful for understanding the nature of mari-

[11] See Stevan Harrell and Sara Dicky, "Dowry Systems in Complex Societies," Ethnology 24, no. 2 (1985): 105-20.

[12] William Parish and Martin Whyte, Village and Family in Contemporary China , 180-92 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

[13] Maurice Freedman, Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung (London: Athlone, 1966), 55; Patricia Ebrey, "Early Stages in the Development of Descent Group," in Kinship Organization in Late Imperial China, 1000-1940 , ed. Patricia Ebrey and James Watson (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1986).

[14] Jack Goody, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive: Systems of Marriage and the Family in the Pre-industrial Societies of Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

tal transfers in Nanxi Zhen and their recent developments. Local historians are eager to point out that the differences in terms of marriage between Nanxi town and the surrounding villages had existed over several centuries: The town elites used dowries to enhance their status, whereas the poor tenants in the villages "sell" their daughters to finance their sons' marriage by asking for a large brideprice. This view is of course debatable, but if it were true, it would confirm the analyses of Harrell and Dicky on a general level, and also the China-specific formulations of Freedman.

The issue is complicated, however, by the question of whether a similar set of factors can be used to explain the differences in the decade of the 1980s. Are the divergent terms of marriage observed today similar to those in the prerevolutionary period, revived after a hiatus of forty years? Or does the explosion of energies in the 1980s indicate how fundamentally family relationships had been changed by the Maoist state in the decades before, and how the post-Mao reforms have further restructured family life in both town and village?

Emphasizing again the social prestige—building element in marriage transfer, as Harrell and Dicky would, one may argue that the escalations of dowry in town today are due to a sudden prosperity combined with a largely untouched cultural tradition. Revived by liberalized policies in the 1980s, the ideal forms of transfer finally become a reality for the majority of people. In the town, the new wealth generates competitive display; parents want to provide for their children in their new households in order to confirm the family's social statuses. It is the same with the younger generation. Nanxi town consists of a large number of young workers, private entrepreneurs and cadres whose fortunes have exploded in the decade of reforms and who are eager to flaunt their newly acquired wealth for the purpose of social networking. Large dowries and at times equivalent contributions from the groom's side are ways to reinforce status. It is also shrewd business strategy, as with the financing of other rituals. This analytical position assumes that the socialist interlude in the past forty years has done little to change cultural expectations and strategies for the perpetuation of family wealth and status.

If one stresses the rights to women's labor in marriage transfer, analytical attention is drawn to the escalating brideprices in the villages and their relationship to labor needs among the farming families. Could the increased pace of economic activities in the 1980s have exacerbated these needs, which are reflected in the ways families strategize and negotiate marriage payments? Social statuses in the villages are changing with increased mobility and rapid out-migration. With an acute labor shortage, it seems logical to assume that families are paying a high brideprice in order to secure the rights of women to augment long-term field labor. That was a concern in the past, and it remains one today. This position regarding the role

of marital transfers assumes that the traditional village-town divide, as well as the gender and generational division of labor, continues to structure the area's ongoing development in much the same way as before.

Observing the divergent terms of marriage in Nanxi town and the surrounding villages in the 1980s, I would caution against viewing these terms as representing two different political economies with their own cultural logic, which have sprung back to haunt the socialist government. On the surface, the town-dwellers' stress on dowry and the villagers' on brideprice seems to indicate that the strategies of prestige building and of the recruitment of women's labor have prevailed in the different sectors. But I suggest that these marital transfers arose in a single culturally constructed political economy, which had undergone drastic transformations in the Maoist period at one level and which had persisted at another. At the level of change, one can view the extravagant dowries in town today as public statements and shrewd networking in an era of entrepreneurial vigor; the peculiar form such vigor takes is based on the popular assumption that the party-state can exert its power against any formal civic organization. I would also show that in both town and village today the marital transfers negotiated involve not so much the exchange of material goods and prestige between the families of the bride and groom as the intense and rapid devolution of property to the conjugal couple at the time of marriage itself. This trend represents a very different intergenerational and interfamilial dynamics in the context of a much-changed political economy. On the issue of persistence, I shall argue that the involvement of women in "the continuation of the house" remains intact in both town and village after forty years of socialism. The peasants who face the rapid emigration of both sons and daughters can meet labor demands by making sharecropping arrangements with migrant laborers; they choose instead to pay a high brideprice in order to anchor much-valued family commitments in the village. Could it be that rather than the family's merely surviving the Maoist interlude, its importance may have been intensified in the last few decades by Maoist politics to the point that the older family members, confronted by a decreasing commitment from their children, are now pursuing family strategies with inexplicable fervor? Goody's analytical views on the importance of the conjugal fund may seem applicable in these circumstances.

Therefore, while appreciating the major roles of both cultural tradition and economic logic in shaping marriage transfers, I suggest that four decades of socialist politics have underlain the mutual impact of marriage and the economy, changing and at times preserving cultural expectations, restructuring economic needs, and at times reinforcing family strategies.^[15]

[15] This is close to the observations of Parish and Whyte for the postrevolutionary period up to the late 1970s. For north China, see Kay Johnson, Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208-14.

That history highlights how much and in what ways family relationships have been transformed, and it is a crucial analytic element for understanding marital transfers in Nanxi Zhen today. Using a random sample survey of three hundred households collected in 1986 and on subsequent trips in 1987 and 1989, I explore these issues of the reconstitution of brideprice and dowry in Nanxi Zhen and the surrounding villages in relation to the process of decollectivization or privatization.^[16]

Prerevolutionary Marital Transfers in Nanxi

The Pearl River delta is a complex, ever-expanding social landscape. As the river continues to flow along a southeastern direction and forms marshes at its lower reaches, it attracts migrants who come to settle from different parts of south China. This process has given rise at various periods to communities with vastly different economic resources and cultural configurations. Nanxi town is one of a line of market towns situated between a well-populated part of the delta and these vast river marshes. Known locally as sands (sha ), the marshes were reclaimed and converted to rice fields by lineage and merchant estates based in the town. In this way, Nanxi grew from an outpost in the sands during the Ming to a dominating center of wealth, power, and ritual by the late eighteenth century. At the turn of the present century, the residents consisted of a dynamic commercial class, together with its functionaries, who controlled the landed estates in the sands and the trading of grain, mulberry, silk cocoons, wine, fruit, and vegetables.^[17]

Although the economies of Nanxi town and the villages have been interlocked, they are worlds apart in many ways. The inhabitants of the sands were mobile, boat-dwelling farmers and fishermen who were treated as an underclass by town dwellers. Generally referred to as the Dan, the sands people worked as hired hands and tenants when lineages reclaimed river marshes, and they engaged in the meaner trades, such as carrying coffins and digging graves. Prejudice against them was reinforced during the years of bad harvests when they fled the area in their boats with whatever they could glean from the fields. When they had gathered strength in numbers, they were portrayed as bandits and pirates.^[18] Until the 1940s there were

[16] The survey covers all fifteen of the town's residential neighborhoods and three villages at different distances from the town.

[17] See Helen Siu, "Recycling Tradition: Culture, History and Political Economy in the Chrysanthemum Festivals of South China," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32, no. 4 (1990): 765-94.

[18] See Dian Murray, Pirates of the South China Coast, 1790-1810 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987). See Helen Siu, Agents and Victims in South China: Accomplices in Rural Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), chaps. 2 and 3, on the historical development of the sands in the Pearl River delta.

seldom any real villages. The occasional straw huts on the dikes were in sharp contrast to the 393 ancestral halls and the 139 temples in the town before the 1949 revolution. Even today, the sands consists only of small villages between which lie extensive fields.

Nanxi was a place of residence for an unusual concentration of the wealthy and upwardly mobile until the land reform. An official document of 1971 records that the town then had 482 persons labeled as landlords and 57 as rich peasants. Most of them belonged to the town's four major lineages, whose members married each other. Before 1949 they and their families constituted a significant social group among the town's some 12,000 residents. For the women in these families, there was little extradomestic employment and no need for it. In fact, a married daughter of the wealthy might not touch the food of her husband's household for at least a year, being supplied with foodstuffs from her natal home. The women were also provided with lavish dowries, which might include elaborate jewelry, double sets of suanzhi furniture, delicate porcelain dishes and vases, silverware, together with annual provisions of grain and large tracts of river marshes.^[19] Brideprice was negligible. In 1986, older women whom I interviewed generally agreed that before the war the brideprice for a "respectable family" was about a hundred silver dollars, a few hundred wedding cakes, and banquet food. Whatever was received was largely consumed in the wedding feast. Both the bride's and the groom's family would hold a dinner for friends and relatives, each making up ten or more banquet tables. They insisted that except for the very poor, families accepted without argument whatever the bridegroom's family would offer. That custom remains unchanged today. Negotiating brideprice would have been a tremendous loss of face. "Only the sands people would act in such a manner," I was told.

To attribute this emphasis on dowry only to a strategy for status acquisition among rich families is to neglect the fact that a similar situation of low brideprice in relation to dowry existed in ordinary town families. It might be suggested that the terms of marriage had different meanings for households in various circumstances. But the life-styles of members of the wealthy lineages and what they provided for their daughters represented the cultural ideal in the area.^[20] The smallness of brideprice might also be

[19] I refer to those that controlled the development of the sands from the Ming dynasty on. See the genealogies of the Zhao of Sanjiang in Xinhui county, the Long and Luo of Shunde county, the Huo of Foshan. See Siu, "Where Were the Women? Rethinking Marriage Resistance and Regional Culture in South China," Late Imperial China 11, no. 2 (December 1990): 32-62, for details of marriage customs in the area.

[20] The same was true for Shawan in Panyu county, another center of wealth and power at the edge of the sands. A large percentage of the town households in Shawan literally lived off the focal ancestral estate, Liugeng Tang, which owned 60,000 mu of the sands. As in Nanxi, women learned sewing and helped with family chores until they settled with their husbands. For the historical evolution of lineages in Shawan, see Liu Zhiwei, "Lineage on the Sands: The Case of Shawan," a paper presented at the panel "Lineage Power and Community Change in Republican South China," annual meetings of the Association for Asian Studies, April 1990.

related to the practice of buluojia , the delayed removal of the bride to her husband's house.^[21] The richer the families, the longer their daughters stayed at home. Ties with a married daughter continued to be important in various ways. As long as she remained at her home, the fruits of her labor were shared with her natal family. The significant break with her parents came when she was about to have a child, not when wedding gifts were negotiated and exchanged. When she joined her husband, provisions for continuing support were often made. If brideprice was used at all for acquiring the rights to a woman's labor, the custom of buluojia would have kept the payment low.

Town residents, whether from families that were formerly rich or poor, insisted that their terms of marriage and those of the sands were very different. The inhabitants of the sands did not practice buluojia ; a woman settled with her husband's family immediately after the wedding. Among the fishermen, the mobility of their boat-dwellings made it difficult to do otherwise, since it was not a question of husband and wife being in adjacent villages. At the same time, their dowries were modest, consisting of several sets of clothes, a blanket, a mosquito net, washbasins, bowls, and plates; but the brideprice was large, usually twice that of the town. In my 1986 interviews I came across old men in Zhixi, a village in the sands, who had been married in the late 1920s and early 1930s. They quoted brideprice amounts of one hundred to two hundred silver dollars, which seemed extraordinarily high given the standard of living in the sands at the time. One part of the brideprice consisted of banquet food for the relatives and friends of the bride. In the town only selected members of households (other than those of close relatives) were invited to attend wedding banquets, but in the sands such occasions involved every aquaintance far and near, young and old. Feasting lasted for three whole days. Meals were served for those guests who had moored their boats the night before. They were feasted again on the wedding day, and on the third day meals were served before the guests left the area. As in Africa, the remainder of the brideprice was

[21] Historical documents through the Qing recorded it as common in parts of the Pearl River delta both among the elites and commoners. It involved women marrying at an early age but continuing for a few years to reside at their natal home. They would briefly visit their husband's home for important ritual occasions and festivals, but not until they were about to give birth to their first child would they settle there permanently. See Siu, "Where Were the Women?" for a summary of the relevant literature.

often used as a marriage fund for brothers,^[22] a use that was scorned by town residents, who asserted that the sands people were "shamelessly aggressive" in negotiating brideprice and that "they had to marry off a daughter in order to get a daughter-in-law."^[23] It seems that their strategy for coping with life at the bottom of a social hierarchy was regarded as a stigma in the eyes of the townsfolk, who used it as a way of dissociating themselves from the people of the sands.

