title: The modern Chinese family in light of economic and legal history.
abstract: Most social science theory and the currently powerful Chinese ideology of modernizationism assume that, with modern development, family-based peasant farm production will disappear, to be replaced by individuated industrial workers and the three-generation family by the nuclear family. The actual record of China’s economic history, however, shows the powerful persistence of the small family farm, as well as of the three-generation family down to this day, even as China’s GDP becomes the second largest in the world. China’s legal system, similarly, encompasses a vast informal sphere, in which familial principles operate more than individualist ones. And, in between the informal-familial and the formal-individualist, there is an enormous intermediate sphere in which the two tendencies are engaged in a continual tug of war. The economic behavior of the Chinese family unit reveals great contrasts with what is assumed by conventional economics. It has a different attitude toward labor from that of both the individual worker and the capitalist firm. It also has a different structural composition, and a different attitude toward investment, children’s education, and marriage. Proper attention to how Chinese modernity differs socially, economically, and legally from the modern West points to the need for a different kind of social science; it also lends social–economic substance to claims for a modern Chinese culture different from the modern West’s.
authors.affiliation: University of California, Los Angeles.
authors.forename: Philip C C
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Huang
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture / Q000191:economics / Q000193:education / Q000266:history; D002681:China / Q000208:ethnology; D004467:Economics / Q000266:history; D005190:Family / Q000208:ethnology / Q000266:history / Q000523:psychology; D005192:Family Health / Q000191:economics / Q000208:ethnology / Q000266:history; D049673:History, 20th Century; D049674:History, 21st Century; D007221:Industry / Q000191:economics / Q000193:education / Q000266:history; D016901:Intergenerational Relations / Q000208:ethnology; D012922:Social Change / Q000266:history; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors / Q000266:history