PART THREE
CHILDBEARING

Nine
The Peasantization of the One-Child Policy in Shaanxi

Susan Greenhalgh

The research on which this chapter is based was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation, grant number BNS-8618121. I wish to thank Wang Zheng, Guo Huizhon g, and Marilyn Beach for superlative assistance in coding and cleaning the data, and Li Nan for detailed comments on an earlier draft.

Population Control: The State-Society Conflict and its Local Mediators

A crucial component of China's development strategy is the control of population growth. Having seen rampant population growth eat up hard-earned economic gains in the past, the reformist leaders of the late 1970s were deadly serious about restraining reproduction. In January 1979 they announced the extraordinary policy of encouraging all couples to limit themselves to one child.^[1] The concrete goals of the policy became clear in September 1980, when the Central Committee issued an "Open Letter" (gongkai xin ) announcing a crash program to control population size within 1.2 billion by the year 2000 and demanding that all cadres and all Party and Youth League members take the lead in forming single-child families.^[2]

For a regime that once prided itself on its deep understanding of the Chinese peasantry, the one-child policy was appallingly out of touch with rural reality. Virtually every policy goal—from restricting the number, thus also the sex, of children, to delaying family formation, to lengthening birth intervals—flew in the face of Chinese tradition and threatened to

hobble one of the few reliable resources peasants had left after thirty years of socialism, the family.

Given the tremendous control the Chinese state wields over Chinese society in the domain of reproduction, a study of peasant fertility strategies alone will shed little light on the forces underlying family formation in rural China today. Chinese peasants follow essentially the same strategies employed by the oppressed everywhere—evasion, deception, manipulation, bribery, and all the rest.^[3] An understanding of how reproduction has evolved in the era of the one-child policy must start instead with the state, its goals, and how they are pursued. In determining local fertility outcomes, however, the key actor may be neither state nor society, but those who occupy the interface between the two.

Between State and Society: The Local Cadres

Local cadres in China—that is to say, village-level officials—are charged with enforcing state policy among the rural populace. At the same time, they are firmly rooted in local society: they live in the village, they are linked to villagers by kin and friendship ties, and their livelihood is drawn from village resources. Over the past forty years, when state rules have challenged profoundly held local values or threatened peasant economic security, village cadres have often tried and sometimes succeeded in bending those rules to the advantage of their relatives and neighbors.^[4]

During the collective era rural cadres appear to have mediated state-society conflicts by kowtowing to the state during periods of mobilization, but favoring society in quieter times.^[5] It appears that most of the time local officials routinely distorted central policies to serve local interests. In cheating the state they were protected by structural features of the political system, in particular by the center's inability to monitor events in hundreds of thousands of villages, many poorly linked to communications networks, and by its chronically overloaded agenda, which allowed the microdeceptions at the grass roots to go unnoticed.^[6]

The reform process has altered cadre relations with both state and society. In the post-1978 era resources have shifted down the administrative

hierarchy, enhancing the capacity of local cadres to twist Beijing's policies to local advantage.^[7] Research in many sectors of economic policy has revealed that policy-making has been fragmented, with local power holders having a major impact on policy evolution.^[8]

While gaining power relative to the state, local cadres have clearly lost influence over society. Reports from many localities suggest that in the immediate aftermath of the parceling out of collective land, peasants deemed their old leaders superfluous and refused to heed their word.^[9] This pattern became solidified with the passage of time, as the elimination of many official duties led to a decline in cadre power and in the economic resources and social prestige that power had brought.^[10] At the same time, new, more difficult duties were added to cadre workloads—enforcing the one-child policy is a prime example—dampening their enthusiasm for official work. During the 1980s cadres retained some important powers and gained some new ones, and these should be considered in an account of alterations in cadre status and power.^[11] The overall picture current research paints, however, is one of decline in cadre power and a shift in cadre commitment from exemplary performance in official duties to self-enrichment in the private economy.

In the population arena, the one-child policy has provoked a locked-horns conflict between state and society over family size. By any except perhaps the cyberneticist's measure, the state devised an unworkable—one could even say a bad—policy that disregarded the basic needs of the rural population. If the post-1978 reforms did liberate local cadres from excessive state control, as recent research suggests, then village cadres had the opportunity to reshape the one-child policy, to peasantize it, as it were, to better fit the needs of their constituents. And if the reforms also lessened cadre control over the peasantry, then birth-planning workers may have had little choice but to modify the policy in response to peasant demands.

In the past few years an old debate over the strength of the Chinese

state has reemerged in new guise, that of state-society relations.^[12] In her provocative book The Reach of the State , Vivienne Shue argues that previous observers got it wrong.^[13] In her reading of the evidence, during the Maoist decades the state was hamstrung by the cellular structure of society, which allowed local cadres to weave protective webs over their village kingdoms. In the post-Mao era the extension of market reforms has torn off those protective webs, exposing the peasantry to the potentially fierce winds of state control. Jonathan Unger contends that it is Shue who has it wrong.^[14] Drawing on primary interview data, he defends the orthodox position that state control was often formidable during Mao's lifetime. Far from showing the limits on state power, he says, the crumbs of resistance peasants and cadres managed to put up only revealed the state-imposed limits on their freedom. In his view, Dengism has at last brought some relief from state domination. With the weakening of many mechanisms of control, both the state's grip over local cadres and the cadres' power to exact compliance from the peasantry have loosened.

Objectives

This chapter examines the evolution of state-society relations in the area of population control. Which side is winning the struggle over family size, how, and why are questions aggregate statistics cannot answer. Using retrospective field data from village Shaanxi, I examine shifts in reproductive control in the reform era and the strategies local birth-planning cadres used to help engineer those shifts. Three questions are of primary concern.

First, how much control does the state wield over family formation in village China; and to what extent did the locus of reproductive control shift from state to society during the first decade of economic reform? The answers should advance the debate over the reach of the Chinese state during both late collective and reform eras.

Second, what components of the economic and political reform process have propelled the hypothesized shift in reproductive control? A number of observers have written about the apparent impact of the reforms on population policy enforcement, but little firsthand evidence has been

brought to bear on the issue. A better understanding of the mechanisms by which the reforms undermined policy enforcement would shed light on the larger process by which economic liberalization sparked demographic liberalization.

Third, what were the strategies of peasants in achieving their fertility goals, and of cadres in mediating the needs of state and society? An understanding of the trade-offs cadres worked out with peasant families, on the one hand, and state bureaucrats, on the other, would help us comprehend the delicate political balance that keeps the one-child policy on the books even as it appears to be largely inoperative on the ground.

