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Chiang Village: A Household Survey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Elisabeth J. Croll
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Extract

The data presented in this paper are drawn from observations and materials that I acquired as the result of a short visit to Kwangtung Province in April 1977. During that time I was able to travel as an individual and undertake 10 days of concentrated interviewing on the composition of the household, marriage and kinship relationsin a selection of rural villages and urban neighbourhoods. During this visit I specifically set out to test the correlation between differing patterns of marriage with the structure and functions of households and primary groups that I had already developed from a study of the documentary sources. In making these correlations from documentary sources, I found that I was far from clear about questions such as household composition, post-marital residential arrangements and relations between households and kin groups in rural villages. I hoped that my visit might allow me to make an inquiry into the structure of domestic groups and the nature of primary kin groups in rural and urban areas. Restricted by time, I had to be less concerned with the actual marriage patterns themselves and with other areas of interest, such as the relation of kin groups to leadership patterns. My collection of data is, therefore, directly relevant to a very limited subject area. The materials collected from one village have been published here because the opportunities to acquire a survey of, or more comprehensive materials from, a single village are still limited, and previous such collections stand out as land-marks in the history of the study of social institutions in China.

Type
Reports from China
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 72 , December 1977 , pp. 786 - 814
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1977

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References

1. I would like to thank the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in London, the China Travel Service in Canton and the Contemporary China Institute of the University of London, all of whom made this visit possible. My thanks are also due to Dr W. Parish, Dr J. L. Watson, Dr C. Howe and Professor K. R. Walker, all of whom read this manuscript and made valuable comments.

2. Social scientists have been especially indebted to Yang, C. K., A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1959)Google Scholar; Geddes, W., Peasant Life in Communist China (Ithaca, New York: Society for Applied Anthropology, Cornell, 1963)Google Scholar; Myrdal, J., Report from a Chinese Village (London: Pelican, 1965)Google Scholar; Crooks, I. D., The First Years of Yangyi Commune (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Chen, J., A Year in Upper Felicity (New York: Harrap, 1973)Google Scholar.

3. The other two villages in which interviews took place and from which comparable data are drawn are Yüeh village (585 pop.) which composed No. 1 production team of the 299 teams which made up the 25 production brigades of Jen-ho commune. This commune is a suburb of Canton and 24 km north of the city centre.Jen-ho commune has 67,000 mou of agricultural land and mainly grows paddy rice, peanuts, and has some forestry, animal husbandry, fisheries and side-line occupation. The second comparable village, Hao-mei village (480pop.) is one of 343 production teams that made up the 19 production brigades of Ta-li commune which like Jen-ho is also a suburb of Canton. It is located 15 km south of the city and mainly grows paddy rice, vegetables and fruiton its 72 sq. miles of farmland.

4. On the basis of this small sample the malproportion may occur by chance. In commenting onthese figures William Parish has pointed out that in earlier studies, the malproportion does not begin in the earliest ages, but around age five continuing through to age 14. He suggests that this malproportion comes from girls in this age bracket being misidentified as boys by the surveyor because the surveyor judges sex by misleading nicknames (personal communication). In this case the sex of the members of the household were given by a representative of each household in their own household in the presence of other members of the household, the village and the commune. Members of the household wandered in and out at will and were introduced on each occasion. Itseems unlikely that misrepresentation of sex is likely in this survey.

5. C. K. Yang estimated that average households ranged from 4 to 6 persons (1959: p. 6) and in a report from a similar area Elizabeth and Graham Johnson found that the average household ranged from 4–44 to 526 persons. See Elizabeth, and Johnson, Graham, Walking on Two Legs: Rural Development m South China (Ottawa, Canada: International Development Research Centre, 1976), p. 71Google Scholar.

6. Levy, M., The Family Revolution in Modern China (New York: Atheneum, 1949), p. 55–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Ibid.; Lang, O., Chinese Family and Society (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946), p. 10Google Scholar.

8. The term “five generations“ or wu fu includes four generations of paternal and maternal ascendants, four generations of ego's own descendants and five generations of the descendants of the ascendants mentioned. See Meijer, M., Marriage Law and Policy in the Chinese People's Republic (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1971), p. 166Google Scholar.

9. It may be that the exogamy of the production brigade for Chiang village is accounted for by the fact that the production brigade was composed of a single surname group, unfortunately the significance of this did not emerge until after the visit.

10. For evidence of the persistence of betrothal gifts and the dowry, see Chung-kuo ch'ing-nien, 16 January 1966; Lo-ying, Sun and Li-fen, Lu, “On Confucian persecution of women in history”, Hstieh hsi yii p'i-p'an (Study and Criticism), 10 01 1975Google Scholar; “Chinese women criticize Confucian-Mencius concept of male supremacy”, NCNA, 7 March 1975.

11. In Kwangtung in the years 1956–57, 1957–58 and 1958–59 the allocation of grain ranged from 44–52 chin per capita. These figures given by Professor K. R. Walker (personal communication) suggest that the allocations of grain have not altered since the late 1950s.

12. In 1976 the income of Yüeh production team or village was composed of 175,000 yüan of which 110,000 was distributed to members of the production team who had earned a total of 1,100,000 work points each of which was valued at 10 cents. The other 65,000 yüan formed a reserve fund, welfare fund and paid for taxes. The production team ran a nursery and a grain processing machine. The 110,000 yüan was distributed half in kind and half in cash. That which was distributed in kind was paidon a per capita basis which ranged from 72 chin of unhusked grain for labourers to 22 chin for young children. The cash component was paid according to work points. At the commune level it was estimated that workers in production teams earned 250 to 300 yüan each year in cash compared to those who worked incommune factories who earned 350 to 400 yüan. The difference was explained by the fact that men and women workers employed by the factory had no time to grow vegetables or participate in side-lines in the household.