Abstract:
Outdated models of Chinese gender roles, marriage, and family transitions portray these changes as streamlined and unidirectional, from traditional to modern, public to private, collective to individual. Chinese Marriages in Transition documents the complex, nuanced, and multidirectional nature of these cultural transformations. Using complex and large-scale historical national data as well as comprehensive data from multiple countries, Xiaoling Shu and Jingjing Chen demonstrate that, while the second demographic transition is unfolding in many advanced Western societies, it is not necessarily a normative form of societal transition. Working instead from a framework of “new familism,” Shu and Chen show that Chinese new familism consists of both old and new values, including the persistence of some traditional beliefs and practices, accompanied by a transition to modern perceptions of gender, and adaption to some modern forms of family formation.

About the Speaker:
Shu Xiaoling is a professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on the impacts of two of the most profound processes of our times, marketization and globalization, on gender inequalities, subjective sense of well-being, and gender, family, marriage, and sexual behaviors and attitudes. She uses data science models on national and international data to carry out country-specific (China and the United States) and cross-national analyses. Prof. Shu served as the director of East Asian Studies at UC Davis in 2017-22, chair of the Section on Asia and Asian America of the American Sociological Association in 2018-21, and president of the International Chinese Sociological Association (formerly NACSA) in 2016-17. She is also the author of Knowledge Discovery in the Social Sciences: A Data Mining Approach.