The chapter begins by introducing the research locale and describing the process of economic reform that transformed the villages from collective brigades into collections of household agriculturalists. I then set out the reproductive demands of the state and the peasantry, taking "the state" to mean officials and organizations at provincial, municipal, and township (before 1984, commune) levels of the state bureaucracy. How peasant families coped with state reproductive demands, and how local cadres in turn coped with the conflicts between state and family demands are examined in the following two sections, which trace the evolution of de facto population policy in the villages over the period 1979-87. This chapter treats five major elements of the one-child policy: late marriage, late childbearing, second children, third and higher-order children, and child spacing. (Birth control is the subject of another study.) In the next section we step back from the implementation details to view the larger strategies local cadres used to smooth the bureaucrat-family interface. A conclusion summarizes the findings about the links between economic and demographic policy and spells out the larger implications for state-society relations in China.

This analysis is part of a larger project on the political economy of family and reproductive change in peasant China over the four decades 1947-87. The data used here were gathered as part of a field research project conducted in collaboration with Xi'an Jiaotong University's Population Research Institute. Carried out during the first six months of 1988, the project involved five stages of data collection: a reproductive survey of all ever-married women in the villages (N = 1,011), the gathering of family social and economic histories from a random subsample of families (N = 150), indepth interviews with present and former cadres, collection of statistical data, and documentary research in local newspapers, journals, and other sources. Staff members of the Xi'an institute carried out the demographic surveys under my supervision; Chinese colleagues and I together conducted the family and cadre interviews and gathered the statistical data, living in the villages for a month and commuting from Xi'an the rest of the time; I was solely responsible for the documentary research. This chapter

draws primarily on the reproductive histories and cadre interviews, but is informed by casual conversations and observations made throughout the research period.

Economic and Political Reform and its Effects on Population Policy Enforcement

As no single locale can typify China, I begin by noting the distinctive features of the study province and villages so the reader may see how they fit into the larger picture.

The Provincial Context: Shaanxi in National Perspective

Throughout the post-1949 period fertility in Shaanxi has for the most part closely tracked the national average, making it an attractive site for research on reproduction.^[15] As elsewhere, birth rates fell rapidly during the era of the later-longer-fewer (wanxishao ) policy (1971-78), when strict controls on childbearing were first applied countrywide. From 5.5 births per woman in 1970, the provincial total fertility rate dropped to 2.7 in 1978.^[16] During the period of the one-child policy, total fertility has vacillated, declining between 1979 and 1980, rising from 1980 to 1982, dropping again from 1982 to 1983, then moving upward yet again, reaching 3.0 in 1987.^[17] After falling below the national average in the early years of the one-child era, provincial fertility rates climbed above the average in 1983-87. Although problems of underreporting argue for caution in interpreting the figures, available data suggest that since about 1983 Shaanxi has been among the laggards in enforcing the one-child policy.

The agricultural reforms introduced in the late 1970s and early 1980s have boosted provincial incomes, but not enough to pull Shaanxi out of the class of poor, least developed provinces.^[18] Between 1980 and 1987, for example, the per capita income of agricultural households grew 2.3 times, rising from 142 to 329 yuan. However, Shaanxi peasants actually lost ground relative to the average Chinese peasant, whose income grew 2.4 times, from

191 to 463 yuan.^[19] Acquisition of consumer durables also lagged. In 1986, for example, only six out of a hundred peasant households in the province owned televisions; countrywide, seventeen of every one hundred peasant families owned a TV set.^[20]

Economic and Political Reforms in the Villages

Located in the Wei River Basin just west of the provincial capital of Xi'an, the three study villages are part of Weinan township (a pseudonym; 1987 population 26,000), which in turn is part of Xianyang city (1986 population 3.97 million).^[21] The villages varied somewhat in size—their 1982 populations ranged from 1,436 to 707—but had similar social, economic, and political configurations. To avoid the problem of small sample size, in the analyses below the three villages are treated as one unit.

Vegetable growers for the nearby urban population, the villages were moderately well-off by Shaanxi standards, although only lower-middling by China-wide criteria. According to township records, 1987 per capita income was 402 yuan, roughly 122 percent of the provincial average of 330 (for the agricultural population), but only 87 percent of the national average of 463 yuan.^[22]

The reforms introduced in the Shaanxi villages were similar in both content and timing to those promoted elsewhere.^[23] In 1979 private plots were turned over to peasant households, and free markets were reopened, providing opportunities to earn cash for vegetables grown on those plots. Another source of cash income was short-term wage labor, which took the form of construction and transportation work in Xianyang and Xi'an. In 1979 such activities were organized by the production team. In 1980 "outside work" was fully privatized and, with urban centers close by, quickly became a common supplementary source of family income. While unskilled jobs outside the village were fairly abundant, opportunities for small-scale entrepreneurship were not. As late as 1987 the great majority of peasants continued to spend most of their time farming; "specialized households" were rare.

Decollectivization took place in phases. As early as 1979 the largest of the three villages experimented with contracting to small groups of four to

five households. The key package of reforms—the division of the collective land, the dismantling of the work-point system, and the introduction of household responsibility systems—took place in early 1982. Since that time peasants in the three villages have had virtually total control over the use of their plots and the marketing of their produce. The majority allocate the bulk of their land to the production of vegetables for the market, reserving small portions for grain for home consumption. Although parcels were reshuffled a few times during the first year or two after the initial division of land, from 1984 on the allocations have been relatively permanent. Small parcels are adjusted every three years, large parcels every fifteen.

The villages' periurban location combined with their vegetable-growing economy may have created a tougher climate for population policy enforcement than that faced by cadres in more rural grain-growing villages. In villages of both types, cadres retained control over the distribution of responsibility land, housing land (zhuangjidi ), and key agricultural inputs such as chemical fertilizer. Cadres in the Shaanxi villages considered these, as well as their control over the electricity needed for irrigation, important sources of leverage over the peasants. In more remote grain-growing villages, however, cadres also gained power from their control over the distribution of other inputs, such as motor fuel, and access to draught animals, tractors, and marketing outlets.^[24] None of these could bolster cadre power in the Shaanxi villages. Vegetable farming was done entirely by hand and with small tools, obviating the need for draught animals or tractors. And proximity to urban centers made the bicycle-driven cart the ideal means of transportation to market. These carts were so cheap that virtually every peasant household could own one. In addition, because their major crop was vegetables, after the distribution of collective land peasants in the Shaanxi villages were not required to sign production contracts with any level of government. In this context, enforcement methods such as "double contracts" linking production and reproduction quotas were clearly useless. Thus, while cadres in the study villages clearly had many levers with which to control peasant behavior, they probably had fewer such resources than local leaders in more remote grain-growing villages.

As part of the reform process collectives also relinquished control over their enterprises, both economic and medical. The cooperative health systems were abolished at the time of decollectivization, the brigade medical stations being contracted out to village doctors (xiangcun yisheng ).

Designed to separate politics from economics and, more specifically, to roll back Party penetration of the economy, commune reform was carried out in April 1983. As elsewhere, at the commune level a township govern-

ment was officially established, while the commune was turned into an economic organization. At the formal level brigades became villagers' committees, and production teams were transformed into villagers' small groups. Informally, the elimination of many cadre duties brought an apparent decline in cadre power and, judging from how much time they spent in their fields, a loss of cadre commitment to official tasks.

