This article investigates fertility intentions and obstacles among young Chinese men and women after the lift of the one-child policy. Over a hundred in-depth interviews reveal that while having one child is viewed as the normative step following marriage, various obstacles remain for second-birth transition. Time and financial concerns are salient among both men and women, whereas labor market disadvantage and the perceived incompatibility between work and motherhood create additional hindrances for women. The gendered childcare leave policy, coupled with discriminatory hiring practice, leads women to view multiple childbirths and successful career as fundamentally incompatible. A universal ‘two-child policy’ without additional institutional measures that address work-life incompatibility for women may not successfully boost fertility level, but would rather exacerbate the existing gender inequity in China’s labor market.
Drawing on 70 in-depth interviews, I investigated how maternal employment shapes urban young Chinese women's work-family expectation in a context of rapid social change. These interviews indicated that respondents attached strong moral meaning to mothers' wage work, regarding it as integral to a "good" mother and an "ideal" woman. This moralization of maternal employment, in turn, led contemporary young Chinese women to view wage work as a taken-forgranted choice. Yet different from their own mothers, these young women were confronted with profound transformation across various domains of the postreform Chinese society. The normative expectation of women's wage work, coupled with slow-to-change expectations about women's roles at home and in a changing labor market, intensified young women's burden of "doing it all." This research highlights the importance of bringing the macro-level context back into the mother-daughter dyad to understand the intergenerational transmission of gender beliefs and behavior. The nexus between women's paid work and motherhood has long enthralled gender and family scholars. Extensive research has examined how women navigate the competing demands of work and family (e.g.
Objective: This article investigates marital sorting by household registration status (hukou) and education in contemporary urban China, paying special attention to individuals who have achieved rural-to-urban hukou mobility before marriage. Background: Existing theoretical frameworks of assortative mating have highlighted economic resources and cultural matching as two key dimensions. These two frameworks place a different emphasis on individuals' achieved versus ascriptive characteristics and hold different implications for understanding the link between marital sorting patterns and social openness or closure. With a focus on hukou converters, this study examines the relative importance of achieved versus ascriptive traits in China's marriage market and contributes to the evaluation of the two frameworks. Method: This study adopts a mixed-methods approach. The quantitative analysis uses the harmonic mean marriage function to analyze the nationally representative 2006 China General Social Survey. The qualitative data consist of 115 in-depth interviews collected in two Chinese metropolitan areas between 2016 and 2017. Results: Quantitative results showed that hukou converters and urban-born individuals had the highest propensity of marrying a spouse of
The Second Demographic Transition (SDT) framework highlights individuals’ ideational shift toward greater individualism in explaining the rise of non-marriage unions. Contemporary China has seen a substantial increase in premarital cohabitation. Drawing on 65 in-depth interviews with highly educated young urban Chinese women and men, this article examines the gendered ways in which young Chinese adults perceive and make decisions about premarital cohabitation, as they envision their ideal lives and what autonomy and self-realization mean to them. I demonstrate that while male respondents predominantly view cohabitation positively as a risk-reduction strategy for avoiding incompatible marriages, female respondents still consider cohabitation to be a risk-amplification arrangement in practice that increases the possibility of uncertain marriage prospect, unsafe sex, and reputational damages. Young women, but not men, often have to strategize—through carefully managing information disclosure—about persistent parental expectations that discourage women’s premarital cohabitation. As a result, while male respondents regard marriage to be neither the necessary precondition nor the end goal of cohabitation, female respondents, who otherwise emphasize autonomy and individualistic fulfillment, continue to desire a close linkage between cohabitation and marriage. Leveraging the unique strength of qualitative data in demographic research, this article articulates the gender asymmetry in how women and men perceive cohabitation’s risks, benefits, and link to marriage. I elucidate the gendered tension between privately-held ideals of individualism vis-à-vis enduring social norms of female marriageability, as women and men differentially navigate parental expectations surrounding cohabitation. In so doing, this article makes a theoretical contribution by bringing a careful treatment of gender into the SDT framework.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.