ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the society’s actual family types. There have been competing theories about China’s changing family structures in the modern era, and the most popular of them asserts that the traditional big and multi-generational families have transformed into small nuclear families. According to the requirements of population-based FBC, two sets of data are needed to calculate a nation or region’s FBC. One set consists of the distribution and population of each family type while the other is each family type’s FBC. Single-person families are households with only one family member. There are more of them in society due to increased mobility of the population. A nuclear family consists of a married couple with unmarried children. A linear family consists of a couple, a married child, and the child’s family. In China, this family type typically takes the form of a two-generation linear family consisting of a couple and their married son’s family.
