Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999 (review)

Although the author does not specifically explain the methodology behind this significant study, its unusual features are evident from the outset. Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four (1971-1978), the author was a migrant farmer working in the southern Heilongjiang village of Xiajia (xiv), which later became the focus of his investigation. After enrolling first in Beijing University and then as a Ph.D. candidate in Harvard's anthropology department, he returned to Xiajia for seven field trips, 1989-1999 (11), publishing two books and several articles based on that research. His background armed him with the terrific advantage of deep familiarity with the village and its approximately 1,500 residents, promoting facility in the local dialect and earning the villagers' trust—particularly important, given the sensitive topics of his inquiry.

Yan discusses the gradual post-1949 loosening of previous restraints on youth autonomy, independent spouse selection, courtship, display of affection, premarital sex, romantic love, conjugal intimacy, and postmarital living arrangements, as well as private domestic space and the government's birth limitation policies. As his principal sources, Yan mixed casual conversations with formal interviews, following "the life course of more than two dozen individuals" (xii) and presumably making careful notes in the evenings ("eleven years of field notes" 171). What he discovered was the gradual breakdown of traditional corporate family controls in Xiajia and, possibly by extension, elsewhere in rural China, although Yan insists that his findings may not apply throughout China (xiii).

Yan has supplemented his major sources with important and hard-to-access local unpublished sources, such as the official village household registration records for 1980, the village women's federation "birth planning files," and Xiajia's Records of Birth Control Implementation (68, 70, 88-89). In addition, he equipped himself with appropriate theoretical background reading, including works specifically focused on China as well as theoretical studies such as Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby, A History of Private Life (Cambridge, Mass., 1987-1991), 5v. Although Yan's study is basically a work of onsite anthropology, the author has also availed himself of findings from economics and politics. In studying the momentous changes in Chinese family structures during the last half century, Yan is also concerned with the discipline of history itself.

Yan perceived the need for his study when he first read former scholars' emphasis on "collective behavior" in Chinese families at the expense of "individual agency," a bias "at odds" with his own experience. Why did Western scholarship commit this error? Yan suggests that Western observers tended to stress elements of Chinese life unfamiliar to their audiences, as a result exaggerating the group more than they should (xi, 219). One might add that in both Chinese and Western societies, individuals do not always fulfill dominant groups' ideals and social values, even though those groups may influence individual behavior and scholarly writing. In the West, for instance, by no means all citizens respect prevailing moral and religious strictures. Such ideals may have been stronger in China than in the West, particularly in recent centuries (219). Moreover, although Yan has documented the emergence of individual autonomy, emotionality, and even the extreme of the "uncivil individual" who operates beyond a moral framework (217), his insights suggest that the decline of the corporate family and the rise of individual agency may date from earlier times (219-220). Yan's book is one of the most significant to emerge in the field for a decade, raising topics that now call for further investigation.