"Living independently is good": residence patterns in rural north China reconsidered.

Filial piety provides an important ideological basis for familybased support in China. Evidence indicates that in recent years the support of the aged within the Chinese extended family has decreased. This article examines filial piety, residence, and support arrangements in three rural Chinese villages. Anthropologists independently conducted research in these villages in the 1990s: Hong Zhang in Zhongshan Village in Hubei Province, Yunxiang Yan in Xiajia Village in Heilongjiang Province, and myself in Lijia Village in Shandong Province. This article examines the strategies used by the young and old in negotiating intergenerational support and residential arrangements within the context of local village circumstances and policies. In each village, the aged are increasingly likely to live apart from children, and to express a preference for living independently. Although these facts appear to contradict filial piety, filial piety continues to be valued. Filial respect of elders, however, is seen less as an inherent right and more as a reciprocal relationship that can be built, maintained, and lost. Housing policies and the economic status of the aged both appear to play an important role in explaining the common trends in these villages as well as explaining the differences between them. To varying degrees in each village, power has shifted to the younger generation. Keywords: filial piety; aging; China, residence arrangements; housing policies Many sources document the fact that there are limits to family-based support across Asia (e.g., Yoon & Hendricks, 2006). In part, this is evidenced by a very noticeable decline in multigenerational living arrangements. Nonetheless, older adults are more likely to live with their children than in the West. This is especially true when the health of the aged declines and the assistance of a caregiver is needed. Studies of nursing homes in China are revealing (see Zhang in this issue). It is not at all surprising to find that there are older people who do not wish to go to nursing homes and never adapt to them, but it is interesting to note that there are also older people in China who wish to go to nursing homes. In some cases, they are prevented from going to nursing homes by their children, who may refuse to put up the money necessary to make the move possible. Whatever the case, a dramatic shift in support for the aged appears to be in process both in China and across Asia (Ikels, 2004; Yan, 2003; Yoon & Hendricks, 2006). Often, Asian governments have failed to provide or institutionalize adequate support networks for the aged because they have expected families to provide the majority of necessary support (Yoon & Hendricks, 2006). In China, the government has actually undermined the ideological and economic basis of support for the elderly within the family without providing adequate alternatives to the family (Miller, 2004a; Yan, 2003). It is often presumed that the reduction in family support and coresidence of elders with their children represents a dramatic ideological shift. This assumption implies that filial piety is both static and relatively free of the influences of its social context. Clearly, filial piety is radically different and much weaker than in the past. It may well be the case that the reason aged parents live with their children less now than they did in the past is that the cultural norms and values that dictated this support have shifted. For example, young people with new and progressive ideas no longer wish to provide the kind of filial support that used to be demanded and the elderly are forced to live on their own. While this is a reasonable assumption, there are cases where the children are the ones who resist the idea of allowing their parents to live alone or go to a nursing facility. Those people do not lack a sense of the value of filial piety. The driving force behind the shift away from family-based support may come from the old as well as the young. …