From the Revolutionary Family to the Materialistic Family: Keywords for a Contemporary Social History of China

The Initial Stage of Socialist Revolution and the Construction of the Revolutionary Family

During the 30 years from the birth of the new China to the ending of the Cultural Revolution, mainland China experienced the recovery and development of its economy in tumultuous ways, including the Great Leap Forward that was brought about in 1958, but which was then followed by the great famine of the 1960s, and then the period of the Cultural Revolution. This was a time of intense political movements and an economy that went through tremendous ups and downs in the wake of efforts of state planning through public ownership, and the management of work units as the basis of social organisation. The monogamous marriage and family system played an important role in maintaining the stability of the political and economic system of the time, and was protected and secured by a system of laws. ¹ ‘Revolution’ was one of the keywords dominating people’s lives, and also became a keyword in descriptions of the sphere of personal relations. The idea of being ‘revolutionary’ thus became the most prominent characteristic of marriage and family.

In the following sub-sections, I will identify three key ideas of the time to illustrate the kinds of transformations that were witnessed.

Marriage Law, the Opera ‘Liu Qiao’er’, ² ‘Living in the Same House after Divorce’

The new government took over the country in a situation of widespread breakdown as innumerable aspects of everyday life came undone after the founding of the new China. It is, therefore, all the more significant that the very first law that was promulgated by the new state was the Marriage Law. Drafting began in 1948 and was completed and implemented two years later, on 1 May 1950.

The essential idea of the new marriage law can be summarised as:

totally abolish the feudal patriarchal marriage law which featured arranged and forced marriages, ignored women’s and children’s interests, by starting a new democratic marriage law which would guarantee freedom of marriage to both men and women, equal rights between men and women and legal rights for women and children. (All China Women’s Federation, 1979, p. 206)

People’s rights, especially women’s rights in marriage and family, were guaranteed by the law after its promulgation, and it brought about a movement against feudal familial structures and relations.

The Marriage Law obviously represented a challenge and threat to the inherited patriarchal family system and resulted in strong reactions by those who upheld feudal conventions and practices. According to the statistics taken at that time, in the two years that followed the promulgation of the law from 1950 to 1952, the number of men and women who were either killed or committed suicide because their right of freedom in marriage was denied to them totaled 11,500 in the east China region (Li, 2008). In one part of the mid-south China region, within one year of the promulgation of the law, the number of women who were murdered or took their own lives totaled over 10,000 (Li, 2008; Yang, 2010). The major cause of the death of women in such large numbers was, first, the ongoing force of the old feudal marriage system which acted as a strong barrier against the implementation of the new Marriage Law. After the founding of the new China, and even after the promulgation of the new Marriage Law, the older patriarchal system which had held sway for centuries continued to be powerful in many rural areas and towns in the newly liberated areas as well as some of the earlier liberated areas, through practices such as arranged and forced marriages, mercenary marriages and child and early marriages. Free love marriages between men and women and the remarriage of widows were still strongly opposed by parents or parents-in-law and by public opinion. In some places, there even still existed the practices of ‘pawn wives’, ‘rent wives’, ‘wife swapping’, ‘abducted wives’ and ‘left-behind wives’.

The second set of reasons can be put down to the ignorance and incomprehension of grassroots cadres and the people themselves, especially in the rural areas, regarding the purpose, scope and guidelines of the new policy. Many local Party cadres still held certain feudal ideas about marriage, believing that ‘free marriage would only benefit women’, and hence did not allow women to divorce their husbands, thus not only violating the new policy but even causing deaths and other tragic incidents that should not have happened (Li, 2008).

Obviously, the Marriage Law played a positive role in liberating Chinese women, yet, we should also recognise the heavy price many women had to pay in this intense process of social change. With the promulgation of the Marriage Law, nationwide divorce rates surged. During the war years, many people, mostly men, ³ who were caught up in fighting the war, had few opportunities to meet a prospective spouse and were also not in a position to afford marriage. Some of these men had a nominal marriage arranged by their parents with a woman whom they did not know, and which they then subsequently sought to break. Still others decided to go in for a divorce because of a change in their social position. Such men therefore used the new law to set themselves free from a marriage arranged by parents which they no longer wished to abide by. According to the sociologist Hao Maishou, the 1950s witnessed the highest rate of divorce. In 1953, the number of divorces accounted for 53 per cent of the total number of marriages, which means, quite simply, that practically every second marriage turned into divorce soon after (Li, 2006).

