Chinese Families Upside Down: Intergenerational Dynamics and Neo-Familism in the Early 21st Century

Yunxiang Yan, Ph.D. (1993), is Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of The Flow of Gifts (Stanford U P, 1996), Private Life under Socialism (Stanford U P, 2003), and The Individualization of Chinese Society (Berg, 2009).

• AcknowledgementsList of FiguresNotes on Contributors1 IntroductionThe Inverted Family, Post- Patriarchal Intergenerationality and Neo-Familism 1Yunxiang Yan2 “We Do”Parental Involvement in the Marriages of Urban Sons and DaughtersDeborah S. Davis3 The “Leftover” MajorityWhy Urban Men and Women Born under China’s One- Child Policy Remain Unmarried through Age 27Vanessa L. Fong, Greene Ko, Cong Zhang, and Sung won Kim4 United in SufferingRural Grandparents and the Intergenerational Contributions of CareErin Thomason5 Floating GrandparentsRethinking Family Obligation and Intergenerational SupportXiaoying Qi6 Families Under (Peer) PressureSelf-Advocacy and Ambivalence among Women in Collective Dance Groups 123Claudia Huang7 Intimate PowerIntergenerational Cooperation and Conflicts in Childrearing among Urban FamiliesSuowei Xiao8 Losing an Only ChildParental Grief among China’s Shidu ParentsLihong Shi9 The Chinese Proto Neo-Family ConfigurationA Historical EthnographyWilliam Jankowiak10 The Statist Model of Family Policy MakingYunxiang Yan11 Three Discourses on Neo-FamilismYunxiang YanIndex