Consequences for Population Policy Enforcement

In recent years a growing literature has dissected the effects of these reforms on population policy.^[25] With few exceptions, that literature is based on secondary sources;^[26] where it draws on firsthand research the fieldwork was conducted in the early 1980s, before some of the longer-term effects had become apparent.

The bulk of these studies deal with the consequences of the reforms for peasant fertility aspirations. The few discussions of effects on policy implementation tend to concentrate on disruptions of economic mechanisms, paying little heed to the fate of administrative tools. Furthermore, virtually all the literature on implementation problems focuses on difficulties in enforcing the rules on number of children; little has been written about the consequences of the economic reforms for enforcement of late marriage, late childbearing, and spacing rules.

Using the Shaanxi data, subsequent sections examine the effects of the reforms on both economic and administrative enforcement mechanisms, and on each of these policy elements (number of children, late marriage, late childbearing, spacing). Here we set the stage for that inquiry by setting out what is currently known about the impact of reform-era changes on economic enforcement methods.

Existing literature highlights three main mechanisms by which the post-1978 reforms are likely to have undermined population policy enforcement. First, it posits, the rise in peasant incomes impaired implementation by enabling couples to pay the fines for violating the policy rules without suffering great hardship.

Second, the abolition of team accounting disabled the system of economic incentives and disincentives by which the one-child policy was to be enforced. Under collective-income accounting, economic penalties were simply deducted from peasant income; when peasants gained control over their incomes, cadres lost the guarantee that they could collect the fines. Payment of incentives was also disrupted. During the collective era economic benefits were paid from the team welfare fund (gongyi jin ). With decollectivization that fund largely disappeared, leaving few resources with which to award those complying with the policy.

Finally, commune reform exacerbated implementation difficulties by reducing the power and prestige of local cadres. Compounding the problem, local cadres were included in the distribution of land. Cultivating their plots was more rewarding than promoting birth planning—a task for which they received nominal compensation—depressing their commitment to their official work.

Reproduction: State Demands, Peasant Demands

When the one-child policy was announced in the late 1970s, state policymakers and Shaanxi villagers stood far apart on virtually every policy issue. We examine their positions on five key issues: the timing of marriage and of childbearing, second children, third and higher children, and child spacing.

State Demands

The large effect of the timing of demographic events on the rate of population growth was not lost on Chinese policymakers. Put simply, their aim was to slow the family's movement through its developmental cycle so as to depress the rate of generational turnover: by pushing first childbearing up to age twenty-four, they figured, they could reduce the number of generations in a century from roughly five to four. Building on the success of the later-longer-fewer policy of 1971-78, designers of the one-child policy set as their goals late marriage, late childbearing, few births, and quality births (wanhun, wanyü, shaosheng, yousheng ). Shaanxi policy largely followed national policy on these basic reproductive demands; here we trace the evolution of provincial and municipal policy in the birth-planning regulations of the two administrative units.^[27] The stress here is on the reproductive rules ; how they were to be enforced is treated in subsequent sections.

Late marriage was a central element of provincial and municipal policy, appearing in virtually all sets of birth-planning regulations issued by the

two units. Throughout the period of the one-child policy late marriage was set at age twenty-three and twenty-five for women and men, respectively.

Late childbearing became an important policy target only with the advent of the one-child policy. (Since the 1980 Marriage Law undermined the marriage ages in effect under wanxishao by establishing the legal minimum as twenty and twenty-two, those fashioning the one-child policy had to devise another way to delay childbirth.) In Shaanxi the one-child policy was not formally incorporated into official regulations until 1981. From that year on, virtually all provincial and municipal regulations advocated late childbearing, defining it as the delay of the first birth until the mother is over the age of twenty-four.

For the great majority of couples "few births" meant one birth. While the transitional policy of 1979-81 stipulated that "one is best, don't exceed two," from 1981 on the slogan was "advocate one birth, strictly limit second births, resolutely stop third births." From the beginning, however, provision was made for couples, especially village couples, who faced real hardships to have a second child. The number of such conditions increased over time. In the provincial regulations the number of special circumstances under which peasants were allowed a second child rose from five in 1981 to seven in 1982 to eleven in 1986. At the city level the number of conditions climbed from three in 1981 to six in 1982, to twelve, fourteen, or sixteen in 1985, depending on ecological zone. While most of the conditions were such that few couples were likely to fit them, in 1985 (city) and 1986 (province) all village residents whose first child was a girl became eligible to apply for permission to have a second child.

All those obtaining permission to have a second child were required to space four years between their first and second births. The spacing rule appeared in all the provincial and municipal regulations, changing from "over three years" in 1979 to "four years" in 1981-85, to "over four years" in 1986. Spacing between second and later children was, of course, irrelevant, as higher-order children were expressly forbidden.

These demands were not simply stated in the birth-planning regulations and then forgotten. On the contrary, top provincial officials kept the pressure on lower-level cadres by reminding them of these demands in frequent speeches and telephone conferences, as well as, no doubt, in internal circulars. Although such intrabureaucratic communications remain largely hidden from scholarly view, some indication of the nature of the demands made on local cadres can be gleaned from media reports of important speeches and conferences dealing with population policy. A review of such media items from 1981 to 1987 shows that during this period the provincial governor, deputy governor, first Party secretary, deputy Party secretary, and Standing Committee of the People's Congress made at least eight major, publicly reported speeches or announcements reminding local cadres

and the population of the urgency of "vigorously" and "resolutely" enforcing the rules on late marriage, late childbearing, and number of children. (Spacing received less emphasis, presumably because the number of couples having second children was supposed to be limited.)^[28] Thus, any laxity on the part of local cadres in enforcing these demands appears not to be attributable to indifference or inaction on the part of provincial authorities.^[29]

Peasant Demands

It is hard to pin down who makes decisions on childbearing in Chinese peasant families. Discussions with many Shaanxi villagers suggest that in most cases it is a shared affair, with men and women, old and young, all attempting to influence the outcome. To understand peasant fertility demands, then, one needs to seek the views of both sexes and both generations.

Studies of ideal family size in China have generally shown that peasants queried during the 1980s have considered two the optimal number of children.^[30] ("Family size" is convenient demographic shorthand for the number of children.) As important as the number of children, however, was their sex: two was best only if one was a girl, the other a boy.^[31]

Residents of the Shaanxi villages apparently thought the same thing. Of the roughly 380 women who married between 1979 and 1987 and whose re-

productive behavior will be examined below, 88 percent named a one-son-one-daughter family as the ideal. Four percent replied two sons and one daughter, 1 to 2 percent each answered one son, two sons, or one daughter, and another 3 percent were unable to make up their minds.