In this divorce upsurge, many divorced women—who were divorced by the husband due to economic or social reasons—continued to live in the household of the husband’s family, even when the husband himself was no longer living there. This phenomenon was referred to as ‘living in the same house after divorce’. Its purpose was to help the divorced woman to survive, prevent her destitution and social loss of status, and hence was widely accepted.

To enforce the Marriage Law, a nationwide campaign was launched to publicise and implement it. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, the Government Administration Council of the Central Government, the National Federation of Trade Unions, the Youth League, the All-China Youth Federation, the All-China Student Association and the All-China Women’s Federation together issued notifications and directions to ensure its implementation (All China Women’s Federation, 1979).

There also appeared theatrical performances to help popularise the Marriage Law, which were created by drawing on experiences among the people. They were staged in the form of local operas, among which two north and north-east China local productions, Liu Qiao’er and Young Erhei’s Marriage, became very popular. Liu Qiao’er was created based on events during the 1940s in the Yanan anti-Japanese base area. The heroine of the opera was a woman with a very distinguished character, open and passionate. She was created to encourage and represent women with strong desires who were also brave enough to fight for a freely chosen marriage. It was extremely influential.

All these examples should be enough to demonstrate the extent to which marriage was at the core of the vision of the communist leadership. Not only central and local governments, but also various mass organisations joined in propagating and implementing the law. It became a movement through the top-down mobilisation of the people. The promulgation and implementation of the Marriage Law immediately following political liberation had a powerful impact on the patriarchal family system. It made people and Party cadres working at different levels aware of the differences between the old and the new systems, and of what was legal and illegal.

In subsequent years, free marriages increased and more egalitarian and harmonious relations among family members developed. According to the statistics of 11 major cities in the first half of 1954, 97 per cent of marriage registrations complied with the provisions of the law (Yang, 2010).

Thus, the Marriage Law paved the way for men and women to play somewhat different roles in family and marriage. Art works represented by Liu Qiao’er reflected a strong desire from the grassroots in favour of free marriage and to be rid of old relations characterised by subordination and hierarchy between members. Yet, when the old relations were thus criticised and uprooted, on what basis were the new socialist family relations to be built? How were the roles of men and women to be determined, especially for women? These were the questions now awaiting urgent answers. The Marriage Law did specify the rights and responsibilities of the husband and wife and made it clear that ‘husband and wife are partners and they have equal positions in their marriage’ (All China Women’s Federation, 1979, p. 200). But it was a long way to realise this ideal. The building of a socialist society and revolutionary family happened all at the same time. The following keywords and ideas will provide us with some important clues in this regard.

A Revolutionary Family, ⁴ ‘Personal Problem’, ‘Work Unit Arranged Revolutionary Partner’

A Revolutionary Family is a film with a complex plot and distinguished artistic performances. It was known to almost every household, and the heroes and heroines in the film became role models among the people. In the film, personal life was closely connected with the revolutionary cause and the future of the country. The story created and described in the film was a typical example of the isomorphism of family and nation. What is particularly noteworthy about the film is that, unlike present-day Chinese mainstream films with ‘revolution’ as their subject matter and with male characters in leading roles, the protagonist here was female—Zhou, Lian (with Tao, Cheng in real life as its archetype)—who was widely accepted as a heroine.

The revolutionary family in the film was set up as an ideal. It turned the function of the family into the building of a socialist society, and hence erased the distinction between the public and the private spheres. It made people believe and accept, unconsciously or subconsciously, the idea that ‘any big things happening in the family are small, and any small things concerning the country are big’. Yet, we should also notice that the focus on family relations had already first been created during the revolution and war years. When the country entered the period of socialist construction, did the revolution family continue to serve as a model for new family relationships? This leads to further research questions.

