Private Life under Changing Socialism : Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999

Annotation For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years' fieldwork that has resulted in this booka comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author's focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving. Frontmatter List of Figures (page ix) List of Tables (page x) Preface (page xi) Introduction: The Chinese Family and the Study of Private Life (page 1) 1. The Changing Local World: Political Economy, Public Life, and SOcial Networks (page 17) 2. Youth Autonomy and Romance in Courtship (page 42) 3. Sex, Intimacy, and the Language of Love (page 64) 4. Gender Dynamics and the Triumph of Conjugal Power (page 86) 5. Domestic Space and the Quest for Privacy (page 112) 6. The Politics of Family Property (page 140) 7. Elderly Support and the Crisis of Filial Piety (page 162) 8. Birth Control and the Making of a New Fertility Culture (page 190) Conclusion: The Socialist State, the Private Family, and the Uncivil Individual (page 217) Character List (page 237) Notes (page 243) Bibliography (page 267) Index (page 283) Xiajia village is located at the southern edge of Heilongjiang province in northeastern China.