An interconnected, nuanced, and nonlinear view of Chinese family life since 1949
With Embedded Generations, Liu Jieyu offers a comprehensive examination of Chinese family life since the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. Grounding her account in the analysis of 260 life history narratives and rich ethnographic data, Liu traces the changing ways families have navigated such experiential milestones as childhood, courtship and marriage, sex and intimacy, and aging over the past seven decades. Using generation, the urban-rural divide, and gender as her analytical lenses, she provides an alternative narrative of Chinese family life, countering the dominant Eurocentric accounts of modernization and family change.
Liu proposes the concept of "embedded generations" to capture the ongoing relational and socioeconomic shaping of family life, taking account of variation within and across generations, and of both intergenerational transmission and individual adaptations to changing conditions of everyday life. Resisting the notion that social and family changes are linear historical progressions, Liu reveals a family portrait of complex change, continuity, and diversity. Rather than a straightforward transition from the traditional to the modern and postmodern, she argues, changes in Chinese family life have entailed the adaptation and "re-serving" of traditional ideas and practices to produce a bricolage of modern and traditional elements. Liu Jieyu is professor of sociology and China studies at SOAS University of London. She is the author of Gender and Work in Urban China: Women Workers of the Unlucky Generation and Gender, Sexuality and Power in Chinese Companies: Beauties at Work and the coeditor of The China Quarterly. "This is truly groundbreaking work. Extensive ethnographic research is underpinned by exemplary scholarship, evincing the breadth and depth of the author's knowledge of both Chinese and Western literature on family life, both theoretical and empirical. Written with a sociological sensibility, this book offers a nuanced and detailed account of both change and continuity in family relationships over generations while challenging much existing theorizing on the consequences of China's social transformations."-Stevi Jackson, University of York
"This book will make a significant contribution to the fields of sex and intimacy, marriage, family life, old age care, and intergeneration relationships in Chinese and non-Western contexts. It is one of the first comprehensive monographs to adopt a multigeneration perspective, which in itself is an important contribution."-Susanne Y. P. Choi, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
"Drawing from innovative life history interviews, Embedded Generations presents a rich overview of how China's tumultuous history since the 1950s has shaped the family experiences of older and younger interviewees, rural versus urban residents, and men versus women."-Martin King Whyte, Harvard University
"Liu Jieyu has provided sociology with a systematic analysis of family life in China based on a rich body of life history interviews across six urban and rural sites. Her framework of embedded generations illuminates how women and men in three current adult generations have created complex, resourceful families amid fundamental changes in demography and social economy. This is a must-read volume."-Ellen R. Judd, University of Manitoba and University of British Columbia
"This is a fascinating study of the changing nature of the Chinese family since the 1940s, which makes us rethink the whole idea of a trajectory towards modernity. With big arguments and engaging narratives that will be accessible to undergraduate students as well as interesting to scholars, it will be widely used."-Henrietta Harrison, University of Oxford "Exceptionally rich in empirical details and sweeping in its conceptual scope, Embedded Generations is a solid study