On the other hand, the concept of class, a concept closely connected with revolution, also entered the sphere of family and marriage. For instance, among many people, when choosing a marriage partner, the first thing to be considered was to which class the spouse belonged (whether he/she came from the working class) and what his/her political attitude might be (whether he/she was a Communist Party member). It was difficult if not impossible for those who came from the politically wrong family background (such as landlords, rich peasants, reactionaries, evildoers and rightists) to marry the one he/she wanted to marry. As a result, in rural areas, many members from the ‘wrong’ kinds of families had to take each other’s brother or sister in marriage. So, even though old feudal relations were being destroyed, new and different relationships featuring the dependence of one member on the other were being gradually built. This is well described and expressed by the following keywords/ideas: ‘personal problem’ and ‘work unit arranged’. Let me explain.

Early in the 1950s, a person was said to be suffering from a personal problem when he/she was well past the age for marriage but still remained single, and the ‘problem’ was usually solved with the help of his/her work unit. During the war years, for instance, many soldiers remained single. Their ‘personal problem’ was solved with the help of the head of their work unit, who would introduce and persuade young women to marry them. This became a common practice after the 1940s, when the regime was in Yanan. In the first few years of the new China, within the Party and the revolutionary army, if a man met three requirements, that is, 28 years of age, in the army for at least five years and in the position of regiment level, he was entitled to marry. A good example to illustrate this would be what happened in the singleton boom of the 1950s when there were more men than women. Young women were recruited from several provinces to match those hundreds of thousands of army veterans who were sent to work on the reclamation farms in Xinjiang. ⁵ In other words, marriages were being effectively arranged by the work unit, in the form of a kind of collective arrangement. Although the special circumstances of the war might explain these new practices, they were quite double-edged. On the one hand, these ‘recruited’ women were made to leave their families and enter public life by belonging to a work unit, making them therefore dependent; on the other hand, they were not simply passive. Having left their families to become part of the life of a work unit also brought about new opportunities and chances for personal happiness.

We also have to take note of how, during this period, the idea of equality between men and women happened at the same time when women walked out of their homes to join socialised production. This has been called by some scholars as the ‘isomorphism of family and country’. ⁶ Under these circumstances, women, in addition to playing the traditional role of doing housework, were also expected to ‘participate in social activities’ and to support the family. The following keywords help decipher how women left their homes and became employed.

Equality of Men and Women, Women’s Employment

Immediately after the founding of the new China, the promulgation of the Guiding Principles, which served as the interim constitution, announced that ‘women enjoy equal rights with men in politics, economy, culture and education, and in all walks of social life’ (All China Women’s Federation, 1979, p. 177). In 1954, the first National People’s Congress promulgated the first Constitution of the nation. In addition to what was said about women’s rights in the Guiding Principles, it added: ‘women have the same right to vote and to be elected as men do’, ‘women share equal rights with men in every way in the family’ (All China Women’s Federation, 1979, p. 85). At this point, equal rights for men and women were established as part of the socialist system, and this was ensured by the law and the constitution. ‘Equal right of men and women’ thus became a keyword/phrase of the time.

Women’s Employment

The following figures speak for themselves. In 1949, the total number of women employed was 600,000, accounting for just 7.5 per cent of the total number of people employed. In 1957, the number increased to 3,286,000; in 1960, the number surged to 10,087,000; and in the 1970s, most urban women were employed (Zuo and Jiang, 2009, p. 34). In the period of the planned economy which featured low wages overall and high employment, the income that women received became indispensable for the family. According to the first investigations into women’s social status, in the 1990s, women’s income accounted for 40 per cent of the family income (see Zuo and Jiang, 2009, p. 35). Many women understood the term ‘equal rights of men and women’ as ‘both men and women get jobs and both are breadwinners’.