The War Interlude

The domination of the town over the sands in the late imperial period continued through the republican period until the decade of the 1940s, when war and endemic disorder finally broke the power of the town-based ancestral trusts. Many tenant farmers in the sands were able to acquire land from their landlords by manipulating cash rents, grain prices, and taxes. In addition, local bosses who rose to the height of their power during the Japanese occupation took over vast estates by force.^[24] Although built with straw and river mud, small villages with more permanent dwellings mushroomed in those places where local bosses set up their territorial bases.^[25] Interviews suggested that in this particular decade marriage strategies changed with the shift in power. The rich households in the villages started to arrange marriages with elite families in town whose fortunes had declined in the years of war. In doing so, they adopted the prestigious custom of buluojia and displayed lavish dowries. My interviews show that several local bosses succeeded in marrying their daughters to the families of merchants and rich peasants from the neighborhoods adjacent to the town.^[26] As for the ordinary people of the sands, the situation did not appear to change, although the new situation provided the basis for them later on to redefine their circumstances. In 1986 I interviewed a dozen of the old residents in one of these villages settled by migrant laborers, Zhixi. Although

[22] See Jack Goody and S. J. Tambiah, Bridewealth , on the functions of brideprice and dowry in African and Indian societies. A circulating fund increases interdependence among siblings and between generations within a family.

[23] The demand of high brideprices in the sands was told to me by many old women in town and confirmed by a marriage ritual specialist who attended many weddings in the area.

[24] For the rise and fall of local bosses, see Helen Siu, Agents and Victims , chap. 5. For Nanxi, see Helen Siu, "Subverting Lineage Power: Local Bosses in the 1940's," a paper presented in the panel "Lineage Power and Community Change in Republican South China," AAS meetings, April 1990.

[25] A richer household might have a tile roof. These houses are known as chan ding ya (wooden beams and bark holding up tiles).

[26] For example, the Liu family of Zhixi village married a daughter into a prosperous Mai family of Yongding in the late 1940s. A great deal of jewelry was given as dowry. The father of the bride was the most powerful local boss in the village.

it was difficult for them to name any ancestor beyond their grandfather's generation, they nevertheless claimed that their families had originated from the older part of the delta where the ancestral halls stood. They insisted that as long as they could remember, they had practiced buluojia . They also disassociated themselves from the boat-dwelling inhabitants of the more recent river marshes further southeast, an area they termed xia sha (the lower sands).^[27] But data from my survey contradicted their claims. Their families at the time demanded extraordinarily high brideprices of between one hundred and three hundred silver dollars. Families of the bride and groom both provided banquets that lasted for several days. Dowries were far below what was given by elite families in town and consisted of kitchen utensils and bedding, although in some cases a set of table and chairs and a chest were added.

Contrast the rural areas with the circumstances of households in town for that period. During the eight years of war with Japan, Nanxi town was ruled by an uneasy alliance of local bosses with the Japanese army that was stationed nearby. Everything was scarce owing to the blockades imposed both by the Japanese military and by what remained of the Nationalist government. The fortunes of landowning families and merchant houses declined rapidly, their estates being divided and sold off to the military bosses. The ideal marital payments were hard to come by. As for ordinary households, the ideal was even harder to imagine. Old women I interviewed claimed that ordinary households provided little dowry to speak of. Brides settled immediately with their husbands because family members were scattered or had perished. The most the couple got was enough food for a dinner with close relatives, together with some basic items of furniture. Those who were refugees from other counties were grateful to have any shelter.^[28] Brideprice, if given, was often in the form of baskets of rice, ranging from one to ten dan .

Except for the local bosses who had risen rapidly during the war, families in town found lavish dowries for daughters harder to reach, and the embarrassment of asking for a brideprice became a necessity. In other words, the dislocations of war and the reversals of fortune for the area's elite families had eroded the traditional terms of marriage before the Communists arrived on the scene. It is this period that provides a realistic baseline for an evaluation of the relationship between the terms of marriage and the transformed social hierarchy after 1949.

[27] Some of the residents of Zhixi might have been poor urbanites who migrated to the villages. They attended the lineage ceremonies in the ancestral halls in town and continued to observe town customs.

[28] In my household survey of 1986, I found many heads of households, men or women, who had come from other counties in Guangdong during the war and who settled in Nanxi afterward.

Socialist Transformations

Since family continuation, social prestige, the devolution of wealth, and the labor needs for households were important factors in marital transfers, family strategies were bound to change during the Maoist period from the 1950s to the late 1970s because the consolidating party-state had made a serious attempt to redefine the ideological principles and to restructure the political economy and the social hierarchy. In Nanxi the step-by-step transformation started immediately after the Communists took power. During the land reform of 1952, the former elites of the town—managers of lineage estates, merchants, administrators of the Nationalist government, and local bosses who came to power in the 1940s—were killed, imprisoned, or had their properties confiscated. Those who had set the standards of wealth and power were then reduced to a caste of untouchables. Not only were the means no longer available for continuing such a life-style, but the policy of overturning the hegemony of "tradition" was actively pursued during political campaigns when activists were brought in from outside the community. Those activists who had often been poor tenant farmers in the sands set about destroying ancestral halls and important public buildings, and carted the materials off to the villages. The political fervor extended to social life itself. Through the 1950s and 1960s, lavish dowries and wedding feasts were periodically stigmatized as "feudal extravagance." Brideprice was condemned as "buying and selling in marriage," and large payments were prohibited. But the uneven ebb and flow of politics meant that local cadres were sometimes compromising and permissive. The uneven pattern of policy implementation was quite similar to the one found by Parish and Whyte in rural Guangdong.

People interviewed in the late 1980s repeatedly expressed resignation about the stripping down of traditional practices in Nanxi town through the Maoist decades. The ideals of traditional marriage payments lingered on after the land reform. It was impossible for the town residents to afford the lavish transfers of the former elites, but dowries did consist of moderate provisions of household furniture, utensils, and jewelry. People recalled carrying brides on sedan chairs and attending wedding feasts. At the time, agriculture and commerce had recovered somewhat from the war. Family fortunes and private property were inheritable. But the subsequent collectivization of town enterprises followed by the famine years of 1958-61 left little for wedding festivities. My friends remembered how they sent their children around the neighborhood streets to gather leaves for fuel, and how fried dough wrapped in banana leaves became a delicacy. When the economy recovered in the early 1960s, local cadres had to brace themselves for the siqing campaigns.^[29] For fear of corruption charges made by

[29] "The four clean-ups" campaigns preceded the Cultural Revolution. The major targets of attack were village cadres who had risen with the Party bureaucracy.

work teams sent from outside, local cadres asked the inhabitants to behave with moderation. Guests could attend wedding dinners only in small groups because the town leadership explicitly limited the number of banquet tables to four per gathering.

The Cultural Revolution tried to kill off whatever remained of the old practices in town, giving rise to severe factional disputes among the town's leadership. Although actual fighting was rare, groups of Red Guards were formed, cadres were challenged by activists recruited from the sands, former landlords were paraded around the town, and ancestral tablets were burnt. The official model for wedding celebrations was to hold tea receptions instead of dinner banquets. Interviews show that because of the concentration of cadres, Party members, union workers, and teachers in town, the official line for simple wedding rituals was imposed more effectively than in the villages. Furthermore, the concentration of ancestral and merchant estates there in the prerevolutionary period meant that there were many families with bad class labels. Reduced to being a group of untouchables, members of these families had to marry among themselves or else "marry down" to whoever would take them. In the latter case the husbands were mostly poor petty traders who could not afford any marriage prestations.

By the mid 1970s those who remained unconvinced by socialist rhetoric were too afraid of the Party's organizational power to express their sentiments publicly. A new generation came of age under the shadow of the Maoist ideological purity who had been denied the appreciation of cultural depth and historical sensitivity. In the eyes of their parents, they had little sympathy for tradition.

Nevertheless, despite economic hardships and the government's explicit restrictions, dowry and brideprice remained an important concern for the local residents. The highest sum for brideprice quoted to me was about a hundred yuan, balanced by a few dowry items, such as bedding, household utensils, chairs, and a table. Such payments were not substantial enough to be viewed as means for prestige building or as shrewd calculations to obtain a woman's labor. But their persistence did reflect the continual importance of family commitments in everyday life under the changing socioeconomic conditions.^[30]

The economy of Nanxi town had been drastically restructured and removed from the sphere of local agriculture. Instead of a place of residence for rentier landlords who lived off the grain from the sands, residents were

[30] The reinforcement of family and patriarchy by socialist transformation has been dealt with by Judith Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Margery Wolf, Revolution Postponed: Women in Contemporary China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985); Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter, Personal Voices (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). See also the works of Kay Johnson and Elizabeth Croll, and most recently, Deborah Davis's chapter in this volume.

employed in collective enterprises, which increasingly entered into subcontracts with state factories and commercial units at the county capital. While private resources were stripped away, wages in these collective factories were low, and the security or social services offered could not be compared with employment in the state sector. Nevertheless, town residents anxiously held on to their meager earnings and unflattering status, hoping that the government would not look for an excuse to send them to the sands and demote them to the status of peasants. Their fear of such arbitrary political reversals was not unjustified. Their status as town dwellers had been redefined when the adjacent rural commune was administratively merged with the town between 1958 and 1963. Ironically, it was their urban status that also led their children to be sent off to the sands in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.

Factory employment meant that the next generation worked with collective town enterprises rather than with their families. With wage employment, young workers might be expected to develop more individualized marriage strategies highlighting the concerns of the conjugal pair. But because of the relatively stagnant town economy and the post-1949 wage structure favoring seniority and the practice of dingti , young workers continued to be dependent on their parents and were expected to contribute to the family budget.^[31] In the collective town enterprises workers received a great deal less of social services than those in the state sector, and the family continued to provide important support. My survey shows that one-generation families were rare. Many households consisted of the parents, a married son and his children, and unmarried children. Because of the continued practice of buluojia , it was not unusual for a married daughter to eat her meals at home. In other words, intergenerational and sibling ties remained strong despite wage employment outside the home and despite government efforts to replace loyalties to the family with those to the Party and the state.^[32]

Indeed, families relied increasingly on an informal network of relatives because many traditional civic organizations had been eliminated.^[33] This

[31] Dingti is a system of job assignment in which a retiring person's job can be taken over by his or her children.

[32] On age cohorts and structured life chances, see Deborah Davis, Long Lives , 1991 paperback ed., chap. 8; "Intergenerational Inequalities and the Chinese Revolution," Modern China 11, no. 2 (April 1985): 177-201; "Unequal Chances, Unequal Outcomes: Pension Reform and Urban Inequality," China Quarterly , 1989, 223-42; on dependent relationships in the urban industrial structure, see her review of Andrew Walder's book Communist Neo-traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), in "Patrons and Clients in Chinese Industry," Modern China 14, no. 4 (October 1988): 487-97.

