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Lihong Shi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University.
List of contents
Introduction
1. The Birth-Planning Campaign: Local Experience of Population Control
2. "Life Is to Enjoy": The Pursuit of the New Ideal of Happiness
3. One Tiger versus Ten Mice: Raising One Successful Child
4. "Little Quilted Vest to Warm Parents' Hearts": Gendered Transformation of Filial Piety
5. "Here Comes My Big Debt": Wedding Costs and Sons as Financial Burdens
6. Emerging from the Ancestors' Shadow: Weakened Belief in Family Continuity
Conclusion
About the author
Lihong Shi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University.
Summary
China's patrilineal and patriarchal tradition has encouraged a long-standing preference for male heirs within families. Coupled with China's birth-planning policy, this has led to a severe gender imbalance. But a counterpattern is emerging in rural China where a noticeable proportion of young couples have willingly accepted having a single daughter. They are doing so even as birth-planning policies are being relaxed and having a second child, and the opportunity of having a son, is a new possibility.
Choosing Daughters explores this critical, yet largely overlooked, reproductive pattern emerging in China's demographic landscape. Lihong Shi delves into the social, economic, and cultural forces behind the complex decision-making process of these couples to unravel their life goals and childrearing aspirations, the changing family dynamics and gender relations, and the intimate parent–daughter ties that have engendered this drastic transformation of reproductive choice. She reveals a leading-edge social force that fosters China's recent fertility decline, namely pursuit of a modern family and successful childrearing achieved through having a small family. Through this discussion, Shi refutes the conventional understanding of a universal preference for sons and discrimination against daughters in China and counters claims of continuing resistance against China's population control program.
Additional text
"Choosing Daughters is an interesting and innovative book that examines the transformations of patrilineal and patriarchal traditions in rural China through the lens of reproductive preferences and child-bearing decisions...This book enriches our understanding of rural Chinese families in general and their new reproductive patterns in the post-reform period in particular."––Yinni Peng, Pacific Affairs
