Unintended Marital Separation in The Peoples Republic of China: A Pilot Study

During the last several years the authors have been involved in a number of research studies in the People's Republic of China (Abbott & Zheng, in press; Abbott, Zheng & Meredith, 1992; Meredith, 1991; Meredith, Abbott, Zhu, 1989). On one visit to southern China we worked with a young Chinese professor whose wife lived and worked in a city over 2,500 kilometers away in northern China. At that time, they had lived apart for over two years, and had not seen each other for six months.Prior to their separation, this couple lived together and worked as English teachers in a school in northern China. They were reasonably content, but desired greater economic opportunities and wanted more political freedom. A plan was devised to achieve these goals. One of them would try to secure a job in a larger, more prosperous city in southern China. If that spouse could change work assignments and relocate, the other spouse might be permitted to join the partner at some future time.The husband secured a teaching job at a university in Guangzhou (Canton) with the hope that his wife would be allowed to join him. They could be reunited if her work unit released her and if his work unit in Guangzhou would hire her. But after three years of separation they were still not together. They decided to take a chance. The wife left her job in the north to join her husband, but she did this without the permission of her work unit. She managed to get a teaching job at her husband's work unit in Guangzhou, but it was only a temporary placement. Because she did not get an approved release from her work unit, she had no job security in her new position and she would receive no government benefits, no health care or other entitlements.As we talked with others we discovered that marital separation due to government work policies was not uncommon in today's China, although it was more prevalent in the past. In modern China, all citizens are guaranteed the right to work, but they are obligated to work at jobs assigned them by the State. Once an assignment is made it is very difficult for most people to change jobs or to transfer to another work unit to do the same type of work. The goal of this policy is to equitably distribute human resources throughout the county. If a couple is separated, one spouse may seek a transfer to the city of the partner's work unit, but permission must be granted from the provincial personnel office. Before such a petition is even considered, however, the person must work several years at the current work unit. There is no guarantee that the couple will be reunited because the needs of the State stake precedence over familial obligations (Bonavia, 1982; Bond, 1991; China Daily, 1990).Given the unique nature of this marital form--at least from an American perspective--we decided to carry out a pilot study on married couples separated because of work related reasons. We hoped to gain some insights into how the separation affected marital satisfaction and if certain factors such as the reasons for the separation, the amount of visitation, the extent of social activity with friends, and the presence of children might moderate the affect of separation on marital satisfaction. We hoped that the results of this small scale study could provide guidance for inductive theorizing from which hypotheses could be tested using a larger sample and more complex design.We did begin the project with a basic theoretical assumption that marital interaction--if rewarding--was positively related to marital satisfaction (Burr, 1976). Marital satisfaction can be defined as an individual's subjective evaluation of the overall happiness and contentment with the marital relationship (Lewis & Spanier, 1979). If a certain quantity and quality of interaction between spouses is essential to marital happiness, the converse should also be true: unintentional marital separation would lessen the possibility of positive interaction between spouses and would tend to lower the level of marital satisfaction as perceived by the partners. …