Just How Do I Love Thee?: Marital Relations in Urban China

Marriage quality is much studied, but mostly in the West. This study applies such research to a large, representative sample of couples from urban China using a multidimensional measure of marriage quality. Characteristics unique to Chinese families-the importance of parental approval of mates and the importance of marriage type-- continue to exert a strong influence on the pattern of marriage quality. However, results also support Western feminist arguments that egalitarian behaviors-division of chores and decision making-and attitudes strongly impact marriage quality, but in sometimes unique ways for each gender. As in the West, children are associated with lower marriage quality, partly through increasing domestic inequality, but only in certain types of marriages. Key Words: China, life course, marriage quality, marriage type. Marriage is one of the most intense human relationships. The quality of this relationship is continually redefined by spouses and is potentially crucial to their overall experience of family life. Although a substantial literature on marriage quality exists, most research focuses on Western families, with less understanding of other societies. Can a common set of assumptions about the marital relationship be applied to different societies? This paper expands the existing marriage quality literature to a non-Western setting-the People's Republic of China (PRC). Examining marriage quality in China, a country undergoing rapid economic and social change, can illuminate a number of theoretical debates within marriage and family theory. MARRIAGE AND FAMILY IN CHINA Although the family has long been and remains the basic unit of Chinese society, the relative importance of different kinds of intrafamilial relations has changed greatly. Historically, the conjugal bond took a distant second place to intergenerational ties between parents and children, especially sons. The five relationships of Confucian philosophy, in descending order of importance, demonstrate what little weight was placed on conjugal relations historically: ruler-- minister, father-son, elder brother-younger brother, husband-wife, and friend-friend. China's patrilineal kinship system emphasized family ties traced through men, in an unbroken "descent line" linking a man with both his ancestors and descendants. Because the descent line was more important than individual family relationships, marriage took place to extend the family line, not to benefit the individuals involved (Baker, 1979). Hence, the quality of marital relations was not necessarily a salient concept in Chinese society. An arranged marriage system and virilocal postmarital residence both facilitated the achievement of family reproduction and kept conjugal bonds inferior to intergenerational ties. The husband, remaining within his family of origin, had closer ties to his parents; his wife, an outsider in his family, focused her hopes on her sons, or what Wolf (1972) calls the "uterine" family. In this system, the marital relationship was hardly the focus of romantic expectations. Marriage was universal and utilitarian, conducted for the purposes of having children and furthering the larger family group. During the 20th century, there have been great changes in the Chinese marriage and family system. In the early 1900s, the most disadvantaged of its members-youth and women-began demanding more freedom from family control, first among the urban intellectual elite (Baker, 1979; Lang, 1946). The Communist Party instituted and encouraged even more change, both through explicit reform (e.g., the Marriage Laws of 1950 and 1980) and indirectly (i.e., moving most women into paid employment). Particularly dramatic has been the shift from an arranged marriage system to a pattern of greater freedom in mate choice (Whyte, 1990a; Xu & Whyte, 1990). Shifting control over the marital decision from extended family to individuals has been one of the key family policy goals of the Communist government since 1949 (Meijer, 1971). …