Caption: Stills from the TV series "Perfect Relationship"
For several weeks, the Xuzhou incident has attracted great attention from public opinion. In addition to the events themselves, we should think deeply about the social factors that produce social ugliness and even evil. The March 2021 issue of The Journal of Victory Against Women published a research article pointing out that the number of women's trafficking cases is closely related to the sex ratio at birth. The sex ratio at birth represents an entrenched value of "male superiority over female inferiority", which has the same root cause as the purchase of a wife for procreation, and is a direct contributor to trafficking in women for forced marriages, and for some buyers, the need for a wife and the desire for a son may be essentially the same thing.
Why do farmers in some rural areas "have to have boys"? Li Yongping, ph.D. in sociology from Wuhan University and assistant researcher at The Zhou Enlai School of Government and Management of Nankai University, made fieldwork and preliminary analysis on this. This article is an excerpt from her new collection of scholarly essays, The Fluid Family.
Through the investigation and investigation in the village, the author excavates the life logic and family mechanism hidden in the daily life of the countryside, and uses a large number of first-hand materials as the basis to sort out the transformation of the family order of Chinese peasants in the transition period. This book focuses on specific phenomena in the family field, such as marriage patterns, intergenerational relations, pension problems, etc., and extends to villages, markets and other fields, analyzing the rich and subtle linkage relationship between each other. The fluid family is both a product of the transformation of society from tradition to modernity and a witness to its development and change.
This book is one of the series of books "Rediscovering China" edited by the famous sociologist He Xuefeng and others. The authors of this series of books are scholars with a professional background in sociology and are good at fieldwork in the depths of China's urban and rural society, and their research results have important reference value for us to understand the real situation of contemporary Chinese urban and rural society.
"Rediscovering China" series
"Strange Acquaintances", "Governing the City", "The Great Equilibrium", "The Rhyming Family"
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What is the farmer's concept of fertility?
Text | Li Yongping
Source | The Rheiding Family
01
Rural north China has always had a strong "preference for having a son", and each family must have at least one son. When the author investigated the rural areas of North China, he found that "pure female households" are extremely rare in the local area. Families without sons are known locally as "heads of households", and such families cannot speak, do things, or be people in the village. Even in the 1980s and 1990s, when family planning policies were strictly enforced, local farmers tried everything they could to have sons. At present, young people in the local area still agree with this set of fertility concepts, believing that at least one son must be born.
The experience of Xiao Liu in Dongtou Village, Zhumadian is very representative in rural North China.
Xiao Liu was born in 1990, married at the age of 19, and is now a mother of three children, of which the eldest daughter is 8 years old, the second daughter is 5 years old, and the son is 2 years old. When the author asked her, "If the third child is not a child, do you want to have another child?", Xiao Liu replied very affirmatively, "Yes." In Dongtou Village, it is normal for a young daughter-in-law like Xiao Liu to have three or four children, and basically the youngest one is a son. When I was researching in Dongtou Village, I also met a 38-year-old daughter-in-law, who now has seven daughters and a son. Due to the large number of children and the family's financial conditions are difficult to cope with, this household was rated as a poor household in 2017. Xiao Liu said:
In the countryside, it is necessary to have a son, and this concept was stronger in the past, but now it is better. We [young people] also want a son, a root, to pass on the generations. If there is no son, although the mother-in-law does not say it in her mouth, she will definitely feel uncomfortable in her heart, and it will not be harmonious for a long time. For the sake of the family (harmony), it is also necessary to have a son, after all, it is a family, or to take into account the feelings of the in-laws and in-laws. After I gave birth to my second daughter, I impulsively said that I didn't want to have another life, and my mother told me that she had this experience herself...
Then, Xiao Liu told us about the grievances her mother suffered when she did not have a brother.
Xiao Liu's mother has a total of four children, the first three are daughters, the last one is a son, and Xiao Liu is the eldest. Xiao Liu's mother only gave birth to her youngest son in 2006, during which she experienced three miscarriages, all of which were shedding because she was a daughter. Xiao Liu is 17 years older than his younger brother. It is also the mother who must have a son, which causes Xiao Liu to drop out of school very early to do housework at home.