Yet, in this theory and practice advocating equal rights, women walked out of their homes to participate in nation building on the one hand, but on the other hand, continued to take on the role and tasks of housewives. Though both the central and local government took the need for running nurseries and kindergartens as important in order to reduce women’s burden, maintaining the household (taking care of the husband, the parents on both sides and the children) remained women’s sole responsibility. This naturally led women, who were hired out and at the same time still had to shoulder such household responsibilities, to protest.

During the initial stage of socialist construction in which revolution was the keyword, the exhortation to build revolutionary families became stronger and stronger till 1966, when the Cultural Revolution was launched, and the concept of revolution was intensified but without emphasis on the family. Taking the eight model operas which became very popular during the Cultural Revolution into consideration as examples, revolutionary relations were now confined to what happened between the characters, but none of them dealt with marriage and none of the characters included their husbands or wives (except that of the husband of one of the female characters, A. Qing Sao, was mentioned insofar as he was described as being away from home on business). The three characters coming from three generations in The Red Lantern actually come from three different families for revolutionary reasons. In the mode of the isomorphism of family and country, only the country was emphasised, while the family was totally ignored and had effectively disappeared.

To summarise, the monogamous family set up as the legal model after 1949 emerged in tandem with the promulgation and implementation of the Constitution, and the laws and policies of the government. The Marriage Law, in particular, played a major role in breaking up traditional kinship-dependent relations in the family, while enabling the emergence of ‘revolutionary’ family relations and the practice of women’s entry into socialist reconstruction. Furthermore, women’s liberation, while contributing to the development of socialism (materially and culturally), made it possible for women to become independent, especially economically. In urban China, this led to the disintegration of the traditional extended family, which was replaced by the nuclear family, though in rural areas, where a collective economy was established soon after the founding of the new China, family and marriage relations based on blood ties and local connections continued to be dominant. Along and through these various processes, an individual was liberated from the bondage of the old system, by being made to sacrifice his/her personal interests and development in the name of the revolution. ‘Individual’ and ‘self’ remained negative terms throughout that were subjected to strong criticism and suppressed. At the onset of the Cultural Revolution when things went to extremes, an individual had become a cog in the state apparatus. Personal rights were no longer protected and many families and marriages were destroyed. The dependency of one individual on the other went to the extreme. But this dependency was not based on ties of blood, but on the state and the Party.

The New Stage of Opening-up to the Outside World: The Materially Oriented Family

China has entered a new historical period in the past 30 years, having left behind the severe ‘political winter’ of the Cultural Revolution, so that the diversity and agency of an oppressed Chinese people has come to life again. Notions of the ‘individual’ and the ‘self’ have risen to the surface after being suppressed for decades, and the relations between people have become more dependent on materialistic considerations.

‘Material-dependent relations’ are universally built through the activities of commodity exchange. In such relations, an individual is rid of the fetters of traditional community ties and has the right to calculate his/her own physical or mental capacities. One is independent and is, so to speak, the subject of one’s life. But at the same time, he/she can only be recognised and accepted depending on the material goods he/she has produced or is in a position to offer. That is to say, one is restricted and controlled materially, that is, by money. When ‘materially dependent relations’ as ‘the principal social relation came to be established in China’s recent history, the ‘revolutionary family” began to transform into the ‘materially oriented family’.

The 1980s can be regarded as a transitional period in our discussion about marriage and family in China. In the ideological liberation movement, a more humanitarian approach was advocated. It offered a chance for everyone to rethink forbidden topics such as love, sex and marriage. The impact on marriage and family came mainly from reclaiming a sense of individual subjectivity and was less related to materialistic considerations in this period.

During the 1990s, with the rise of a commercial economy, family and marriage relations also changed, and had less to do with love and emotion among its members, being shaped more closely by materialistic considerations and the role of money. China, in fact, has witnessed the development of such ‘materially oriented family relations’, in which money, interest, power and desire become the interconnected elements that dominate personal relationships. Consequently, materialism has become a new keyword dominating contemporary marriage.

