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

In Private Life under Socialism, Yan Yunxiang offers his account of one example of "romantic revolution . . . [which] results from the rise of youth autonomy and the decline of patriarchal power and in turn speeds up the same process of transformation in the other respects of private life, such as family formation, property division, support of the elderly, and fertility culture" (p. 85). Starting from where he left off in his discussion on marriage exchanges in the last chapter of his 1996 book The Flow of Gifts, and interspersing passages from a subsequent article, "The Triumph of Conjugality,"¹ Yan offers this longitudinal study of a single village. This is a study that delivers many dividends on its original investment of patient and intensive fieldwork in a community where Yan was first assigned as a young displaced urbanite in the 1970s. There he conducted his dissertation research and made five subsequent research visits, and the resulting monograph puts on display the quiet revolution that was taking place there.

Yan is too modest in claiming that he provides only a "case study" of a small northern farming village, which, despite its own heroic efforts to get on the bandwagon of rural industry by selling milk to Nestle or contributing to the temporary migration of young workers to the erratically booming Chinese cities, has largely been left behind in the recent reforms. The misfortunes of Xiajia Village serve as a model of the impact of modern pressures on village life. Despite the disintegration of much of this villages original social structure, there is the eerily familiar rise of certain aspects of modernity such as courtship and love, the "triumph" of the nuclear family, the increasing insularity of physical space, and the significant improvements in the social and economic status of women. A new sense of privacy justifies a range of new indulgences, from the relative sexual freedom of young women before they marry to the "early" inheritance of family wealth and the release from the burden of caring for aged parents. These changes represent a real shift in family authority in favor of the young in everything from the choosing of spouses to the control of resources. Yan argues that this shift is accompanied by the growth of a private realm in two senses: a private space for the smallest social unit, the family, shielded from public concerns, and a new privacy within individual emotional lives. This new privacy has changed the character of intimacy so that it embraces new notions like "love," which are influenced by global popular culture, Western religious philosophy, and the sense that what is happening here is really something new.

The question of whether private life is a new experience that has overturned the traditional corporate family model or just a newly packaged discourse that vaguely explains the current disintegration of broader social order is left disappointingly undertheorized, and essentially unanswered, in this book On the one hand Yan sees Georges Duby s formulation of the distinction between public and private as an "obvious, commonsensical distinction" (p. 7) as a problem that ignores significant reformulations of this dichotomy in gender studies and anthropology generally. Yan sees the rise of privacy as a natural outgrowth of modernity, even as the institutions of modernity in governance and social organizations actually appear to be falling apart in Xiajia Village. On the other hand he strenuously objects to the idea that romantic love and intimacy could ever have been missing from village life. Citations to the contrary duly noted (e.g., a reference to Jankowiak and Fischer on p. 44),² I think that he overstates (as they do) the view that in general we have assumed that Chinese villagers were incapable of expressing or experiencing romantic love, by whatever name, before their domestication as the proletariat and their rebirth as modern consumers.

The gaps in Yan's...