Xiao Liu said:
I didn't finish elementary school, and my family was too busy. Our family was three sisters at that time, there were no boys, others looked down on us, and my mother felt very uncomfortable. Originally she had been sterilized, and later revealed. After three pregnancies, because it was a girl, all of them were done. My mother did not dare to go out after she was pregnant, for fear of being seen, at that time family planning was tightly grasped, she told me, let me stop going to school, help cook at home... (Before there was no brother) My mother was entangled in her heart, uncomfortable, wronged in front of the neighbors, talking and doing things felt like a dwarf, and could not lift her head. For example, when getting married and making a bed, everyone is willing to find a family with a son, the more sons the better, and the one without a son will not let you get involved. People don't let my mother participate in the marriage and bed, and she is very disappointed. Rural people are chatting outside in a bunch of piles, and when it comes to the topic of my son, my mother has nothing to say. People say that there is no son in this life, it must be something wrong in the previous life, and God is punishing. My mom rarely participates in chats, and others don't want to chat with her... She has suffered these grievances, so she must have a son, and I must have a son. I said I wasn't going to be angry, and she got angry and got into a fight with me.
It can be seen that rural areas in North China have always had the tradition of "male preference". Similarly, in the clan villages of South China, local farmers must also have sons. However, the same "male preference" in rural and rural South China is derived from different dynamics.
02
For the question of "why do you have to have a son", the farmers in North China gave a common explanation - "in order to pass on the generations". Passing on the generations, that is, continuing the incense, so that the family can be passed on from generation to generation, the blood line is a kind of value pursuit of farmers, which constitutes a value interpretation of the peasants' reproductive behavior. However, further investigation found that although the succession of generations constitutes the basic driving force for farmers to have sons, the sons of farmers in North China are mainly due to functional needs. Rural areas in North China are generally multi-surnamed and mixed, and a competitive structure with small relatives within five clothes as the core has been formed within the village.
Competition between small relatives is reflected not only in village politics, but also in all aspects of peasants' daily lives. "Having a son" is the basic condition for participating in village competition, and families without sons have no face in the village, and they tend to automatically withdraw from the village competition and become marginal people in the village society. Families without sons often have no motivation to continue to struggle, and the fathers no longer work at a very young age, nor do they want to build houses, showing a state of life of "living a day and counting a day", and completely without the enthusiasm of families with sons to struggle. In addition, the more sons, the more confident the parents are in talking and doing things within the village, and the easier it is to occupy the dominant and dominant position in the village competition, so the farmers in North China are eager to strengthen their family strength by having more sons, so as to win in the village competition.
The author interviewed a typical case during his research in Dongtou Village, Zhumadian. Aunt Liu of Dongtou Village was born in 1952 and has two sons and a daughter, but unfortunately, both sons have only two daughters. Aunt Liu's second son is a college student, who works in Zhengzhou with his wife and has bought a house in Zhengzhou. Aunt Liu has cultivated a college student by her own hard work, and it is reasonable to say that she should be very proud and have a lot of face in the village, but in the interview, she seems very depressed, especially when asked about her family situation, she is very depressed, and no grandson hits her very hard.
She said:
There are no grandchildren, I feel inferior, everyone in the village knows that my eldest (eldest son) only has two daughters, the second has been outside, and the people in the village do not know whether he has a son. Someone asked me if my second brother was a son and a daughter, and I said ' Hmm' and I dealt with it. Usually I don't want to go out and chat, I don't want to talk about it. I always feel that others will look down on you and say that your two sons have no sons, and it must be that you have done something immoral in your previous life, but in fact, it is fate.
Aunt Liu was grumpy about not having a grandson, and the main reason was that she felt that she had no face in the village.
For farmers in North China, giving birth to sons is more out of the need to participate in village competition, and the functional considerations are more realistic and immediate than the value goal of succession. In contrast, farmers in clan villages in South China have sons more for the sake of passing on the lineage and continuing the value pursuit of incense.
Functionality is different from value, the former is more based on realistic considerations, while the latter emphasizes the continuous value goal. In fact, the different motivations of north China farmers and South China farmers in "male preference" can be further demonstrated from the behavioral logic of intergenerational support of fathers to children.
