Thammasat University students interested in China, history, sociology, anthropology, economics, political science, gender studies, feminism, and related subjects may find it useful to participate in a free 13 December Zoom webinar on The Future of Marriage in China.

The event, on Friday, 13 December 2024 at 2:30pm Bangkok time, is presented by The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Students are invited to register at this link:

https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/webform/view.php?id=13695699

The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of marriage in China.  

The event announcement notes:

Synopsis of Lecture:

Twenty years ago marriage was nearly universal for men and women in the PRC. Today marriage rates have fallen to an all-time low, and some young adults now openly discuss the option of never marrying. In this lecture Deborah Davis draws on census data, surveys, Chinese social media, and extended conversations to explore the future of marriage as an institution.

In celebration of New Asia College’s 75th Anniversary and the 70th Anniversary of Partnership between New Asia College and Yale-China Association, the College is honored to have Professor Deborah Davis, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Yale University to deliver an academic lecture.

Professor Davis is a world-renowned scholar on families, gender, and society in urban China. She has made significant contributions to the study of contemporary Chinese society, family dynamics, and social stratification. She joined Yale University’s Department of Sociology in 1978 and retired as a full professor in 2018.

Speaker:

Professor Deborah Davis, Professor Emerita of Sociology, Yale University

Biography of Speaker:

Deborah Davis is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Yale University where she chaired the Department of Sociology, the Council on East Asian Studies and the Women Faculty Forum. Currently she is a visiting faculty member at Schwarzman College at Tsinghua and an honorary professor at Fudan. She previously served six terms as a Trustee of the Yale-China Association and chaired the International Advisory Board of the Universities Service Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Humanities panel for the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. She has served on the editorial boards of The China Quarterly, The China Review, and the Chinese Sociological Review. She holds degrees from Wellesley College, Harvard, and Boston University. Her most recent book, co-edited with Sara Friedman, was Wives, Husbands and Lovers: Marriage and Sexuality in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Urban China.

Professor Davis’ book is available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.

A review in Pacific Affairs, a peer-reviewed, independent, and interdisciplinary scholarly journal focusing on important current political, economic, and social issues throughout Asia and the Pacific, stated in part:

This book opens the Pandora’s box of marriage issues in China, offering readers a view of the growing anomalies of familial, sexual, and marital mores and the complexities engendered by deviancies in the three Chinese societies of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the PRC. These “hidden” by-products, evolved throughout history and transformed by modernity, are disrupting and restructuring the conventional orders of marriage and family relationships in contemporary China. It is at this historical moment that they are captured by this book and presented as an important topic for discussion and debate: the “deinstitutionalization” of marriage in China).

The book incorporates multiple perspectives (legal, socio-demographic, gender, and culture) of scholars who approached the topic in both qualitative and quantitative ways. It is divided into three parts. Part 1 focuses on the PRC. Davis interprets the revised marriage laws/regulations in the PRC and the driving factors and social implications beyond legal amendments. She argues that the paradoxical role of the state as a “legal referee” that increasingly legitimizes marriage freedom (sexual intimacy and conjugal property) and as a Maoist-style “social engineer” that unwaveringly dictates marital fertility and reproduction constitutes a unique feature of marriage deinstitutionalization in China. […]

Yong and Wang explore the underlying forces of the (re)emergence of late marriages in Shanghai. They argue that marriage reinstitution is more of an evolutionary than revolutionary phenomenon because marriage practices, i.e., marital age and birth planning, feature an increasing degree of individual choices and reduced legislative enforcement. Their data analysis adds credit to the inference that China will likely follow a similar trajectory to that in its neighbouring countries in East Asia where the conventional marriage institution has been disrupted and remodelled by the younger generation.

Zhang and Sun capture an interesting phenomenon in Shanghai People’s Park, where parents negotiate a marriage suitor for their daughters. They attribute the highlighted anxieties of parents to three main factors: first, the growing economic pressure; second, demographic changes, such as the implementation of the One-Child Policy; and third, parents’ ideological connections to the socialist past. The discussion of shifting intimacy from the private to the public thus exposes essential issues of China in transition. […]

Part 3 focuses on Taiwan. Kuo analyzes the transformations of Taiwanese family law in response to the emergence of new types of marriage in recent decades. His discussion of Taiwan’s legal reform in response to the private life “reordering” not only demonstrates the increasing trend of deinstitutionalization of marriage in Taiwan but also alarms governments in other societies to initiate legal actions to manage similar challenges.

Yu and Liu’s survey on the determinants of housework division between husbands and wives shows that patriarchal marriage values persist in Taiwan. They argue that the co-existence of the changes and continuities is an incomplete breakdown of the traditional norms instead of a linear process of reinstitutionalization of marriage in Taiwan. This conclusion adds weight to (re)conceptualizing the “deinstitutionalization of marriage” in the Chinese context.

Shen argues that “split marriages” connected through a gendered division of labour can reinforce conjugal ties. This is because geographic separation enables both husbands and wives to cultivate new spaces of their own. Taiwanese (business)men enjoy the freedom of casual sexual liaisons in China whereas their wives gain autonomy and explore their social circles outside home. Her work taps into the counter-force of deinstitutionalization of marriage as it shows that unconventional marriage practices can strengthen the existing institution of marriage.

In analyzing the relationships between gender, population, and sovereignty in cross-Strait marriages, Friedman argues that the regulatory regime in Taiwan, based on a “dependency model” of immigration, enhances the unequal status of Chinese marital immigrants as evidenced by their legal and financial reliance on their Taiwanese spouses. She also finds that the state asserts and undergirds its sovereign power through the bureaucratic scrutiny of marriages, a practice that is inseparable from the political contestations across the Strait.

Overall, the chapters are neatly integrated under the theme of “deinstitutionalization of marriage” in China. The book injects new blood into scholarship on the topic of marriage and sexuality and offers alternative ways of thinking and questioning institutions—as symbolized by the cover of the book.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)