‘Men in Charge of Outside, Women in Charge of Inside’, ‘One Family Two Systems’, ‘One Sacrificing to Guarantee the Job and Income of the Other’, ‘Better to Marry the Right Man than to Work Hard to Earn One’, ‘Full-time Wife’

Women as a social group have suffered the most during the process when the Chinese economy became market oriented. As early as the 1980s, there already appeared phenomena such as laid-off women workers, rural women returning home and female university graduates unable to find jobs, which gradually turned into social problems. The old conventional idea of ‘men in charge of outside, women in charge of inside’, ⁷ once again, became acceptable. In the mid-1990s, during the very years when the central government declared that China would develop into a market economy, the gap between men and women in employment and payment widened considerably. According to research undertaken in 2000 on Chinese women’s social position, the rate of employment among urban women between the ages of 18–49 years was 72 per cent, 16 per cent lower than the decade before. In the same year, the average annual income of married women was 3,356 RMB, which was 57 per cent of the 5,971 RMB of men (Xu, 2006, p. 73). Under such circumstances, many families adopted various strategies: that of ‘one family two systems’ (one member of the couple worked in a publicly owned work unit, the other in a unit under private management); or one where ‘one member of the couple sacrifices to guarantee the job and income of the other’ (usually the job and income of the husband). It became the trend of the time for members of a family to depend on and cooperate with each other to make a better life: thus demonstrating how the family as a social unit has become critical to the survival and development of an individual in a market economy. It is the protection provided by the family that enables the survival of those who have been excluded from the protection of a system of social security. The function of the family has thus been reinforced with the weakening of social security in a market-driven economy.

Beginning from the second half of the 1990s, a saying became popular among young women, especially female university graduates. In a nationwide research study, 37 per cent of women surveyed in 2000 believed that ‘it is better to marry the right man than to work hard to earn one’s own income’ (Zuo and Jiang, 2009, p. 106). At the same time, the ‘full-time wife’ as one way for women to live out their adult lives re-emerged again after its abrogation in the 1950s.Although there have been ongoing voices protesting against ideas such as ‘men in charge of outside, women in charge of inside’ or ‘better to marry the right man than to work hard to earn one’s own income’, we need to ask ourselves what makes women choose to return to such models of marriage and family. When the socialist-inspired forms of social security that guarantee women’s development no longer function, women are forced to accept the new reality, and returning to the fold of the family would appear then to be a solution. Yet, what is obvious is that in doing so, women are once again placed in positions of dependency.

‘Buy a House, Affordable Male’, ‘Divide Up Family Property among Children’

If marriage is the most important thing in a woman’s life, for a man, the most important thing is to buy a house. Nowadays, in urban China, the first thing to be considered and to be done when a man thinks of getting married and starting a career is to buy a house. If he cannot afford to do so, marriage and children are impossible. According to research undertaken by a well-known love and marriage social network called Rose Network on the prerequisites of men and women choosing a spouse, the most distinctive gender differences turned out to be: for women, the man should have his own house; and for men, the woman should have a pretty face. As for the age of the man to be chosen, 75 per cent of girls would like to choose an adult well above the normal matrimonial age, between 30–35 years old. The tendency now is for more and more young women of marriageable age to make such a choice (see Liang, 2009).

This tendency among women to choose to marry men with a house of their own has led to the phenomenon where certain words or terms originally used to describe houses or housing are now used to describe men, and have also turned into criteria for evaluating a man. For instance, the new term ‘affordable male’ comes from ‘affordable house’.

Why should buying a house become so important for marriage and family? This is a question worth further discussion. In the present stage of the development of China’s economy, the real estate industry has become the key sector in the government’s push forward after the commercialisation of housing in urban areas of China since the 1990s. The housing industry has become critical for the promotion of the national economy for the government. Local governments and real estate businessmen and contractors have joined forces in controlling the housing industry, making it a heavy burden for people to buy a house. Most people have become a ‘slave of the house’. Young people born in the 1980s are the first generation of people who have to buy their own homes. They have naturally become the target of real estate businessmen who look at them as potential customers. Yet, in recent years, when the price of housing has been spiralling upwards, it has become increasingly difficult for young people to even become a ‘slave of house’ even when they are willing to be one.

