Do your own research on a certain issue mentioned in the textbook and post on the discussion board. Prompt: What’s the issue that interests you the most in Chapter 9? How is China’s approach in handling it? What do you think would be a better approach to it? (300 words and your own ideas should be included after discussing the issue.)
Include the textbook citation and one other external references. Don’t forget the in-text citations and the references at the end. APA FORMATTING!!! Use APA 7th as your formatting option.
The reading is attached below!! Read chapter 9 Environmental Problems!!
309
Historic Strains on China’s Environment
Ma Rong discussed human problems in Chapt
er
8; in this chapter, I discuss
the environment in which humans live and their interactions with it. De-
spite improvements in some areas in recent years, the overall quality of
China’s environment has deteriorated considerably since the founding of
the People’s Republic of China in 1949. The PRC’s current population of
over 1.4 billion may already have exceeded the number that the country can
hope to support at a good standard of living by relying on its own resources
and has led to a massive growth in food imports (Xie Gaodi et al., 2012).
Moreover, rapid unequal economic growth has led to environmental social
unrest, which has increased significantly since 2000 (Steinhardt and Wu,
2016). Judith Shapiro (2012) identifies five intertwined drivers of recent
change in China’s environmental policy: globalization, national identity
(the views of what China should be), governance (reach of the state), civil
society, and a desire for environmental justice. The political system is
changing slowly, with the many local decisions that affect the environment
often remaining beyond central government control. Even the most positive
observers continue to see the combination of a huge population and eco-
nomic activity within a framework lacking political transparency placing
serious strains on China’s environment.
Modification of China’s environment goes back a long way, as Rhoads
Murphey explained in Chapter 3. When humans first settled on the Loess
Plateau in north central China (see Map 2.5), the area was probably covered
with a mixture of forests and grasslands. Intensive use of some of these
lands led to a reduction in vegetation and serious erosion on the plateau
centuries ago. Similar problems occurred elsewhere as the proto-Chinese
9
China’s
Environmental Problems
Richard Louis Edmonds
people proliferated, spread out, and incorporated other groups over the past
2,000 years (Edmonds, 1994:28–35). The Han Chinese evolved some eco-
logically sound agricultural practices that improved the quality of the soil,
but they stripped the land of forests as they spread southward (Vermeer,
1998:247–259). As they spread more slowly to the north and west, they
began to farm virgin land and substantially degraded many fragile areas
(Elvin, 2004; Marks, 2011).
During the 1950s, the Chinese focused on reconstructing a war-torn
country and devising means to promote rapid economic growth. Although
these efforts led to better attempts at hygiene and health care, the govern-
ment generally viewed natural resources as a commodity to be exploited to
create wealth. During the years of the so-called Great Leap Forward
(1958–1961), large numbers of trees were felled for fuel to produce low-
quality steel in small, highly polluting home furnaces. From 1960 to 1962,
China was hit with a drought that, combined with these policies, produced
the Three Bad Years (1960–1962) of widespread famine and staggering es-
timations of death rates in the tens of millions (Dikötter, 2010; J. Yang,
2012; Pietz, 2015:219–232). In 1966, just as the country was devising poli-
cies designed to avoid recurrence of such a catastrophe, Chairman Mao Ze-
dong proclaimed the Cultural Revolution. Close to a decade of political un-
rest followed, and ecological degradation became commonplace (Shapiro,
2001; X. Li et al., 2007; Pietz, 2015:235–238).
In the early 1970s, China began more vigorous efforts to deal with eco-
logical problems, when the government created the National Environmental
Protection Agency, and environmental planning first became included in
national plans. However, the international scale of problems such as climate
change and pollution of the oceans and polar caps increased. But some Chi-
nese academics and policymakers argued that China must follow the “pol-
lute first and clean up later” phase that the developed world had experi-
enced before pollution control received high priority. Still, the government
promulgated an Environmental Protection Law (for trial implementation) in
1979. Under this law, the agency began to write environmental impact
statements on proposed heavy industry, manufacturing, and infrastructure
projects. However, the recommendations of these impact statements gener-
ally were ignored and were not available to the public.
From 1982, the concept of harmonious development (xietiao fazhan),
similar to the idea of sustainable development formulated by the Brunt-
land Commission, was adopted as official policy. It was supposed to initi-
ate recycling and pollution abatement measures. However, the new small
entrepreneurs did not comply. A full-fledged Environmental Protection
Law was adopted in 1989, but environmental policy decisions continued
to be held back by vagueness of the laws and local priorities that accentu-
ated economic growth and corruption as well as the relative weakness of
310 Richard Louis Edmonds
many local environmental protection bureaus (Ma and Ortolano, 2000; G.
Chen, 2009).
In the 1990s, the Chinese system began to open with the formation of
nongovernmental organizations, although many were either “government-or-
ganized NGOs” or had to register under the supervision of government spon-
sors leading to what could be called an embedded structure (P. Ho and Ed-
monds, 2007). New laws allowed for a modest increase in public participation
in environmental matters (Moore and Warrant, 2006:5–6; G. Chen,
2009:33–52) but, as already mentioned in Chapter 4, protest also grew consid-
erably (Steinhardt and Wu, 2016). The rapid growth of China’s role in the in-
ternational economy in the past two and a half decades has been accompanied
by growing demands from the international community for China to adhere to
international environmental standards at the level of a developed country.
Moreover, there are increasing concerns about China’s investments in other
countries causing serious environmental problems—largely through mining
and dam construction and other infrastructure projects, including its One Belt,
One Road project from China to Europe (Economy and Levi, 2014).
Contemporary Environmental Problems
Pollution has grown rapidly in China while water supply, vegetation, soil
quality, and other natural resources have dwindled. Urbanization has been
rapid, with plans to relocate hundreds of millions of rural people to cities
by 2030. There may well be a metacity stretching all the way from Beijing
in the north through Shanghai to Hong Kong in the south by 2020 (Sta-
moran, 2010). China already has much less land area, forest cover, and
water resources per person than the average country. Cropland accounts for
only 11 percent of China’s total area. China has been getting around food
shortages by importing resources, which has facilitated environmental
degradation in other countries.
Water Shortages
China’s water shortage has grown steadily throughout the reform period
(Gleick, 2009; L. Zhao and Seng, 2010:165–194; Bateman, 2014). The
country currently supports over 18 percent of the world’s population with
only 8 percent of the world’s water. Many rivers, lakes, reservoirs, and
aquifers have shrunk or dried up during the past four decades and an esti-
mated 55 percent of the country’s rivers that existed in the 1990s have dis-
appeared. China has stopped expanding its irrigated area since the begin-
ning of the 1980s. Water shortage is at its worst north of the Huai River
(roughly, in a line due west along the mouth of the Yangtze River; see Map
2.5), where 65 percent of China’s cultivated land has access to only 17 per-
cent of the country’s water, and there is considerable annual variation in
China’s Environmental Problems 311
precipitation. The water table in northern China is currently estimated to be
falling a meter a year (Qiu, 2010). Some cities have sunk as the earth set-
tles to adjust to this loss of water and the construction of large buildings.
For example, about 1,000 square kilometers of land in Shanghai (Map 2.3)
has subsidized since 1921; Tianjin has seen subsidence problems since the
1960s; and other cities such as Suzhou, Changzhou, Taiyuan, and Xi’an
have been affected (Yi et al., 2011). Although rising sea levels, increased
erosion, and geological movements of the earth’s crust can be responsible
for this condition, the lowering of the water table is a key factor.
The water supply problem is most acute around big cities in northern
China, where precipitation levels are lower and coal consumption and
production are much higher than in the south (Wong, 2016a). It is said
that two-thirds of China’s official cities are water short and about one-
sixth of them suffer from severe shortages (Cheng, Hu, and Zhao,
2009:241). The Yellow River had stopped flowing virtually every year
from 1985, and dried up for seven months in 1998, resulting in the August
2002 announcement of a ten-year project to tackle environmental prob-
lems. Flow rate has improved recently (International Water Centre, 2012).
Whether flow shortages are avoided or not, projects to move water north,
one via the Grand Canal and a second, central route from the Three
Gorges (Sanxia) Dam, were completed in 2013 and late in 2014, respec-
tively (K. Zhao, 2014). Because irrigation water is often used in an inef-
ficient manner, the government has modestly increased charges in cities
such as Guangzhou (Tan, 2014) and advocated dry-land farming, and
water quotas assigned to industries have resulted in some savings. Water
associations have also helped improve water management in rural areas.
As incomes continue to increase, however, and more people move from
older housing into homes with modern plumbing, domestic water con-
sumption will increase. The water shortage problem has even become an
international issue as China increasingly builds dams in the upper reaches
of rivers that flow into other countries, causing concern in Southeast and
South Asia (Tilt, 2015).
Forest Loss and Recovery
All major basins now experience annual floods and drought, due in part to
past forest loss. For example, during June!July 2016, flooding affected 31
million people and 73,000 buildings collapsed in southern China. The State
Forestry Administration indicated in 2013 that a national survey revealed
that China forest cover is equal to 21.63 percent of the country’s total area,
which is roughly two-thirds of the world average (“China’s Forest Areas
Cover 21.63 Pct of Land,” 2014). Illegal logging activities had been wide-
spread, especially as the market economy made it easy to sell timber. China
is now the largest importer of wood with about 15 percent of imports being
312 Richard Louis Edmonds
illegal (Illegal Logging Portal, 2016). The natural forests that remain today
have been saved largely by inaccessibility.
China aims to reach 23 percent forest coverage by 2020. There are sev-
eral large projects to plant trees along the middle and upper reaches of the
Yangtze River, around Beijing, in the north, and elsewhere (Yin and Yin,
2009:1–12). These programs have planted billions of trees, but some have
voiced criticism for planting monoculture and use of water-demanding non-
native species (Luoma, 2012).
In addition, the Obligatory Tree-Planting Program, adopted in 1981, re-
quires all Chinese citizens above the age of eleven to plant three to five
trees each year or do other relevant forestry work, although reports suggest
that only a little over half the targeted population participated in the oblig-
atory tree-planting programs. In the meantime, Xi Jinping and other leaders
continue to undertake photo-op tree plantings (“President Xi Plants Trees,
Urges Forestry Development,” 2016). Most Chinese cities, and many areas
in the countryside, show the benefits of urban tree-planting programs along
streets and highways.
Soil Erosion and Nutrient Loss
Over one-fifth of China’s area is not suitable for plant growth. Moreover,
the country has one of the most serious soil erosion problems in the world.
According to the First National Water Resource Census, 31.12 percent of
China’s total land area is affected by soil erosion (Ministry of Water Re-
sources, 2014). Rapid soil erosion has contributed to China’s overall envi-
ronmental degradation in several ways. Riverbeds, lakes, and reservoirs silt
up and their hydroelectric and flood control storage capacity is reduced.
The loss of good-quality topsoil reduces arable land and food production.
Some of the most severe erosion occurs in northern portions of the
semiarid Loess Plateau of north central China (see Map 2.5). According to
some reports, the plateau loses about a third of an inch (0.838 centimeters)
of topsoil each year and about 60 percent of the land has suffered some sort
of soil erosion, generally above 2,000 tons per square kilometer per year
(Zheng and Wang, 2013). The Yangtze River valley in central China and
Heilongjiang and eastern Inner Mongolia in the northeast are other badly
affected areas. Even areas in the far south that once had little erosion—such
as Yunnan, Hainan, Fujian, and Jilin—have had severe soil erosion in the
past four decades.
China has made considerable efforts to stem the flow of topsoil. A mas-
sive area of eroded land that has been improved since the mid-1950s has
been planted with trees or terraced. In addition, tens of thousands of check
dams have been built across small gullies to control erosion. Today, the
focus has shifted from individual plots to entire river basins and from central
to local government. The problem is the massive scale of the effort required.
China’s Environmental Problems 313
The increased erosion largely resulted from policies implemented since
the 1950s that opened steep slopes, formerly forested areas, and wetlands to
farming. Some of those areas that were opened up are being returned to
forests and herding. However, many of the areas where such policy needs
to be carried out are generally poor and remote. Still, areas such as parts of
the Loess Plateau have seen over 90 percent soil retention rates through
various mitigation methods such as check dams (Xu Xiang-Zhou et al.,
2012).
China’s soils lack nutrients even where they are not yet degraded to a
point that crops will not grow. For example, the rich yields of southern
China have been obtained only through heavy labor inputs, fertilizer, and in
poorer areas the widespread use of manure and composted matter. The nat-
ural organic content of China’s soil averages less than 1.5 percent. Today,
some peasants are beginning to practice “ecological agriculture,” combin-
ing farming, animal husbandry, and forestry with local food processing and
reuse of residual materials while larger conglomerates are attempting sus-
tainable agriculture on an increasing scale.
In the past decade, Chinese corporations and the government have
taken to buying up land overseas—mostly in Africa, South America, and to
a lesser extent in Southeast Asia, Siberia, and even Ukraine—to grow crops
for the Chinese market (Horta, 2014). This is seen as a cheap way to in-
crease food security, but it has also led to resentment and difficulties in the
countries where the land is leased.
Desertification and Salinization-Alkalinization
Approximately one-quarter of China’s land is degraded by dry climate and
sand or rocky desert. Despite progress in recent years, an almost continuous
belt of degraded land stretches from northwest to northeast China (see Map
2.5). Desertification affects millions of people and vast areas of pasturage,
cropland, and rangeland as well as railway lines, roads, and even the Great
Wall (Williams, 2002; Marks, 2011). Sandstorms related to desertification
cause considerable economic damage. Most notably, the government wor-
ried about dust storms that affected the Beijing and Tianjin areas and in-
vested considerable effort in the areas to the northwest of Beijing.
