Education, Class and Marriage in Rural Shanxi, China in the Mid-20th Century
Long XING
Shanxi University
Cameron Campbell
The Hong Kong University of Science and TechnologyMatthew Noellert
Shanxi University; University of Iowa
James Lee
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
This paper explores assortative mating by education and registered social class in midtwentieth century rural China. Using data from rural Shanxi province in north China, we examine
whether the dramatic social, political, and economic changes between the founding of thePeople’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 and the mid-1960s altered patterns of assortativemating. Relevant changes included a massive expansion in primary education, extraordinary
efforts at social and economic leveling, and a new marriage law introduced in 1953 that forbid
arranged marriages and other interference by senior generations in the marriage decisions ofadult children. While these and other changes might have been expected to promote marriage
across traditional boundaries defined by social and economic status, other changes such as theassignment of class labels created new boundaries.
This study is distinct from most previous studies of assortative mating in 20th century
China by virtue of its use of detailed and nearly contemporaneous administrative data to focus on
the period immediately after the founding of the PRC, and its use of class labels as anothermeasure of status. Most previous studies of assortative mating in 20th century rely on survey or
Census data collected recently, and well after 1949. Such data typically have a limited number ofmeasures of social and economic status. Often, the only one available for rural populations
education, as recalled by respondents many decades later. We make use of data from registers
compiled in 1964-66 in preparation for the Four Cleanups campaign. As will be discussed later,
the contents of these registers were drawn from other village administrative records that dated
back to 1949. Importantly, they not only record education, but class labels and as well ashousehold landholding and other wealth at multiple points in time.
We have three goals in this paper. The first is to compare patterns of assortative matingby class label and education. We focus in particular on homogamy and female hypergamy. As
we will see later, class label is strongly associated with family landholding before 1949, and isaccordingly closer than education attainment to being a direct measure of past family social andeconomic status. A finding that patterns of assortative mating differed according to whether
status was measured with class label or education would raise the possibility that the current
reliance on educational attainment in studies of assortative mating may be yielding anincomplete picture. The second is to examine whether patterns of assortative mating changed
after 1949. We focus on whether status homogamy and/or female hypergamy intensified orweakened after 1949. As noted earlier, while there are reasons to expect boundaries to haveweakened, there are other reason to expect boundaries to have weakened, there are other reasons
to expect that they strengthened.
The paper is organized as follows. In the first part, we provide background on marriage in
China in the next section, with an emphasis on norms and empirical findings related toassortative mating. We also provide some basic historical context on changes in China in themid-20th century. In the second part, we introduce our setting and our sources. We introduce
rural Shanxi, focusing on features of local context that are important to keep in mind wheninterpreting results and drawing conclusions about China more generally. We also introduce theChina Siqing Social Class Dataset – Shanxi (CSSCD-SX) constructed by the Research Center for
Chinese Social History (RCCSH) at Shanxi University from their collection of village
government archival materials. In the third part, we briefly introduce our methods. Briefly, weuse methods for the analysis of contingency tables, where counts of marriages between men andwomen in particular combinations of categories is modeled as a function of the numbers of men
and women in each category, along with additional variables that summarizes features of thecombination of spouses’ characteristics. In the fourth part, we present our results. We show thatpatterns of assortative mating by education and family class background differ. We then showthat homogamy became less pronounced after 1949. We then examine the interaction between
status assortative mating and village endogamy. We conclude with some remarks about future
directions.