In the countryside of north China, fathers not only have to have sons, but also have to do everything possible to get each son married. If the offspring end up being reduced to a single stick, then village public opinion will condemn the parents for not being able to do it. The failure of a son to marry will deprive his parents of face within the village, and will also deprive him of the opportunity to participate in the village competition, and gradually marginalize him in the village.
When I investigated, I found that very few people in the local village played singles, and as long as the son did not have intellectual disabilities, his parents would try their best to get him married. If the man's family conditions are not very good, then it can be solved by finding women with poor conditions or by finding women who remarry. If you really can't find the right one, it is also possible to find a woman with intellectual disabilities. In the zhumadian countryside, almost every village has a daughter-in-law with mental disabilities, and these men generally have poor family economic conditions, and even some are disabled. For the man's parents, the only belief is that they cannot let their son beat a single stick, which means that the family will gradually become marginalized in the village. Therefore, even a daughter-in-law with mental disabilities should look for one. Of course, they don't really want the daughter-in-law, but just want her to give birth to a child for the family, preferably a boy. Only with boys can the family continue to gain a foothold in village society.
In rural South China, there is limited intergenerational support from father to offspring. The father has the responsibility to marry the daughter-in-law for the son, but the responsibility does not mean that it must be done by himself, but that the overall resources of the family can be mobilized to help the children get married. Moreover, the parents only have to do their best. If the son is delayed in getting married, the village public opinion will say that the son is too ignorant, so old that he is not married, and he still has to worry about his parents, even if he is really unfortunate enough to become a single stick in the end, the village public opinion is more to condemn the son's own incompetence, rather than saying his parents.
It is precisely because the sons of farmers in North China are mainly out of functional needs, parents will actively participate in the practice of establishing a family for their children, and will not hesitate to fight for their children for a lifetime. For the farmers in South China, having sons is for the continuation of the family bloodline, to serve the needs of the succession, and to be a more long-term and value consideration, so it will not prompt them to actively run for the marriage of their children.
03
The "preference for having a male" that is still relatively common in rural areas of North China is gradually changing under the influence of various factors.
Specifically, the concept of fertility in rural Henan has gradually changed from "many children and many blessings" to "one son and one daughter", but the premise is still that there must be a son. The author learned from the zhumadian rural survey that if the first child is a boy and the second child is still a boy, more than 90% of the families will choose to miscarry. This is mainly due to two reasons: one is the continuous increase in the cost of male marriage, if there is only one son, through the continuous efforts of the parents, they can barely bear the cost of marriage, if there are two sons, in the face of the current cost of marriage, most peasant families are difficult to bear; the second is that the cost of raising children continues to increase, which is related to the increase in market prices, but also stems from the mutual comparison of farmers in raising children. A young daughter-in-law in Dongtou Village said: "Now raising a child even has to compare with other people's food and clothing, and when you see what other people's children eat, your own children do not eat, and you feel that you can't play with others." In the past, everyone was poor, there was nothing to compare, now everything should be compared, the rich should be compared, the rich should be compared, the no money should be compared, smashing pots and selling iron must be compared, otherwise they will feel that they have treated their children badly. It can be seen that the direct driving force for the change of rural farmers' fertility concept in Henan stems from the increase in the cost of marriage for men brought about by the high dowry, as well as the increase in the cost of raising children.
In contrast, the change in the concept of fertility in rural Shandong is different. In the 1980s and 1990s, the local government in rural Shandong had a strong ability to implement the family planning policy, so family planning achieved substantial results. The most prominent manifestation is that "pure female household" households have reached a fairly high rate in rural Shandong.
In the case of Guo Village in Zibo, Shandong Province, which I surveyed in 2016, the proportion of "pure female households" in the village reached 40% among the marriageable young people in their 20s and 30s. A direct result of this is that the current structural imbalance in the marriage market in rural Shandong is not obvious, so the bride price is not as high as in rural Henan. It can be said that the change in the concept of fertility among rural farmers in Shandong is to a large extent the result of strict implementation of policies.