ABSTRACT
Introduction: discourses of changing urban Chinese families Academic scholarship has traditionally depicted the Chinese family as a hierarchical institution in which older family members hold power over the young to a degree not seen in the West (see, for example, Baker 1979; Hsu 1953; Yang 1959). The all-consuming nature of family influence is evocatively noted by Yang who, in the late-1950s, observed that from ‘cradle to grave the individual was under the uninterrupted influence of the family regarding his physical and moral upbringing, the formation of his sentiments and attitudes, his educational training, his public career, his social associations, his emotional and material security’ (1959: 5). It is commonly agreed that such a degree of influence was a consequence of ‘patriarchal clan ideology and Confucian doctrines’ (Sheng 2004: 121) that portrayed filial piety (xiao, 孝) as the root of all virtue (Whyte 2003: 6). Such a picture regarding the place of the young within Chinese families is in stark contrast to more contemporary accounts that observe that younger family members are now recipients of parental resources, care and familial worship. The influence of the Confucian tenet xiao is said to be fading due to social changes, the influence of Western individualistic values and changes in family structure (Li 2005: 263). Commentators now talk of the emergence of the 4-2-1 factor in urban China: four grandparents and two parents coddling one child (Jun Jing 2000: 19). Such changed discourses have cultivated a whole array of images and language. Within families, young Chinese are, for example, depicted as spoiled, ‘self-centred, willful, extravagant, and sometimes “despotic” ’ (Zhao 1996: 642): ‘ “little suns” (xiao taiyang) because their parents’ lives revolve around them’ (Fong 2004a: 29), whilst the phrase ‘ken (to eat) lao (old) zu (group of people)’, translated as someone who lives off the elderly, has entered the contemporary lexicon. Whilst such discourses provide a context for the arguments put forward in this chapter, it should be stated at the outset that the picture of young Chinese that emerged in this research is quite different. I argue that the place of younger family members and the dynamics taking place between them and older relatives, particularly parents, has not shifted in the dramatic ways indicated by the
media and by some academics but are, as has been observed in other research, rather more nuanced (see, for example, Fong 2004a). More specifically, the first part of this chapter identifies how structural changes occurring within the Chinese family, namely divorce, movement and the one-child policy, have impacted upon the experiences of younger family members. I argue that these changes have created contradictions, simultaneously reducing and accentuating the authority of older family members, not least because the material dimensions of family life continue to exist upon what can fruitfully be conceptualized as a Confucian framework. Then I argue that the extensive involvement that parents have in their children’s lives, in conjunction with their weighty and often unrealistic expectations, stimulates a sense of inferiority in younger family members. Young Chinese are not, however, passive victims in this dynamic, but rather invest in it, largely because it constitutes a means through which feelings of security can be attained.