It was not only young women who thought small families were best. Men of all ages held the same view. Of 150 family heads asked their reaction to the old saying "more sons, more happiness" (duozi duofu ), 91 percent rejected it outright. Four percent agreed, 3 percent thought it was right for some reasons and wrong for others, while a final 2 percent could not decide. While too many children had many drawbacks, too few children were also unacceptable. One child was clearly too few, for hazards of disease or accident could take it away, leaving a couple without issue. In short, two children were needed to guarantee one. And one of these had to be a boy. Thus, while one of each was deemed ideal, two children, including one son, were deemed essential.

There is no doubt that these responses were colored—to some unmeasurable degree—by features of the birth-planning program, in particular its antinatalist propaganda, which had been steady diet in the villages for over twenty years, and the fear of coercion its campaigns had instilled. However, the preferences for two-child, mixed-sex families may also have reflected genuinely held views, ones supported by the social and economic structures of village life. One's confidence in this possibility is increased when one hears the reasons villagers gave for wanting this offspring set. The fascinating subject of child "costs and benefits" could occupy a paper in itself; here I simply touch on the highlights to convince readers the peasants knew what they were talking about.

Students of peasant China are likely to ask two questions of the response that one son and one daughter are ideal. The first is why only one son, the second, why as many as one daughter? Taking the second first, peasants themselves were hard pressed when I asked them why they considered one daughter absolutely necessary. It seems they had never bothered to ask themselves this question. After repeated probing, the answer that emerged is that daughters provide crucial emotional support. The image that recurred was one of an elderly couple, unable to get around much any more, whose married daughter comes home to cook the meals, do the laundry, and generally keep them company. This was apparently a powerfully appealing idea, for a large number of informants, many of them men, produced it on their own.

As for why one son was sufficient, many informants noted the heavy economic burden entailed by raising many children. The costs not only of daily necessities but also of big-ticket items such as weddings and houses (expected at family division) have skyrocketed in the last decade, making the "cost of children" argument more compelling than it probably ever has

been in rural China. The bottom line, however, was captured in the following expression: "One father can raise ten sons, but ten sons cannot support one father." In other words, when there is only one son, he has a clear obligation to support his elderly parents. When there are more than one they fight over who has to live with the parents, causing great humiliation and often even economic hardship for the older generation.

As for the timing of the phases of family formation, the older generation, whose opinions carried considerable weight, generally favored early marriage and childbearing. The reasons were both demographic and political. Demographically, the aim was to accelerate the family developmental cycle (precisely what the state sought to retard): the sooner one's son married, the sooner the grandchildren were born, the sooner grandparents could retire from heavy agricultural work to a more leisurely life of housework and child tending. The anxiety to hurry family formation was clearly also a product of the forceful and changeable fertility policy; in this political context peasants sought to marry and have their children as soon as possible, on the not-so-off chance the policy might become yet more restrictive.

The Evolution of De Facto Population Policy I: Late Marriage and Late Childbearing

Squeezed between a state promoting minuscule families and a society wanting modest families, what did local birth-planning cadres do? Treating village cadres as the creators of de facto policy—the adapters of de jure policy to local reality—the following sections trace the evolution of de facto policy on marriage and childbearing. The emphasis here is on implementation of the reproductive rules; as we shall see, economic and political reforms undermined enforcement mechanisms, narrowing the range of strategies available to birth-planning workers in the field.

Economic Incentives for Late Marriage

Late marriage was to be enforced through both economic and administrative mechanisms. Provincial and municipal regulations offered couples marrying late paid postnuptial vacations. During the collective era cadres could simply record the appropriate number of work-points for couples marrying late. With the abolition of unified team accounting, however, work-points were eliminated, leaving cadres without funds to pay vacation allowances.

In this incentive vacuum village cadres improvised. In the study villages couples marrying late were awarded a certificate giving them the privileges of having a child and of having it in a hospital free of charge. On close inspection, however, this new offer turned out to be an empty one.

First, as we shall see shortly, the de facto birth policy that evolved over

the 1980s allowed virtually all couples, regardless of the age at which they married, to conceive their first child immediately after marriage. Thus, the privilege of having a child embodied in the certificate was no privilege at all. Second, the cost of a hospital delivery—about 50 yuan in 1987—was scarcely steep, and fell over time as a share of peasant income. In 1987, for example, a hospital delivery took a mere 3 percent of average household income.^[32] Thus, a combination of changes stemming from the economic reforms—especially the elimination of work-points and rising peasant incomes—worked to empty the box of economic incentives available to birth-planning workers.

The Marriage Registration System

Late marriage was to be enforced through a strict registration system that required couples wishing to marry to obtain certification of marriage age from the village accountant. With that in hand, they were to proceed to the township police station to request a marriage certificate (hunyin zheng ). As the reforms began to loosen administrative control, the commune tried to tighten it again with a new set of regulations. In January 1983 new regulations called for concentration of matrimonial study classes (in late marriage and late childbearing) and ceremonies during three annual holiday periods: International Labor Day (Wuyi, May 1), National Day (Guoqing, October 1), and Spring Festival (Yuandan, January or February). All those wishing to marry, the rules stated, must report one month earlier to the commune headquarters with their certificate. Only after passing an investigation and review and obtaining a marriage contract signed by their unit were they allowed to receive a marriage certificate. Strict penalties were on the books for those caught trying to escape the registration net by living together out of wedlock.

While the reforms contributed to the loss of control over marriage age by undermining the system of economic incentives, the timing of the shift in marriage age (documented below) suggests that another change played the decisive role. The 1980 Marriage Law set the legal minimum age at marriage at twenty and twenty-two for women and men, respectively. Since the new law was formulated and actively promoted by the political center, it clearly superseded provincial, municipal, and commune regulations that had called for higher ages at marriage. Peasants now had a centrally sanctioned excuse to lobby for earlier marriages, and cadres had no effective counter.

While local cadres lost their authority to strictly enforce the late-

marriage regulations, they were clearly obligated to enforce the new legal marriage ages. Like most central directives, however, the 1980 Marriage Law was a general document that was strong on rules but weak on means of enforcement.^[33] Lacking clear operational guidelines, local cadres took the system that had been devised to enforce late marriage and turned it into a tool to enforce legal marriage ages.

Table 9.1 shows how this transformation occurred. Between 1979 and 1987 the average female age at first marriage dropped from 23.7 years, just above the late-marriage age, to 20.9, just above the legal marriage age (col. 3). As cadres lost higher-level support for the late-marriage goal, the late-marriage rate for women plummeted from 75 to 14 percent (col. 4).

Remarkably, throughout this period of flux in marriage age the marriage registration system remained intact. In every year virtually all couples registered their marriages with township officials before holding a family wedding ceremony (col. 1). Roughly 90 percent registered within three months of marrying (col. 2), suggesting close adherence to township rules on wedding procedures.