[33] I refer to marketing networks, temple and credit associations, neighborhood shrines, and ritual specialists. For example, residents relied more on their relatives for funerals when ritual specialists and coffin-bearers were not readily available.

dependence was compounded by the general bureaucratization of life—for example, in the allocation of housing, for the establishment of quotas in various neighborhoods to send educated youths to the sands, or for the recruitment of soldiers and students based on class background.^[34] Maneuvering the power of the state became a feature of everyday life. It showed even in household registration: married children delayed the registration of their new household until it was strategic to do so. A paradox existed for the town residents: while they relied heavily on the family for services not available through state channels, coping with the power of the state had become a cultural given in domestic decisions. The terms of marriage were negotiated within the framework of this politicized environment.

Maoist politics brought about drastic economic transformations in the sands as well as in the town. Nevertheless, marriage transfers continued to be significant for the local population. Instead of mooring their boats along a wide network of rivers, the inhabitants of the sands were forced to settle on land, where they were increasingly confined to their cellularized villages.^[35] But under the policy of the Maoist period, settlement rights had strings attached. An exclusively grain-growing economy tightly controlled under the state pricing system kept their incomes low and their lives isolated from the towns and cities. Their daughters, whose children would automatically be assigned rural status, were no longer an available choice as marriage partners for those outside the sands. By the late 1950s the traditional strategy of achieving upward mobility by marrying into town mainly as second wives was closed off. Despite government claims to the contrary, the social gap between rural and urban residents widened.^[36]

Brideprice negotiations continued in the Maoist era. Rural women described the marriage market and the transfer of payments at that time as unpredictable. Families with many daughters were fortunate to get them married off and had to choose from whoever was available in the village. At times, they took whatever brideprice was offered. In other villages men complained that there were not enough women around even when their families offered a good brideprice. A big change came about when people took wives from within the village. Daughters naturally remained nearby

[34] For the bureaucratization of urban life, see Martin Whyte and William Parish, Urban Life in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Jonathan Unger, Education Under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960-1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Gail Henderson, The Chinese Hospital: A Socialist Work Unit (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).

[35] Cadres in the sands of Nanxi Zhen complained that it was difficult to make the sands people settle in houses clustered in a village, which was achieved only in the 1970s. See Helen Siu, Agents and Victims , on the step-by-step cellularization of rural communities in south China.

[36] On the village-town divide, see Helen Siu, "The Politics of Migration in a Market Town."

even after marriage, and they continued to help out at home. When a family was short of labor, daughters stayed longer at home, like the town people. The collectivization of the economy of the sands and the corresponding cellularization of rural communities paradoxically intensified interdependence within local families as well as between them.

Villagers in Zhixi, Yongding, and Jiuji celebrated their weddings with banquets of a dozen or so tables throughout the 1950s until the late 1970s, except for the very lean years 1958 to 1962 and during the high tide of the Cultural Revolution, when officials explicitly demanded ritual simplicity.^[37] Still, a brideprice of a hundred yuan plus wedding cakes was not uncommon. As for the dowry element, it was not until the 1970s when "the three treasures," a bicycle, a watch, and a sewing machine, were added to the ideal dowry list. They were largely "luxuries" reserved for the families of rural cadres.

The Reconstitution of Dowry and Brideprice in the 1980s

Is the renaissance today a reinstatement of earlier practices spurred on by new prosperity? Not entirely. If both the terms of marriage and the political economy on which they were based were redefined by the state, their expansion today is further shaped by the entrepreneurial energies in town and in the sands. In two earlier papers, I interpreted the upsurge of seemingly "traditional" ritual practices not simply as a revival but also as having undergone great changes as a result of the socialist period. A similar argument can be applied to dowry and brideprice.

In Nanxi Zhen, the ten years of liberalization since 1980 have brought much prosperity for both town and village. Two categories of residents have made remarkable fortunes. First, party cadres have used official connections to make business deals; they have accepted "bribes" to facilitate those transactions, and they have anticipated the new policies of privatization, moving ahead of others to get the best resources for their families. The large modern villas that have sprung up in town are mostly theirs. Second, there are the entrepreneurs whose interests conflicted with the monopolizing powers of officials but who also colluded with them to gain a share of the profits. Many inhabitants of Nanxi town have been able to make contact with relatives in Hong Kong and Macao, who contributed to the building of houses, bought them imported consumer goods, or invested in joint ven-

[37] Yongding, a village adjacent to Nanxi, is a rural settlement older than Nanxi town itself and containing established lineages. Jiuji, three kilometers southwest of Nanxi town, was a sizable village by the late Qing. Zhixi became a permanent settlement in the republican period. Traditional customs in the villages did not disappear until the late 1950s. A village cadre in Zhixi said that when his daughter married in 1953, she was carried in a sedan chair.

tures; these residents are known as having "a southern window" (nanfeng chuang ). Those relatives who contribute to the enterprises are duly rewarded, but meanwhile the local entrepreneurs make profits and are asserting their independence. This assertion of independence is particularly prevalent among the younger entrepreneurs in town, where the life-styles and preferences of these two categories have become models for emulation and envy among the society as a whole.

The marriage transfers for these privileged families are elaborate. In town, brideprice demands are still not explicitly made, but new calls are made on the groom's family, and the expenses incurred by them are large. It has become essential for the groom to provide a new house for his bride.^[38] Because of the shortage of building sites in town, the cost of a square meter of land is about 180 yuan. Together with building materials, decorating, and labor, a standard house can easily cost 70,000 yuan. Cadre families are particularly under pressure to make such contributions because, as one said, "people expect us to use administrative means to secure the prime sites, the imported tiles, and the color television. When we take the lead, others eagerly follow, claiming that present policies allow everyone to be prosperous."^[39] According to another cadre, such transactions not only assure people that wealth is politically acceptable, but also enable them to convince themselves and others that they have not lost control of the situation in an era of ideological redefinition.

Similar pressure was felt by the nouveaux riches, because to spread the impression that "they have the means" is necessary for business. These families are now ignoring the official norms for the age of marriage. In one case, a marriage was contracted and a house built for a twenty-one-year-old, the only son in the family, because the parents, who were former landlords and who had migrated to Macao a few years earlier, were anxious to have male progeny to receive the family wealth.^[40]

Besides the expenses of the house, the groom's family also pays a substantial brideprice, which has reached a norm of 800 to 1,000 yuan. The sum is mainly used to help pay for the wedding feast at the bride's natal

[38] The provision of a house for the married couple illustrates what Jack Goody speaks of as "indirect dowry," which is generally stressed by poorer families, whereas direct dowry is stressed by richer social groups (such as the former landlord and merchant families).

[39] The price for building land shot up in the town as well as in the villages adjacent to the town. In 1988, the price reached 200 yuan per square meter, compared with about 80 yuan for the villages farther away. The head of Nanxi was notorious for having secured some prime sites cheaply for his children and friends because he was in control of town planning and construction. A modern five-bedroom villa in town was 40,000 yuan in 1986 and rose to 150,000 yuan in 1989.

[40] I attended the wedding of this young man, who had two older married sisters. He seemed not to know what he was doing throughout the entire affair. Earlier, I had interviewed him in my random sample survey as the head of a household.

home.^[41] The standard in town is now at least thirty banquet tables at the local restaurant, at a cost of about 6,000 to 9,000 yuan.^[42] Of course, the wealthy give more, as in the case of a successful private entrepreneur where the parents of the groom offered 1,200 yuan as brideprice, another 50 yuan as lucky money for the bride's brother, together with the cost of thirty-two banquet tables for the bride's family, who resided in a village on the outskirts of town.^[43] They also provided thirty banquet tables on the wedding day for their own friends and relatives. Their banquet food included imported beer and soft drinks from Hong Kong, expensive dried mushrooms, squids, scallops, pork and chicken, and six hundred wedding cakes.^[44]

It is difficult to insist that these prosperous families are attempting to "compensate" for the bride's labor. More appropriately, it has become a strategy for the upwardly mobile to win a bride of appropriate background, to acquire prestige in the local community, and to strengthen personal networks in a volatile system where formal organizational ties are still unreliable. For the common folk, the new standard is making it hard for their sons, because they have neither the wealth nor the political means to meet these expectations and would have to wait to get married until the richer households had chosen their brides. One might argue that this state of affairs is no different from the old days. But in the old days, no poor household would be competing with a rich one for a wife, in accordance with the saying "Bamboo door matches bamboo door, and wood door matches wood door." Now it is a tougher game when the woman one fancies in the workplace finally decides to marry a co-worker whose family has the "southern window" and can provide a house and thirty banquet tables for the marriage. A new hierarchy is in the course of defining itself through marriage and marital transfers.

In town, the expenses for the bride's family can be just as high if not higher. Among the wealthy, dowry items include modern furniture, a bicycle, electric fans, a sewing machine, imported color television, a washing machine, a hi-fi system, totaling over 15,000 yuan. It seems natural to argue that there are many upwardly mobile families created by the sudden opening up of economic opportunities in this area, who use the marriage of their sons and daughters to make an impression in town. However, there is

[41] The sum is about four to five times the average wage of a young worker.

[42] In 1986, a standard wedding gift from friends was 5 yuan. In 1989, I was told to give 25 yuan whenever I was invited to a wedding.

[43] The family used to work on bamboo handicrafts. In the 1980s the head of the household worked as a manager for foreign trade in the largest factory in Nanxi Zhen. His annual salary and benefits easily reached 60,000 yuan, according to friends. One of the sons opened a small factory for metal parts and had his own prosperous business. In the previous three years, the family had built two three-story houses, costing over 100,000 yuan each.

[44] In traditional marriages, wedding cakes and banquet food were listed together with the brideprice and other items and presented to the bride's family before the wedding.

an added dimension. Even for the very rich families, the bride and groom both contribute to the sum by saving up over the preceding few years. The self-accumulating dowry has arrived, and the couple are no longer entirely dependent upon their parents. The objects will be publicly transported and displayed during the course of the wedding day when they go to fill the new house assigned to the young married couple.^[45] Dowry may still consist partly of the inheritance due a daughter, but it increasingly takes on the meaning of a conjugal fund created by and for the newlyweds themselves. Among the young workers, technicians and private entrepreneurs, who now earn a great deal more than their parents because of bonuses and shared dividends, the creation of their own independent conjugal fund is both possible and preferred.^[46] Their eagerness to start the union in a new house symbolizes this concern. They take great care and pride in building and decorating their house according to the styles that are promoted in the television programs beamed from Hong Kong and in magazines for home living.^[47]

Although the younger generation in Nanxi have taken the initiative in building their own conjugal funds, parents who have the means eagerly contribute, for both their sons and their daughters. Given their economic situation, it is not difficult to see the logic behind their efforts. Old age security becomes an important concern when the changing political winds and the subsequent competition from private entrepreneurs have shaken the town's collective economy in which they have participated. In fact, the town's enterprises experienced a great deal of uncertainty in the mid-1980s when faced with fierce competition from the mushrooming industries in the nearby villages. When businesses folded, workers were laid off with little prospect of a pension. Retirees have also found their pensions too meager to catch up with the severe inflation. If one argues that the function of the family as the basic provider persisted during the Maoist era, it is reasonable to expect that those with the means contribute to the consolidation of their

[45] The huiyou , close companions of the groom, often collectively give large decorative mirrors for the new couple to hang in their own house. In the case of the successful entrepreneur mentioned earlier, the groom asked the bride's family to buy whatever dowry items it wanted and then have them billed to his family. When asked why they did that, the answer was the concern for "face."

