Filial Daughter? Filial Son? How China’s Young Urban Elite Negotiate Intergenerational Obligations

ABSTRACT

This article deploys narrative method to explore how young adults in China enrolled in higher education negotiate future intergenerational obligations. The study finds that the process through which filial piety is being renegotiated is complex and sometimes contradictory, and norms and values do not always align with practices, as intergenerational obligations need to be managed in tandem with obligations envisioned towards future spouses, as well as work opportunities. Although no longer explicitly son-centred, the intergenerational contract is highly gendered, and patrilineality and patrilocality have not simply become attenuated through some general process of modernization. Rather, there are many ways in which they have become renegotiated, revealing both continuity and change in intergenerational relations. The article illustrates ways in which both patrilineality and patrilocality—whether endorsed, resisted, or negotiated—are still important organizing principles for how intergenerational relations play out. It introduces the concept of “neo-patrilocality” to denote the practice of families channelling resources along the patriline to organize housing for sons in order to enhance their prospect of getting married and having children, a central aspect of filial piety. While filial sons may be involved in more complex relations of reciprocity due to both cultural imperatives and material investments, filial daughters appear to have more leeway in negotiating intergenerational relations. This may reflect a watered-down, but still implicit, understanding that daughters and grandchildren by daughters are outside of the lineage. It seems that, for filial daughters, the parent–adult-child relation is both more intense and more central to filial piety, while for filial sons, intergenerational relations extend beyond the parent–child relation—to grandparents and future children—more than they do for young women. The article concludes that gender relations and intergenerational relations interact and mutually reinforce one another, and that there are differences in class. Patrilineality and neo-patrilocality were more central for affluent and less privileged families than for families belonging to the middle class.

KEYWORDS:

• Intergenerational relations
• China
• narrative analysis
• filial piety
• neo-patrilocality
• patrilineality
• gender

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to the young adults who participated in this study and who shared their life stories and experiences so candidly with me. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their critical and constructive comments. I am also grateful for comments by Johanna Esseveld, Zhanlian Feng and Alison Gerber on earlier drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The data were gathered as part of the research project “Family life and intimate relations in the context of a shortage of women.” The results of the project have been reported in several other publications (cf. Eklund, 2016a, 2016b, 2018).

2. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 12 male and 13 female students in spring 2014. To include diversity in terms of class, rural/urban origin, sex, sexuality, marital status, and family history, the study applied a maximum variation sampling strategy. The informants were aged 19–24. Interviews centred around family history and relations, plans for family formation and work, filial piety, future living arrangements and future old age care arrangements. The interviews were audio-recorded with the consent of the informants, and later transcribed. To protect anonymity, all names are fictive.

3. Rather than coding the empirical material, which risks fragmenting the stories told, the transcriptions were read and re-read while analytical notes were taken to tease out how stories about the past, present, and future were interrelated.

4. There are regional variations in the terms for maternal grandmother and maternal grandfather, and some do not include the prefix wai.

5. Although the interviews were carried out before the one-child policy was lifted, couples in which at least one spouse is a single child were already allowed to have two children at the time of the interviews, and none perceived the population policy as a limitation on how many children they would have.

6. The hukou system is a household registration system introduced in the 1950s, which divides the population into rural and urban residents. Hukou status decides certain rights and access to social services.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lisa Eklund

Lisa Eklund is an associate professor of sociology at Lund University specializing in the study of family relations, reproduction, parenthood, sex ratio imbalance and family policies. She has recently completed the research project “Family life and intimate relations in the context of a shortage of women” in China, and has been a team member of the projects “DefiChine” which investigates the individual and social transformations brought about by a reduced availability of female partners on the marriage and sexuality markets in China, and “The Politics of Parenting Support: Development, Forms and Actors” in Sweden.