Inspection of the months in which weddings took place (data not shown) reveals that 85 percent of couples married around the time of the three holiday periods stipulated by the township. Seventy-eight percent took their vows during the Spring Festival (January and February), and another 4 percent each wedded during the Labor Day (May) and National Day (October) holidays. Clearly, the state had a lot to say about when weddings took place.

De Facto Policy on Late Marriage

The strategy local cadres evolved apparently entailed conceding marriage age to the peasants while appeasing officials higher up the state bureaucracy by rigorously enforcing the registration system and strictly carrying out the Marriage Law. Interviews with village birth-planning workers left the impression that upholding the Marriage Law was one of their proudest achievements. And uphold it they did. Between January 1981, when the law was put into effect, and December 1987, only 5 percent of women married before reaching the age of twenty (table 9.1, col. 5). The absence of a discernible trend in illegal marriage suggests that this handful of women marrying at eighteen and nineteen represent, not cases of lax enforcement of the law, but exemptions from the law fully authorized by local cadres. With explicit permission from local officials, families facing special difficulties were allowed to arrange early marriages for their sons. Most exemptions appear to have been granted for single-son families in which the mother was incapacitated; such families had a compelling need for a daughter-in-law to perform the cooking, cleaning, and other tasks reserved for women in rural China.

While late marriage remained on the books as a policy goal, then, it virtually disappeared from the de facto policy objectives local cadres sought to achieve. That village cadres had virtually abandoned late marriage as a goal emerged clearly from interviews with them in 1988. In one interview the birth-planning cadre of one village incorrectly identified the late-marriage ages for women and men as twenty-two and twenty-three; in another discussion she referred to the late-marriage ages as twenty and twenty-two, unwittingly substituting the legal marriage age for the late-marriage age. Clearly, the task in her mind was to keep couples from marrying before the legally stipulated minimum age.

Economic Incentives for Late Childbearing

Policymakers' second important timing goal, late childbearing, was inherently more difficult to enforce. (Registration systems do not easily control behavior within bedrooms.) As abortion of the first pregnancy was apparently not an acceptable means of control,^[34] local cadres had only economic incentives with which to encourage the delay of first births. Provincial and municipal regulations of 1981 and 1982 offered generous paid maternity leaves for women postponing the birth of their first child beyond the age of twenty-four. In 1983, after the dismantling of the work-point system undermined the payment mechanism, commune leaders issued a new set of regulations offering women who both met the late-childbearing standard and accepted a one-child certificate (described below) cash awards of 20-30 yuan to be paid over the course of a two-month maternity leave.

In a newly privatized and rapidly growing economy, however, 20-30 yuan was a weak inducement to delay conception of a precious child. First, rapidly rising peasant incomes reduced the value of the award. Between 1983 and 1987, 25 yuan fell from 3 to 1 percent of average household income. Village cadres were also deprived of the means to pay the awards. The incentives were to be drawn from excess-child fines; as we shall see, however, collection of such fines dropped off over time, leaving those charged with encouraging late childbearing empty-handed.

De Facto Policy on Late Childbearing

With virtually no means to encourage delayed childbearing, local cadres had little choice but to simply abandon this policy goal. Data in table 9.2 suggest that this is precisely what they did. Between 1979 and 1985 the late-childbearing rate fell precipitously: from 84 percent in 1979, the proportion of women meeting the late criterion dropped to 18 percent in 1985 (col. 4). (Not enough women marrying in 1986 and 1987 had given birth by December 1987 to permit calculation of their intervals.) During that same period the average interval between marriage and first birth dropped from 17.5 months to 13.4 months (col. 2; the latter figure is biased downward slightly by the omission of a few women who had not given birth by December 1987). Of the seventy-eight women marrying in the last two years of observation, 1984 and 1985, fifty-one gave birth within a year of marriage, and ten had their first child nine months after matrimony (data not shown). The de facto rule on the timing of first births appears to have been: any time you want.

Interviews with village cadres confirm the story told by these statistics.

In response to a question about the status of late childbearing, village birth-planning workers replied: "No regulations, no propaganda, no rewards." The head of one village (cunzhang ) said he had "heard of such things" as late childbearing and late marriage, but "was not clear exactly what they were."

The Evolution of De Facto Population Policy II: Second Children, Third and Higher-Order Children, and Spacing

Timing was a crucial component of the one-child policy, but the heart of the policy lay in the number of children couples were encouraged to have. While third and higher-order children were expressly prohibited, the rules always included provisions for couples facing great hardship to have a second, provided they spaced four years between the first and second. Indeed, as we have seen, the problem of second children was a difficult issue for Chinese policymakers, one they eventually resolved by raising the number of conditions under which peasants were allowed a second offspring. Ironically, efforts to improve enforcement by fitting the rules more closely

to peasant desires only made enforcement more difficult, for fluctuation in the official position created room for maneuver and manipulation at the local level, and peasants wasted no time rushing in.

How did local cadres control demands for second (and third) births and keep birth intervals of women fitting the special circumstances at four years? When the policy was first introduced three types of enforcement tools were available: administrative discipline, material rewards, and economic penalties. With the restructuring of the rural economy the force of each of these tools was blunted.

Administrative Discipline

The judicious use of administrative sanctions against selected birth-planning offenders was probably very effective in the late 1970s, when commune posts were deemed plum jobs. According to a set of commune-level documents, in 1979-82 twenty-eight high-status workers, including administrative cadres, teachers, women's team heads, and other officials, were relieved of their posts for violating the rules on number of children. Interviews with peasants revealed that workers in commune enterprises were also disciplined in this way.

The reforms, however, reduced the allure of commune work. As agricultural incomes rose, even workers with secure jobs in urban industry were tempted back to try their hand at "enlivening the rural economy." Teachers too left their posts for the promise of riches in the fields. As the relative income, and to a certain extent also the prestige, of commune jobs sank, the use of this form of administrative discipline against birth offenders dropped off. I uncovered no evidence of such firings after 1982.

Economic Incentives for One-Child Families

Economic measures also lost their punch. As elsewhere in China, in the Shaanxi villages couples promising to have only one child were awarded "one-child certificates" along with a host of material benefits. During the collective era benefits stipulated by the province included: priority in admission to kindergarten and school, in access to medical treatment and hospitalization, and in competitions for elevation to worker, soldier, and advanced-student status; priority in the allocation of housing land; monthly health stipends of three yuan; and adult grain rations and special consideration in the distribution of refined grain, sidelines, and other material goods; all to continue to age sixteen.

Village birth-planning cadres reported that during these years such incentives were both easy to award, as they came directly from team granaries and welfare funds, and appealing to parents, as the extra rations were paid immediately on the birth of the child. The dismantling of the collectives, however, eliminated the kitties from which the awards were to be

paid. The result was a marked decline in single-child benefits, a process that can be traced in the provincial and municipal regulations.^[35]

On the village level local cadres attempted to cope with the shift to household farming by offering single-child families double the normal allocation of responsibility land. This system, however, proved too inflexible. Much to the cadres' distress, it was extremely difficult to retrieve extra allocations from couples who went on to have a second child. In addition, land adjustments were infrequent, forcing couples to wait up to three years for their extra share. For these reasons the system was abandoned by two of the villages in 1984.