Desertification and water shortages go hand-in-hand. These glaciers
have lost 8 percent of their volume in the past forty years. Annual mean
temperatures have been rising in the northwest at a rate of 0.7 degrees
Fahrenheit every ten years, causing glaciers there to recede nearly twice as
fast between 1978 and 2004, triggering dust storms and diminishing the
flow of the Yellow, Yangtze, West, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Ganges, Sal-
ween, Irrawaddy, and Indus Rivers, all of which have their source in the
mountains of this region. If this rate of melt continues, nearly all the gla-
ciers could be gone by the end of the twenty-first century, leaving these
314 Richard Louis Edmonds
rivers without a steady water source and rapidly speeding desertification.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as others,
predict a much faster rate of melt than that (“Glacier Study Reveals Chill-
ing Prediction,” 2004; “Tibetan Glacier Melt Leading to Sandstorms,”
2006; Collier, 2007; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007;
Morton, 2011). In short, glacial melt in the Himalayas could eventually lead
to a major global water conflict. That said, China’s 2014 pledge to cut
greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 offers some hope of slowing the pace of
the melt.
Although China has improved large areas of salinized-alkalinized land
since 1949, problems of salinization and alkalinization remain serious due
to inefficient drainage and excessive irrigation, which have increased the
levels of salts in the soil. Various estimates indicate that a fifth of China’s
irrigated cropland is salinized and some counties in the drier parts of north-
east China have more than 20 percent of their land salinized (X. Li et al.,
2007:422). Crops sensitive to salt cannot grow on this land. It appears that
the total area affected by salinization is continuing to grow. Overpumping
in coastal areas has also allowed saltwater to seep into the groundwater
supply. The major land reclamation projects carried out during the Great
Leap Forward in the late 1950s destroyed many wetlands that had helped
dissipate excess water during flood periods (Shapiro, 2001). This led to
China’s Environmental Problems 315
A view of one of China’s 46,298 glaciers, which are
rapidly shrinking due to climate change.
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increased flooding and salinization of flooded areas. Today, more wetland
areas are being filled for industrial development and housing.
Pollution
Despite considerable improvement in recent years, China’s industries re-
main major polluters. According to a 2007 report, 750,000 people were
dying of pollution in China annually (World Bank, 2007). By 2014, 28.8
percent of the tested sections of China’s major river systems were catego-
rized in the lowest two grades of water quality or below, with the Hai, Huai,
Yellow, and Songhua Rivers having the worst quality; and one-quarter of
China’s major lakes failed to meet China’s Grade III standard, with 12.5
percent failing to make even the lowest standard, Grade V (Government of
China, 2016). These figures suggest progress in inland water improvement
in recent years, but it is difficult to know the accuracy of such estimates
since testing is more advanced in some parts of the country, some of the
testing is done in-house, and local governments can sometimes overlook re-
sults that benefit local power brokers. Finally, as has been discovered in
parts of the United States, there can be little knowledge about or testing of
pipes leading into homes (Economy, 2013).
Water pollution is more serious in populous eastern China than in the
northeastern quarter of the country while the western area sees increasing
problems as it industrializes (Larson, 2012). Millions of rural people rely
on surface water, which makes them particularly vulnerable to possible pol-
lution. In general, only lakes and reservoirs that provide drinking water
have been protected, and even some of these have levels of ammonia nitro-
gen higher than the national standards. Pollution is especially severe in
small lakes near urban areas. Problems in many large lakes, such as Tai
Lake, Chao Lake, and Dian Lake, appear to be spreading from smaller bod-
ies of water. In 2013, the Dian Lake Metropolitan Authority near the city of
Kunming began a costly diversion, pumping water from the Niulan River
westward toward Dian, which has sped up water circulation in the lake by
about 25 percent. Such local improvements can make worries for down-
stream rural areas (Scally, 2016).
There have been some alarming cases of pollution of the coastal seas
and some estuaries and bays with dead zones of coastal eutrophication in-
creasing since the 1960s (Tong et al., 2015). The most poignant case was
pollution of the Bo Sea off the northern China coast, which had become so
serious that a fifteen-year cleaning program was launched in 2001.
Pollution from organic chemicals and heavy metals has been serious in
places. Inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus generally exceed the Chinese
maximum limit in coastal waters. Oil concentrations above fishery stan-
dards have been found in coastal waters such as the Pearl River Delta
around Guangzhou, Dalian Bay, and Jiaozhou Bay. Red tides, which refer
316 Richard Louis Edmonds
to seawater discolored by certain types of marine plankton that feed on pol-
lution and are fatal to many forms of marine life, continue to increase along
China’s coastline and occurred seventy-three times in 2012 (Tong et al.,
2015). In mid-2016, China announced that it was building the world’s first-
ever floating nuclear power station to be in operation by 2019 and sug-
gested that such a plant could speed “commercial development” in the con-
tested South China Sea (Chang, 2016).
The groundwater around some cities has been found to contain phe-
nols, cyanides, chromium, chlorides, nitrates, sulfates, and increasing de-
grees of hardness. Wells have had to be shut down. In 2016, the govern-
ment reported that 80.2 percent of groundwater in the country was unfit to
drink (X. Chen, 2016). Moreover, polluted groundwater is difficult to treat.
That said, groundwater pollution has improved in some cities, but the over-
all trend indicating that the category of “excellent” and “good” groundwa-
ter classification worsened each year from 2010 to 2015 (China Water Risk,
2016). It may be that improved monitoring is giving a more realistic picture
of the state of groundwater rather than such rapid deterioration. Lowered
water tables around some coastal cities have added to salinization of
groundwater. In many cases, people have taken to drinking bottled water,
but fake bottled water has undermined confidence in this source (China
Water Risk, 2016).
Water pollution problems are by no means confined to urban areas. In
suburban and rural areas with relatively high densities of farm animals, an
increase in nitrates can be detected in the soil and water. Many small rivers
have become anoxic—no longer able to sustain aquatic life. As mentioned
above, many lakes are suffering from eutrophication—overloads of organic
pollution. More than 80 percent of groundwater in rural areas on the popu-
lated plains of north and central China is estimated to be polluted (Buckley
and Piao, 2016).
Although China has undertaken increased efforts to improve soils in a
wide range of environments, soil pollution has negated much of this initia-
tive. In 2016, a survey by the Ministries of Environmental Protection and
Land and Resources stated that about 16.1 percent of lands surveyed were
polluted by heavy metals including cadmium, arsenic, lead, and mercury,
and 19.4 percent exceeded national standards with the situation particularly
severe in central and southwestern China (“Battle to Clean China’s Soil an
Uphill Struggle,” 2016). The levels of remediation of polluted soil being
undertaken at contaminated industrial sites are inadequate and there is a
need to increase efforts (Y. Yao, 2016).
Increased and improper applications of chemical fertilizers, coupled
with growing livestock production, have also led to degradation of soil
quality in rural areas (Meng Yang, 2012). China’s fertilizer usage is higher
than the world average and rose to a record high in 2014 according to Food
China’s Environmental Problems 317
and Agriculture Organization data (Food and Agriculture Organization
2017).
Pesticide use remains heavy and excessive in some areas, though there is
some evidence that in some places pesticides are underused (Zhang et al.,
2016). Despite the growth of a pesticide monitoring system, lack of oversight
and rapid growth have led to unscrupulous entrepreneurs selling foods
processed with cheap substitutes and additives, many of which are poisonous.
Biogas appears to be a good (but minor) solution to both the solid
waste and the energy shortage problems in rural China, which goes through
cycles of promotion and relative abandonment. Biogas is methane produced
by the decomposition of organic matter. The gas can be generated in reac-
tors into which crop waste, animal and human excrement, and a fermenting
agent are placed. The residual sludge from this process is organic and
makes an excellent fertilizer.
At its height in 1978, the Chinese said there were 7 million biogas
small-scale reactors in use, mostly in southern China. The transformation to
family farming generally hurt the production of biogas since the communes
provided a larger-scale operation for reactors and the labor force needed to
maintain them. The Chinese government is giving subsidies to farmers to
build larger-scale biogas reactors to control stock farm pollution in part be-
cause of greenhouse gas concerns, although some reports show a low rate
of digester use and the residue water from the process can still be polluting
(Xia, 2013). Chinese companies now export biogas digesters to other coun-
tries and have been looking into using biogas within the vehicle fuel mix.
Another solution to emerge on the scene in recent years is shale gas, which
China is beginning to pursue in Sichuan, Liaoning, and other areas (K. Liu
and Turner, 2011). It now is the second-largest producer in the world after
the United States (Cutler and Schwartz, 2014). However, there are ques-
tions about water usage and pollution in connection with this new gas ex-
traction method that suggest it might not be the best solution for a water-
short country such as China. Yet another area of expansion is in biofuels
and, most notably for China, “second-generation biofuels,” which are oils
made from agricultural wastes instead of agricultural food products.
Bioethanol and biodiesel are expected to grow in use, with all automotive
gasoline to be made from biofuel and nonfossil energy accounting for 15
percent of total energy use by 2020 (Wang Xiaotian, 2011; USDA, 2013).
China creates about 300 million tons of waste a year (J. Li, 2015). This
rapid growth has been fueled by rapid urbanization, industrialization, and
consumerism, with recycling not keeping pace and waste disposal problems
affecting all. There remains a tendency toward more wet trash in Chinese
cities, which generates a greater proportion of methane than in the United
States or Western Europe and is harder to incinerate. Around mining sites in
rural areas, tailings of milled ore residues create reservoirs of polluted
318 Richard Louis Edmonds
water. A considerable proportion of the waste released by industry is
dumped directly into rivers and streams, although new regulations are being
planned to require the mining sector to treat more than 85 percent of its
wastewater (Stanway, 2016).
Although China has moved from solid fuels to gas, to a considerable
degree (Carrington, 2016), especially in urban areas, this is offset by the
growth of city populations and rural development such that the refuse prob-
lem continues to grow. To increase natural gas supply to keep up with rapid
demand, China is importing considerable amounts both by pipeline and as
liquefied natural gas. China imported 53 billion cubic meters of natural gas
in 2015, and the government estimates that it will reach 12 percent of
China’s energy mix by 2020 and the country will be importing 270 billion
cubic meters by 2030 (Collins and Erickson, 2010; Cutler and Schwartz,
2014; Slav, 2016). China imported its first shipment of liquefied natural gas
from the forty-eight coterminous United States in 2016 through the Panama
Canal (Hsu, 2016). Yet gas plays a relatively small role in China’s energy
mix. It is also expanding coalbed methane production and is experimenting
with coalbed methane liquification.
Most urban refuse is removed by truck or boat to farms or dumping
sites at ever-increasing distances from city centers, and most often it is
poorer people at the periphery of these cities who suffer. Since 2009, there
has been a rise in protests related to excess dumping around various cities
in China (Kao, 2011). Research into how to bury trash in lined landfills
began only in 1986, and the first modern incineration plant was built in
Shenzhen in 1987. China began to set up toxic waste storage sites during
the 1990s and the number of brownfield sites is increasing, with some dat-
ing from the 1950s and penetrating the soil up to 10 meters in depth (J. Xie
and Li, 2010:3).
An initial nuclear power station became operational at Qinshan in
Zhejiang province during 1991. By mid-2016, thirty-five nuclear plants
were in operation with a further twenty under construction. So far, the
Chinese say that monitoring at these power plants has indicated no per-
ceivable impacts on the surrounding environment. Nuclear power as of
2016 accounted for only 3 percent of China’s power supply, compared to
18.8 percent in the United Kingdom, 19.5 percent in the United States,
0.5 percent in Japan, and 76.3 percent in France. Although China’s plans
to build new plants is slowing, it is still highly likely that the amount of
energy produced from nuclear fuel will increase significantly during the
next decade.
Coal-fired power stations are a problem that China is addressing, al-
though coal still accounts for about 70 percent of energy production. New
cement plants, steel mills, aluminum smelters, and petrochemical, glass,
paper, and other energy-intensive industries are opening, but at a slower
China’s Environmental Problems 319
pace in the past few years. And over 55,000 new automobiles go into serv-
ice each day. Together, they are responsible for creating greenhouse gases,
which include CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide. China surpassed the United
States to be the world’s largest CO2 emitter in 2006, with total carbon diox-
ide emissions of 10.5 billion tons in 2014, although per capita emissions re-
main about half that of the United States. That said, China plans to reduce
its carbon emissions by 18 percent between 2016 and 2020, which is likely
to be facilitated by a slowing economy. China became the world’s largest
auto production site in 2013, with the annual number produced growing to
21 million cars in 2016. China’s oil demand in 2015 was close to 10.63 mil-
lion barrels of oil a day and the amount keeps growing.
Particle levels in Chinese cities, about half of which is caused by coal
combustion, are worse than in most urban areas in industrialized countries.
Production of coal seems to have peaked in China in 2013!2014, although
statistics are somewhat unreliable. About 70 percent of China’s energy was
produced by burning coal; that is not likely to change much until at least
2025, when pipelines from newly acquired oil fields in Kazakhstan are
completed and will make petroleum more steadily available. Much coal is
burned in small- to medium-sized furnaces, often with poorer efficiency
than is the case in Japan or the United States. Progress made in particle
control has been negatively offset largely by increased coal consumption,
although this is likely to slow considerably in the next decade. Particulate
levels are higher in the cities and provinces of the north (Beijing, Tianjin,
Hebei, Qinghai, Liaoning, and Ningxia). There are serious questions about
320 Richard Louis Edmonds
Morning smog at Temple of Heaven in Beijing.