In rural China, ‘to divide up family property among children’ has become a trend. To ‘divide up family property among children’ was an important practice in Chinese families for most of its history. Even during the years when private ownership was abolished and socialist public ownership was established as the general norm, it did not cease to exist. There were two upsurges in ‘dividing up family property among children’: one appeared during the period of land reform in the early years after the Chinese liberation; and the other appeared in 1958 when people’s communes were set up everywhere in rural China. But there was considerable change in terms of what was to be divided up after the establishment of a collective economy and the abolition of private ownership in land, which left very little property in the hands of the family for further division. So, dividing up property took on such forms as to ‘cook separately’ within an extended family household unit. This practice accelerated the breaking up of extended families into nuclear families and at the same time, reduced the power of the parent (Wang, 2006).

In the 1980s, in rural China, the family regained its function as a production unit when land was divided up among households and the contracting out system of production was initiated. This accelerated the speed of rural families in dividing up family property among their children. According to some researches, in the 1960s, the average time for a family to divide up its property was five years or more after the children got married; in the 1970s, it reduced to three to four years; in the 1980s, it came down to one to two years; and from the 1990s, property division followed immediately after the children’s marriage (Gao, 2006; Wang, 2006).

The accelerated speed of property division among rural families demonstrates the advanced and dominant position that educated young people have gained in the commercial economy, and the growing role that young and middle-aged women are also playing. Most of them have a junior or senior high school education and have had the experience of being hired out for work or doing business of their own. They have a strong desire and capacity to earn their own income. Usually, they demand to live apart from their parents immediately after or even before they get married, not to mention that some of them do not return to their natal homes but settle down in the city or town once they start to work there. It also demonstrates the development of a sense of self among rural women in the course of the changing relations among people from ones characterised by mutual dependency to becoming materialistically oriented.

One problem that has accompanied this acceleration in change is that few young people are prepared to stay behind to take care of their aging parents. Unavoidably, in the process of dividing up the family property pushed by material interests, the old who are incapacitated or suffering from poor health are now considered ‘useless’. An old man of Jingshan in Hubei province, laughing at himself, describes life and the present situation of the old like this: A man begins to set up a hearth of his own when he gets married; feels excited when his son is born; argues and quarrels with his siblings over how to divide the family property among them all night long; but is then rejected along with his wife by his children when he becomes old; and is finally less welcome and in demand than the farm pig. He believes that the first four stages in his description relate to what is happening in China in general, while the last reflects actual developments he witnessed in his own village (see He, 2009, p. 6).

As the erstwhile ‘patriarch’, what makes such old men in rural China become the disadvantaged? In contemporary China, many parents still hold traditional ideas and follow the old practice of dividing up the family property among their children when they grow into adults. Yet, while this idea and practice is an old tradition that is kept up, the other side of the coin, that children should take care of their parents when they are too old to support themselves as a duty in return for what parents have done in bringing them up, has been lost. That is to say, the tradition is truncated because the second half no longer exists. As a result, in the present situation where not all people are included in the national medical and old-age care system, those old people who do not have any property or children to take care of them are left in a state of ‘being old with no one to rely on’.

Interpretation of Marriage Law (III)

On 12 August 2011, the Supreme Court issued the Interpretations of Some Problems Concerning the Marriage Law of People’s Republic of China (III), referred to as Interpretation of Marriage Law (III) or Judicial Interpretation (III). It meant to provide an explanation regarding the Interpretation since the law had aroused certain disagreements when it was put into practice. The drafting of the Interpretation lasted three years. Yet, it immediately caused further disputes when it was issued. One widely shared criticism about it is that it overemphasised the material relations between the couple. As evidence in support of such criticism, out of the 21 items contained in the legislation, as many as 14 of them were about how to divide up the property between the couple should they divorce. So, with this, the materialistically oriented family was buttressed by a materialistic judicial interpretation.

The promulgation of the Interpretation of Marriage Law (III) itself suggests that, having entered a commercial society, the materialistically oriented family and marriage relations need to face up to and deal with change with the help of the law. But one effect of this is that it is designed more to deal with economic and material disputes between the couple than with other problems.