In 1987 the villages offered instead benefit packages of the following sort: four gifts twice a year (an award letter, candy, toys, and pen and notebook); monthly health stipends of five yuan; free attendance at the village kindergarten and local school; and free viewing of a movie or cultural program twice a year. To discourage further childbearing, parents who had accepted the one-child benefits but went on to have a second child were required not only to pay the excess-child fee, but also to return the accumulated value of the health stipends they had received.

The economic value of these benefits was clearly quite modest. The major incentive, the health stipend, amounted to only about 3 percent of average 1987 household income. The token size of the incentives, coupled with the fact that at most merely a handful of village couples actually intended to have only one child, probably explains why the birth-planning cadres described the single-child benefits as "unimportant to the peasants." What they meant, I see in retrospect, is that the benefits existed mainly on paper. Certainly, nothing in my six months' field experience led me to conclude that the one-child family was an important policy goal of cadres or reproductive aim of peasants.

Economic Penalties for Unauthorized Children and Short Spacing

The system of economic penalties was also disrupted by the abolition of team accounting. When income was paid in work-points, penalties could be directly deducted from a peasant's earnings. After peasants gained control of their income the task became one of persuading couples to hand over the fines, a difficult task given prevailing views about official policy.

In the villages studied excess-child and short-spacing fines were not formally collected until September 1979. In that year village cadres deducted amounts ranging from 500 to 1,200 work-points (the equivalent of 50 and 120 workdays) for having unauthorized third children (at that time second children were still permitted). Beginning in 1980 the fines were collected in cash. Following provincial guidelines announced in May 1981, from 1981-

82 on (depending on the village) the fine for having unauthorized children or for spacing under four years was officially set at 420 yuan. This sum represented 10 percent of the "standard wage" (i.e., net agricultural income) in the township (estimated at 600 yuan) for seven years. For third births the fine was set at 840 yuan, or 10 percent of income for fourteen years. To ensure payment, the fines were supposed to be paid in one lump sum within a reasonable time after being levied.

Putting this system of fines into practice turned out to be very difficult indeed. On the one hand, since the fines were not adjusted for rising incomes, one might expect them to be increasingly easy to collect over time. The figures, though, seem to reflect the other hand. They suggest that peasant couples were unhappy about paying for the "privilege" of having children, regardless of the size of the payment, and did their best to avoid doing so. They avoided paying by bargaining with local cadres to get their fine reduced, by paying token sums, or by simply refusing to hand over any money. Both the portion of violators who were fined and the proportion of fines that were paid up declined with the decline of cadre power and influence over the peasantry.

These conclusions are based on the data in table 9.3, which examines trends in fines for unauthorized children and short spacing levied between 1979 and 1987. Shown in column 1, the proportion of couples having second and higher births (third and higher in 1979) who were fined for the offense rose from 44 percent in 1979, when the birth policy was just building up steam, to a high of 86 percent in 1980, then began to fall in 1981-83, reaching a low of 49 percent in 1984 before rising (for unknown reasons) to 60 percent in 1985.

In 1986 and 1987 the fine system broke down and was essentially abandoned. I discovered this fact, not from talking to the birth-planning cadres—who were not proud of the fact and tried to conceal it—but from studying the data they gave me. When I asked for longitudinal information on fines levied and collected, they provided detailed name lists running from 1979 to 1985. The request to fill in 1986 and 1987 was met with delay. The lists they finally produced gave only one fine, not indicating whether it represented the amount levied or the amount collected, and the numbers were all standard fines. Even in the years of good fine collection, standard fines were rarely collected. Later discussions with cadres not responsible for birth planning confirmed what the lists made me suspect, namely, that in 1986 birth-planning workers had begun to give up on collecting fines, and by 1987 the system had fallen into desuetude.

The destructive effect of decollectivization on cadres' ability to collect the fines is measured in columns 2-4. While the amount of fines levied quadrupled, rising from 4,565 yuan in 1981 (the first year all fines were paid in cash) to 18,420 yuan in 1985, the amount of money taken in only doubled,

increasing from 3,341 to 6,861 yuan over the same period. The growing gap between cadre effort and cadre success is documented in column 4, which computes the level of fines collected as a proportion of fines levied. This share dropped precipitously from 68 to 87 percent in the three years of collective income accounting, 1979-81, to 24 to 37 percent in the years of private income acquisition, 1982-85. Clearly, it was easy to deduct work-points from team ledgers, but difficult to retrieve cash from peasant bureau drawers.

Some of the political processes underlying this loss of cadre control are revealed in column 5. These figures show the proportion of couples fined who were exempted from paying part of all of the fee. The numbers suggest that cadres were under intense pressure from peasants to lighten the load, and that after decollectivization they increasingly gave in. From 25-39 percent during 1979-81, the proportion of couples granted exemptions rose to 76-96 percent in 1982-85. Clearly, the peasants were very successful in cajoling, bargaining, bribing, or otherwise persuading the cadres to give in.

Analysis of the reasons exemptions were granted suggests that the situation changed from one in which cadres bargained with the peasants to comply, trading exemption from the fine for contraceptive surgery, to one in which cadres had to bribe the peasants to pay any money at all. In the earlier years, especially 1980-83, the great majority of exemptions were

granted in exchange for proof of sterilization. By 1985 exemption-for-sterilization trades had disappeared entirely, being replaced by exchanges of exemption for insertion of an intrauterine device (IUD), a less draconian method of contraception much preferred by the peasantry. In these cases cadres at least got something in exchange for granting the exemption. Reflecting their growing loss of bargaining power, in other cases cadres were apparently forced to grant exemptions for no other reason than that the offending couples were willing to pay a portion of their fine. And these cases grew in number over time. From a figure of 13-31 percent of couples gaining exemptions in 1981-83, the proportion getting off easy simply for being a "fine-paying activist" or not refusing outright to honor the fine rose to 50 percent in 1984 and an astonishing 79 percent in 1985. By 1985 the peasants had clearly gained the upper hand in the matter of excess-child fines. This is no doubt why the cadres virtually suspended the fine system in 1986 and 1987.

De Facto Policy on Number of Children and Spacing

As routine enforcement mechanisms broke down under the weight of economic privatization, a de facto birth policy evolved that differed substantially from the one spelled out in the provincial and municipal regulations. Constrained from enforcing the policy preferred by the state, local cadres instead enforced a policy closer to that preferred by the people. Tables 9.4 and 9.5 reveal what that policy was and how it evolved over time.