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the accuracy of China’s air pollution monitoring, growth in the number of
the more dangerous small-sized particulates, and a view that the situation
has not improved in recent years (Andrews, 2008–2009). One encouraging
sign, however, was the municipality of Beijing’s release of its first smog
red alert in December 2015, and it appears that the city’s air pollution prob-
lems have been reduced slightly. Recent awareness and concern about air
pollution was spurred on by the video Under the Dome, which went viral
on the Web and was quickly banned (Chai, 2015). One study concluded that
38 percent of the Chinese population lives in areas with long-term air qual-
ity averages that would be classified as “unhealthy” by US standards, and it
is also estimated that 1.6 million people die each year from heart and lung
problems and strokes because of heavily polluted air (Huang, 2016).
Despite real attempts at improvement of pollution in the past couple of
years there remains a legacy from past pollution problems. The World Bank
(2007) report Cost of Pollution in China, written with the cooperation of
Chinese ministries, had about 30 percent of its text cut, including a sensi-
tive finding that 750,000 people die prematurely each year from urban air
pollution, with perhaps 300,000 of those dying from poor air indoors (Mc-
Gregor, 2007; World Bank, 2007; M. S. Ho and Nielsen, 2007). Coal burn-
ing continues to be seen as having the worst health impact in China with an
assessment of it as the cause of death for 366,000 Chinese in 2013 (Wong,
2016b). Cancer rates from air and water pollution are said to be rising rap-
idly. In 2011, the Ministry of Health revealed that cancer had become the
leading cause of death in China—and it remains so at the writing of this
chapter in 2017 (Larsen, 2011; W. Chen et al., 2016).
Despite decline of emissions in recent years China remains a major
emitter of sulfur dioxide (SO2). Sulfur dioxide, like particulate, is closely
connected with coal smoke, which produces the vast majority of SO2 emis-
sions. Sulfur dioxide causes acid rain, which inflicts considerable crop
damage as well as material damage. More than 30 percent of the country’s
total area is subject to rain, and in 2014 close to 30 percent of the 470 cities
(districts, counties) under precipitation monitoring were stricken with acid
rain. The problem is most serious in the area east of the Qinghai-Tibetan
Plateau, including the Sichuan Basin and south of the Yangtze River (see
Map 2.5). Because of the high temperatures in the atmosphere there, sulfur
dioxide converts to acid faster than in most northern industrial countries.
More than half of the rainfall in southern China is overly acidic.
New wind-powered electrical generating plants are also under con-
struction, with estimates suggesting wind power generation could supply
up to 14 percent of China’s energy demand by 2030 (Yuan, 2016). Solar
buildings as well as bases have been constructed and manufacturing is
growing with China now the largest producer of solar panels as well as
the largest market (Campana, 2010; Fehrenbacher, 2015; Mu Yang and
China’s Environmental Problems 321
Yu, 2011:81–100, 137–198). China is also the largest geothermal energy
producer and it is talking about producing much more. Still, the propor-
tions of solar and geothermal energy in domestic use remain small com-
pared to conventional energy generation, but it is an area targeted for
growth by the government.
Noise has received low priority compared with other forms of pollu-
tion, but regulations have toughened in recent years. Before 1982, there
were no standards set for construction materials. Many buildings were built
with steel-reinforced concrete panels little more than an inch (3 or 4 cen-
timeters) thick. When one walked on the stairs in these buildings, the noise
sounded like drumbeats. As of 2014, just under three-quarters of the 327
Chinese cities attained a Grade Two standard, although those results repre-
sented a decline from 2013 (Government of China, 2016). Citizen com-
plaints about noise have mushroomed in the twenty-first century, making
noise control a major issue in urban China. The government is concentrat-
ing on reducing noise from traffic, construction, and industry, as well as
residential noise, and most rigorously in urban areas. Nationally, more at-
tention is being paid to constructing noise barriers along high-speed ex-
pressways and other transport corridors as well as enforcing bans on night-
time construction.
Pollution problems in general are compounded by the favoritism that
many industries receive from local government, which has allowed them to
operate inefficient equipment without scrubbers or sewage treatment, al-
though significant process in the construction of sewage plants has oc-
curred in recent years leaving the national recycling rate at about 15 percent
(Bateman, 2014). Air quality had become so bad by late 2015 that Beijing
found it necessary to plan 500-meter-wide “ventilation corridors” through
the city to “blow away” smog after periods of heavy pollution (“Beijing
Plans Ventilation Corridors to Blow Away Smog,” 2016). The picture in
rural China is less clear and varies from region to region.
Many waste-producing industries have relocated from the urban areas
to the countryside over the past three and a half decades. There has been
some local success in the control of rural pollution but streams of consumer
wastes and agricultural runoff, which account for 70 percent of water pollu-
tion, along with illegal dumping of industrial and municipal wastes, remain
problems despite improvements in water efficiency measures at the provin-
cial level (Schneider, 2011). Many rural areas have employed complex and
intensive waste-recycling systems to produce high-value products such as
silk and freshwater fish. In some cases, pollution in rural areas has been re-
duced by consolidating small plants so their wastes can be treated and min-
erals recycled. However, the number of cases of untreated rural wastes
being discharged is still serious. Some rural villages continue to freely
dump and burn their waste without sorting. Sewage monitoring has in-
322 Richard Louis Edmonds
creased since the 1990s. Despite much effort, pollution problems remain
significant in China. However, significant efforts in recent years to address
pollution have meant there has been improvement in places. The costs of
pollution have been tremendous in economic terms and have helped en-
courage change. Perhaps most significant in stimulating change has been
the growth of citizen protests against pollution and projects that could pol-
lute, including paraxylene plants in Xiamen (2007) and Kuming (2013); an
incineration plant in the Panyu District of Guangzhou Municipality, Guang-
dong (2009); an oil pipeline explosion in Dalian (2010); and chemical ex-
plosions in Tianjin and Zhangzhou (2015) (Steinhardt and Wu, 2016). The
rise of the middle class in China as elsewhere created more pollution at the
same time as it stimulated efforts to reduce pollution. International linkages
have also impacted the Chinese government through treaty ratification,
through nongovernmental activism, and to a lesser degree through corpo-
rate responsibility activities.
Nature Conservation
China is known as a treasure house for many rare species of wildlife. The
first nature reserve and laws directly dealing with nature conservation ap-
peared in 1956, which represents a good early start. In the early 1980s, the
government set up a wildlife protection bureau, an office to control import
and export of endangered species, and the China Wildlife Conservation As-
sociation (Enderton, 1985). In 1988, the government devised China’s first
wildlife protection law, which stipulated details of administration and pun-
ishments. In 1992, the State Council promulgated Regulations on the Pro-
tection of Terrestrial Wild Fauna of the People’s Republic of China, and the
government published the first volume of China’s Plant Red Data Book:
Rare and Endangered Flora (Fu, 1992). Local governments have followed
suit with similar laws and regulations, but many species continue to dwin-
dle. At the end of 2014, there were 2,729 nature reserves in China covering
14.84 percent of China’s national land territory. Nature reserves are organ-
ized into various types arranged here in order of total area: desert ecosys-
tem, wild animals, forest ecosystem, inland wetlands, wild plants, grassland
and meadow, geological monuments, marine and coastal ecosystems, and
paleontological monuments (Government of China, 2016). In addition, as
of 2015, there was an expanding system of 98 designated wetland parks and
822 national forest parks geared toward tourism.
The administration of nature reserves in China is not uniform, how-
ever. Many of China’s nature reserves are considered national nature pre-
serves (428 in 2014), and others are classified as provincial or local. Dif-
ferent reserves are often administered by different organizations and at
different government levels. The forestry bureaus have tended to domi-
China’s Environmental Problems 323
nate because nature conservation work began in the Ministry of Forestry
(now called the State Forestry Administration), although oversight of the
system is now under the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Other
government organs involved in nature reserve management and supervi-
sion have included the Ministry of Land and Resources, the Ministry of
Water Resources, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Chinese Academy of
Natural Sciences, and the State Oceanic Administration. This mixture of
bureaucracies has hindered management due to overlaps in responsibili-
ties and priorities.
Vertebrate species are protected in the PRC at first-class or second-
class levels of protection. China also has three categories of protected plant
species. Animals and plants receiving first-class protection are those that
are endemic, rare, precious, or threatened. Those accorded second-class
protection are species whose numbers are declining or whose geographical
distribution is becoming more restricted. The third-class species are plants
of economic importance, and thus harvesting is to be limited. In general,
the preservation method has been to establish nature reserves in the areas
where the wildlife live and breed or to establish artificial breeding centers.
Certain endangered species are recovering. However, some animal popula-
tions continue to remain low or to decrease. For example, increased nutri-
ent loading and industrial pollution in lakes, along with the construction of
dams and weirs, have led to drastic reductions in fish and crustacean yields
and species. Often, to increase food production, crab and carp eggs have
been stocked in lakes, leading to a reduction of indigenous species and, in
some cases, extinction.
China is a member of the Man and the Biosphere Program of the UN
Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), has signed
the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (of Wild
Fauna and Flora) (CITES), has sites on the UNESCO World Heritage Com-
mission’s list, and has nature reserves included on the International Impor-
tant Wetlands List. Many of the larger reserves have research organizations
attached, often with international cooperation.
In 1981, an agreement was signed with the World Wildlife Fund to pro-
tect and study the giant panda (Schaller, 1993). Although archaeological ev-
idence indicates that pandas once were distributed widely over southern
China, their range now has shrunk to small areas in southern Shaanxi,
Gansu, and Sichuan. During 1975 and 1976, 138 giant pandas were found
dead along the Sichuan-Gansu border (Map 2.2) due to deterioration of the
arrow bamboo and square bamboo groves that provide their food (Enderton,
1985). This panda famine stimulated a series of attempts to preserve the an-
imals’ habitat. The total giant panda population of China in the wild was es-
timated to be 1,864 in 2014, which represents almost a doubling of the
number in the 1970s (WWF Global, 2016). There are sixty-seven reserves
324 Richard Louis Edmonds
protecting the giant panda in southwest China containing about two-thirds
of the panda population.
China’s cooperation with other countries and multinational corpora-
tions in conserving animals has been increasing since the 1980s. However,
as ecotourism grows, the desire to bring in tourist revenue can compromise
the conservation aspects of nature parks. Cases of national parks being
turned into tourist spots have been common. The effects of tourism on
China’s nature preserves have rarely been positive. Wealthy Chinese have
been known to pay large amounts for tiger bones, elephant tusks, and parts
of other endangered species. China’s ivory trade has been linked directly to
the threat to the African elephant’s survival, with legal factories and outlets
in China increasing from 31 in 2004 to 145 in 2013 (Gao and Clark, 2014).
There are many illegal ivory outlets as well.
The various units that administer the nature reserves have had a ten-
dency to look for short-term economic advantage or to protect only those
aspects of the environment beneficial to their bureau’s interests. Often, state
forests or forest parks are located next to nature reserves; joint management
of these could bring increased conservation benefits. Sometimes reserves
are zoned for various revenue-generating or productive purposes, compro-
mising their conservation role.
Attempts have been made in many of the larger nature reserves to com-
pensate and relocate local dwellers. The government has been trying to
solve employment problems for some local people by training them as for-
est rangers or nature reserve staff. There remain cases where logging and
hunting are still happening in areas where such activities are prohibited by
law.
Most Chinese environmentalists point to the long-term economic value
that improved management of nature conservation brings. This was the ar-
gument that had attracted the attention of a government intent on rapid eco-
nomic development, although priorities have been changing. China’s poli-
cymakers have come to understand that nature conservation is a necessity
for the country’s long-term survival. So far, overseas help and the dedica-
tion of Chinese researchers have moved the agenda forward. In addition, in
recent years, China has become concerned about invasive foreign species.
The Three Gorges Dam
In spite of recent international controversies over dam building on rivers in
southwestern China that flow into Southeast and South Asian neighboring
states (discussed in Chapter 7), the most controversial dam built in China
remains the Three Gorges (Sanxia) Dam on the Yangtze River in western
Hubei province. The Sanxia area, which extends for 125 miles (200 kilome-
ters) along the river, is rich in historical sites and evokes many ancient
China’s Environmental Problems 325
Chinese legends (see Hengduan Shan on Map 2.5). It contained six historic
walled cities, ancient plank roads cut into cliffs, Stone Age archaeological
village sites, many old temples and burial sites, and miles of spectacular
caves. It was home to a multitude of plants and animals. The sublime
beauty and strategic significance of the Three Gorges was celebrated for
centuries in the works of China’s poets and travelers (for photos prior to
reservoir impounding, see Benson, 2006; Zorn, 2006). To build a dam in an
area of such cultural and natural treasures was bound to cause irredeemable
damage.
Proposals for building a dam in the Sanxia area date to the 1920s, and
arguments for and against the project persisted among various ministries
and provinces from that time (Edmonds, 1992; Q. Dai, 1997). The climate
of repression in the aftermath of the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989
helped stifle public opposition. The 1991 Yangtze and Huai River floods
brought the issue to the fore, and, since a principal objective of the dam
was flood control, the stance of proponents was strengthened. Defiant ges-
tures in the National People’s Congress during formal approval in the
spring of 1992 over the dam issue included a record-breaking number of
delegates voting against the project, or abstaining, and an unprecedented
walkout by two delegates.
Construction began in December 1994. The main course of the Yangtze
River was successfully dammed in 1997, with the first generator installed
in 2001. The final stage of reservoir clearance began in 2001 and the reser-
voir started filling in April 2002; in 2003, the dam’s first turbines began
generating electricity, the coffer dam was dismantled, and, in 2006, the
reservoir water reached 156 meters. The original planned components of
the project were finished in October 2008 in line with the 2008 Beijing
Olympics. The city of Chongqing, standing at the western end of the pro-
posed reservoir, was separated from Sichuan province in 1997 and given
the same national municipal status as Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai. China
has planned to use this project to facilitate inland economic growth. Argu-
ments as to whether the dam should have been constructed concentrated on
several key questions: flood control, water supply, navigation, energy sup-
ply, safety, human dislocation, and ecological damage.
