http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7031-932X
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Abstract
This paper presents new insights into contemporary Chinese demography and family life based on survey and interview data from rural households in Yunnan Province, China’s most ethnically and linguistically diverse region. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, we examine fertility trends, sex ratios, and son preferences in our study sample. We analyze differences between the majority Han and various ethnic minority groups that have been subject to less stringent family-planning policies. Our results show an overall fertility decline and a trend toward more balanced sex ratios, both of which are in line with national trends. We find evidence for son preference in the demographic data for both Han and minority households, despite widespread agreement in qualitative interviews rejecting the idea of son preference and emphasizing the value of both sons and daughters. We interpret these findings in light of several important changes in Chinese society, including legal and policy reforms governing marriage and inheritance, a nationwide “Care for Girls” social campaign, and shifting cultural norms about gender roles.
Acknowledgements
The authors would also like to acknowledge the institutional support of Yunnan Normal University.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Bryan Tilt is a Professor of Anthropology at Oregon State University. His research focuses on social change, sustainable development, pollution control, and water resources in China and the United States. A former Fulbright Senior Research Scholar in Beijing, he is the author of the book, Dams and Development in China: The Moral Economy of Water and Power, published by Columbia University Press in 2015.
Xiaoyue Li is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at ICTA – Universitat Aut`noma de Barcelona, Spain. She worked on this research while a doctoral student in anthropology at Oregon State University. Her work focuses on the interactions between society and the environment. She has conducted fieldwork in China and the United States on local and traditional knowledge, migration, demography, ethnic identity, and perceptions of climate change.
Edwin A. Schmitt is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo, Norway, where he is part of a multi-year research project called “Airborne: Pollution, Climate Change, and Visions of Sustainability in China.” He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces on rural development, energy issues, and environmental change.
Notes
1 New regulations in place as of 2016 allow all married couples to have a second child. However, the data for this study were collected and analyzed before the new policy went into effect. Moreover, it remains unclear how the new policy will affect long-term demographic trends in China, as discussed briefly in the conclusion.
2 As noted in the “Research Methods and Study Locations” section, we aggregated nine different minority nationalities (N = 201) in order to have a large enough sample to compare against Han households (N = 400). The risk of this approach is that it masks potentially meaningful differences between minority groups in the sample. This problem is perhaps most acute for groups such as the Lahu, whose kinship patterns and gender relations were historically quite distinct from the Han. We conducted several descriptive analyses to see whether some of the fertility patterns for Lahu households in our sample were markedly different from Han households and from the total sample. They were not: for Lahu households, the total fertility rate (TFR) was 2.09 and the male-female sex ratio of children was 1.21. Both of these figures are generally in line with the other groups in the sample, as we report in and .