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Intergenerational Transmission of Family Property and Family Management in Urban China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2010

Danning Wang
Danning Wang
Affiliation:
The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Email: danningwang@cuhk.edu.hk
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Abstract

This article applies Myron Cohen's studies of family division and family management in rural China to an examination of how working class families in urban China cope with the hardships created by industrial transition and housing reform. Senior parents work with their adult children; parental authority retains a critical role. By flexibly shifting powerful domestic roles, senior women, in particular, work with their adult sons in order to transmit the domestic resources necessary to secure the filial services to which they feel entitled. In China's fast-changing economic environment, fuelled by the modernization process, the dynamics of family culture still present effective tools and strategies for individual citizens seeking to protect and advance their own interests.

Type
Articles
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 204 , December 2010 , pp. 960 - 979
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2010

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References

1 By 2008, similar to those in other Chinese cities, Tianjin's property market was plagued with bubbles. Homes in garden-gated communities in desirable locations cost about 10,000 yuan per square metre. Even the second-hand commercial flats away from the central loop could be sold at 6,000 yuan per square metre, so that it would cost 300,000 yuan to purchase a second-hand 50 square-metre one-bedroom apartment while a state-owned enterprise retiree's monthly income was only 1,200 to 1,400 yuan and a blue-collar service job paid only 700 to 1,000 yuan per month. Few working class families could afford this.

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12 Ibid.

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18 If necessary, vulnerable sons would also pay filial services to their wives' parents and turn to her extended family to gain domestic security. In Shi Lihong's case studies, she points out that, because of the empowerment of rural women, i.e. the entitlement of claiming divorce without paying back the brideprice, increasing numbers of rural males provided more filial practices to their in-laws. See Lihong, Shi, “Little quilted vests to warm parents' hearts,” The China Quarterly, No. 198 (2009), pp. 348–63Google Scholar.

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21 Luigi Tomba explicitly specified five crucial steps to domestic collaboration in the process of purchasing new residential apartments when they first became available in Beijing. His detailed ethnographic data demonstrated the flexible domestic strategies employed by both senior parents and their adult children in the domains of living space arrangement, family financial pooling and intergenerational exchange of public entitlements. See Tomba, “Creating an urban middle class.”

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24 Ethnographic data were collected in a working-class neighbourhood in Tianjin during summer 2008. As a neighbourhood, Xinshuli, a state-owned enterprise dormitory area, is composed of two five-floor apartment buildings and 13 rows of connected single-room red brick houses. Each room is about 12 to 16 square metres.

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