The Sanxia Dam controls about half of the Yangtze River valley’s an-
nual flow volume. The 12 million people and 2,000 square miles (5,200
square kilometers) of good fields in the Jianghan Plain just below the dam
site receive the greatest flood protection from the project. The dam suppos-
edly gives the Jianghan Plain 100-year flood protection instead of the 40-
year flood protection calculated as the optimum obtainable from further in-
vestment in existing dikes without the dam. In addition, water has been
diverted to water-deficient northern China via the central route of the
South-North Water Diversion Project since 2014. The Sanxia Dam can
326 Richard Louis Edmonds
allow 10,000 dead-weight metric ton vessels to get as far as Chongqing for
more than half the year if there are no major drought conditions.
The Sanxia Dam has an 18,200-megawatt generating capacity, making
it the world’s largest hydroelectric generating plant (and the world’s largest
dam in terms of tons of poured concrete). It is built to supply about one-
eighth as much electricity as was generated in China during 1991. In the
debate about the project, proponents stressed that building a large dam at
Sanxia was more cost effective than building a series of small dams on trib-
utaries upstream or constructing coal-fired plants. Moreover, the centrally
located site was deemed the best on the river for distributing electricity
around China.
Proponents stated that the dam would be safe from military attack, de-
nied that it lies in an earthquake zone, and asserted that it would not induce
earthquakes or burst in the event of an earthquake. They also argued that re-
settlement costs would be low because more than half of those displaced
came from small towns, and their incomes would skyrocket through the
sale of goods and services to construction workers.
During the proposal phase, proponents also argued that ecological dam-
age would be minimal and the loss of good agricultural land would not be se-
rious. Air and water pollution that would have been generated by coal-fired
power plants would be avoided, and they stated there was little evidence to
suggest that the reservoir would create breeding grounds for disease-carrying
parasites. The reservoir was considered to have great fish-raising potential
and a positive effect on local microclimates. Some historical artifacts cur-
rently sited below the new water level have been moved to higher locations.
China’s Environmental Problems 327
Wu Gorge, the center of the Three Gorges, before construction of the dam.
Ro
be
rt
E
. G
am
er
Opposition to the Sanxia Dam from within China persisted during con-
struction, though little opposition aired in the official press until 2007. In
contrast, overseas opposition was considerable. Opponents argued that
flood control is relevant only to the area directly below the dam. Major
rainstorms upstream could flood areas there, and clear-water releases from
the dam could lead to undercutting of dikes downstream. Some suggested
that dikes already being raised in height on lower portions of the river com-
bined with several dams on tributaries would have been a far more effective
and less expensive means of flood control, with less aesthetic and environ-
mental harm. For the first time in the history of any hydraulic project,
manila grass is being grown on Sanxia project dike banks to stop erosion—
a cheap and simple solution that opponents say should have been used more
widely before more drastic solutions were attempted. They also pointed out
the mutually exclusive functions of a flood prevention dam and a power-
generating dam: a dam used for hydropower generation should have its
reservoir largely full of water, whereas one used primarily for flood control
should be kept almost empty.
Others argued that building a series of small dams along the Yangtze,
using smaller ships, and extending hours of navigation would have in-
creased efficiency without as big a risk. Opponents also suggested that
the buildup of silt upstream could lead to increased flooding above the
dam or actually burst it. Considerable amounts of electricity could be lost
in transmission over long distances, and there were questions about the
efficiency of such large generators. Critics cited past Chinese big dam
construction experiences that did not inspire confidence. Gezhouba Dam,
just downstream, took eighteen years to finish at a cost close to four times
the original estimate. Its locks have experienced serious failures, which
appear to be due to basic design flaws and lack of maintenance. If this
ever happens at the Sanxia Dam, with water depths of over five times
more on either side of its locks, such an incident could result in a great
disaster.
Estimates vary, but approximately 1.3 million people living in the area
were relocated during construction (Wee, 2012). There was significant op-
position to resettlement in the Sanxia area, and there were cases of peasants
refusing to move and being forcibly evicted as well as reports of misuse
and embezzlement of resettlement funds. More than 150 towns and a por-
tion of Chongqing were flooded, and the land submerged generally was
more productive than the land given to compensate peasants. Many peas-
ants were moved to apartments in town, away from jobs or land. In spite of
this, soil erosion had become so serious by 1998 that reforestation of some
newly cultivated land, banning of cultivation on slopes over 25 degrees,
and resettlement of people out of the region became necessary (Steil and
Duan, 2002).
328 Richard Louis Edmonds
Some postulated that the reservoir might cause the water table to rise
and trigger landslides, and evidence since construction suggests that they
were correct. Opponents also pointed out that there are geological fault
belts near the reservoir area. Earthquakes greater than 4.75 on the Richter
scale have been recorded, and increased pressure on the bottom of the new
reservoir could cause stronger earthquakes (L. Chen and Talwani, 1998).
Officials have acknowledged that seismic activity has increased slightly
since the reservoir began filling in 2002, and there are Chinese scientists
who have cited dams as responsible for over a dozen earthquakes since
1949 (Naik and Oster, 2009). Research suggests that the dam has induced a
large number of earthquakes in the region during times of rising and falling
water levels in the reservoir (M. Dai et al., 2010; Probe International,
2011).
There were worries about the effect of the dam on climate, the cre-
ation of disease-fostering habitats, pollution from submerged mines, im-
pacts on downstream ecosystems, and the future of some forms of wildlife.
In September 2007, for the first time, the Chinese government’s official
Xinhua News Agency and People’s Daily Online issued press releases not-
ing that in a report “officials and experts have admitted the Three Gorges
Dam project has caused an array of ecological ills, including more fre-
quent landslides and pollution, and, if preventive measures are not taken,
there could be an environmental ‘catastrophe’” (“China Warns of Environ-
mental ‘Catastrophe’ from Three Gorges Dam,” 2007). The report admits
that erosion had triggered ninety-one landslides along the banks of the
reservoir, that clear-water discharges are threatening downstream embank-
ments, and that the water on tributaries has deteriorated. In the spring of
2011, drought forced authorities to close a 140-mile (225-kilometer) seg-
ment of the middle reaches of the Yangtze to traffic as water levels reached
the lowest level since the dam began operating in 2003, demonstrating that
the project has been unable to successfully manage water flow. All this has
been more serious and costly than experts predicted and required further
resettlement of 70,000 people out of landslide-prone areas. In the spring
of 2011, the Chinese State Council released a statement admitting that
there were significant flaws in the project, and there has been consider-
able criticism of the project on the Internet (Wang Xiangwei, 2011). The
unreliability of flood control also has led to the cancellation of a nuclear
power plant at Xianning in Hubei province about 350 miles (550 kilome-
ters) east of the dam and 20 miles (30 kilometers) from the banks of the
Yangtze (“Flood Risks Might Postpone Construction of China’s First In-
land Nuclear Power Station,” 2011). Thus, the Chinese government fi-
nally admitted what many experts predicted all along. The problems
found with the Sanxia Dam have helped to spur on environmental ac-
tivism in the past few years.
China’s Environmental Problems 329
That said, even though the Sanxia project is finished and antidam ef-
forts in China continue, China is constructing the five dams on the Jinsha
River, an upstream tributary of the Yangtze on the Sichuan-Yunnan border.
China is also focusing on plans for a recently revived series of thirteen
staircase dams on the Nu (Salween) River, eight dams on the Lancang
(Mekong) River in Yunnan province (Magee, 2013; Tilt, 2015), and five
along the Yarlung Zangbo River (also known as the Brahmaputra) in Tibet.
All these dams have international implications, and concerns have been ex-
pressed by Southeast and South Asian states through which these rivers
pass. As of 2014, China was involved in 321 dam projects overseas—some-
thing unimaginable twenty years ago.
Prospects for China’s Environment
The Chinese government first took a stand on international environmental
cooperation at the UN Conference on Environment and Development held
in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. China ratified the UN Framework Conven-
tion on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, which aimed to cut green-
house gas emissions, but because China was classified as a developing
country in both cases, it had no binding emissions levels. China argued that
poverty was the main cause of environmental degradation in developing
countries, and thus it was not reasonable to expect these countries to main-
tain lower emissions levels or install expensive equipment to control emis-
sions on their own. Instead, the developed nations should transfer funds and
technology to help poorer countries reduce emissions levels; in the case of
China, it is thought that by 2050 global warming may submerge all of its
coastal areas, which are currently less than 13 feet (4 meters) above sea
level, forcing relocation of about 67 million people. This viewpoint was
part of a foreign policy initiative to assume leadership of the developing
countries’ environmental bloc as well as to gain relief for China’s pollution
and resource degradation reduction, with outside help. At the December
2015 Paris conference, a more developed China played a more cooperative
role, resulting in a legally binding framework and a commitment to lower
carbon dioxide emissions per unit of 2005 GDP 60!65 percent by 2030.
While the signs are good at the national level, implementation of this pol-
icy could prove more difficult with local governments often more con-
cerned about rapid economic growth. It has been pointed out that the Chi-
nese government probably feels more pressure to control domestic air
pollution and ensure economic growth than to cut CO2 emissions (Adams,
2015).
Observed data show that nationwide mean surface temperatures in-
creased markedly during the twentieth century, with changes of 0.9–1.5 de-
grees Fahrenheit (0.5–0.8 degrees Celsius), and prediction of a further 6 de-
330 Richard Louis Edmonds
grees Fahrenheit (3.2 degrees Celsius) rise is possible by 2080 if CO2 emis-
sions are not cut (Lin et al., n.d.:1–2). The rates of sea-level rise since the
1950s are put at 1.4–3.2 millimeters per annum (about an inch per decade)
while drought has generally increased in north China and flooding has in-
creased in the south. Water flows in the major rivers also appear to have de-
creased (Lin et al., n.d.:3). The Chinese further predict that agricultural pro-
duction could be seriously affected over the next fifty years with production
down 5–10 percent by 2030, and there could be an increase in arid land
area with a reduction in permafrost areas, inland lakes, coastal land, wet-
lands, and biodiversity as well as more increases in drought and floods.
However, some flora and fauna, such as grassland and forestry, might actu-
ally increase although species would vary and growth pattern change could
be disruptive (Qiu, 2016).
China has modified its tough developing country stand as it has moved
up in the world order and lost developing country status. Stiffer regulations
aimed at conservation and efficiency have been promulgated. Increasingly,
low carbon development is taken as a basic policy.
China itself is likely to be seriously affected by climate change because
of the country’s continuing dependence on agriculture. Chinese research
suggests that a doubling of CO2 output would have a negative impact on
wheat, rice, and cotton production. If oceans rise by 3 feet (1 meter),
China’s coast below 12 feet (4 meters) above the current sea level would be
flooded (an area the size of Portugal) resulting in much good agricultural
land being lost and major cities being submerged.
Still, the overall effect of global warming on Chinese agriculture would
be mixed. Warmer temperatures mean that growing seasons would be
lengthened. It is also likely that in many places precipitation would increase
and even that the glacial melt would lead to short-term moisture increases
followed by serious aridity in later times. In the moister areas too, evapora-
tion should make soil drier and thus reduce water supply. Pests, weeds, and
more severe storms could also reduce farm and fish yields in many places.
At the same time, despite recent crackdowns against political dissidents,
the social atmosphere in China is changing in ways that favor environmen-
tal activism (Moore and Warrant, 2006; Steinhardt and Wu, 2016). Citizen-
based environmental groups were becoming more tolerated, although that
has changed since 2015, and increasingly they are closely watched if their
activities are deemed to be political (see Chapter 4).
As previously mentioned, one of the most threatening of China’s envi-
ronmental problems is the continuing destruction of resources, particularly
in poor western and central areas. The fragile ecosystems of the western
and border areas are under great strain. Since the 1950s, the expansion of
settled agriculture and industry in traditional herding pastures and oases of
the west and the proliferation of new roads and highways have led to
China’s Environmental Problems 331
serious degradation. Population densities in parts of the west must be re-
duced and emphasis put on animal husbandry and forestry where possible.
Although resource degradation is also serious in the east, the immedi-
ate problem facing the better-off population of eastern China is pollution.
Pollution is widespread in rural areas. Many rural enterprises use outdated
equipment, cannot afford or lack the political will to spend money on pol-
lution abatement, and are inefficient energy users. In particular, rural indus-
tries have caused serious water quality degradation. The appearance of
“cancer villages” has been most alarming (L. Liu, 2010). Dealing with the
rural industry pollution problem will require a tremendous investment by
the Chinese government as well as strict enforcement of regulations. On an
optimistic note, progress is being made in some rural areas.
The best that can be hoped for China as a whole is that the pace of water
depletion, deforestation, soil erosion, and desertification will slow in coming
years. If efforts at reforesting and population control begun in the 1980s
prove successful, that will help the environment—although there are those
who feel the detrimental efforts of population control will stifle the economy
and thus may hamper the ability of government to invest in environmental
controls. Efficient management and stricter enforcement of environmental
laws are helping—for example, carrying out environmental assessments on
construction projects, imposing fines, and implementing the new environ-
mental programs. In addition to more funds being properly spent and more
personnel, there is a need for more public openness to assessment informa-
tion. Raising prices of polluting fuels and industrial inputs will increase eco-
nomic efficiency and improve China’s environmental problems. Such pricing
policies have helped to control some forms of degradation, such as pollution
by state-run industries, and have aided in the promotion of environmentally
friendly products. Although an array of price reforms has been introduced
and citizen activism has increased, pressure from government nonetheless re-
mains the main force regulating investment in environmental control.