[46] I am not sure how far these attitudes are due to the impact of the television and media of Hong Kong, which promote the individualistic energies of young entrepreneurs. In fact, young people in Nanxi copy the Hong Kong life-style; for example, they buy imported clothes and electrical goods, smoke American cigarettes, drink Hong Kong beer, and use the vocabulary of Hong Kong television.

[47] Two of my good friends, both young entrepreneurs with a good education and contacts in Hong Kong, live apart from their parents, although the latter come to care for their infant daughters. The interior design of their houses, each of which is equipped with a color television, a hi-fi system, and video, matches that of upper-middle-class families in Hong Kong.

children's marriages, with the hope that some measure of intergenerational dependence can be maintained under such conditions. In one case, two retired teachers saved up enough to buy a color television for their married son who had taken a job in a research unit in Human. When the young couple had a baby, the mother-in-law went to Hunan for several months to take care of the newborn, leaving her husband behind with an unmarried son. She eventually brought her grandson back to Nanxi. I asked why she did all that, well knowing that their resources and energies were strained. Her reply was straightforward: she would maintain a good relationship with her sons in the hope that they would reciprocate when needed, Whether her strategy works or not remains to be seen.

The sands have also been rapidly transformed in the last decade. Wedding banquets have grown even more elaborate, and it is common to have thirty or more tables. According to town residents, the sands people have adopted the custom of the town by sitting around tables, where courses were brought out one by one. This differs from their habit of serving food in large bowls all at once, with the guests squatting around to help themselves. New houses are provided by the groom's family for the newlyweds, but these belong mainly to cadre families.

If marriage practices were only mainly a means for families to work their way up the social hierarchy, one would expect the people in the sands to reduce their demand for brideprice, inasmuch as this has been such a stigma in the eyes of the town residents. Surprisingly enough, dowry remains moderate, but the monetary demands for brideprice have escalated sharply, reaching an average of 2,000 yuan, twice that of the town and more than the annual income of an adult worker in the villages.

To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to trace the history of the socialist transformation in the sands. Today wedding festivities provide a sharp contrast to the normally quiet life in the villages. These rural areas are devoid of young workers, either men or women, with only old men and women doing light farmwork and carrying grandchildren on their backs. Most of the younger ones have migrated to the periurban neighborhoods, women to work in factories, men on construction sites. Farm labor is in such short supply that farmers increasingly make sharecropping arrangements with migrant farmers from the provinces of Guangxi, Jiangxi, and Hunan. Sometimes they hire workers outright by giving them room and board plus 80 to 100 yuan a month during the busy season. Not all of these migrant workers are good farmers. In 1986 the municipality in which Nanxi situates turned back 20,000 illegal migrants because, according to a municipal cadre, the region had suffered poor harvests for the last few years as a result of the poor quality of their labor.

One may wonder why many families continue to enter into contracts for large areas of land for growing grain despite such acute labor shortages.

The reason is simple; grain prices are high in the open markets, often over 100 yuan per dan , in contrast to the negotiated state price of about 25 to 30 yuan. The high price is due either to the fact that many families have switched to the growing of turfs, fruit, and sugarcane, or to the fact that their children have gone into the towns and cities to work.^[48] This forces them to buy grain in the markets in order to fill the delivery quotas that are part of the process of contracting land from the village.

Attachment to the land is also promoted by concerns of a cultural and historical kind, which have been sharpened by the migration of the young. During interviews, older farmers repeatedly expressed a heightened anxiety about maintaining a base in the village because of the past history of settlement rights, especially as their children do not share such sentiment and would often like to emigrate from the rural areas. It took centuries for the people of the sands to be recognized as permanent inhabitants on the land. During the socialist period, attachment to land was seen as a burden that tied families to rural poverty; only with difficulty did the government convince them to build permanent brick houses in order to form "villages." When land again became a valuable household resource in the 1980s, they felt they must defend settlement rights, which entitled their sons to build houses in the village, and from which later arrivals are in their turn excluded. Waves of migrant workers from Yangjiang in southern Guangdong, from Guangxi and Hunan provinces, have become the new underclass of the sands. The verdicts of criminal cases that came before the people's courts in the last few years show that many of the victims of extortion, robbery, rape, and murder in the sands are these recent migrant workers. History repeats itself; the recent migrants take up the social space formerly occupied by the people of the sands.

The increased mobility of the rural population in general has created a dilemma for the earlier families who want to maintain their rights in the sands. They complain that it is increasingly difficult to find brides for their sons because local women, just like the men, prefer factory employment near Nanxi town, with the added intention of finding spouses there. Families are reluctant to let their grown daughters be married off too soon, and when they take in a daughter-in-law with an ever-increasing brideprice, they try to keep her at home.

It is true that where there is ample land and where agriculture continues to rely on manual labor, labor becomes a prized commodity. The crucial issue is why, given the availability of cheap migrant labor, families in the sands choose to pay high brideprices in an effort to keep their women at

[48] In the villages closer to Nanxi town, turf is grown to supply the offices and hotels in the coastal cities and in Hong Kong. In the farther corners of the sands, banana plantations are common. They also produce for both the internal and the export markets.

home. Today settlement rights in the sands are highly valued, especially for the older generation, who were discriminated against before and who finally feel that they have gained a productive foothold in the 1980s. The "continuation of the house," as Goody describes it, made possible by commitments from the parent's generation toward the new conjugal units, is the culturally acknowledged basis for claiming these settlement rights. It also secures for the family the much-needed long-term farm labor. Furthermore, the demand for a high brideprice distinguishes these families from the new underclass of migrant workers, who cannot afford such payments and would not be able to make such a demand. As before, marital strategies serve a political function by excluding those at the lowest end of the social hierarchy.

Conclusion

The analysis of marital payments in this chapter takes into account the history of political transformation of the regional economy. The resources available to families and the way they choose to maneuver within the constraints imposed by the state are intertwined with this political history, which shapes the available options as well as the perceptions of them. In general, marital transfers in Nanxi Zhen have to do with strategies of family continuity and advancement. In the early twentieth century, these transfers took place in a highly stratified socioeconomic context. Apart from endowing daughters, the giving of a lavish dowry in town was a strategy for building prestige among the elites; for the commoners, it was more a way to distinguish themselves from the sands people. The inhabitants of the sands and the town had regarded themselves as worlds apart precisely because their lives were connected in multiple and unequal ways to an evolving regional economy. There were fierce contestations in material relationships and symbolic arenas. Ethnic labels or terms of marriage among families were political statements in this expanding part of the delta. As in dialogues on lineage, community, and settlement history, they were means of exclusion, differentiation, and acculturation among the local population as they sought their respective places in the emergent polity.

It would be naive to expect the "equalizing" measures of the socialist regime to have reduced the inequality between Nanxi town and the sands. There were less status competition and fewer prestige-building strategies among former elite families in town who were condemned to be a caste of untouchables. This process might explain the drastic drop in the dowries in town. But the life chances of the residents of town and sands continued to differ. Their respective positions within the socialist state reinforced and even enlarged the town dweller's traditional discriminations against the people of the sands. Unlike the urban families in the large cities as de-

scribed by Whyte in chapter 8 in this volume, whose livelihoods have been based on an established state sector, these families lived in a small market town dependent on a shaky collective economy near the margin of the rural collective sector. Their cultural strategies to distinguish themselves from the people of the sands remained significant, although the strategies were subdued by a general lowering of living standards of the elites who defined them, and although the motives behind the strategies were based on the realities of a different rural-urban hierarchy.

It would be equally naive to assume that collectivization from the late 1950s to the late 1970s had dwarfed concerns for inheritance and for the continuation of the family, especially in view of the fact that the family has once again become a focal point of social life in the 1980s, which has in turn led to a revival of marital transfers. Interdependence among family members remained strong if not intensified in the Maoist era for both the town dwellers and the villagers; hence the continual negotiation of marital payments despite the attempts of the government to restrict and undercut them. This "preservation" of family commitment was a way for people to cope with the transformed relationship of state and society, another unintended consequence of the policies in the Maoist era.

Family dynamics and the related terms of marriage today cannot be seen as a restoration of what had been put on hold since the late 1950s. Instead, as Whyte observes in Chengdu and Huang in rural Shangdong, they resulted from several contradictory trends that had changed the meaning of the family at one level and reinforced it at another. At the level of the institution of the family vis-à-vis the larger society and the state, relationships have changed because other mediating aspects of the civil society had been stripped away. At the level of commitments among family members, the concerns for continuity have remained strong precisely because other institutions were redefined by political ideologies and were no longer viewed as reliable for the individual.

The economic opportunities of today, which have been created by a decade of liberalization, pose a new social reality for the residents in Nanxi town as well as for those in the sands. The opportunities allow young urbanites to create viable conjugal funds on their own initiative by means of exaggerated dowries and brideprices, largely self-accumulated. Their efforts dovetail those of their parents, who are eager to gain some old age security in a time of uncertainty and who contribute with this end in view. Rural youths, both men and women, are anxious to shed their peasant status and eagerly fill the gaps at the lower end of the town's employment hierarchy, an opportunity that was denied them for over three decades. For the older generation, with the drastic loss of their young at a time when agriculture becomes profitable, settlement rights reemerge as an important issue. Their concern is often not shared by their children. Mustering the cultural re-

sources at their disposal, they try to control marriages for reproduction and for continued commitment to the family. By maneuvering marriage payments, they hope to tie women to the household economy. This new concern increases the demand for a large brideprice in the sands. The "success" of these strategies pursued by the older generation remains to be seen. With the productive links between the rural generations broken by migration and urban employment, and in town by increased entrepreneurial opportunities for the young, generational conflicts are numerous and explicit. Prospects of retaining the young are not high, although some may be persuaded to stay.

In sum, factors leading to different payments of brideprice and dowry are complex. They involve intergenerational dependencies within the family, as well as the fortunes of individual family members in relation to the larger society and state. From the early twentieth century to the post-Mao era, three crucial political turning points—the war interlude, the Maoist era, and the post-Mao liberalization—have continued to create different life chances for the residents of the town and the sands and have triggered divergent strategies. In analyzing these terms of marital transfer in Nanxi town and the sands through this time, I hope I have given a historically grounded and meaning-focused account of the ways the transformations of political economy intertwine with the cultural, symbolic resources people use to make sense of their lives.

Eight
Wedding Behavior and Family Strategies in Chengdu

Martin King Whyte

Marriage decisions are central to any discussion of family strategies. Normally, marriage is a central step in the age-old Chinese effort to continue the family line.^[1] It should also be obvious that not just any marriage will do. Which individuals sons or daughters marry may have important consequences for the future prospects not only of those sons and daughters, but also of the larger families in which they grew up. Which partners are chosen and how the wedding is celebrated may affect the social status and links to useful patrons and allies of those involved. And whether particular marriages result in an expansion of an existing family (by the couple's moving in with what I call an "old family") or the setting up of an independent household (which I call, for the sake of simplicity, a "new family") may influence the opportunities Chinese have to succeed in the world that confronts them. For these and other reasons it is obvious that marriage is a central focus of family strategic thinking. In this chapter I analyze survey data from one Chinese city in an effort to gain insight into how family strategic behavior in regard to getting married may have changed over time, and particularly in the post-Mao or reform period (i.e., since 1978).

With colleagues at Sichuan University I collected survey data in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, in 1987.^[2] Our interviewees were a probability sample of 586 ever-married women between the ages of twenty

[1] Concubinage, adoption, and other steps may be taken to this end, but for most Chinese, and particularly since 1949, marriage has been an essential prerequisite to family continuity.

