Fertility decline and the transformation of working class family life in Tianjin, China, 1963--1970

The dissertation is an ethnographic investigation into family decision-making processes regarding contraception among the working class families in urban China during the 1960s. Taking everyday life in the socialist restrictive era as the point of departure, it shows how the practice of contraception started among the privileged urban group through political, social, and cultural calculations in addition to the already known economic concerns.;Because of the internal contradiction between state-controlled industrialization and the increasing cost of massive urbanization, created by the Stalinist industrialization model, the Chinese state, instead of the individual families, first felt the massive urban population pressure and employed a series of strategies to deal with it in the 1950s and 1960s. The micro level socioeconomic constraints that catalyzed individual Chinese urban families to adopt contraception were in fact created by the state's strategic urban policies and the local interactions that developed in the wake of socialist urban management. Family size and living standards were sensitive to the social and economic pressures generated by the frozen salary system, the state controlled employment system, the restrictive consumption standards, and local scrutiny. What this dissertation addresses is how human reproduction was regulated by the state for its encompassing control over female urbanites' public/private lives and how the double burden imposed by the state on female urbanites was intensified by the state's restrictive urban control. It shows that the urban fertility transition in the 1960s was not the direct result of a state's birth planning campaign, nor was it a straightforward outcome of industrialization and urbanization processes as argued for western societies. Instead, it was the individual families' culturally justified reaction to a series of structural constraints that emerged through the development of Chinese socialism. The fertility transition in the 1960s is unique in that the distinctive features came from the citizens' negotiations with the state as to where the collective vs. private boundaries should be set in daily life.