For these Shaanxi villagers, we have seen, the optimal family included one son and one daughter. Given the odds of getting a girl and a boy on the first two tries, some families had to have three children to get one of each sex. The truly unfortunate had to have four.

Statistics on births by parity show that even during the years of greatest success in enforcement of state policy, peasants continued to have substantial numbers of second, third, and higher-order births (table 9.4). The proportion of first births is not a good index of the parity policy because it reflects the number of women marrying the year before (we saw earlier that couples were allowed to try for their first child immediately after marriage). A better measure is the proportion of third and higher births, which were expressly prohibited by state policy but ardently desired by the roughly 50 percent of couples whose first two children were of the same sex. Shown in column 4 of table 9.4, that share fell from 29.1 percent in 1979, the year the one-child policy was introduced, to a low of 7-8 percent in 1984-86, before climbing back to 13 percent in 1987. A more liberal informal policy on third and higher children, then, seems to have evolved only in 1986-87. (To prevent, the birth of third and higher children in 1987, in most cases cadres would have had to take measures in 1986; for this reason the relaxation should be dated from the earlier year.)

If substantial numbers of couples were having second children, were they waiting the stipulated number of years? Table 9.5 says no. Even in the years of closest adherence to formal policy the interval between first and second births never approached the four years dictated by state regulations. Women marrying in 1978, 1979, 1980, and 1981 waited about two and one-half years before having their second child (an event that occurred in 1981-85; data in col. 1). Women marrying later got away with even shorter intervals. The cohort married in 1982 waited just over two years, while that of 1984 saw just one year and eleven months elapse between their first and second births. By the mid- to late 1980s, it seems, there was no enforceable spacing policy in effect. As one village birth-planning cadre remarked, "Couples not waiting four years used to be fined; this practice was eliminated sometime before 1987, but I don't recall exactly when."

While data on parity and spacing tell part of the story of how local population policy evolved, the most important part is yet to come. The core conflict between state and society was over family size (in the state's formulation) or over size and composition (in society's). What we really want to know is how many couples got the two-child, one-of-each-sex families they wanted. The answer can be found in table 9.5. Here we find family

composition as of December 1987 by marriage cohort. The "as of December 1987" is crucial, for with the exception of couples with one spouse sterilized, all couples had the potential for further childbearing should they decide to go to the trouble (or should the official policy change, an unlikely prospect).

On the basis of informed speculation about reproductive intent,^[36] the ten marriage cohorts can be divided into three groups: those married from 1978 to 1982, most of whom had probably completed the process of family formation by the end of 1987; the cohorts of 1983-84, a majority of whom had finished childbearing; and couples married in 1985-87, most of whom had definitely not ceased reproductive activities. The group of greatest interest is the first, few of whom will go on to have more children. Of these, 57 percent (statistic not shown) achieved the ideal of at least one son and one daughter. Another 24 percent had two or three sons, considered an acceptable substitute for one of each kind. A further 13 percent had two or three daughters,^[37] considered an unfortunate outcome indeed, while 5 percent had only one child, an unacceptable state of affairs.

Eighteen percent (with one child, or only girls) may seem like a high level of reproductive dissatisfaction, but data on contraception suggest that the majority of women in these circumstances were planning to become pregnant again. For while 85 percent of all couples married in 1978-82 were contracepting at the end of 1987, a substantially lower 55 percent of couples with one child or daughters only were using birth control (data not shown). And the great majority of these were using the easily removable IUD. Only four couples were sterilized; in two of these cases a son had died after the operation was performed, indicating an intention to have a son and one or more other children. Should all these couples who were not sterilized go on to have another child, and should 50 percent of those be boys, then overall 90 percent of those married in 1978-82 will end up with families of a sort considered ideal or close to it.

If peasant families did fairly well in achieving their compositional goals, how well did the state do in attaining its family-size targets? Columns 7-11 of table 9.5 suggest that state policymakers did even better, at least on this measure of policy performance. Overall, only 0.5 percent of couples marrying in this decade had four children, and a slightly higher but still respectably low 5.4 percent had three children. State policymakers were always ambivalent about second children, and it looks as though peasants exploited this ambivalence by pressing for a policy of (at least) two children for all. Fully 82 percent of the couples married in 1978-82 had two

children, and another 12 percent had three or four. Local cadres' strategy, apparently, was to oblige state and society at once. The de facto policy they evolved allowed virtually all peasant families to have two children, and all but a small minority of biologically unlucky couples to end up with a son and a daughter, or two sons. At the same time it largely succeeded in achieving the state's goal of eliminating third and higher births.

Cadre Strategies: Mediating the State-Society Interface

In evolving de facto population policy for their villages, local birth-planning cadres worked out a compromise that placated both state and society, even if it pleased neither. What quid pro quos enabled them to do so?

Satisfying Peasant Families

Having dealt with a long stream of insufferable state policies over the years, Chinese peasant families probably did not take long to decide that the one-child policy was of this type. Neglecting basic survival requirements, it had no legitimacy in the eyes of village society. The view in the Shaanxi villages was that the minimally legitimate population policy was one that allowed couples two children, one of which was a son. Widely held by ordinary peasants (as is indicated by responses to survey questions), this view was also sanctioned by local Party officials, one of whom quietly allowed a relative to have a third child after the first two turned out to be girls.

As birth-planning cadres were basically of society rather than of the state, it is not surprising that they biased the policy to favor their kind. Over nine years they gradually peasantized the policy, permitting most couples to end up with two children, including one son; and allowing families to accelerate their movement through the developmental cycle by approving female marriage at age twenty rather than twenty-three, consenting to the conception of the first child immediately after marriage, and forgoing spacing requirements.

Yet these concessions were not granted cost-free. Even with their hands increasingly tied by the erosion of enforcement tools, cadres did their best to make life difficult for peasants infringing on the remaining rules. For example, couples were administratively prevented from marrying before the legal minimum age, premarital pregnancies were effectively prohibited, and, at least in the early years, couples desiring exemptions from excess-child fines were required to undergo contraceptive surgery. Over time a modus vivendi evolved in which a combination of growing local consensus on legitimate policy, application of some economic and administrative measures, and probably also fear of further sterilization campaigns worked to maintain enforcement of de facto policy at reasonable levels.

Appeasing State Bureaucrats

If local cadres effectively abandoned so many policy goals—indeed, they dropped virtually all the one-child goals except the prohibition on higher-order children—how did they appease policymakers in the state bureaucracy? Certainly, one trick they used—one of the oldest in the books—was to try to fool their superiors by sending up doctored records of policy implementation and performance. And when officials higher up the state bureaucracy called for sterilization campaigns, village cadres cooperated with township officials in co-opting couples with ample numbers of children into undergoing the dreaded sterilization operations.

