John Logan Jing Song Brown University Market transition in China has been an intriguing topic concerning the withering of the socialist legacy and the expansion of market, but limited efforts have been made understanding changes in the rural household since the reinstatement of the family farming system. This dimension becomes more important given the industrialization of the countryside, the rise of the private sector, and the increase of migration. This project seeks to answer how new economic opportunities are allocated in transitional rural China, i.e., who is employed in nonagricultural employment and how family and market factors are translated into employment patterns? The project integrates quantitative and qualitative analyses. The quantitative models use the CGSS (cross-sectional), CHNS (longitudinal) datasets to estimate what kind of men and women under what family and market conditions are more likely to have nonagricultural work over time. The qualitative part of the research will collect in-depth interviews in coastal and inland village with different levels of industrialization and urbanization. The qualitative analysis will capture political economic dynamics underlying employment patterns, offer supplementary explanations for observed family and market effects, and open up new territories that helped to shape gendered experiences in economic expansion. Based on the integration of small-N case studies and large-N data analysis, the project tries to bridge research traditions of rational choice, gender theories and developmental politics, and to fill the knowledge gap between patriarchal family and developmental state.
Broader Impacts
Research findings have the potential to contribute to a better understanding of grassroots reactions to market-oriented reforms in a previous socialist regime; aid governments and international organizations in the design of developmental strategies that speak to family norms and local contexts and to better evaluate market reform policies in patriarchal societies; suggest fresh ways to look at the relationship between agriculture and other economic sectors in the developing world provide new information on gender relations and family roles in China that are relevant for long term concerns with the position of women in society.
This project has two parts that investigate the transitional employment patterns in rural China. The first part of the research uses two large datasets (Chinese General Social Survey and China Health and Nutrition Survey) to estimate the effects of family and market factors on nonagricultural work. The results support the positive effect of education but not that of political capital. Women’s employment is more responsive to the presence of grandparents and young children in the household, yet "young" grandparents and "old" grandparents make a difference. At the market level, local geographic, economic and labor force conditions of the village also play an important role in shaping family employment patterns, and the eastern and central regions illustrate a higher likelihood of nonagricultural employment than the western region. The first part of the research also suggests that over time, both men and women have a greater chance of doing nonagricultural work, but the increase rate for women is smaller. In addition, men seem to have a more salient difference in the increase rates across cohorts. At the couple level, the models suggest an increasing tendency that the husband and the wife move into nonagricultural sectors together. The "husband off-farm, wife on-farm" category has slowed down its growth among young cohorts and has declined among old cohorts. However, there seems to be little increase of families in which women lead the transition into nonagricultural employment. The second part of the research analyzes in-depth interviews collected from two coastal villages and two inland villages, each characterized by distinct developmental pathways and thus unique employment patterns. The related economic structures and social institutions set a nuanced context for grassroots perception and family negotiation of employment and welfare opportunities in three aspects: policies and practices on land use and its relationship with other economic sectors; the relationship between local structures of life chances and migration-based economy; the structure of career ladders and the means of job mobility. Such contextual facets are shaped in interactions between the top-down policy implementations and the bottom-up initiations, and contribute to the unique work-household-gender nexus in areas with prosperous private sectors, or with resilient collective legacy, or dominated by labor outmigration, or integrated in larger urbanization projects. The consequent adaptive family strategies include the safety-first logic of peasants to stick to the farming sector, the diversification and multitasking strategies to spread risks, strategies of specialization and investment concentration, various forms of family cooperation/ sacrifice, and tendencies to move for opportunity structures independently. The intellectual merit of this project is to integrate the analysis of real-life narratives and local contexts and that of statistical data analysis. The project uses in-depth description of people’s perception and strategies in economic expansion to enrich the observed employment patterns in statistical models, which adds to research traditions of rational choice, gender theories and developmental politics. The project also contributes to previous studies on market-oriented transitions that have not caught the recent tendencies of how people respond to opportunity structures emerged from the gradualist reform in China. The project also proposes a research strategy using married couples as the unit of analysis and takes into account both family dynamics and local market conditions, thus fills the knowledge gap between the patriarchal family and the developmental state. This project makes several types of contributions to larger society. First, the project can help policymakers in China to look at the relationship between agriculture and other economic sectors in terms of job selectivity and life chances, and the creative ways in which Chinese peasants have responded to changing opportunity structures. Second, the project may inspire governments and organizations to design developmental strategies that speak to family norms and local contexts in patriarchal societies. In particular, the project provides updated information on gender relations and family roles in China that are relevant for long term concerns with the position of women in society. Third, the project suggests that scholars and international organizations need to be cautious in evaluating the outcomes of market-oriented reforms, particularly in a previous socialist regime. The interactive processes of top-down policy implementation and bottom-up grassroots reactions can lead to expected and unexpected consequences in economic and social structures. There is no uniform pattern of the withering of the socialist legacy and the expansion of market.
