Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.2, 2015

 

Land Collectivization and the Structural Transition of Traditional Rural Families

(Abstract)

 

Wang Tianfu, Wang Fei, Tang Youcai et al

 

We use oral history materials from elderly rural people aged over seventy to analyze rural family production and living conditions prior to collectivization in the mid-1950s; during collectivization from the 1950s to the 1970s; and under the household contract responsibility system of the late 1970s. We find that the transition from the traditional family to the nuclear family was not the result of industrialization in the traditional Western sense. As an early industrialization strategy of the state after 1949, rural collectivization fundamentally changed the organizing pattern of traditional family production and living conditions and of inter-generational relations and structure under the patriarchal system, and in addition started the historical course of structural transition in the family. This explanation differs from the classical “theory of modernization” of family change.