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China's Changing Family Structure China’s Changing Family Structure DIMENSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS Edited by Nicholas Eberstadt SEPTEMBER 2019 AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE China’s Changing Family Structure DIMENSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS Edited by Nicholas Eberstadt SEPTEMBER 2019 AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE © 2019 by the American Enterprise Institute. All rights reserved. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, 501(c)(3) educational organization and does not take institutional positions on any issues. The views expressed here are those of the author(s). Contents Introduction .......................................................................................................1 Nicholas Eberstadt Modeling the Future of China’s Changing Family Structure to 2100 .......................... 23 Ashton M. Verdery Dynamics and Policy Implications of Family Households and Elderly Living Arrangements in China .................................................................. 79 Zeng Yi and Wang Zhenglian Household Change and Intergenerational Transfers in China: What Lies Ahead? ............................................................................................102 Wang Feng, Shen Ke, and Cai Yong Changing Family and Marital Structure in China: Emotional Strain at Cultural and Individual Levels ........................................................................ 116 David E. Scharff China’s Demographic Trends: How Will They Matter? ...........................................126 Jacqueline Deal and Michael Szonyi About the Authors ...........................................................................................149 iii Introduction Nicholas Eberstadt I that China’s vast administrative apparatus was nominally supposed to provide to ordinary people. he family is the fundamental unit of society: its In China, family is recognized as the key to survival Tmost basic building block. It is the foundation in bad times and the key to prosperity in good times, for all the more complex arrangements humanity a fact of life so obvious for most Chinese that it has managed to devise since the beginning of the his- hardly bears belaboring. The family—and one’s own torical era: national economies; kingdoms, states, membership in a family—is a thing in China to be and empires; civilizations. The family, indeed, is the celebrated and revered. single human organization absolutely indispensable Today, however, over 2,500 years of family tra- to the perpetuation of our species; so it has been since dition in China is on an unavoidable collision the emergence of our kind, and—absent some future course with 21st-century China’s new demographic dystopia beyond current imagining—so it looks to be realities. The initial impact has already taken until our end. place—and the reverberations promise to play While the family is necessarily central to all the out for generations to come, with oscillations of world’s great traditions, the argument can be made increasing magnitude. The demographic forces that the institutions of family and kin enjoy an espe- transforming the Chinese family are extraordi- cially prominent role in the Chinese way. For mil- nary and historically unprecedented. It is not too lennia, Chinese philosophy and metaphysics have much to say they may leave Chinese family struc- imparted a special place to the family in their think- ture all but unrecognizable before the end of ing about the universals and eternity; indeed, the this century. Confucian tendency directly links the family (and Curiously, while a small library of studies has been one’s obligations to virtuous conduct therein) to published over the past four decades on population celestial harmony. Family, kin, and clan are accorded change in modern China, little has been written on a correspondingly impressive priority in the honored the bearing of these changes on the Chinese family literature, histories, and other aspects of culture from itself. This cross-disciplinary volume is an explor- the Sinosphere. atory foray into that intellectual terra incognita. In And in more pedestrian terms, the extended the following pages, we attempt to describe the demo- Chinese family has served, as long as writing and graphic dimensions of the changes in family struc- memory recall, as the main bulwark against the ture already underway, and visible out to the horizon, risks and threats from an uncertain and often dan- and to examine some of the implications for China’s gerous world—notwithstanding the protections people, economy, and role in the world. 1 CHINA’S CHANGING FAMILY STRUCTURE II about kinship or extended familial networks in large populations. One of the few is the Church of Jesus Since the pivotal December 1978 Chinese Commu- Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which diligently nist Party (CCP) Plenum at which Deng Xiaoping strives to reconstruct the family trees of its adher- determined contemporary China’s new economic ents. There is an overarching reason for these efforts, direction, China has substantially developed and of course: To LDS faithful, a new convert’s embrace modernized its official statistical apparatus. It has of Mormonism promises eternal salvation to gen- likewise trained a sizable cadre of world-class demog- tile ancestors in the convert’s lineage for all genera- raphers and population specialists now at work in the tions past. Thus, an exception that actually proves a nation’s universities, research institutes, and govern- rule, the rule being that authorities collect the demo- ment administrative organs. Despite this far-reaching graphic information they deem to be relevant to their upgrade of statistical and research capabilities, fam- interests and purposes—and that detailed informa- ily structure remains something like a demographic tion on family structure and kinship has not been blind spot for Chinese academics and policymakers. judged worthy of collection by those criteria in most This should not surprise; the same is true all around places and times. the world. Official statistics have always served pur- For modern China, this statistical blind spot turns poses of the state, and information about family and out to be portentous. Not only is China arguably kin networks has seldom been regarded as bearing an especially family-centric culture and not only is directly on the fortunes of governments. The earli- Beijing a regime that requires “policy information” est forays into political demographics in both East for its unusually assertive and far-reaching vision of and West—the population censuses conducted in government social control, but in recent decades, rad- East Asia and the Mediterranean thousands of years ical changes in demographic patterns have been qui- ago—were organized to facilitate taxation and mil- etly overturning the realities of family order—with itary mobilization. Thus, the original focus on head results that still remain to be reckoned. counts of individuals and tallies of households, a The main driver of China’s revolutionary demo- focus that continues to this day. graphic pressures recasting national family pat- Of course, vastly more demographic information terns is of course the pronounced decline in is at the disposal of the modern scholar or admin- childbearing since the death of Mao. It is generally istrator: vital statistics on birth, death, marriage, believed that all-China fertility levels fell below and divorce; information on migration and urban- replacement level in the early 1990s and that lev- ization; detailed data on population composition by els have been well below replacement for at least age, sex, and a whole panoply of social and economic a quarter century—with especially low levels of characteristics. But at the heart of this vast compi- fertility prevailing in China’s urban centers. Expert lation of data lies the same age-old taxonomic clas- opinion is divided over the demographic impact of sification system: information on the individual or China’s coercive population control program—the information on the household. The living arrange- One-Child Policy in force from 1981 until 2015—in ments revealed in household data, to be sure, cast this decline.1 some important light on family patterns. But the But while this debate involves important questions overlap between household and family is obviously about the recent Chinese past, it has little bearing imperfect—and household data can tell us nothing on current birth patterns. Even though Beijing raised directly about extended families, kinship networks, birth quotas to a “two-child norm,” and then subse- and other critical aspects of family patterns that quently suspended anti-natal efforts altogether in matter greatly to real people. 2018, it appears that national birth levels have con- Exceptionally few authorities or institutions trou- tinued to slump,2 apparently due to a shift in popular ble themselves to gather information systematically attitudes about family size. 2 INTRODUCTION Other demographic factors, of course, are shap- that are underway now and expected to unfold in the ing the national contours of China’s new family pat- decades ahead. The problem is that it is impossible to terns: among these, marriage and divorce trends, sex draw any direct quantitative inferences about current ratios at birth, and parity progression ratios—that is, or prospective patterns and trends in extended family the proportion of Chinese adults who end up with structure for China due to the aforementioned blind no children, one child, and more than one
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