China's New Rural Daughters Coming of Age: Downsizing the Family and Firing Up Cash Earning Power in the New Economy
Author(s)
Zhang, Hong
Abstract
This paper discusses China’s “new rural daughters,” born in the late 1970s and 1980s. The life experience of rural daughters who grew up under China’s birth control policy and in Deng’s market-reform era is dramatically different from that of their mothers a generation ago. But what does this different life experience imply for the traditional gender roles of rural daughters in China’s family system? Does a low fertility rate affect parental care for and investment in the well-being of their children on the basis of gender? Will small family size and new paths of social and economic mobility become new forces that redefine parent-daughter relations and challenge the cultural norm of gender bias against daughters? How do rural parents respond to the increased cash-earning power of their daughters and to those daughters’ economic independence? In this article I draw on my ethnographic study of a village in central China to address some of the questions raised above. In particular, I examine whether new demographic realities, new employment opportunities, and new marriage practices have come to reshape intergenerational relations and have led to new parental attitudes and practices toward gender equity in rural families.
