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Introduction: Rural Economic Reforms and Chinese Family Patterns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Martin King Whyte
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Extract

The rural economic reforms introduced into China after 1978 have wreaked havoc on the accumulated scholarship of China specialists in the west. Dozens of books and articles that had revealed the inner workings of people's communes and the merits and faults of competing work point systems were reduced to historical curiosities by the decollectivization drive that swept the nation. In the wake of the demise of the familiar and fairly standardized pattern represented by people's communes, many questions arose for debate. How much of the collective system remained in rural China after decollectivization? To what extent did the revived system of family farming represent a return to pre-socialist organizational patterns, or was any resemblance to the past superficial and misleading? Was there a general pattern of village organization across the nation in the wake of decollectivization, or had uniformity completely given way to local peculiarities?

Type
A Symposium on Rural Family Change
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 130 , June 1992 , pp. 317 - 322
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1992

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References

1. See the discussion of the reasons for these and other trends in rural family life in Parish, William L. and Whyte, Martin King, Village and Family in Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).Google Scholar

2. The classic work describing the logic of these “modernizing” trends in family life in China and elsewhere is Goode, William J., World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York: The Free Press, 1963).Google Scholar

3. This claim that apparent revivals of traditional customs in rural China conceal important new elements is an important part of the analysis by Siu, Helen in her book, Agents and Victims in South China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4. Research over the years on Taiwan makes it very clear that apparently modern and traditional family practices can be readily combined, but this lesson has not been absorbed by all researchers studying family patterns in the PRC.

5. In the past interviewing in Hong Kong was an option involving less uncertainty, an option used by William Parish and myself in the study cited earlier. On the pros and cons of Hong Kong interviewing and field-work in the PRC, see my article, “On studying China at a distance,” in Thurston, Anne and Pasternak, Burton (eds.), The Social Sciences and Fieidwork in China: Views from the Field (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983)Google Scholar. However, with 1997 approaching this option is becoming less viable.

6. One aspect of family life, enforcement of the draconian family planning policy, continues to be highly sensitive in the PRC, and both foreign and Chinese researchers have got into trouble for what they have written on this topic.