Page 159 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

146 SALLY SARGESON
Jack Goody’s proposition, that different economic and social systems follow quite
distinctive logics in utilising marital payments and inheritance to circulate property,
provided a potentially useful framework for theorising changes in marriage, household
formation and inter-generational wealth transmission in China (Goody 1990, 1998).
Goody argued that in classless societies practising shifting cultivation in Africa, payments
of bridewealth reallocated the wealth necessary for the arrangement of marriages laterally
among households with children of marriageable age. In Europe and Asia, where complex
divisions of labour were associated with intensive agriculture, industry and commerce,
economic and social status inequalities were perpetuated and family wealth conserved in
the form of productive assets by the vertical transmission of property, through sons’
inheritance and daughters’ dowries.
Applying Goody’s theorisation to explain changes in dowry and brideprice in the
Guangdong delta in the 1980s, Helen Siu (1993) suggested that marriage customs and
methods of intra-familial property transmission were being altered in response to China’s
market transition. Siu argued that marital payments ‘involve not so much the exchange of
material goods and prestige between the families of bride and groom as the intense and
rapid devolution of property to the conjugal couple at the time of marriage itself’ (Siu
1993:170). This was precipitated, Siu reasoned, by villagers’ concerns about
‘continuation of the house’ in the context of the revival of a market economy. The
collective investment in new housing was a ‘family strategy’ to acquire prestige, expand
social networks, strengthen children’s allegiance to their parents and reinforce rights to
settlement and farmland.
However, Goody’s proposition that families utilise marital payments and inheritance to
conserve their assets is, to a large extent, contingent on the assumption that the rights of
beneficiaries to exchange and profit from those assets will be protected by private
property rights institutions. In rural China, some collective property rights still take
priority over the property rights of individuals. Individuals do not own the land on which
their village houses are situated, for all rural land is the collective property of villagers (Ho
2001). Certainly, houses in the countryside are owned by individuals and can be sold and
rented. But rural real estate markets are suppressed by legislation, specifically designed to
conserve agricultural land, that prohibits villagers who sell or rent their homes from
immediately applying for another site on which to build (Sargeson 2002). As a
consequence, the sale and rental of rural housing is common only in the vicinity of cities.
Nor can rural dwellings easily be mortgaged. Contrary to Siu’s suggestion, house owners
are not automatically entitled to contract farmland or receive subsidies, benefits or
dividends funded by the village’s collective assets. Hence, in contrast to Goody’s
prediction that intergenerational transfers are intended to preserve a family’s ownership
of productive property, in rural China the expenditure of marital payments on a new
dwelling transforms family wealth into an unproductive asset.
Economically unproductive, perhaps, but Siu argues that new housing is necessary to
ensure the reproduction and prestige of the family. And, notwithstanding a caveat that
members of a family might disagree over their collective values, goals and strategies, her
argument implies that it is the patrilineal family whose reproduction is being ensured.