[2] My Chinese collaborators are Yuan Yayu and Xu Xiaohe, both affiliated with the Sociology Research Office of Sichuan University. Our research was supported by the U.S.-China Cooperative Science Program of the National Science Foundation and also by the United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia, Sichuan University, and China's State Education Commission.

and seventy who lived in the two main urban districts of that city. Since we asked our respondents a variety of questions about how they first got married, and since the dates of those first marriages ranged over the fiftyfive years from 1933 to 1987, we are able to say quite a bit about how the marriage experiences of these women have varied across time periods.^[3] Given a particular interest in the reform period, we can examine whether women in Chengdu who married after 1978 did things differently than women who married in earlier periods.

Here I intend to go beyond simply examining whether wedding behavior has changed over time in Chengdu. A number of more complex questions are of interest and may tell us something about shifts in family strategies. For example, how did social groups within Chengdu differ in their wedding behavior? Which types of individuals or families were most likely to have experienced arranged marriages, to have had elaborate weddings, or to have set up new households after marrying? Have the "social correlates" of different kinds of wedding behavior changed over time, and particularly in the post-1978 period? Is there any sign in our data, for instance, of a group of nouveaux riches families arising as a result of the reforms and distinguishing themselves by holding particularly elaborate weddings? Did families of Party members "hold the line" against the revival of elaborate weddings in the reform period, or did such families lead the way in this trend? These are ad hoc examples of the kinds of questions we can address with our Chengdu data. Since much evidence on how wedding behavior has changed over time has already been presented,^[4] after reviewing that evidence briefly here, my main focus will be on the social sources of variation in wedding behavior in Chengdu and how those sources may have changed over time.

I should clarify at the outset that, although like my fellow authors I am interested in family strategies, the evidence I have to work with—the

[3] The response rate for the survey was 87.7%. Chengdu is, of course, not "typical" of all of urban China, but it is not especially unusual in comparison with other major cities in China. (Chengdu is China's tenth largest city, with an estimated population of 2.6 million in 1985.) Inferring change over time from this kind of cross-sectional sample is, of course, not an easy matter. Many of the older women in our sample were not living in Chengdu at the time they first married, and many of the women who were getting married in that city in the 1930s and 1940s have either died or moved elsewhere. So the data presented here cannot, properly speaking, tell us how the wedding behavior of representative members of the Chengdu population varied across time periods. Instead, they should be interpreted as telling us how the wedding experiences of a representative sample of women living in Chengdu in 1987 differed depending upon the time at which they married.

[4] See Martin King Whyte, "Changes in Mate Choice in Chengdu," in Chinese Society on the Eve of Tiananmen , ed. Deborah Davis and Ezra Vogel, 181-213 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990).

Chengdu survey data—does not contain any direct information about such strategies. We asked respondents questions about such things as who made the decision about whom to marry, how much was spent on the wedding, who paid for the celebration, and where the couple lived after the wedding. We did not, however, ask any questions about why things had been done in a certain way or about how the decisions were arrived at and with what family goals and concerns in mind. To address questions such as these properly would require a different research technique, involving intensive, in-depth interviews rather than a roughly one-hour-questionnaire survey. Even if we had used this alternative technique we would have faced difficulties, since the older respondents in our sample might have difficulty remembering and providing accurate reconstructions of family strategic thinking three or more decades earlier, and many of them (particularly those who experienced strictly arranged marriages) were not consulted at the time.

In the absence of direct information about family strategic thinking, I am forced to rely on inference here. My approach is to look for overall patterns in the data to see what those patterns might indicate about family strategies and changes in such strategies. I contend that if family strategies have been operating with any degree of success, we should see evidence of the operation of such strategies in our data on wedding behavior. If we do not find such interpretable patterns in our data, then we have evidence either that family strategies were not successful or that they did not exist in a coherent way in the first place. Inferring family strategies from such patterns in the data is not an easy or exact process.

Changes in Mate Choice in Chengdu

How did wedding behavior change over time in Chengdu, and what do any trends tell us about changing families and family strategies in that city? In dealing with these questions, I focus on aspects of wedding behavior that tell something about changes in intergenerational relations.^[5] This focus is important because it may help us deal with a central question in the study of family strategies: What is the proper unit of analysis? To put the question in a different way, when we want to study the formulation and negotiation of strategies for success in urban China, does it make most sense to look at individuals, at what I call new families, or perhaps at old families? Who, after all, is involved in these kinds of decisions? And might it not be that the locus of strategic thinking in regard to marriage has changed in

[5] A more general examination of changes in a broad range of mate choice and wedding customs has already been published. See Whyte, "Changes in Mate Choice in Chengdu."

fundamental ways over time, from parents and family elders (the leaders of old families) to potential brides and grooms (those who will form the new families)? By examining what wedding behavior tells about shifts in relative power, social ties, and interdependency between generations, we may be able to draw inferences about basic changes in the nature and locus of family strategic thinking in contemporary China.

There are good reasons for assuming in advance that basic changes in the nature of intergenerational relations may have occurred in twentieth-century China. All that we know about the nature of marriage in late imperial China suggests that for most this was a relatively extreme form of arranged marriage in which the old family was the locus of power and the new family had little if any voice. Parents or other senior kin decided when it was time for children to marry and whom they should marry, and in many cases the young couple was not consulted and did not even meet until the day of the wedding. Sometimes a child betrothal or adoption of a future daughter-in-law as an infant was involved, making even clearer the total subordination of the younger generation to the wishes of their elders. Negotiations over brideprices and dowries and the financing of a wedding feast were also matters of family decision, rather than issues left for the young couple. Usually there was an expectation that the new family would be incorporated into the old through patrilocal residence, but even if not, the decision about where to live and how to earn a living were often matters determined more by the old family than the new. In some accounts from earlier times we learn of families making decisions to have one son study for the imperial examinations, another remain in the household and take over the family farm, and another go off to work in a market town or city, all in an effort to maximize chances for family success.^[6] The power of the older generation and the role of that generation in making decisions about family strategy were reinforced and expressed in multiple ways in marriage behavior in late imperial China.

Changes that weakened the power of the old family in marriage matters were already under way before the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to national power in 1949. Both growing industrialization and commercialization and the spread of Western ideas about marriage and family life fostered trends toward greater independence of the young in the first half of

[6] This scenario is somewhat idealized and would have applied mostly to families already well above the margin of subsistence. But in general a picture of the old family fairly explicitly dictating the lives of the young is a commonplace in descriptions of social life and social mobility in earlier times. See, for example, Ho Ping-ti, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China (New York: Science Editions, 1964); Yung-teh Chow, Social Mobility in China (New York: Atherton Press, 1966); Lin Yueh-hwa, The Golden Wing (London: Kegan Paul, 1947). The best-known fictional portrayal of the conflict over the power of the elders to control the fate of young family members is Pa Chin, Family (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1972 [originally 1933]).

the twentieth century.^[7] After 1949 the CCP used its impressive power to campaign against arranged marriage and other manifestations of parental power. Both economic development and the socialist transformation of property relations carried out by the CCP should have weakened further the power and resources parents could wield in their efforts to dictate marriage matters.^[8] Further economic development and the return of Western cultural influence during the reform period could be expected to accentuate these trends even more. How does the evidence from Chengdu fit these expectations?

The first aspect of marriage behavior to consider is the degree of freedom of mate choice—whether parents (or other family elders) or the young couple play the dominant role in deciding whom to marry. In this realm there have been clear changes, as the data presented in table 8.1 reveal. (This table and table 8.2 divide years of first marriage into periods that correspond roughly to important turning points in the history of contemporary China.) In general, there has been a shift from the old family to the new family in terms of who makes the selection of marital partners. (Other trends shown in the table have already been discussed in previous writings and will not be focused on here.) A more fine-grained analysis, making use of a summary scale and finer time divisions, reveals a somewhat more complex pattern. In figure 8.1 I display a three-year moving average of a summary Freedom of Mate Choice Scale across years of marriage.^[9]

Figure 8.1 confirms that the change toward increasing freedom of mate choice was already under way prior to 1949 and that this trend continued during the 1950s. However, the figure also reveals that after about 1957 this shift more or less "stalled," with little net change toward greater freedom of mate choice during subsequent periods. Neither the storms of the Cultural Revolution nor the frenetic changes of the reform period had much effect on the freedom of young people in Chengdu to choose their own mates. To summarize briefly, I argue that the 1950s involved a massive structural change—the socialist transformation of the urban economy. That change

[7] These trends are documented in Olga Lang, Chinese Family and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946). See also Marion Levy, The Family Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949).

[8] The classic work on how various aspects of "modernization" produce changes that give young couples more autonomy is William J. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York: Free Press, 1963).

[9] The summary Freedom of Mate Choice Scale was constructed from the mean of the standardized scores of each respondent on six questions—those numbered 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, and 9 in table 8.1. A three-year moving average is constructed by taking the average of the scores for the years before and after a particular year. For example, the value for 1957 is an average of the values for 1956, 1957, and 1958. This procedure is followed to compensate for modest numbers of cases in each marriage year, and the result is a smoother and more readily interpretable graph.

reduced the power of parents dramatically, since they no longer controlled property or access to adult jobs, but urban young people gained increased autonomy only up to a point. The real winner was the bureaucratic system constructed by the CCP, which controlled education, employment, health care, housing, and all other important resources. Young people found that some of the freedom gained from parents was lost to the bureaucratic gatekeepers of the state (in schools, factories, etc.), individuals who were decidedly not indifferent to when and how young people married.^[10]

[10] This central role of the bureaucratic state is the decisive element left out of Goode's account of modernization and family change in capitalist countries. In the capitalist world, both governments and employers and other bureaucratic gatekeepers are largely indifferent to the private lives of the young, so that power lost by parents is gained by the young.

Fig. 8.1.
Freedom of Mate Choice, Moving Average

A variety of measures of wedding celebrations and wedding finances are displayed in table 8.2. Also included in that table are responses to a question about where the couple lived after the wedding. There are dramatic changes across time visible in these figures, but the pattern is quite different from the one seen in table 8.1 and figure 8.1. Broadly speaking, what we see here is a curvilinear trend. Initially there are sharp shifts away from "traditional" patterns. By the late 1950s and 1960s fewer couples were having wedding ceremonies and banquets, fewer people were being invited to such events when they were held, marriage finance transactions (e.g., brideprices, dowries) were less common, less money was being spent, more often the bride and groom were paying for any festivities themselves, and it was increasingly common for the new family to reside separately from either his or her parents.^[11] In more recent times, however, all of these trends have been reversed. By the final period, the era of the reforms, wedding ceremonies, and banquets are once again increasingly common, more people are being invited to them, more is being spent on them, and it is less and less common for the young couple to finance their weddings themselves. By the same token, postmarital residence in a new household has become less common during the reform period, with moving in with the groom's or the bride's parents (most commonly still the former) once again on the rise (see also the figures presented in chapter 2 by Unger).^[12] So in these realms we see not a stalling of a pattern of change, but an apparent reversal and return toward more "traditional" patterns.^[13]

[11] A variety of other aspects of change in wedding customs are not displayed in table 8.2. In general many couples who married between the 1950s and 1970s in urban China followed the models espoused by the CCP by holding a simple celebration with close friends and workmates in the work unit, with tea and candy distributed to participants. In a few cases these "revolutionary" weddings included explicit political statements, such as a speech by the Party secretary encouraging devotion to the revolution, presentation of a set of Mao's writings to the couple, or having the couple bow to a bust or portrait of Mao Zedong. The role of the family is obviously strikingly deemphasized in such wedding ceremonies, which contrast very clearly with the traditional wedding, in which the family-run feast is the central event. The spartan nature of these "revolutionary weddings" helps explain why so much less was spent and why couples could finance things themselves. It might be noted that we asked a question about another officially espoused model, the "collective wedding," in which large numbers of couples are married at a single time in a public ceremony presided over by CCP officials. We found very few cases in our sample of such collective weddings in any time period.

