Page 160 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

BUILDING FOR THE FUTURE FAMILY 147
This begs investigation. Precisely whose ‘house’ is to be continued? Who insists that new
mansions must be built? Who initiates early family division, and why?
Recent research suggests that young women increasingly are transacting their own
marriages and household arrangements, rather than being the objects of others’
transactions. In Shaanxi, Yan Yunxiang (1996) found that young women had begun to take
it upon themselves to inspect the quality of potential bridegrooms’ houses and then
negotiate the size and content of marital payments with both their own parents and the
groom’s family Not surprisingly, Yan’s informants downplayed women’s agency, saying
that the brides were acting as pawns of their husbands-to-be, eager to acquire a share of
family wealth and village land. Zhang Weiguo (1998) drew different conclusions from his
study in Hebei. Zhang found that village women controlled much of the expenditure of
marital payments and, once married, they decided how household income would
be spent.
My own investigation of housing construction and household formation supports Siu’s
contention that villagers are indeed building to ensure ‘continuation of the house’, but, in
keeping with Yan’s and Zhang’s findings, it shows that in many instances it is young
women’s housing and family ideals that are being constructed. The mansions that are
springing up across the Zhejiang landscape express women’s desire to emancipate
themselves from their husband’s family and identify them and their families as ‘modern’,
independent participants in the capitalist economy At the same time, the resources needed
for ongoing construction urge villagers to participate in ever-widening markets for
labour, credit, material goods and ‘life-styles’.
My argument draws on three sources of information. Over more than a decade, I have
been visiting and conversing with two generations of women from a few families in a
village in north-eastern Zhejiang. To assess the representative nature of their actions and
attitudes, in 2000 I conducted a random survey of 296 households and conducted
interviews with members of 40 households in four villages in northern, central and south-
western Zhejiang. I also interviewed the village chiefs, Party Secretaries and women in
charge of family planning in the surveyed villages, and officials in the city and town land
administration and construction bureaux administering those villages. The average size
and composition of the households surveyed were consistent with national averages. The
villages also presented a broad spectrum of households’ economic circumstances, with
average per capita annual incomes ranging from 14,528 yuan in the wealthiest village to
2,900 yuan in the poorest village. My third source of data comprised government
documents, statistical yearbooks and press reports on household formation and housing
construction in rural Zhejiang. Based, as it is, on research in one affluent coastal province,
the findings from this study cannot be extrapolated to explain trends in China’s central
and western regions or in urban centres. Nevertheless, my research demonstrates that at
least in this part of the countryside, women are attempting to secure some control over
their married lives and the future of their children. It also illuminates the (sometimes
unintended) consequences of women’s actions for the economy and culture of rural
Zhejiang, and for relations within the home.