Ultimately, if the country is to feed and clothe all its people and pro-
vide a good standard of living in the next century, China needs strict popu-
lation control, extensive environmental education, financial and infrastruc-
tural resources, political stability, and a more open society where
information can be obtained and opinions freely expressed. It also needs to
foster the nascent political and corporate cultures that feel it is in their best
interests to control environmental degradation.
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Bateman, Joshua. 2014. “China’s Looming Water Crisis.” Ecologist. February 24. www.the
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336 Richard Louis Edmonds
337
The family is a fundamental social unit in every society. In
no aspect of culture are the diversities of human societies more striking than
in the institutions of family and marriage. All families meet basic human
needs of mating, reproduction, care and upbringing of children, care for the
aged, and the like, but families in different societies meet these needs in dif-
ferent ways. For example, in 1950, only 4 percent of all births in the United
States took place outside of marriage. By 2011, that figure had increased to
41 percent (Livingston and Brown, 2014). In China too, premarital sex, di-
vorce, and staying single are also on the increase, but at a much slower rate
compared with the United States. Hollywood, rock music, and individual
paychecks also sing their siren songs in China, but have been slower to alter
family life. Loyalty to one’s family takes precedence over other obligations.
Even China’s constitution contains detailed provisions about the family, pre-
senting the care of the elderly and the upbringing of young children as impor-
tant values. In doing so, the contemporary constitution echoes the emphasis
of Confucius on the primary role of the family. Nevertheless, the reform era
(1978 to the present) has found many of its core assumptions challenged
about how to live a good life inside and outside of family interactions, espe-
cially strengthened by the coming of age of its single-child generation (Grif-
fiths, 2013). We examine many of the cultural attributes, principles, and be-
haviors that persist as well as those that are currently in a state of flux.
Family Structure
Sociologists usually divide families into four basic structural categories.
The first category is single men and women living alone, including those
10
Family, Kinship,
Marriage, and Sexuality
Zang Xiaowei and William Jankowiak
who have not married and those who are widowed or divorced. The second
category, the nuclear family, consists of a couple and their unmarried chil-
dren, but also includes childless couples or one of the parents (widowed or
divorced) living with one of their married or unmarried children. The third
category is a stem structure of an extended family, containing an aged par-
ent or parents, one married child and his or her spouse, and perhaps grand-
children as well. Finally, the extended family differs by having two or more
married siblings living together with their children and a grandparent or
two.
In imperial China, the ideal family was an extended family consisting
of five generations living together under one roof, sharing one common
purse and one common stove, and under one family head (Knapp and Kai-
Yin, 2005). Confucianism expressed a concentration with familial relations
and ethics. Families that were organized on the basis of “proper” relation-
ships were considered by Confucian scholars to be fundamental to the
maintenance of social harmony and political stability in China. The
younger generation was ethically bound to support, love, and be obedient to
their seniors (Hsiung, 2005; J. Watson, 1982; R. Watson and Ebrey, 1991).
In effect, the family was a patriarchally (or senior male generation) gov-
erned institution.
The Chinese imperial state, which relied on Confucianism as its ideo-
logical foundation, strongly supported the traditional family institution
(Faure, 2007). A local magistrate, for example, might erect a large memo-
rial arch testifying to a widow’s virtue for her refusal to remarry, or give an
extended family a placard of honor to promote the ideal of five generations
living harmoniously under one roof. Dividing the extended family, espe-
cially when aging parents were still alive, was strongly discouraged be-
cause it went against Confucian ethics (Mann, 1987).
Parents arranged marriages for their offspring, sometimes before they
were old enough to live together and consummate the marriage. When a
boy married, he brought his bride to live with his parents. When the father
died, in an ideal situation, his estate was divided equally among his sons.
Thus, marriage did not lead to the creation of a new household. Usually,
new families were created through partition of the family estate after the
death of the father. Each son might use his share as the economic founda-
tion for a new smaller family that he now headed, moving out of the par-
ent’s house to establish a nuclear family (Cohen, 1978). One son might stay
with, or take in, the widowed mother to create a stem family. Because of
this cyclical process, at any given time most families were small. Some in-
cluded parents (or one surviving parent) living with one or more married
sons and perhaps their children. Others were limited to parents and their un-
married children and were thus similar to many present-day Western fami-
lies in size and composition. Extended families with five generations living
338 Zang Xiaowei and William Jankowiak
together were rare (Zang, 1993). The primary force for undermining the
united or joint family came from the son’s wives who desired to live in sep-
arate conjugal units.
In Chinese families today, individuals go through different stages of
the life cycle, typically including marriage, parenting, and old age. Each of
these life stages entails a different approach to identity with different ex-
pectations, rights, and responsibilities. Moreover, as Myron Cohen (1978,
2005) notes, the larger joint family (parents and married adult offspring,
their wives and children) lived together as a unified production unit. But
this production unit, especially with the death of the parents, usually
changed over time from a joint family into separate, albeit smaller, nuclear
units. Family size was restricted not only because of divisions, but also be-
cause of high infant mortality rates in imperial China and short life ex-
pectancy. However, rich families were more successful than the less well-
to-do in raising their children to maturity. Rich families also tended to have
higher birthrates than the less well-to-do because of better nutrition and the
practice of polygamy (i.e., a man having two or more wives at the same
time), and the presence of additional women greatly increased the likeli-
hood of more children. Although polygamy was generally acceptable in
pre-Communist China, rich families were far better able to afford it. Conse-
quently, rich families were larger than average in size; many of them were
extended families that included several generations and could be extremely
large. Because a large percentage of China’s impoverished citizens lacked
sufficient resources to achieve the proper family form, many adopted a
pragmatic approach and formed less conventional families. For example,
Matthew Sommer’s (2015) research about the late Qing dynasty found sup-
port for the prevalence of a polyandrous family (i.e., one woman with many
husbands). It came about entirely out of desperation: being unable to feed
themselves, women often insisted their husband either sell them to a some-
what better-off man or asked a man to join their family and provide finan-
cial assistance (Sommer, 2015). This family form was illegal and not well
received by villagers. But it was nevertheless understood, and was not re-
ceived without some empathy, because the couple needed to form a polyan-
drous family. In effect, the choice was a survival strategy.
In the late nineteenth century, because of Western penetration into
China, new bourgeois and working classes emerged in coastal cities along
with a new intellectual elite. Since these classes obtained their incomes
through employment outside the family, they had relative independence
from family elders. They were exposed and receptive to the new cultural
and intellectual forces entering China from Japan and the West. Hence, they
agitated for legal and cultural reforms to promote ideals of marriage based
on free and romantic attachments and on equality of men and women with
respect to marriage, property, and inheritance (Lee, 2007). The reforms led
Family, Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality 339
to an increasing trend in urban China toward smaller nuclear family units
and a growing freedom of choice for men and women in choosing marriage
partners. Since the 1930s, most urban Chinese have resided as nuclear fam-
ilies (Zang, 1993; Whyte and Parish, 1984:chap. 6). Xiaowei Zang’s (1993)
research found from survey date that, by 1900, more than half of urban
families had already taken the nuclear form; by the 1980s, they had in-
creased to two-thirds.
Chapters 4 and 8 analyze the increasing urbanization and rapid indus-
trialization that followed the establishment of the People’s Republic of
China in 1949. Those trends contributed further to the separation of nuclear
families from control by their elders, especially in cities. The newly formed
nuclear families were able to make more independent decisions about re-
production, where to live, food preparation, consumption, and household
expenditure. In the domain of child-rearing, parents in the role of grandpar-
ents continued to remain actively involved (Hershatter, 2004; Jankowiak,
2009; Parish and Whyte, 1978; Whyte, 1992:317–322; Whyte and Parish,
1984:chap. 6).
The stem family structure has not disappeared in urban China, how-
ever. From the Mao Zedong era to the early reform period of the 1980s,
housing availability often compelled young couples to live, at least for a
few years, with either the husband’s or wife’s parents who had an extra
room. These pragmatic considerations stabilized and often increased the
number of stem households temporarily (Riley, 1994:798–801; Knapp and
Kai-Yin, 2005; Q. F. Zhang, 2004). For example, William Jankowiak’s
(1993:212) research findings from the 1980s obtained in a midsize northern
city found that 127 out of 300 (or 42 percent) of the households were stem
households, with 172 (or 47 percent) nuclear. This ratio changed over the
course of life, but more or less held constant. Today, many young people
are even delaying marriage until they can afford to buy a flat, as they over-
whelmingly prefer to live by themselves, and increasing numbers of young
couples are able to do so. This has resulted in a rise in the number of resi-
dences occupied by single families. The single-child generation has linked
both sides of the family so that they each become more actively involved in
mutual child care. This is a profound historical redefinition away from the
patrilineal descent principle toward a more fluid open parenting relation-
ship that now unites both sides of the couple’s family. William Jankowiak
(2009) has referred to this new arrangement as the bilateral multigenera-
tional family.
In rural areas, families continued to be organized along traditional lines
until 1949. This is not surprising, given that the rural Chinese economy be-
fore 1949 was almost exclusively based on traditional technologies and or-
ganizations. Traditional family forms were changed after 1949 (Cohen,
1995; Hershatter, 2004; Potter and Potter, 1990; M. Wolf, 1985). An impor-
340 Zang Xiaowei and William Jankowiak
tant factor causing the change in rural areas was the long period of collec-
tivization (1955–1980). Prior to it, the father’s indisputable authority within
the family had been based on his control over, and management of, family
property, farmwork, and dealings with the outside world. Collectivization in
the Mao era abolished the private ownership of the means of production
and transformed peasants into wage earners in collectives (i.e., the people’s
communes) organized by the Communist Party. The farming family was no
longer a production enterprise. With the family’s well-being based mainly
on the earnings of individual family members working for their collective
unit or in other ways outside the family context, the father’s authority was
reduced significantly (Santos and Harrell, 2016). There were no large fam-
ily landholdings that would encourage brothers to stay together under their
father’s authority. Brothers tended to move out of their parents’ house
shortly after marriage, being constrained only by the cost and availability of
new housing. However, the stem family structure survived the collectiviza-
tion campaign as some parents continued to live with one of their married
sons for old-age support and security.
Parental authority did not disappear totally during the collectivization
period. Sons generally stayed in their father’s village. Many peasant parents
remained deeply involved in the marriage of their children, even if they had
not chosen the spouse. Parental power over a child’s marriage derived from
Family, Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality 341
Taking baby for a stroll in Shanghai.
Ro
be
rt
E
. G
am
er
the fact that a groom usually required the parents to give his bride’s family
a large cash gift before marriage and, in some cases, it could be worth sev-
eral years of his family’s earnings (Croll, 1984). Parental power was also
based on the parents’ responsibility for preparing the wedding ceremony
and the housing for their son and would-be daughter-in-law.
The post-1976 policy shift to decollectivize the people’s communes has
had unintended implications for family organization (X. Liu, 2000; Zeng,
2002). Although most families are still nuclear and stem in form, rich fam-
ilies are reappearing in the countryside, some larger than average and simi-
lar to the typical extended family because of the inclusion of married broth-
ers (Cohen, 1992: 370–373). Rural houses, both old and new, are often
designed to hold stem or extended families; in villages near cities, extra
space may be rented to migrant laborers who have left their village to work
in construction. William Lavely and Xinhua Ren (1992:378–391) found
that preference for patrilocal residence continued to be the norm. Only a
few couples chose to stay with the bride’s family (matrilocal residence).
Among some ethnic minorities (e.g., Mosuo, Naxi) living in Yunnan
province in southwestern China, matrilocal residence is normative. In these
matrilineal descent societies, a groom moves into his bride’s house and has
no control over household possessions and other assets.
In urban China, most married couples either lived by themselves (neo-
local) or close to the groom’s family (patrilocal) (Zang, 1993).
Jankowiak’s (1993) fieldwork showed no preference for living with the
groom’s family over the bride’s family. Moreover, his research found a
strong preference for couples living by themselves. Because private apart-
ments were nonexistent, there was always an apartment shortage. Newly-
wed couples selected an apartment based entirely on availability, regard-
less of descent norms.
In sum, although the nuclear family and with it neolocal residence is
now urban China’s norm, nuclear families continue to remain in close con-
tact with their parents and grandparents. Urban China’s senior generation
also prefers an independent way of living, but it does not want to be forgot-
ten and in effect abandoned. Post-1978 massive urban construction, which
increasingly forces couples to relocate to distant parts of the city, or even to
other cities, makes it more difficult to sustain a bilateral multigenerational
family unit. In the countryside, most relatives continue to live with newly
married couples. It is understood, however, that the newlyweds or the con-
jugal unit is the primary source of domestic authority.
A vivid demonstration of the transformation and redefinition of famil-
ial authority is found in the change of the daughter-in-law’s status. Histori-
cally, it was expected that the daughter-in-law would obey her mother-in-
law, blindly following her most minute instructions. Not to do so often
resulted in a severe scolding or a vicious physical beating. Jankowiak
342 Zang Xiaowei and William Jankowiak
(1993) was the first to document that, in an urban setting, the interaction
of the mother-in law with her daughter-in-law was less that of a stern au-
thority figure and more of a devoted attentive host. When queried about
this special type of behavior, most mothers-in-law were adamant: they
wanted to continue a warm intimate relationship with their son, believing
that their sons tend to follow the visiting practice of their wives. As a re-
sult, a son’s wife would not want to visit his natal family if she did not feel
safe, honored, and admired by it. Mothers felt that the overall quality of
the relationship with their sons would diminish if a daughter chose to not
visit them. Ten years later, Yunxiang Yan (2003) observed a similar trend
in a northern Chinese village during the 1990s. The power of daughters-in-
law was found again in another northern village (Shi, 2017), and again in
a south Chinese village (Santosand Harrell, 2016). In rural China, the
shortage of females has resulted in increased power for potential brides:
they can refuse marriage knowing full well that there are other potential
suitors who desire them (Shi, 2011). Moreover, brides-to-be now insist that
they and not their natal family be given the largest percentage of bride
price that the groom’s family is obligated to give the bride’s family (Shi,
2009).