[12] Richard Barrett (personal communication) has found evidence from the 1985 In Depth Fertility Surveys that shows a similar trend of neolocal residence declining and patrilocal residence increasing during the 1980s in urban areas of several provinces (Beijing, Shandong, Liaoning, and Guangdong).

[13] There are a number of "new" elements also visible in Chengdu wedding customs in the 1980s. For example, wedding banquets in restaurants are increasingly common, something that fits the Hong Kong more than the traditional Chinese model. Similarly, the wearing of a Western-style white wedding gown for a formal wedding picture is increasingly the norm, and more and more couples are taking honeymoon trips. My claim is not that all aspects of wedding customs are reverting to traditional forms, but that those aspects of wedding celebrations that have implications for intergenerational relations are moving in that direction.

Fig. 8.2.
Wedding Elaborateness, Moving Average

As earlier in regard to freedom of mate choice, we can examine whether a more fine-grained analysis will reveal further details about these trends in wedding elaborateness and expenditures. I constructed a mean scale of wedding elaborateness from a variety of the available measures, and in figure 8.2 I graph a moving average of scores on that scale against years of marriage.^[14] Figure 8.2 reinforces the conclusions already reached about a curvilinear time trend, but adds a few extra details. According to this measure, the elaborateness or costliness of weddings in the reform period appears to be even greater than in the prerevolutionary period. Also, the decline in wedding expenditures is visible even before 1949, whereas the revival of wedding costs begins prior to Mao's death, rather than after 1978.

Put very simply, I think a variety of forces are at work in these reversals of wedding behavior. In part we see reflected here a return to something closer to normalcy after the Cultural Revolution, as lessened CCP monitoring of private life made it possible for families once again to follow cherished practices in celebrating weddings. Also at work, at least after 1978, is the new official encouragement of conspicuous consumption and the rapidly increasing incomes of urbanites, factors that made possible and respectable the sorts of lavish weddings that would have gotten people into trouble only a few years previously. (On this score the CCP continued to advocate spartan wedding celebrations while saying it was good to get rich and that envy provided a powerful incentive for economic improvement. Encouraging restaurants, photography shops, and other service facilities to cater to popular needs and make profits also helped to fuel the revived "wedding trade.")

Even though the post-1978 improvements in consumption standards applied to housing as well as to food, clothing, and other areas, the increases in urban housing space were not translated into improved chances for young couples to get a place of their own. My interpretation of this apparently contradictory finding, admittedly speculative, is that in the context of housing demands suppressed for so long, with many older people with stalwart work and political records waiting on housing lists for years, newly marrying couples had less chance than in previous periods of getting allocated housing on their own. By continuing to live with either her parents or his they might be able to move into new housing as it became

[14] Included in the scale were seven items: those numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, and 8 from table 8.2 and responses to a question about the monetary value of the dowry items (with zero used in cases with no wedding, banquet, or dowry). As with the Freedom of Mate Choice Scale earlier, this scale was formed by taking an average of standardized scores of each respondent on these seven items. This scale can be interpreted as measuring the elaborateness and costliness of the proceedings. Note that the postmarital residence measure is not part of this scale.

available during the 1980s.^[15] (See the related discussion in the chapters by Davis, Unger, and Ikels.) In any case, in these realms we see a fairly consistent pattern that constitutes a reversal of the patterns that occurred in earlier years.

How are we to interpret the evidence presented so far? What do the data reviewed here tell us about shifting patterns in the relationship between generations in Chengdu families? What we do not see in this evidence is a pattern of "creeping individualism," of continuing growth in youth autonomy. Nor is the expectation of a linear trend toward more "modern" weddings borne out. Young people seem to have gained some power relative to their elders, at least when it comes to deciding whom to marry. However, their ability to live separately and rely on their own resources has actually diminished in recent years. We do not know, unfortunately, how in recent marriages it was decided how much to spend, how many to invite to the wedding, or where the couple would live afterward. But we can see that, even though the dominant role in choosing whom to marry is now in most cases played by "new families," in order to actually complete the process they have to rely on their "old families" in multiple ways. This continued and, indeed, revived intergenerational dependency may not mean that family elders are once again dictating matters to the young, but it would seem to require some sort of negotiation between generations over the nuts and bolts of how the wedding will be conducted and where the young couple will start out married life (a point also made by Davis in chapter 3). These results, taken as a whole, qualify my earlier discussion. This is not a situation in which powerless old families look on helplessly as the lives of their children are determined by an omnipotent and inflexible bureaucracy. Instead, continued family involvement and support appear to be vital to survival in the bureaucratic environment that is urban China. The trend toward increased youth autonomy from earlier in this century has been halted and in some respects even reversed.

Social Background and Wedding Behavior

Now I turn to the questions of how subgroups within the Chengdu population differed in their wedding behavior and whether the sources of variation in such behavior changed across time periods. In the pages that follow I review a wide range of evidence bearing on these questions by examining the correlations between various background traits of our respondents (and

[15] Figuring out how the housing supply affects patterns of postmarital residence is tricky. Young couples might end up with a place of their own for quite contradictory reasons—either because housing is so short that there is no space for them to move in with either set of parents or because housing in the city is so ample that young people can obtain their own place.

their old families) and their actual wedding experiences in various time periods.^[16] From the large number of measures available from the Chengdu survey, I selected a limited range of important measures to examine, and consider only five basic aspects of wedding behavior: the degree of freedom of mate choice, the elaborateness of the wedding, whether or not there was a dowry presented by the bride's parents,^[17] how much of the total wedding expenditures were borne by the young couple themselves, and whether the couple set up a new residence after the wedding. In terms of social background characteristics, I use a select subset of the available measures of three types: background characteristics of the individual bride and groom, background characteristics of their "old families," and "other" characteristics (i.e., traits that are not social status traits either of the bride and groom or of their families—for example, the year of the wedding, the age of the bride at the time, etc.).

Displayed separately here, the correlations between background characteristics and wedding behavior in three broad time periods—1933-57, 1958-77, and 1978-87, are collapsed further from the five categories used in previous tables. Each of these time periods has enough women in it (178, 198, and 210, respectively) to make analysis of correlations possible, but the main reason for these divisions is substantive. The first period involves the prerevolutionary era as well as the years after the CCP came to power but before the new socialist system was fully consolidated. The middle time period might be regarded as the years of full socialism or even "high Maoism"—they begin with the year in which Mao Zedong's visionary Great Leap Forward was launched and include the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. The final time period is, of course, the era of the reforms initiated under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping.

What can we expect to learn by comparing correlations between social background traits and wedding behavior across these time periods? Of

[16] The correlation is not the most appropriate statistic to use in examining many of these relationships, since most of our variables are ordinal or even nominal, rather than interval. However, most nominal variables can be rearranged to make them ordinal (for example, with occupations ranging from low status to high), and the use of interval statistics, such as the Pearson product-moment correlation, to summarize findings is claimed by most experts to be an acceptable shorthand that in most cases leads to similar conclusions as relying on cross-tabulations and ordinal statistics. (A large number of cross-tabulations were examined as a preliminary to preparing table 8.3, and that examination confirmed this impression.) Also, full tables on so many variables would be completely unwieldy.

[17] The dowry is included as a separate measure even though this is one component part of the Wedding Elaborateness Scale. The reason for this "double counting" is that much previous literature suggests a particular importance for dowry exchanges in reflecting such things as continuing ties with the woman's natal kin and competition for high status. See the discussion in Rubie Watson and Patricia Ebrey, eds., Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

course, we can consider a wide range of specific predictions about whether well-educated individuals, families with bad class backgrounds, or women who marry late (for example) had different types of weddings than others, and in all periods or only in one or two. However, my main interest in presenting the figures that follow is not to consider such specific predictions, but to look for overall patterns, and for any variation in those patterns across time periods.

To oversimplify somewhat: If we consider that our first broad time period captures marriages that occurred under basically presocialist conditions, then we can see what types of individuals and families had the most freedom of mate choice, the most elaborate weddings, and so forth, under those conditions. (We can also consider whether the distinctions found are similar to those uncovered in research on other nonsocialist societies.) If we designate the second period as the full socialist or high-Maoism period, then we might expect the predictors of variation in wedding behavior to have been somewhat different in those years (in comparison both with the pre-1957 period and with other societies). For example, the heightened emphasis on socialist values and vastly expanded bureaucratic control over people's lives under "high Maoism" might have produced a situation in which education and occupational status lost their predictive power in regard to weddings, but Party membership and class-origin labels gained predictive power.

If we find some clear differences between these first two time periods in the overall pattern of differentiation in wedding behavior, then we have a template against which to judge things in the final, reform period. Have the reforms sufficiently altered urban social structure in China and restored markets, material incentives, and meritocratic competition for personal advantage so that those social background traits that affected wedding behavior in the pre-1957 years reemerge as important after 1978? Or does the pattern of differentiation in wedding behavior in the reform period look much like that under high Maoism, suggesting that the dynamics of urban life have not changed as much under the reforms as many people suppose? Or is there some sort of completely new pattern of association between social background traits and weddings emerging in the reform era, unlike either the presocialist or high-Maoism eras? These are the sorts of ideas that motivated the analysis that follows.

Because the analysis of wedding behavior is spread over tables 8.3-8.7 (one table for each aspect of behavior considered), it may appear difficult to notice general patterns.^[18] However, by looking across all five tables, the

[18] Additional complexities concern how the various measures were constructed. Briefly, the Freedom of Mate Choice and Wedding Elaborateness Scales are interval measures whose construction was described earlier in the chapter; the dowry measure is a simple dichotomy (see no. 7 in table 8.2), the measure of the couple's contribution is a 7-point measure from 0 to 100% (more detailed than is shown in table 8.2), and the postmarital residence measure is again a simple dichotomy of all other arrangements vs. neolocal (i.e., less detailed than the measure used in table 8.2). The various education measures are all 5-point ordinal measures ranging from illiterate to at least some college; the Party membership measure is actually 1 = masses, 2 = Communist Youth League, 3 = CCP; the occupation measures are 1 = industrial worker, 2 = service worker, miscellaneous, 3 = cadre or professional occupation; the parent urban origin measure is 1 = neither parent an urbanite, 2 = one parent an urbanite, 3 = both parents urbanites; the family class origin measure is 1 = landlord or capitalist, 2 = peasant, 3 = worker, 4 = poor urbanite, handicrafts, etc., 5 = cadre, employee, professional; and the parental class label measure is 1 = landlord, capitalist, rich peasant, 2 = petty bourgeois, 3 = peasant, 4 = worker, 5 = cadre or martyr.

main pattern I want to draw attention to should be clearly visible. Generally speaking, there are a number of fairly consistent background correlates of wedding behavior of those women who married during the years 1933-57 (see the first column in each table). In that period, it was common for brides and grooms who were well educated and who had well-educated par-

ents, who belonged to the CCP or its youth auxiliary, who had high occupational status, and in which the bride had parents with urban roots and a father in a high-status occupation, to engage in more "modern" weddings—with greater freedom of choice, with less elaborate and expensive ceremonies, with the couple themselves paying a large share of the cost, with no dowry given by the bride's parents, and with the couple living in a separate household after the wedding.^[19] Weddings in that period also tended to be

[19] We do not have detailed information on the social backgrounds of the groom's parents to allow us to examine their characteristics separately. The strength of the associations noted in the text varies widely across tables and measures, and there are exceptions both to these patterns and some other measures that have an influence on one or another of the wedding measures. A few other background measures were examined (e.g., bride's father's Party membership) but were left out of the table because they did not have a clear effect on any of our wedding behavior measures.

more "modern" when the bride was older at the time she married and when the year of marriage was more recent. In addition, in those years there was a fairly consistent association across the various different wedding behaviors, such that couples who had more free choice in choosing their spouses tended to have simpler weddings, more payment by the couple, no dowry, and neolocal residence after the wedding (see the bottom rows in tables 8.4-8.7).

