Family and Household Transformation in China

Qiang Ren, Peking University
Qiong Zhou, Peking University
Lihua Pang, Peking University
Leiwen Jiang, Peking University

Chinese family has been experiencing significant changes in the most recent decades. Driven by various socio-economic, politic, cultural, ethnicity composition and demographic factors, Family structure becomes simpler, household size declines. In a recent paper, John Bongaarts tests the applicability in the developing countries of the convergence theory of family structure proposed by William Goods, by exploiting data of 43 countries from the recent DHS survey. According to Bongaarts¡¯ study, convergence to smaller and predominantly nuclear households is proceeding slowly in contemporary developing countries. His study does not include China, given that China was not a participant of DHS survey. Should China follow the same path of household transformation? Will China sustain its personality in the process of the household transformation? The present research reviews historical trend of Chinese family structure in the process of industrialization since 1950. Compiling the data on household size and composition of the whole country and its provinces in the past 50 years, we study the simplification process of household structure and its socio-economic, demographic and cultural determinants. Taking the advantage of obtaining 2000 census dataset, we will conduct a multi-level analysis on household characteristics and socio-economic development conditions at national, prefectural, and individual household levels, in order to test if different households of the regions with different characteristics are closely related to their industrialization levels, and therefore, shed new lights on the understandings of the household transformation tendency in the developing world.