Marriage
In imperial China, love and romance were not unknown, but they were rare
and never a basis for forming an arranged marriage (L. Pan, 2016; Lee,
2007). Young people had little say regarding marriage, either about timing
or about partners. Many marriages were arranged by parents and thus were
blind, with the bride and the groom not even meeting each other until the
wedding day. Frequently, two sets of parents contracted marriages between
young children, who did not begin to cohabit until they were older. All this
gave parents effective control over the marriages of their offspring.
Arranged marriage was a crucial part of a family’s strategy for success
(Ning, [1945] 2016). For example, Jankowiak (1993) recalls a small Inner
Mongolian Han farming family who wanted to establish a relationship with
a family who lived on the grasslands so that they might send their sheep to
graze every summer. A marriage alliance between families would allow for
this exchange.
Through marriage, old alliances between families could be strength-
ened and new ones formed. Parents secured economic and social support in
their old age. In this way, resources were continually being transferred from
one family to another (X. Xu and Whyte, 1990:714; Riley, 1994:792).
Parental influence in the marriage institution was gradually eroded
after the turn of the twentieth century as reformers and revolutionaries de-
nounced the personal misery and suicides that had resulted from arranged
Family, Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality 343
marriages. Especially in cities, young people struggled to change traditional
practices such as the Confucian ideals of filial piety, arranged marriage, and
the subordinate role of women in the family. These struggles led to signifi-
cant changes in the marriage institution, one of which was the age at which
youths married. In Zang’s (1993) study, he found that about 10 percent of
respondents who had been brides during the 1930s were less than fifteen
years of age; by 1950, that practice was reduced significantly (also Whyte,
1990; Whyte and Parish, 1984:chap. 5). Early marriage has not been en-
tirely eliminated under the communist regime, however. In 1990, China still
had over 8 million marriages of girls under the age of fifteen. More than 90
percent of early marriages were found in rural areas.
Freedom of choice in choosing one’s mate has radically increased in
urban China since 1900 (Lee, 2007). Proceedings dominated by parents
arranged more than half of all marriages between 1900 and 1938; by 1982,
such practices had almost disappeared. By then, four in every five couples
married of their own volition. Data from Xiaowei Zang’s (2004) fieldwork
conducted in Lanzhou in 2001 show that only 8.5 percent of Han women in
that city reported an arranged marriage. Chinese women today enjoy much
more freedom in selecting mates than their counterparts who married before
1949 (Diamant, 2000; Xia and Zhou, 2003).
Parents and older associates still played a major role in this process,
however. Introductions by friends and coworkers were important for young
people to find prospective mates. Studies indicate that workplace officials
did their best to serve the needs of young people, including their marital
concerns, in exchange for their political loyalty and obedience (Whyte,
1990; Whyte and Parish, 1984:chap. 5; J. Yang, 2015).
Casual dating was rare prior to the 1990s and was viewed as a type of
ritualistic courtship, whose central purpose was to reach a marriage agree-
ment (Hsu, 1981). A 1980s survey found that nine out of ten Chinese
women never had considered marrying another person besides their even-
tual husband. Less than 30 percent had other boyfriends. Many women said
they rarely or never dated their future husbands; even for those who did, the
dates almost always came after the decision to marry, rather than prior to it
(X. Xu and Whyte, 1990). Data from a large sample (1,778 couples) col-
lected in Beijing in the early 1990s show that most respondents did not date
often—77 percent of women and 66 percent of men dated no one or only
their spouse prior to marriage—and 56 percent of couples knew each other
less than one year before marrying (Pimentel, 2000). Some individuals did
secretly meet, while claiming that their encounter was nothing more than
getting together with classmates or colleagues. In the end, most Chinese
youth had to select a spouse without first learning something about their
own personal preferences through casual dating.
344 Zang Xiaowei and William Jankowiak
The twenty-first century has brought with it a transformation in China’s
courtship habits. China’s cities now have fully formed dating cultures,
where the goal is not necessarily to form an immediate marriage arrange-
ment, but rather to enter into a series of enjoyable associations that may or
may not result in marriage. Chinese dating culture, more earnestly than that
found in Western societies, blends fun with assessment of a potential date’s
marital value (Jankowiak, 2013a). As explained in Chapter 13, movies,
novels, and magazines are introducing Western ideas of love and marriage.
As clubs, restaurants, dance halls, movie theaters, fast-food joints, karaoke
bars, and other entertainment spots multiply, and young people have more
spending money, dating becomes easier. The new road system, urban
sprawl, and the proliferation of motorcycles and cell phones give many
rural youths the opportunity to take advantage of these urban attractions as
well (Stanat, 2006; Farrer, 2007; Chang, 2001:207–245). Young people also
are connected via cell phones and the Internet. Given these structural and
cultural changes, a true culture of dating has gradually emerged in China’s
largest cities. Moreover, James Farrer (2015:89) points out, “We are wit-
nessing not only the weakening of institutional structures and their replace-
ment by individual strategies, but also the production of new cultural
scripts [to express] intimacy.”
For example, some 500 million Chinese post photos, blog, and chat on
Renren, Baidu, Sina Weibo, and other sites. Among 180 million bachelors
Family, Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality 345
A date in the park.
Ro
be
rt
E
. G
am
er
in China, over half are registered to use one of the three most popular dat-
ing services: Jiayuan.com, Zhenai.com, or Baihe.com. Because they must
pay high fees for blogging, chatting (including with online matchmakers),
and dating, only a fraction of them use these services at any one time. But
with 120 men for every 100 women as a result of the one-child policy, for
many bachelors those fees seem worthwhile. The Chinese Academy of So-
cial Science conservatively estimates that by 2020 there will be 24 million
more unmarried men than women of marriage age, with declining
prospects of marriage (M. Fong, 2016; D. Zhang, 2012). However, the
focus on the distorted sex ratio misses a critical point: marital choice is
seldom based only on demographic factors, but it is based more on the
number of socially acceptable or potential mates available. Because there
are fewer college-educated Chinese men than women, male college gradu-
ates delay marriage as they are aware of their increased mate value among
college-educated female cohorts.
Like the 1960s US youth, Chinese youth usually live with their parents
until they marry. This pattern is expected by cultural norms and the fact that
few young people can afford to rent or purchase an apartment before they
are married. Young people live in close physical proximity to their parents
during the time when they choose a spouse, thus giving their parents ample
opportunity to meet, judge, and comment on their boyfriends or girlfriends.
Young Chinese would not want their parents to arrange their marriages, and
almost all parents agree. However, they show little obvious resistance to,
and seem to genuinely accept, a certain amount of parental influence and
involvement.
Jankowiak’s research found that urban Chinese mothers were often a
deciding force in their children’s choices of marital partners (Jankowiak,
1993:chap. 8; Riley, 1994:794–798; Pimentel, 2000; Zang, 2004). There
were also notable exceptions: where the grandmother, instead of the mother,
was the primary caretaker (so the child bonded more with the grandmother
and less if at all with the mother), the mother’s ability to influence her off-
spring’s mate choice was minimal. Jankowiak found northern mothers born
in the 1960s and married in the 1980s seemed to have established greater
emotional control over their only daughter’s mate choice, but retained less
control over their only son’s marital decision (Jankowiak and Li, 2016).
Similar changes in mate choice also occurred in rural China (Lavely
and Ren, 1992; Y. Yan, 2003). Working in a collective in the Mao era gave
young peasants opportunities for daily contact unavailable to them in the
past, which increased their freedom to marry someone of their own choos-
ing. Post-Mao decollectivization has not changed this situation; young
peasants still have greater freedom of choice. A marriage may be arranged
by the parents, but the son and daughter will be given the opportunity to
meet and agree to the match, or a young couple may become acquainted on
346 Zang Xiaowei and William Jankowiak
their own through dating and ask their parents to prepare the wedding (Fan
and Li, 2002; Murphy, 2004; Yuen, Law, and Ho, 2004; Y. Yan, 2003,
2010).
It is important to note that high percentages of China’s over 260 mil-
lion migrants are young rural women who have left their villages to work in
urban factory assembly lines in new coastal boomtowns. Unlike their male
counterparts, they have little opportunity to advance on the job or to retain
this work past the age of twenty-five. Most of them return home to marry.
However, around 2010 the government began to grant urban residency
(hukou) to migrants working in small and midsize cities. The change in the
government’s policy enabled many migrants to find a local spouse who
may or may not be from the countryside (Choi and Peng, 2016).
Urbanites often view poor rural people as outsiders. Some factories
provide housing for married couples, but most couples must rent a small
apartment at an exorbitant price. Many rural women migrants return home
for childbirth and have their own grandparents visit them to help with their
infants. They have little contact with their in-laws, who may even speak a
different dialect. In south China, men often hold low-level management po-
sitions and thus can achieve quicker promotions at work, and their pay is
generally much higher.
The wives with good income may send home cash to help support their
parents. But once these couples become used to shopping malls and big city
life, it is often hard for them to return to their villages. The social mobility
is speeding up independent dating and living. Yet migrants who live in
China’s megacities continue to lack the right to permanent residence and to
the social services that are reserved for permanent urban residents under the
hukou registration system (F.-L. Wang, 2005). These migrants must pay far
more than permanent residents for school fees, in inferior schools set up
just for migrants, so they may find it necessary to send the children back to
one of their home villages for education. And they often miss their families
(Chang, 2001:360–376, 404–407; Gaetano and Jacka, 2004; H. Zhang,
2009). Chapter 8 discusses this further.
A problem facing all prospective young couples in urban areas is the
cost of housing, which is rising rapidly as old buildings are torn down to
make way for new expensive ones built by real estate developers. And
newly married couples living away from their parents must find funds to
pay for child care while they are at work and for commuting long distances
to and from work. Middle-class young men often feel the need to own a flat
and car and have some savings before getting married. Although men be-
lieve they should be primarily responsible for a home purchase, Leta Hong
Fincher’s (2015) Beijing research found the purchase of a home is a com-
plicated process that involves a host of relatives, as well as friends, from
both the husband’s and wife’s side. She also uncovered that women, from
Family, Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality 347
every social class, made a significant contribution to the home’s purchase
as well as to regular home maintenance. For example, it is expected that the
woman or her family will pay for most household renovations (zhuangxiu).
In spite of women’s substantial economic contribution, however, more than
53 percent of the newlywed women, due to the belief that it is better for the
man to be symbolically perceived as financially capable of supporting his
family, did not insist that their name should also be on the deed to the house
(Fincher, 2015:51). Fincher also found that almost half of urban women
have begun to redefine China’s conventional gendered norms and insist on
joint property ownership.
Marital Breakdown
Divorce is another trend that mirrors the experiences of other countries.
Causes of marital breakdown in China include the failure to deliver emo-
tional support or a gratifying sexual relationship, family violence, the fad-
ing of romantic love after marriage, and extramarital affairs (Tian, Merli,
and Qian, 2013). In addition, political changes have had a great impact on
divorce in China. In 1953, China experienced a surge in divorces. Scholars
view it as a consequence of the promulgation of the Marriage Law in 1950,
which for the first time allowed women to ask for divorce. Many married
women regarded divorce as a way out of intolerable arranged marriages. In
rural areas, enforcement of the law was short-lived, as explained in Chapter
11. After the mid-1950s urban divorce, which required the couple to first
obtain approval from authorities in their work unit, remained rare (Conroy,
1987:54–55; Stacey, 1983).
Many China experts hold that a large number of divorces occurred dur-
ing the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The revolution’s impact on di-
vorce is difficult to assess with accuracy because of the lack of data. Be-
cause of the extraordinary social upheavals and fear of persecution, one
partner would often sue for divorce when the other got into political trou-
ble. The consequences for the whole family of one member’s political
wrongdoing were potentially disastrous. Divorce proceedings were initiated
not because of dissatisfaction in a relationship or ideological differences,
but for the purpose of social survival and protection of the children’s future
(Conroy, 1987:55–56; Liang and Shapiro, 1983; Thurston, 1987).
Divorce has been on the upswing in China since the 1978 economic re-
forms (Conroy, 1987:58; R. Li, 2002). Extramarital affairs have increased
(Farrer and Sun, 2003). At the same time, contemporary Western notions of
marriage have gradually entered China, which has contributed to the rising
divorce rate. From 1987 to 1990, divorces increased fourfold. Married peo-
ple in their thirties exhibited the highest divorce rate. In 1994, there were
6.19 million divorced people, living mostly in cities. Divorce rates were
348 Zang Xiaowei and William Jankowiak
lowest on the east coast and in eastern areas, highest in the northwest and
the northeast, and moderate in the middle and southern parts of the country
(Zeng and Wu, 2000). There have been 2 million divorces a year since
2000, 1.5 per thousand people as opposed to 5.2 in the United States (Jiang,
2011). In Shanghai, about 40 percent of divorces were filed because of ex-
tramarital affairs, 38 percent because of personality conflicts, and only 3
percent because of an unhappy sex life. In many cases, the wife initiates the
divorce (R. Li, 2002:6; Beech and Hua, 2006). China’s divorce rate has
been much lower than in the West (Dong, Wang, and Ollendick, 2002).
However, within the single-child generation cohort, the divorce rate is be-
coming remarkably similar to the rate in Western societies.
Family Relations
The traditional Chinese family was most emphatically male centered with
respect to the distribution of authority, patterns of employment, residence,
inheritance, a pronounced preference for male offspring, and oppression of
women. In imperial China, even illiterate farmers were aware of the Confu-
cian Three Obediences, by which women were to be governed: an unmar-
ried woman must obey her father, a married one must obey her husband,
and a widow must obey her adult sons (Stacey, 1983:chap. 1; Mann, 1987).