Although there are some weak points and inconsistencies in these patterns, in general they show that a set of altered wedding practices was emerging, and that people who had advantaged social statuses tended more often than others to hold such "modern" weddings. Furthermore, the patterns visible in this period are quite similar to those found in research

on other societies that have modernized in a nonsocialist context.^[20] The reasons for these associations between advantaged statuses and modern wedding behavior are much debated, and I will not try to resolve the existing debates here.^[21]

[20] Many aspects, such as freedom of mate choice, marriage without a dowry, and neolocal postmarital residence, are increasingly prevalent and are most often practiced by the best-educated and most modernized strata in capitalist societies. See the discussion in Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns . However, simplified wedding celebrations are not part of a pattern Goode deals with, and the trend over time toward first simpler and then more elaborate weddings seems distinctive to the PRC.

[21] One issue in the debates is at what point in the modernization process the situation turns from people who have high social status being the most elaborate and traditional in their wedding behavior to being the most modern and simple. Another issue is whether culture or social structure is more important in producing the shifts toward modern weddings—in other words, whether the change comes mainly from differential exposure to Western ideas about modern marriages or from differential involvement in new, meritocratic opportunity structures.

When we turn to the second and third columns in tables 8.3-8.7, the picture looks different. Generally speaking, strong correlations are rare enough in those columns that they might almost have occurred through chance alone.^[22] In other words, with the exception of some fairly clear

[22] The statistical significance measures used tell us this. P = .05 means a measure unlikely to occur by chance alone more than 1 time in 20. When we examine 28-34 separate correlations in the various subtables for these two columns, we would expect to find 1-2 correlations surpassing statistical significance due to chance alone. In these tables we find from 1 to 5 of such correlations, little better than a chance result.

trends related to the year of marriage, there appears to be no clear or consistent relationship between any of our social background characteristics and these aspects of wedding behavior in the years since 1958.^[23] Furthermore, even the internal consistency of wedding behavior weakens or disappears in the post-1958 years. For example, it is logical to expect in any society that brides who are older when they wed will have more say in the matter; that couples who have more freedom of choice will have simpler weddings, will more often live neolocally, and will more often pay for much of the wedding cost themselves; and that couples who have elaborate weddings will be less likely to live neolocally. All of these patterns are clearly visible for those who married prior to 1957 (see the bottom portion of column 1 in tables 8.3-8.7), but not for those who married during the full socialist and reform periods. This decrease in internal consistency among various aspects of wedding behavior is especially puzzling.

In terms of our interest in the reform era, an additional implication of these findings is that the pattern of associations we find in the Deng era looks much like that in the Maoist period—in both periods most correlations with background traits are not significantly different from zero. There are few signs of any reemergence of the kinds of associations that existed prior to 1958. Because of this weakness, there is no point in looking within our Chengdu data to see whether Party members, cadres, new entrepreneurial elites, or others are behaving differently during the reform era. For those aspects of marriage behavior we are considering here, there is no clear evidence of such new trends in Chengdu. Social background traits do not seem to differentiate people in their wedding behavior in either the reform era or the preceding, Maoist period. The remainder of this chapter will be devoted to an effort to puzzle out the meaning of this curious set of findings.

Transformed Social Structure and Wedding Behavior

Why might the pattern of associations between individual and family status characteristics have disappeared in the full socialism and reform eras? My answer to this question becomes necessarily speculative, since there are no definitive ways to test various explanations with the Chengdu data. There are several possible explanations for the "disappearing correlations" in tables 8.3-8.7: (1) bad data, (2) declining variability, (3) random behavior,

[23] Credit for first noticing this curious disappearance of correlations in the later periods goes to my collaborator Xu Xiaohe, who discovered it while carrying out an analysis of changes in freedom of mate choice.

and (4) changes in underlying social structure and causation. I believe that the answer to our puzzle can be found in (4), but before explaining what changes are involved, I have to show why possibilities (1), (2), and (3) can be discounted.

An explanation premised on bad data involves the idea that our interviews were of such poor quality or our respondents were so confused or inaccurate in their responses that the resulting measures of background and behavior are loaded with random error, thus washing out any underlying correlations. Any study contains a certain amount of random error, and perhaps a study conducted under new and unusual conditions, such as our Chengdu survey, contains more than most. However, this explanation does not accord with the fact that relatively consistent correlations in the expected directions were found among the oldest women we interviewed, those who married prior to 1958. Other things being equal, the limited education and more severe memory problems of older women should produce more error in their answers than for younger women. Since there is no obvious reason why the degree of error should be worse for younger women, this first explanation can be discounted.

Another possibility involves the decline in variability in our data. Perhaps what we see here is evidence of an increasing homogenization of both behavior and backgrounds produced by the revolution. If everyone comes from pretty much the same background and behaves in pretty much the same way, then we would not expect to find very clear associations between background and behavior. This second explanation would be consistent with a pattern of correlations weakening over time, as is shown in tables 8.3-8.7. I examined this possibility by comparing across time periods the standard deviations of both the background traits and the wedding behaviors used in these tables (detailed results not shown here). Although in a few cases (e.g., father's occupational status, bride's educational level, Freedom of Mate Choice Scale), a decline in variability across marriage periods was visible, in most cases it was not.^[24] In general there is enough variability in background traits and wedding behavior in the second and third marriage periods to expect some clear patterns of association to emerge. For this reason I conclude that the second explanation also can be discounted.

A third possible explanation for the patterns shown in tables 8.3-8.7 is random behavior. This idea involves the possibility that the reasons people have big weddings, defer to parental wishes in selecting a mate, or live independently after marriage are mostly determined by personal tastes and

[24] In 14 out of the 19 measures used in tables 8.3-8.7 the standard deviations in the second or third marriage periods were as high as, or higher than, in the first period. In those cases there was no clear trend toward increased homogeneity for those who married after 1958.

idiosyncratic situations and constraints, so that no general associations between background traits and behavior will be visible. No doubt there is much that is personal and situational in the way weddings are observed in China, just as in any other society. But a large share of idiosyncrasy is not incompatible with social background traits exerting considerable influence. After all, social scientists deal with probabilistic explanations, and they typically expect to explain only a modest portion of the variability in individual behavior with their predictors. They are looking for common underlying patterns in their samples despite idiosyncrasies, and they do not aspire to explain the precise behavior of each particular individual within those samples. In any case, this explanation again runs afoul of the fact that we find quite acceptable associations in the expected direction among the pre-1957 marriages. There is no obvious reason why the degree of randomness of wedding behavior should have increased for those who married after 1958. This third explanation, like its predecessors, does not fit the patterns observed in the Chengdu data.

I have suggested that the most likely explanation of the weakening of the association between social background traits and wedding behavior, for couples who married after 1958, is that changes in urban social structure altered the sources of variation in individual behavior in basic ways. What sorts of changes do I have in mind? To oversimplify a great deal, I suggest that we see in the Chengdu data evidence of a major change in the nature of the urban social order in China from a status group/class/market system to a rank/network/bureaucracy system. This basic transformation had important implications for the role of families and family strategies in realms such as negotiating marriages.

To clarify this claim, it may be helpful to examine the assumptions that lie behind asking interviewees about their educational levels, occupations, Party membership, urban experience, and other related background traits. Asking such questions is the bread-and-butter approach used by most Western social scientists in their attempts to explain variation in individual attitudes and behavior, but this approach is based on research in capitalist or market societies. The reason these sorts of traits are asked about is that researchers assume that in these societies people who share certain background traits will have a variety of things in common that will affect how they behave and think. For example, well-educated women will differ from other women in a number of predictable ways, such as by having more access to desirable jobs and higher incomes, more knowledge about the world, and more "modern" ideas. In terms of the kinds of behavior we are interested in here, such women more often will make their own choices about whom to marry, they will have more modern-style weddings, and they will be more likely to set up a new household with their husbands when they marry. In general, groupings based on occupation, education, political

membership, urban experience, or other similar traits become meaningful and important in such societies.^[25]

The status groupings derived from such background traits may be the building blocks of larger and more complex solidarities in these societies, such as social strata, interest groups, and social classes. In general, the central idea here is that the markets and opportunity structures existing in capitalist societies produce competition for status and advantage that tends to make the kinds of social background traits we have been considering important influences on individual behavior. Our Chengdu data suggest that this sort of approach was useful for interpreting behavior of Chinese urbanites up into the 1950s, but not since then. Why the change?

I argue, as do others, that the socialist transformation of the mid-1950s produced a very different urban social order. A highly centralized state relied upon subordinate bureaucratic organizations to directly control the populace by administrative means. Labor markets and market distribution in other realms (e.g., housing, medical care, etc.) were effectively suppressed, and most individuals were locked into a high degree of dependency upon their work units (danwei ) for access to the resources needed to survive.^[26] This system was accompanied by severe scarcities in most realms and a weak legal system and convulsive political atmosphere, factors that made the decisions of bureaucratic gatekeepers appear highly arbitrary and unpredictable.

Individuals and families trying to survive in this system were ill-advised to simply accept the rules of the game and hope that bureaucratic favors would be bestowed on them for their individual efforts. Nor in most cases could they threaten to leave, compete for new opportunities, or organize collectively to gain better treatment. Instead, they had to try to survive and improve their lot by currying favor with superiors and by cultivating connections (guanxi ) with gatekeepers, both within their enterprises and

[25] The particular traits that are important may vary from society to society, and from locale to locale within any one society. For example, religion and rural vs. urban residence may be important differentiating factors in one society and quite unimportant in another. Many discussions of advanced capitalist societies assume that those traits related to what is called socioeconomic status—particularly education, occupational status, and income—will be particularly important influences on individual behavior and attitudes in such societies.

[26] See the analysis in Martin King Whyte and William L. Parish, Urban Life in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Similar ideas have been further developed in Andrew Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Related arguments have been advanced for rural China as well. See, in particular, Edward Friedman, Paul Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). Similar ideas have been used to interpret the social orders of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe prior to 1989. See Kenneth Jowitt, "Soviet Neotraditionalism: The Political Corruption of a Leninist Regime," Soviet Studies 35, no. 3 (July): 275-97; Ivan Szelenyi, Urban Inequalities under State Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

outside—with doctors, housing office employees, store clerks, and many others. But individuals differed widely in their potential for developing supportive networks and their skills at doing so.

What are the sorts of factors that distinguish between success and failure when operating in this system? First, there is the type of work unit, for some units are much more able to provide resources to employees than others, and individuals of quite different personal background traits will share in the advantages or disadvantages of membership in a particular kind of unit.^[27] A second important influence on success within this system is position and rank within the unit and whether these give control over or access to important resources and opportunities. A third important factor is the nature of one's social networks and the extent to which such networks can be used to meet individual and family needs. Wang Gongmin and Chen Zhiyuan may have quite similar educational backgrounds, occupations, and Party membership status, but if Wang is located in a favored work unit, has a position that gives him control over important resources, has cultivated a broad range of helpful connections, and has a strong and supportive family network to supplement those connections, while Chen lacks these things, their lives and their behavior will be quite different. Their social background traits will not have much influence on how they are treated, but their work units, positions, and connections will make all the difference in the world (see also the discussion in the Davis and Phillips chapters).