Yet these rather token efforts could hardly have sufficed to close the hole between official goals and unofficial performance. Given the size of that hole, how is it that state bureaucrats did not "crack down" on the local cadres and insist on better performance?^[38] The answer, of course, is that the state bureaucrats' hands were tied. After all, it was the state itself that bore responsibility for undermining the mechanisms by which the one-child policy was to be enforced. It was policymakers in Beijing who had introduced the rural economic reforms, ironically, the very same year they had introduced the single-child policy. The top leadership too was accountable for the 1980 Marriage Law, which undermined the legitimacy of the late-marriage rule. Finally, state wavering and policy fluctuation on the issue of second children opened a "big hole" into which peasants in great numbers jumped. (The aim of the central-level policy that first significantly relaxed rules on second children was to "open a small hole to close a big hole.")^[39] Itself ultimately to blame for undermining the one-child policy, the state could not complain too loudly when local cadres failed fully to enforce it.

Floating administrative levels above village society, state bureaucrats were also totally dependent on local cadres for policy implementation. The local cadres were their only link to the peasantry; without their cooperation, problematic as it was, the policy could not have been carried out at all. And a close look at policy enforcement in the villages suggests that local cadres were giving more than a pro forma performance. If not the one-child policy, birth-planning workers were at least enforcing some population policy, and one that accorded with state goals. In the villages studied, local cadres achieved a record of solid accomplishment in some important areas: they

upheld the Marriage Law with admirable thoroughness; they prevented third and fourth births, except where the first two or three were girls; and they continued to remind the people, through wall slogans, tours of propaganda vehicles, and other educational means, that population control was good for nation and individual alike. Recognizing that local cadres were doing a good job in a difficult situation—at least they were not actively subverting state goals—and that finding replacements to perform this thankless task would not be easy, state bureaucrats probably concluded that they were getting the best they could expect.

Conclusion

What light do the Shaanxi data shed on the larger issues of economic-demographic policy links and state-society relations? The answers are the subject of this conclusion.

Links Between Economic Reform and Population Policy

Existing literature posits a number of pathways through which the reforms disrupted the system of economic incentives by which the one-child policy was to be enforced. The field data from Shaanxi allow us to go beyond these general hypotheses to document precisely how and when those enforcement mechanisms came apart, and with what effect on each of the policy's demographic targets. In the study villages the incentive system was disabled by the opening of free markets in 1979-80, only to be crippled by the dissolution of the collectives in 1982-83. Loss of economic tools, coupled with changes in the legal environment, devastated enforcement not only of rules for the number of children but also of the timing rules. Every one of the timing goals—late marriage, late childbearing, and spacing—was dropped from the de facto policy enforced in the villages, with calculable effects on population growth rates.

The field data also shed new light on the reforms' effects on administrative enforcement mechanisms. One form of administrative discipline—the firing of commune cadres—was rendered obsolete by the reforms, as the appeal of commune posts faded before that of agricultural entrepreneurship. However, the marriage registration system remained a powerful tool for shaping the age at marriage and time of wedding. Cadre control over the household registration system served a similar function; its effects, however, were most apparent in the control of contraception. Thus, while the economic mechanisms were enfeebled, cadres retained certain administrative controls that facilitated policy implementation.

Finally, the Shaanxi village data also provide a window on the political process that pushed cadres' backs up against the wall. Newly empowered by the reforms, peasants bribed, cajoled, and otherwise manipulated birth-

planning workers to grant so many exemptions that the system of fines had eventually to be abandoned.

The view from the villages thus suggests that in ways certainly unanticipated by China's leaders, economic and political reform weakened the enforcement of population policy, undermining the achievement of state demographic goals, which were, in turn, crucial to the attainment of state economic goals. The size of the demographic impact depends on the extent to which the dynamics of policy implementation in the Shaanxi villages were general to village China as a whole.

Reproduction has been a particularly fruitful arena in which to observe this process, as state goals are so clear-cut, policy enforcement mechanisms so copious, and outcomes so eminently measurable. However, the process by which the freeing of economic controls loosens sociodemographic controls is a general one, which should extend to all areas of social life that fell under the umbrella of state control in the collective era. The unraveling of systems of rural old-age support, health care, and migration control, for example, could be greatly clarified by tracing out the links between economic and political policies, on the one hand, and social outcomes, on the other.

Reproductive Control: From State to Society?

Trends in reproductive control in Shaanxi appear to support the orthodox view that the reach of the state was very long at the end of the Maoist period. Data from the late 1970s suggest that under the collective regime the state wielded truly awesome control over peasant reproduction, pushing female age at marriage above twenty-three, getting the great majority of women to adhere to late-childbearing rules, and strictly limiting the number of third and higher-order children. This was a remarkable display of state power, given what can be inferred about peasant reproductive preferences at the time.

As in other policy sectors, during the 1980s a good deal of this power was lost. By 1987 the average age of brides had fallen by three years, while the share of women meeting the state's late ages at marriage and childbearing had sunk to abysmally low levels. Despite the one-child-with-exceptions policy officially in effect, nearly all women who had completed their childbearing had two or more children.

While reproductive control clearly shifted in the direction of society, too much freedom should not be read into these data. State controls had become indirect, but not inoperative. For example, marriage age had fallen—but not below the legally stipulated age. Although couples had gained freedom from the late-marriage rule, they remained subject to the marriage registration system. Society had gained important freedoms, yet the state had maintained its grip over crucial aspects of family formation.

One of the state's major sources of reproductive control was its capacity

to launch birth-planning campaigns. Preliminary analysis of the Shaanxi data suggests that campaigns were conducted in a more lenient fashion as the 1980s wore on. Nevertheless, one can speculate that the memories of highly coercive campaigns in the past, as well as still-present fears of being targeted for sterilization in future campaigns, must have been powerful deterrents to those tempted to challenge state policy.

At the grass-roots level the shift from state to state-cum-peasant reproductive control was engineered by the local cadres. Although they had gained power relative to the state, they had lost power relative to society. As a result, they were increasingly absorged into society, overwhelmed by it, and constrained to accept its rules. Microdeceptions grew into macrodeceptions, and state policy was slowly but surely altered to fit societal demands.

In a complex process of mutual influence and learning, the peasantization of informal policy at the grass roots was communicated up the political hierarchy, with visible effects on formal policy. At the provincial and municipal levels, rules on the timing and number of children remained in place, but conditions for having second children were broadened, and implementation methods were modified to better accord with reform-era conditions.^[40] Nor were national-level policymakers blind to the limits on their power in the villages. At the political center too, basic reproductive rules remained unchanged, while conditions for having second children were expanded and the population target for the end of the century was raised.^[41] Thus, state and society moved closer together, and state policy itself was altered to reflect fundamental societal needs.

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

Hill Gates

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Petty Capitalism and Kinship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Many Children are Enough?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coping with Childcare

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

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

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

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

Adoption

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

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

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

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

Care by Siblings

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

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

Daycare as Education

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

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

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

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

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

Hired Care at Home

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

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

Long-Term Care Outside the Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mothers-in-Law

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

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

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

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

Conclusions

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