As Laurel Bossen points out in Chapter 11, women in some regions and
households found ways to assert a degree of independence, but these oppor-
tunities were limited.
Female infanticide—the killing of female babies at birth—was prac-
ticed among some poor families before 1949 (Mungello, 2008). Poor par-
ents might sell their daughters into slavery at three or four years of age or
as prostitutes or concubines at twelve to fourteen (Johnson, 1993; A. P.
Wolf, 1980). Even marriage did not bring women a higher status in the fam-
ily. If a wife displeased her husband or her mother-in-law, she could be re-
turned to her parents and, in times of economic stress, she might be rented,
leased, or sold outright to a more prosperous man. She would obtain a de-
gree of authority in her own right only after the passage of many years. Her
position was weakest when she was childless (sonless); it improved when
she bore a son, and it grew even stronger when a daughter-in-law came
under her direction. And by the time she entered into advanced age, her au-
thority began to approximate that of her husband; if his was the earlier
death, full power within the family might sometimes be in her hands (M.
Wolf, 1985:chap. 1).
Women’s oppression resulted from Confucian patriarchal ideology and
women’s economic dependence on men. The roots of women’s subordina-
tion were undermined by the communist revolution of 1949 and subsequent
economic and social changes. Yet gender discrimination, especially in the
Family, Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality 349
workplace, continues to persist (Min and Xu, 2015). In addition, the Chi-
nese government started the one child per household family planning policy
in the late 1970s, discussed in Chapters 8 and 11. Persons not in compli-
ance with the policy face heavy fines or demotions and, on rare occasions,
forced abortions. In rural areas, enforcement of the one-child policy is not
uniform, and a number of female births simply go unreported. But a study
of abortion decisions and reported sex ratios at birth in a rural Yunnan
county found a bias against male abortion. The preference for a son arises
out of pragmatic realities: sons stay and daughters marry out, and families
that are without a son have no one to work the land. Because there is virtu-
ally no social security in most of rural China, peasants must rely on their
sons for old-age support. Given these considerations, China’s sex ratio at
birth rose from 107 males to 100 females in 1984–1987 and 110 to 100 in
1988–2000 (Löfstedt, Luo, and Johansson, 2004). Selective abortions of fe-
male fetuses may contribute most to the extremely high sex ratio for males
among newborns (Wu, Viisainen, and Hemminki, 2006; see also Chu, 2001;
S. Li, Zhu, and Feldman, 2004). The preference for a male offspring does
not mean that parents do not respect, like, or desire a daughter. Kay Ann
Johnson’s (2016) investigation found that many Chinese families were cun-
ning in dealing with a nonapproved birth by arranging for relatives, or
someone whom they knew, to adopt an overquota daughter. Johnson also
found that Chinese adopted daughters more often than Westerners, which
undermines the commonplace notion that Chinese did not value daughters
(see also Hsiung’s [2005] analysis of the Ming dynasty’s elite families’
adoption preference for daughters).
China’s skewed sex ratio has, however, lowered the marriage prospects
for many young men and left a shortage of women to work the farmland. In
northern China, the shortage has resulted in overt favoring of daughters
(over sons), as daughters are increasingly perceived to be more filial and
less expensive to marry (Shi, 2017). In comparison, sex-selective abortions
occur in urban China on a much less frequent basis because of the existence
of social security systems there (discussed in Chapter 8). Today, the in-
crease in sexual freedom discussed in the next section has shifted the preva-
lence of urban abortions to unmarried young girls, who often have sex
without protection or working knowledge of contraception and who face se-
rious social taboos about having children out of wedlock, while there is
more widespread acceptance of abortion (Nie and Kleinman, 2005).
Jankowiak (1993, 2013b) found that, in the 1980s and again in the twenty-
first century, more than half of the abortions in the northern city of Hohhot
were by unmarried women. In many mid- and large-size cities, small pri-
vate clinics advertise that abortions are “easy, painless and cheap.” It seems
that Chinese young women, like 1990s Japanese women, use abortion as
their primary means of birth control.
350 Zang Xiaowei and William Jankowiak
Despite these instances, blatant discrimination against Chinese women
has been reduced significantly under the communist regime. In particular,
since 1949, Chinese women have achieved a degree of economic indepen-
dence as they work with men in state- or collective-run organizations. In
urban China, it is unusual for women not to work outside the home. Chi-
nese wives make more decisions than husbands, or the couple makes deci-
sions together, despite unequal spousal status and widespread patriarchal
values and practices (Zuo and Bian, 2005; see also Pimentel, 2000; Yu,
2004). Jiping Zuo and Yanjie Bian (2005) explain the unique Chinese pat-
tern with “family collectivism.” They argue women’s participation in the
labor force, along with income-leveling programs in the post-1949 era,
haveshifted wives’ financial dependence on husbands to a mutual financial
interdependence of working husbands and working wives. It has also influ-
enced wives’ ability to participate in household decisions as equal partners.
Since wives do more housework and have a better knowledge and under-
standing of family needs, they make more decisions than their husbands.
Furthermore, urban young people in China today mainly rely on social
institutions outside the family for employment and education, though they
live with their parents. Mothers are the center of the family’s communica-
tion network, like most Latin American families, and provide the glue that
binds families together. Chinese youth, especially daughters, adore and
confide in their mothers. A mother usually functions as the intermediary be-
tween her husband and their children. As the status of mothers evolves, the
traditional hierarchical family authority structure is gradually disappearing
in China (Jankowiak, 1993).
In general Chinese youth do not challenge their fathers, who seldom
issue direct orders to their children. Both parents and children carefully
seek to avoid direct confrontation. Jankowiak (1993) found, however, that
in families where there was physically or verbally violent conflict between
their parents, children usually took the mother’s side, which resulted over
time in resentment of their father. This was especially evident in working-
class households where the father seldom listens, preferring instead to
issue mostly negative declarative commands. In contrast, in more college-
educated families, fathers tended to discuss everyday events with their only
male or female child and have a warmer parent-child interaction and thus a
closer emotional bond.
Sexuality
The sexual bond between husband and wife is part of the basis of marriage,
which in turn is the basis of the family. In China before the 1980s, an ex-
tremely high premium was placed on premarital virginity and conjugal fi-
delity. If an individual was caught having premarital sex or had engaged in
Family, Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality 351
adultery, he or she would face serious punishments such as mass criticism,
forced confessions, demotions, or dismissal. Occasionally, an adulterer
would be brought to court and sentenced to imprisonment on a verdict of
hooliganism or rape (Cui, 1995:15–18). In Mao’s China, for the ordinary
citizen there was no double standard as the cultural norms restrained men
and women equally.
Generally speaking, sex was a taboo topic in China before the 1980s
(Dikötter, 1995). Any materials relating to sex, even works of nude art,
were strictly forbidden. Pornography was not unknown (primarily coming
from Hong Kong), but was hidden. Even among married couples, sex was
seldom discussed. This did not mean, however, that sex was not regarded as
a positive value. Jankowiak (1993) found that women frequently divorced
because of the sexual impotence of their husband. Although a 1990 survey
reported that more than half of respondents never discussed sex with others
(Zhao and Geng, 1992:1–4), some urban men often asked their friend or
friends for advice on how to arouse their wife who was indifferent to the
sexual experience. Research in this century continues to find strong sex dif-
ferences in men and women’s sexual enjoyment (L. Zhang et al., 2007; H.
Yan et al., 2007; Lonn et al., 2007; Higgins and Sun, 2007). Suiming Pan
and colleagues’ (2002) comprehensive sex survey interviewed more than
3,000 individuals from both urban and rural areas, including migrant labor-
ers, and found that urbanites (especially the younger respondents under age
forty) reported greater sexual activity than the rural folk. Thirty-five per-
cent of men aged thirty to thirty-four reported having premarital sex, in
contrast to 14 percent of men over forty years of age and 9 percent of urban
women. In addition, a relatively high proportion of young urban men had
viewed pornography and paid for commercial sexual services (Pan et al.,
2002, as cited in Jeffreys and Yu, 2015:161). Another more recent survey
confirmed many of Pan’s findings that Chinese youth possess “increased
knowledge and experience of sexual techniques, positions and relation-
ships” (Jeffreys and Yu, 2015:161).
An older more tacit norm that assumed engaged couples had premarital
sex has given way to a more explicitly voiced acceptance of premarital sex
between those engaged and those who are just dating. Today, rural men be-
tween the ages of sixteen and twenty-two years old are less likely than their
urban counterparts to remain virgins (Guo et al 2012). For urbanites, sexual
activity before 18 years of age remains rare, with the average age of the first
sexual encounter for men at 22.5 years old and women 23.1. The average
age of China’s youth’s first sexual experience is higher than that typically
found in Western societies, but it represents a notable decline in age com-
pared with the generations of their parents and grandparents.
Another study of adolescents and parents from various social classes in
the city of Changchun found that most adolescents had not talked about sex
352 Zang Xiaowei and William Jankowiak
with their parents (L. Zhang et al., 2007). Another study, in Jiangsu, found
that, although a high percentage of college students spent several hours a
week on the Internet, less than 10 percent of the men and almost no women
admitted to watching pornography (H. Yan et al., 2007). In other domains,
respondents expressed a high tolerance for premarital sexual behavior. An-
other national study of university students from differing social back-
grounds found that urban professionals are more liberal in their views on
what they see as an acceptable number of sex partners than their rural coun-
terparts (Higgins and Sun, 2007). In a 2000 national survey, 32.6 percent of
twenty-five- to twenty-nine-year-olds admitted to having premarital sex
(Farrer, 2015:65).
Public discourse on sexuality has become more prominent in the Chi-
nese media since the 1980s (Cui, 1995:15–18; Honig and Hershatter,
1988:51–59). In the 1980s and 1990s, the focus of the discourse was on
chastity and self-restraint, emphasizing that improperly managed sexual
feelings could lead to physical harm and social ruin. Today, state-sponsored
media is still filled with government-supported sex counselors who, while
less inclined to focus on chastity, stress the importance of managing sexual
feelings so as to properly manage the body and one’s role in society (Lee,
2007; McMillan, 2005; Slote and De Vos, 1998; Xinran, 2003).
There continues to be much discussion of promiscuous foreign cul-
tures. James Farrer (2002), in his study of patrons of Shanghai dance halls
and sex shops, reports that numerous young women (as in the 1930s) want
to find a rich man to financially take care of them (as a mistress) or to
marry them (see also Farrer and Field, 2015).
China’s sexual revolution is straying little from Confucian ideals (Slote
and De Vos, 1998; Farquhar, 2002). In the not-so-distant past, wives were
ideally expected after their marriage to wait for their husband to initiate
sex. In effect, their primary task in marital intercourse was to satisfy their
husbands’ sexual needs (Honig and Hershatter, 1988:182; Jankowiak,
1993:233; Zhao and Geng, 1992:15). The normative ideal did not always
result in women not becoming, whenever they desired, sexually assertive.
In every culture, there is a difference between public discourse and private
practice. For example, Jankowiak (1993) recalls a husband complaining
that he did not want to have a child at that time, but his wife would come to
bed and touch him and, before he knew it, he had sex. Six months after this
conversation, he reported that his wife was pregnant. Women in Louise T.
Higgins and Chunghui Sun’s (2007) survey expressed the importance of
male superiority in marriage, but not necessarily in the bedroom. Jankowiak
(1993:230–234) reports that, in the 1980s, when a wife does not like her
husband, she may show more inclination to resist his advances and spend
more time with her children or friends. In Suiming Pan and colleagues’
(2002) comprehensive sex survey, fewer than 3 percent of male respondents
Family, Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality 353
in any age group reported experiencing kissing or sexual foreplay (women
were not asked)! Until the maturing of China’s single-child generation,
kissing remained a subdued behavior. In more than 2.5 years of relentless
urban field research, Jankowiak never observed in a private or public set-
ting a single couple kissing (Jankowiak and Li, 2016). But in this new cen-
tury, that has changed. Singletons often use the public arena to intensify
their emotional bond and nothing is more daring, exciting, and stimulating
than to engage in a public kiss.
The enhanced knowledge about sex, especially among China’s single-
child generation, has given rise, since the 1990s, to a more tolerant attitude
toward premarital sex and cohabitation. Some university students move out
of student dormitories and rent flats outside the campus to live with their
sweethearts without any commitment to marriage. Such unions may dis-
solve, without any bitterness, as soon as they graduate.
Significantly, a long-standing cultural axiom that middle-aged women
and, to lesser extent, men should cease to be interested in love, marriage, or
sex is currently being challenged by numerous writers and, more impor-
tantly, in the behavior of these women and men. Jeanne Shea’s (2005) im-
portant 1990s research conducted with 200 rural and 199 urban Chinese
women between the ages of forty and sixty-five found that the vast major-
ity (72 percent) had retained an active interest in sex and were still sexually
active with their spouse. Moreover, 80 percent of rural women reported
higher rates of sexual activity compared to 64 percent of urban women
(Shea, 2005:139). Guan’s (2004) research in rural Henan also found that
rural women retained interest in sex into their fifties and sixties. The degree
to which they engaged in sex depended on the quality of their marriage: if
they felt they had a good marriage 80 percent had regular sex, but if they
felt it was less than satisfactory the urban women had sex less often or not
at all (Shea, 2011:373). The deciding factor is that most Chinese women no
longer believe that divorce or widowhood means that they must give up in-
terest in being a sexual being.
