Changing kinship relations and their effects on contemporary urban Chinese society: A case study in Tianjin city

This dissertation offers an ethnographic account of changing kinship relations and their effects on contemporary urban society in north China. Based on fifteen months of anthropological field research in three urban neighborhoods in Tianjin between 1995--96, the study relied on participant observation, a series of intensive interviews, and an analysis of detailed local district archives established in 1949 that tracked individuals' social status, employment history and residence changes for each neighborhood. This study revealed that the socialist policies in income, housing and promotion based on collectivism, egalitarianism and gender equality had transformed family relations away from historic patterns of partrilineality, patrilocality, and age and sex hierarchies to bilateral kinship relations which are characterized by greater gender and age equality, flexibility in post-marital residence, and a recognition of descendants from both son's and daughter's sides. These changes have had wide ranging impacts on a host of institutions. "The network family," a new family pattern, is emerging in the community as a result of the rapid decline of extended and stem families and the frequent contacts among nuclear families in a kin group for social and economic needs. Moreover, the more equal relations among kin have provided both parents and children with greater freedom in their private life, particularly in dating. In addition, this new kinship system has also provided people with more opportunities and flexibility to create fictive kin in order to take advantage of current economic and social transformations. Finally, family business has also been reshaped: family firms in the city are primarily owned, managed and run by a nuclear family and thus have lost the advantages in kinship-based investment, cheap labor, and economic and social networks which were formerly provided by the patrilineal and patriarchal culture. Thus, the family business as the defining characteristic of Chinese capitalism is declining in urban China.