| 摘要 | Key Points
Over 2,500 years of family tradition in China is on an unavoidable collision course with 21st-century China’s new demographic realities. The demographic forces transforming the Chinese family are extraordinary and historically unprecedented.
Curiously, despite the small library of studies on population change in modern China, little has been written on what these changes in the Chinese family portend.
This cross-disciplinary volume is an exploratory foray into that intellectual terra incognita.
The chapters in this volume describe the demographic dimensions of the changes in family structure already underway and visible out to the horizon, as well as their implications for China’s people, economy, and role in the world.
The volume features works by authors Ashton M. Verdery; Zeng Yi and Wang Zhenglian; Wang Feng, Shen Ke and Cai Yong; David E. Scharff; and Jacqueline Deal and Michael Szonyi—leading scholars in their respective fields.
Introduction
The family is the fundamental unit of society: its most basic building block. It is the foundation for all the more complex arrangements humanity has managed to devise since the beginning of the historical era: national economies; kingdoms, states, and empires; civilizations. The family, indeed, is the single human organization absolutely indispensable to the perpetuation of our species; so it has been since the emergence of our kind, and—absent some future dystopia beyond current imagining—so it looks to be until our end.
While the family is necessarily central to all the world’s great traditions, the argument can be made that the institutions of family and kin enjoy an especially prominent role in the Chinese way. For millennia, Chinese philosophy and metaphysics have imparted a special place to the family in their thinking about the universals and eternity; indeed, the Confucian tendency directly links the family (and one’s obligations to virtuous conduct therein) to celestial harmony. Family, kin, and clan are accorded a correspondingly impressive priority in the honored literature, histories, and other aspects of culture from the Sinosphere.
And in more pedestrian terms, the extended Chinese family has served, as long as writing and memory recall, as the main bulwark against the risks and threats from an uncertain and often dangerous world—notwithstanding the protections that China’s vast administrative apparatus was nominally supposed to provide to ordinary people. In China, family is recognized as the key to survival in bad times and the key to prosperity in good times, a fact of life so obvious for most Chinese that it hardly bears belaboring. The family—and one’s own membership in a family—is a thing in China to be celebrated and revered.
Today, however, over 2,500 years of family tradition in China is on an unavoidable collision course with 21st-century China’s new demographic realities. The initial impact has already taken place—and the reverberations promise to play out for generations to come, with oscillations of increasing magnitude. The demographic forces transforming the Chinese family are extraordinary and historically unprecedented. It is not too much to say they may leave Chinese family structure all but unrecognizable before the end of this century.
Curiously, while a small library of studies has been published over the past four decades on population change in modern China, little has been written on the bearing of these changes on the Chinese family itself. This cross-disciplinary volume is an exploratory foray into that intellectual terra incognita. In the following pages, we attempt to describe the demographic dimensions of the changes in family structure already underway, and visible out to the horizon, and to examine some of the implications for China’s people, economy, and role in the world.
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