5 Chinese Families

For most Chinese people, family (jia or jiating) is a simple as well as a complex concept. It is simple because everybody has a family (or families) and thus knows what it is. It is complex because different individuals have different explanations about families. Quite often, the answer to the question, “What is a family?” is “it depends. . . .” In traditional Chinese society, family was another name for a patriarchal clan, including not only its current members but also its ancestors enshrined and worshiped in clan halls, and a set of feudal orders and ethical codes among kinships, based on Confucian doctrines. In contemporary China, the meanings of family may vary from person to person. From the perspective of politicians (such as Mr. Yaobang Hu, former leader of the Chinese Communist Party), family, rather than the individual, is the “basic cell” of the society. In the view of administrators, a family is a household within which a group of people live at a given period of time for resident registration or census. Meanwhile, a rural peasant may think of his house, land, and livestock as part of his family, and family in the mind of an urban dweller may include the networks of direct kinship spreading outward in the city. In addition, family may mean mom, dad, and a playground to a little child; a small but warm, comfortable, and affective home to a young newly married couple; raising up children and supporting the aged to a middle-aged person; or all her children and grandchildren to a retired senior. Despite these variations, Chinese academics have commonly accepted a more institutionalized concept of family—“[F]amily is an essential unit of social life, which is tied through relationships of marriage, blood, and adoption” (Chinese Encyclopedia: Sociology, 1991, p. 102)—and taken the “household” approach to operationally define family in their empirical studies. From a rigorous scientific point of view, by highlighting the instructional feature of family only, this definition is too general to cover other natures of family, such as biological (MacIver, 1937), cultural (Lowie, 1934), interactional (Burgess & Locke, 1960), and structural-functional (Parsons, 1955). Moreover, the “household” approach underrepresents the real cultural connotations of Chinese families, given that most Chinese people consider family as something more than a household. Therefore, C H A P T E R