The Sociological Review Monographs 73/4

Obligated to Care: Intergenerational Family Relations in Contemporary China

This Monograph provides a kaleidoscopic overview of the Chinese family in the first quarter of the 21st century, including its historical background and prospective trajectories. Sociological inquiry reveals that while the family is arguably a universal institution its form is subject to ever transforming dynamic elements and the influence of changing social, economic, and political environments. Indeed, the sociology of the family necessarily reports divergent trends and characteristically different historical and cultural features of families. Changes experienced by families in present-day China reflect the transition from a planned to a market economy and China’s ‘opening up’ to global participation and influence. The distinctive intergenerational basis of family life is still primary in China but on very different grounds than previously. The changing nature of obligations of care between generations, different types of care practiced in families in which its members migrate, include LGBTQ persons, are singletons or have siblings, and changed from traditional to present-day forms in the modes of delivery of care are all discussed in the contributions to this Monograph. Here is a collection of papers empirically grounded and theoretically innovative which inform exploration of the family in China today, and in doing so enliven sociological analysis. Conventional understandings of the Chinese family and its intergenerational relations are challenged in these contributions and the diversity of familial experience and prospects clearly set out and explained.