Marriage and childbearing among China's first single-child generation

Vanessa L. Fong (Professor of Anthropology, Amherst College)

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Abstract

Drawing on interviews, surveys, and participant observation conducted as part of a longitudinal study of Chinese singletons carried out between 1998 and 2022, this talk looks at how the intensive parental investment, high educational attainment, and egalitarian gender roles experienced by the cohort born under China’s one-child policy have led to high rates of late marriage, no marriage, childlessness, and refusal to have more than one child now that they are in their mid-thirties; despite policies that now allow them to have up to three children, and the widespread desire to marry and have two children, which most of them expressed during their twenties.

About the speaker

Vanessa Fong is Professor of Anthropology, Olin Professor in Asian Studies, and Chair of the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at Amherst College. She graduated from Amherst College in 1996, received her PhD in Anthropology from Harvard University in 2002, and was Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education from 2003 to 2012, before returning to Amherst College in 2012.

Her research focuses on a cohort born under China's one-child policy between 1979 and 1986. She has been engaged since 1998 in a longitudinal project that will follow this cohort and their spouses and children throughout the course of their lives.

Registration

This webinar will take place online via Zoom. Click here to register .

Chair: Dr Xiaoning Lu, Reader in Modern Chinese Culture and Language, SOAS University of London.

Organiser: SOAS China Institute

Contact email: sci@soas.ac.uk