I suggest that as a result of the major changes in urban social structure that took place in the 1950s, the sorts of traits that affect individual and family behavior changed in fundamental ways. Traits that help form status groups in a market society became relatively unimportant, while new characteristics of individuals and their immediate environments gained salience. I also suggest that whether individuals had a fair amount of free choice in deciding whom to marry, held elaborate and expensive weddings, got new housing so they could live neolocally, and so forth, probably depended in predictable ways on the type of work units that employed both partners and key members of their "old families" and on the positions within those units and social networks of all the principals.^[28] I also acknowledge that we did

[27] Familiar examples are that individuals in military units and defense factories, the railway system, and large industrial plants tend to benefit from the special treatment those units receive, while those working in primary schools, small state stores, and neighborhood factories are not so well treated.

[28] For example, in order to hold an elaborate wedding it is important to be able to mobilize enough funds and assistance for the event, to arrange for the banquet in a suitable place for a reasonable price, and to be able to avoid criticism for violating the official policy on frugal weddings. All of these things require connections and patronage. To obtain housing for neo-local residence one needs the right connections and the support of powerful individuals in work units and/or in housing management offices. Even the degree of freedom of mate choice will be affected by the size and sex composition of the work unit, the degree of puritanism and control versus tolerance and protection exercised by supervisors, and the relative resources and networks of the couple vis-à-vis their parents. The high marriage ages in recent years mean that the great majority of both brides and grooms—85% or more—are already employed at the time they marry. This means that positions within the work units and personal networks of brides and grooms are more important than would be the case if marriages occurred at younger ages.

not ask the right kinds of questions in our Chengdu survey in order to test these ideas directly. To know whether my arguments are correct, we would need detailed questions about the nature of people's work units, their specific positions and degree of control over scarce resources within those units, and the nature of the kinship, friendship, and other social networks they are embedded in. Unfortunately, our Chengdu survey does not contain such questions.^[29]

These ideas refer particularly to China's urban social structure during the full socialist era, roughly the years 1958-78.^[30] What of the reform era? During the years since 1978 this system has been modified in important ways, with market reforms introduced in many realms. The Chinese and Western media in the 1980s were full of accounts of the resulting changes—for example, of new, family-run restaurants, of entrepreneurs setting up private companies, and of skilled personnel leaving state jobs to sell their services elsewhere.

To what extent have these reforms altered the social sources of popular behavior? From our data on wedding behavior in Chengdu, the answer is very little. This conclusion stems from the fact that the "disappearing correlations" observed in column 2 of tables 8.3-8.7 have not reappeared in the third columns of the tables, which deal with marriages in the reform era. Despite the modification of Maoist policies and the introduction of market reforms, there is little evidence that traits such as educational level, occupational status, and Party membership have regained importance in explaining wedding behavior.

My explanation for the limited impact of the reforms is that those most affected by them in urban areas, such as private entrepreneurs and the self-employed, remained a small portion of the total population (5 percent or

[29] We did include questions about whether the work units of the bride, the groom, and the bride's father were state, collective, or private in ownership form. However, this question is too crude to allow us to get at many meaningful distinctions among types of work units.

[30] During those years, the Chinese system was distinctive even when compared with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the degree to which bureaucratic allocation was stressed and markets were suppressed. The most important distinction was that a labor market was virtually nonexistent in the Chinese case, while this was not so in the other cases. See the discussion in Martin King Whyte, "State and Society in the Mao Era," in Perspectives on China , ed. K. Lieberthal, J. Kallgren, R. MacFarquhar, and F. Wakeman (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1992).

less) in most large cities such as Chengdu in the late 1980s, so that the mass media accounts mentioned above are decidedly atypical. Most urbanites remain highly dependent upon state enterprises for meeting their basic needs. Even if enterprises now have to orient themselves more to market forces, individual urbanites (as consumers, employees, patients, etc.) still face an environment filled with scarcities and organized predominantly by bureaucratic allocation. It is these more typical state factory workers, office clerks, and technicians who predominate in any general population sample, such as the one used in the present study.

A second influence that helps to suppress the influence of individual social background traits is the officially encouraged revival of conspicuous consumption. Displaying one's superior living standard, an act that was dangerous in the Mao era, is now looked upon with favor. China's urbanites have responded to this shift with alacrity, and in the process popular expectations about how you should dress, what consumer durables you should own, and how you should celebrate a wedding have been raised dramatically. As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to meet those expectations without drawing on the aid and support of the extensive social networks cultivated in previous years. Since individuals with similar social backgrounds may have quite different social networks, and thus quite different potential for mobilizing such support, the influence of background traits on wedding behavior continues to be small. If these ideas are correct, personal status traits will become important influences again only if and when much more thoroughgoing economic and political reforms are instituted, reforms that reduce the role of networks of connections and make it possible to meet basic needs by relying on individual effort and meritocratic competition.

The evidence presented here for the shift from a status/class/market to a rank/network/bureaucracy system, and the maintenance of the latter well into the reform era, is admittedly very limited. The data analyzed in this chapter are consistent with such an interpretation, but they do not directly test it. But assuming for the moment that these arguments are correct, several obvious questions come to mind. Is Chengdu unusual in this regard, and would we see much more effect of the reforms in locales more centrally affected by them, such as in Shanghai or, even more so, in Canton? Is there a lag-time in popular adaptation to the reforms, such that if we go back and look at Chengdu marriages in the 1990s we will discover more signs of a revival of the influence of social background traits? Is the shift after the 1950s in the sources of individual behavior described here confined to wedding behavior, or would we see it as well in realms as diverse as political participation, leisure time pursuits, and fertility? Can we design questions informed by the rank/network/bureaucracy perspective that allow us to measure how individuals and families are situated in the urban pecking order

and how that location influences their behavior and attitudes?^[31] Only as future research deals with questions such as these will we be able to resolve fully the questions raised in the present analysis.

Conclucions

In the process of reviewing here changes in wedding behavior in Chengdu over the years, I have focused on the dramatic shift in the role played by individual and family background traits in explaining wedding behavior. I have speculated that this shift can be attributed to the major changes in the urban social order carried out during the 1950s, with that social order persisting into the 1980s despite reforms. The analysis has been somewhat unconventional, since I am interested not simply in describing changing Chinese wedding customs, but in using those customs as, in effect, a measuring gauge to judge the contours of the underlying social order. According to my measuring gauge, the transformations in the nature of that social order have been profound enough to undermine the utility of the approaches to explaining social behavior used by most Western social scientists. But what does this analysis tell us about the nature and importance of family strategies in urban China today?

It might be supposed that when a highly centralized system of bureaucratic allocation takes over, as in China after 1957, the role of family networks and family strategies will decline into insignificance. Earlier conceptions of post-1949 China based on the totalitarianism paradigm sometimes used terms such as "atomization" to suggest that the revolution resulted in powerless individuals facing the omnipotent party-state without protection from supportive family and friendship networks. Much research now makes clear that at least for most people in urban China, the effect of the socialist system was more nearly the opposite of atomization. Precisely because the party-state was so powerful, but also because of the pervasiveness of shortages and the arbitrariness with which goods and services were distributed, individuals could not survive, let alone prosper, through individual effort and following the rules of the system. Getting by and getting ahead depended on finding ways to manage or to beat the system and, given the nature of that system, required the cultivation of as many useful social ties as possible. The result was a formally bureaucratic system, which at an informal level was riven with personalistic ties and private deals.^[32]

[31] New research under way, such as that conducted by Andrew Walder and collaborators in Tianjin, involves attempts to design questionnaires to tap connections and networks more directly than has been done before.

[32] See the discussion in Zheng Yefu, "Connections," in The Chinese: Adapting the Past, Facing the Future , ed. Robert Dernberger, Kenneth DeWoskin, Steven Goldstein, Rhoads Murphey, and Martin Whyte (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, 1991). Some analysts have suggested that the resulting system, with its strong emphasis on patron-client relations and personalistic favors, builds upon some of the worst features of the old imperial order. Chinese society after the 1950s, according to this argument, has more in common with feudalism than with either capitalism or socialism. See, for example, Tang Tsou, The Cultural Revolution and Post-Mao Reforms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Friedman, Pickowicz, and Selden, Chinese Village, Socialist State . Similar analyses have been advanced for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. For example, Zygmunt Bauman argues that the rank-based societies produced by state socialism embody a modern version of the sort of patrimonial order that Max Weber described as characteristic of feudalism. Bauman terms this modern variant "partymonialism." See his article, "Officialdom and Class: Bases of Inequality in Socialist Society," in The Social Analysis of Class Structure , ed. Frank Parkin (London: Tavistock, 1972).

Useful social ties might have many origins—in status as co-workers, neighbors, friends, former classmates, relatives, and even as chance acquaintances. But kinship is a particularly useful basis for such ties. Kinship provides a ready-made network of ties that can be mobilized, rather than one that has to be created anew. Family connections tend to involve primordial loyalties that make them more reliable during times of political danger than most other kinds of social ties. Perhaps most important, relatives also tend to be highly dispersed geographically and situated in a broad range of work units and occupations. The heterogeneity involved in kinship relations provides a natural basis for mutually advantageous exchanges.^[33] Socialist reforms in the 1950s may have undercut some of the structural grounds for relying on kin by attacking lineages and their corporate property and by eliminating family-run enterprises and the inheritance of capital. However, the new system sustained and perhaps even strengthened the reliance on a dispersed network of family relationships, as such networks became central to survival in confronting the bureaucratic system that was (and still is) Chinese socialism (see also the related discussion in chapters 2, 11, and 12).

Even as they heard their reformist leaders proclaiming a new era in which individuals would be able to succeed through meritocratic competition, bolstered by revived markets, strengthened legal codes, and rational administrative systems, young people contemplating getting married after 1978 found they could not do so without relying on a broad range of support and assistance from their families. We do not have any direct evidence in the Chengdu study on how family decisions about wedding celebrations and postmarital living arrangements are actually negotiated. We do have enough evidence, however, to state emphatically that family-based cooperation and negotiation between generations remain absolutely central in reform-era China.

[33] Neighbors and workmates might be the source of more frequent interactions than relatives. However, as individuals in much the same boat, they do not provide as much opportunity for advantageous exchanges as do relatives located in distant markets or in work posts where the mixture of benefits and shortages is quite different. Diversity is a more fruitful basis for mutual advantage than similarity.

Market Town Wedding

Small-town bride about to enter her husband's home (Helen Siu)

Bridal car to carry her to banquet (Helen Siu)

Presentations before the family altar (Helen Siu)

The Making of a Stem Family

A weeping bride is led away from her parents' home. (Stevan Harrell)

A proud mother-in-law ushers her new daughter-
in-law into the bridal chamber. (Stevan Harrell)

A relative of the bride paints the groom's parents' faces to ensure
their good humor toward their daughter-in-law. (Stevan Harrell)

A new stem family poses for a formal portrait. (Stevan Harrell)

Family Portraits

Small-town fishing family (Helen Siu)

Multigenerational family in Shanghai (Graham E. Johnson)

Multigenerational family in rural Guangdong (Graham E. Johnson)

Entrepreneurs

Chengdu stallkeeper (Hill Gates)

Chengdu Shopkeeper (Hill Gates)

The proud owner of a new house with modern
furniture, Renhe, Panzhihua (Stevan Harrell)

Housing Styles

Shanghai apartment building,
constructed in the 1950s (Deborah Davis)

Shanghai apartment building,
constructed in 1978 (Deborah Davis)

Shanghai apartment building, constructed in 1988 (Deborah Davis)

Village house built with Canadian remittances, Duanfen, Taishan, Guangdong (Graham e. Johnson)

New house with traditional ritual couplets, Fucheng, Dongguan, Guangdong (Graham E. Johnson)

Old-style mud-walled housing under construction in Yishala, Panzhihua, Sichuan(Stevan Harrell)

New-style mansion of twenty-nine rooms, home to a family of ten in Renhe, Panzhihua (Stevan Harrell)