What needs to be highlighted is that this defect of the Interpretation damages the legal rights and interests of women. Take Item 7 of the interpretation as an example, which says:

The property ownership of real estate bought by the parents of one party of the couple should be written in the contract under the name of this party when the couple gets married. It can be understood to be a gift that the parents of this party send him/her, and hence belongs only to this party of the couple. Real estate bought by parents of both parties of the couple but written in the contract under the name of one party of the couple should be recognised as belonging to both the two parties, each owning the share that his or her parents have paid, except when the two parties of the couple have made other prior agreements about it. Supreme People’s Court (2011).

Evidently, in the present situation when both in urban and rural areas, the old tradition of marriage in which the head of a household is frequently still the husband and everything in the household is written under his name, this Interpretation places women further in a dependent position in the family. In rural China especially, the dominant practice is that the wife has to leave her own family and village and live in the family and the village of her husband, and it is not feasible for her to make the opposite choice since there are very strict rules about the distribution of arable land and homestead. A married woman will no longer have a share of land and homestead in her natal village but is supposed to live in the house built in her husband’s village and have her share of land there. So, in this situation, if a married rural woman wants to divorce her husband, she will have no place to shelter herself, even have no place to go to.

Conclusion

In the 30 years that have elapsed since the reforms and the opening up of China to the outside world, family and marriage relations have undergone changes from ‘revolutionary’ to ‘materialistic’. On the one hand, the establishment of a so-called socialist commercial economy and the re-establishment of private ownership have made material possessions and money the only thing by which to judge the value of a person. ‘Materialistically oriented’ social relations among people are gradually being built up. A social order based on people’s location (resident’s registration, for instance) is being replaced by one based on contract. As a result, family relations and the marriage market, too, are constituted by material and monetary calculations. Family, marriage and individuals are recognised by such a society, yet people of one family now belong to different classes depending on this new orientation. This is a great change. There is now a hierarchy within and across families, between urban and rural areas, between different social classes and between people from different walks of life. A materialistic orientation has become a more and more pronounced characteristic of the urban middleclass family and marriage relations, where people consider well-matched social and economic status as something very important and are even prepared to return, after decades, to the practice of arranged marriages, with one member of the couple depending economically on the other. At the same time, second-generation migrant workers, especially young women, are finding opportunities through migration to break the fetters of arranged marriage that may otherwise be forced upon them. At present, when a social security system is yet to be created, most people still have to stay within or depend on the family to warm themselves and keep each other warm. The protective function of the family has thus been reinforced.

This article, though partial in scope, has made an attempt to survey and analyse family and marriage through an interpretation of certain keywords and ideas. We have already seen that the monogamous marriage and family played an important role in maintaining social stability when the political and economic development of China underwent upheavals 60 years ago. Although the governing ideas of family and marriage have shifted from the ‘revolutionary’ to the ‘materialistic’, personal development is still in the process of changing from ‘depending on somebody’ to ‘depending on material possessions’, that is, it is still in the early stages of what Marx termed the second social formation (Marx and Engels, 1979). The characteristic of human development in this stage is one of great disparities between people of different genders, classes, geographical regions and age groups. On the whole, we are still far from the third stage which should feature ‘the freedom of individuality built on the basis of all-round personal development and social wealth produced with joint productive capacity’ (Marx and Engels, 1979, p. 104).

The most important aspect in human relations in a shift from ‘depending on somebody’ to ‘depending on material possessions’ is the development of individuality and subjectivity. How this individual with subjectivity deals with his/her relations with other individuals is closely related with matters as small as family and marriage relations and as large as the building up of civil society. At present, there are many voices and ideas about the building of civil society governed by the rule of law in China, yet, family as an indispensable cell of society is considered as belonging only to the private sphere, hence ignored. The fact is that major changes have already happened to this social cell, which cannot be ignored. It is vital and urgent for us to think of how to achieve a balanced development of the family and society which can only happen together.