China’s increasing openness to sexual expression, combined with
looser sexual restrictions, along with drug usage (Mexico, 2009:75–94,
231–250, 293–303; Jing and Worth, 2010), sex trafficking, careless and un-
safe blood transfusions, and prostitution (Gifford, 2007:76–85; Zheng,
2009; Mexico, 2009:23–58, 231–250, 278–282; Jing and Worth, 2010;
Zhou, 2010:71–100) are contributing to a growing AIDS problem in China
(discussed below). Moreover, the government remains reluctant to discuss
sexuality and thus there is little formal education about sex. Although mar-
ried urban couples often use condoms, few dating couples do so, relying on
abortion as a way to terminate an unwanted pregnancy. Today, China is es-
timated to have one of the highest abortion rates in the world, with some-
where between 9 million and 23 million abortions performed a year, mostly
354 Zang Xiaowei and William Jankowiak
on unmarried women under twenty-four years old (Jeffreys and Yu,
2015:15; Oleson, 2011).
After China’s massive syphilis epidemic in the first half of the twenti-
eth century, government policy, combined with cultural conservatism to-
ward sexuality, contributed to the elimination of the infection for twenty
years (1960!1980). The substantial changes that have been taking place in
contemporary Chinese society have altered earlier attitudes toward sexual-
ity, which has also resulted in a massive increase in sexually transmitted
diseases. Research has discovered that the “human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV) infection has begun to spread beyond the initial transmission pockets
of injection drug users (IDUs) and blood transfusions” (Parish et al.,
2003:1265). William Parish and colleagues also point out that “if current
infection trends persist, absolute numbers of individuals with HIV infection
are projected to surpass current numbers in the United States within 2 years
and those in South Africa (currently the highest) within a decade”
(2003:1265). The high rate of sexually transmitted diseases, frequency of
abortions, and expansion of prostitution are all clear indicators of a society
that has rediscovered sexuality. In this and in many other ways, Chinese so-
ciety has returned to earlier historical eras, which were relatively open to
sexual expression both inside and outside a marital union (Mann, 2011;
Sommer, 2015; L. Pan, 2016).
Homosexuality has a long social history (Hinsch, 1992; Sang, 2003;
Kang, 2009; Ho, 2010). It is increasingly accepted by China’s single-child
generation, but remains unpopular among its senior generation (W.-S.
Chou, 2000; Kam, 2013). In 2001, the Chinese Psychiatric Association
ceased to define homosexuality as a mental disorder. Gay bars and social
clubs have sprung up in the major cities, with a lively subculture (Rofel,
2007:111–156; Yau, 2010; Zheng, 2015). Though no laws prohibit homo-
sexuality, these establishments are subject to periodic police raids. Numer-
ous websites are available to China’s gay community, and many Chinese
films reference homosexuality (S. H. Lim, 2007; Martin, 2003). In spite of
gradual acceptance of homosexuality, most gays and lesbians remain
guarded, especially when interacting with parents who tend to be the most
troubled by their sexual orientation (W.-S. Chou, 2000; Sang, 2003; Mex-
ico, 2009:115–131).
Ethnic Minorities
Intermarriage rates constitute a primary index in determining the degree of
ethnic closure and, thus, the relative strength of cultural borders. Through-
out China, intermarriage rates between minorities and Han population vary
by region. For Turkic Muslims, intermarriage between a Han (an unbe-
liever) and a Muslim is a fundamental cultural taboo. In Xinjiang, intermar-
Family, Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality 355
riages are so infrequent that one could assert that they are virtually nonex-
istent. Those few who do transgress are disowned and their children are
never accepted into the larger extended family (Rudelson and Jankowiak,
2004). Unlike Buddhism’s greater tolerance of intermarriage between be-
liever and nonbeliever, the Islamic religion is adamant in its insistence that
marriage can take place only between believers. Given the Han reluctance
to convert, or in any way sensitize themselves to Hui or Uyghur cultural
practices, the religious stricture makes Islam an effective border for the de-
velopment and maintenance of separation.
The Hui insist on marrying fellow Muslims or persons who promise to
convert to Islam after marriage. For example, Xiaowei Zang’s (2011a)
urban fieldwork compared patterns in marriages and household structures
between the majority Han and Chinese Muslims or the Hui, the third-largest
minority group in China (see Chapter 8). He found in his field site,
Lanzhou, a city in northwest China, that fewer couples (Han 27.2 percent
vs. Hui 29.4 percent) used friends or relatives for introductions before their
marriage. However, the Hui were much more likely than the Han to use
parental arrangements or matchmakers to find a prospective mate (23.5 per-
cent vs. 8.5 percent, and 7.6 percent vs. 3.7 percent, respectively). In addi-
tion, 48.5 percent of the Han met their spouses on their own, compared
with 32.8 percent of the Hui.
In contrast, the research of Jankowiak (1993; Jankowiak and Li, 2014)
among urban Mongols found a more fluid mating arrangement. Male Mon-
gols preferred women to marry only a Mongol while they insisted that they
themselves could marry from any ethnic group. Despite this adamant and
often voiced view, women ignored the demand and married whomever they
wanted. By this century in Hohhot, capital of the Inner Mongolia Au-
tonomous Region, the intermarriage rate was huge. For example, in 1982,
15 percent of Mongolian marriages were mixed; it rose in 1990 to 40 per-
cent, and in 2001 more than 75 percent of the marriages were between
Mongol and Han (Burjgin and Bilik, 2003).
Muslim motherhood was regarded as a key safeguard of Islamic cul-
ture. The preservation of family honor traditionally entailed gender separa-
tion, the supervision of women, and restrictions on women’s behavior, par-
ticularly with regard to dress, mobility, and contact with men outside the
immediate family. Uyghur men, however, are given more power and auton-
omy since they have to compete with Han Chinese in the labor market.
Uyghur women were also more likely than their Muslim brothers to report
arranged marriages because Muslim women had a lower level of autonomy.
Parents were less able to control or influence the marriage decisions of
higher-status children (likely to be men) than those of lower-status children
(likely to be women) (Zang, 2007, 2012).
356 Zang Xiaowei and William Jankowiak
Culture, and perceptions of culture, also link AIDS and minorities in the
minds of many Chinese (Hyde, 2007). The first AIDS case in China was
identified in Yunnan in 1985. The government immediately suspected that it
emanated from minority groups—Tai, Lahu, or Wa—living along the border
who have members indulging in promiscuous sex and using unsterilized
needles to inject heroine. The government set up a working group to track
AIDS cases among these individuals and, for twenty years, the official line
suggested that this behavior was the source of AIDS and that the rest of the
country had no problem (Hyde, 2007). In fact by that time, more than a mil-
lion people, in every province of the nation, were HIV positive and the dis-
ease was spreading because promiscuous sex—both with prostitutes and
among other consenting adults—was quietly takingn place throughout China
(Hershatter, 1997; Mexico, 2009:115–132, 273–292; Jing and Worth, 2010;
Sutherland and Hsu, 2011). In 2005, the government began to address AIDS
as an urgent national crisis. By 2009, official statistics placed the number of
individuals who were HIV positive at 740,000, of which a third were homo-
sexuals. That is probably a conservative estimate (Jing and Worth, 2010).
Provision of Elderly Care
Elderly care has become a major discussion topic in family studies both in-
side and outside China in recent years. The 1996 Law of the People’s
Family, Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality 357
A Uyghur family enjoys a fresh yogurt treat
on a Sunday outing in Kashgar, Xinjiang.
Ro
be
rt
E
. G
am
er
Republic of China Regarding the Protection of the Rights and Interests of
the Elderly defines the “elderly” as those in the age group of sixty years old
and above. It is claimed that in China, “25 per cent of the total population
will be aged 60 and above by 2030, and the population of those aged 65
and over is projected to increase to 15 per cent, also by 2030. Meanwhile,
the worker retiree ratio is expected to fall from 8.6 to 1 in 2010 to 2.3 to 1
by 2030” (Lin, 2014:145). By 2050 China may have 115 million senior cit-
izens over eighty years old (Hou and Li, 2011:514), and it is not well pre-
pared to meet the challenges for long-term elderly care due to rapid aging
of the population (Shen, Fang, and Tanui, 2014:679; see also Hou and Li,
2011; Kwok, 2006). For example, in 2010, “there were about 3.496 million
beds in total, including different kinds of social service institutions, cater-
ing to only 1.97 per cent of the population aged 60 and above” in China.
There are other issues related to institutional care, including affordability,
“poor living conditions and poor service quality, as well as a shortage of
professionals in private institutions” (Lin, 2014:150!151). Unsurprisingly,
Rita Jing-Ann Chou (2010) found that only 20 percent of the elderly in
urban areas were willing to live in elderly care institutions. The China Na-
tional Committee on Ageing (2008) claims that more than 85 percent of
elderly people prefer to receive care service in their own home.
Since most senior citizens prefer to age at home, several aspects of
family and marriage institutions discussed above, such as small family size,
fertility transition, a large number of elderly bachelors, and marital break-
downs, have major impacts on elderly care in China (Y. S. Li, 2005; L. W.
Li et al., 2012; L. Liu, Dong, and Zheng, 2010; C. Y. Yang, Fu, and Li,
2016). For example, living alone is associated with lower subjective well-
being for the elderly, whereas coresidence with immediate family (spouse
or children) is associated with positive subjective well-being. Also, com-
pared to living with a son, coresidence with a daughter is more positively
linked to the emotional health of senior citizens (Chen and Short, 2008; W.
Zhang et al., 2015). However, in both urban and rural China, the number of
empty-nest families (i.e., old people living by themselves or with their
spouses rather than with their children) is growing rapidly. It is found that
8.3 percent of the elderly lived by themselves and 41.4 percent lived with
their spouses in China in 2006. In some economically developed cities such
as Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai, the proportion of empty-nest families can
be as high as nearly 60 percent (Lin, 2014:147). Given this development,
the government updated the 1996 law on July 1, 2013, requiring adult chil-
dren who are not living with their parents to visit their parents regularly.
Other major determinants of the health of elderly Chinese include eco-
nomic conditions, chronic health conditions, social activity participation,
and caring for grandchildren. This is true for both self-rated health and psy-
chological well-being. The beneficial effects of social activity participation
358 Zang Xiaowei and William Jankowiak
are particularly salient for elderly women and for the old-old, and the salu-
tary effects of caring for grandchildren are more substantial for elderly men
and for the young-old (W. Zhang et al., 2015). J. X. Feng et al. (2015) re-
port that living with a spouse, financial independence, and perceiving care
support from any resource are associated with higher survival rates for eld-
erly people. This is true for both urban and rural elderly. There is a larger
difference between those perceiving care support from family or social
services and those perceiving no care support in urban areas.
Although family care is the primary form of elderly care today, it alone
cannot cope with the challenges from a rapidly aging population. There are
many unsolved issues and concerns in the provision of elderly care in China
such as government funding support and community involvement. W. Y. Lin
(2014; see also Shen, Fang, and Tanui, 2014) highlights affordability as a
critical issue in the provision of elderly care in China. With the support of
the central government, 90 percent of the rural population now receive some
form of basic health coverage. A critical issue is reimbursement rates. For
outpatient care, the reimbursement rates are under 40 percent and under 32
percent for urban and rural patients, respectively. This is certainly not
enough to cover catastrophic illness, and that is why many Chinese feel they
are just one major illness away from poverty (Hou and Li, 2011).
Another major issue in the provision of elderly care in China is urban-
rural inequality (Lin, 2014). J. W. Hou and K. W. Li (2011) found that
urban senior citizens enjoy better health care than their rural counterparts.
Medical payments are a greater burden on the elderly in rural areas than on
those in urban areas, given their income differences. The urban elderly also
have better access to health care than the rural elderly because of differ-
ences in social capital, geography, and so forth. Unsurprisingly, X. L.
Wang, X. Y. Shang, and L. P. Xu (2011) found that over 16 percent of the
rural elderly population and 11.5 percent of the urban elderly population
rated their life satisfaction as poor or very poor.
The rural elderly have also suffered from a large-scale migration of
younger workers from rural to urban China since the 1990s, which has sep-
arated many adult children from their aging parents and imposed great chal-
lenges on the traditional patterns of familial support for rural older people
(Connelly and Maurer-Fazio, 2016). These challenges are augmented by the
fact that in rural China the elderly have been deprived of a state pension
and other welfare provisions available to urban residents. However, J. Y.
Liu (2014) disagrees that migration is always detrimental to the rural eld-
erly who stay behind. Members of the rural households across different ge-
ographical locations actively worked together to build and maintain con-
nections and, hence, the collective welfare of the family. In particular, the
caring, supportive, and kin-keeping roles performed by women played a
critical role in ensuring social and physical reproduction across generations.
Family, Kinship, Marriage, and Sexuality 359
Liu concludes that, contrary to assumptions in some migration studies and
aging literature in China, it is the breakdown of the webs of interdepen-
dence and reciprocity rather than the event of migration that has negative
effects on old-age care for the seniors in the household.
Conclusion
The family revolution occurred first in urban China, as it experienced the
penetration of Western influence and rapid industrialization. The lack of
technological development in rural China kept out many of the forces of
change that challenge traditional concepts of family life. This is true today.
In cities, families are changing more quickly. Urban youth can meet
prospective marriage partners without help from their parents and even can
engage in premarital sex. They can set up households and nuclear families
that give them some distance from parental influence. In the countryside,
rural youth have greater freedom than before to choose their own mates and
make decisions about whether to stay or move to the city.
Yet youth are inclined to seek advice from their parents and keep in
close contact with them. And women, who are increasingly freed from eco-
nomic dependence on their fathers and husbands, continue to value the ad-
vice of their parents and at times their husbands. The coming of age of the
single-child generation has contributed to promotion of a more individual-
istic spirit (Y. Yan, 2003, 2010; Jankowiak and Li, 2016) that youth are
using to renegotiate what it means to be a person, modern, and Chinese.
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