Chinese one-child families in the age of migration: middle-class transnational mobility, ageing parents, and the changing role of filial piety

The late twentieth century marked the start of dramatic socioeconomic changes for families in China. The post-1978 economic reform witnessed the rise of a new “middle class” in China (Li 2010a). The increasing household wealth of this class was coupled with sharply reduced family size as a result of the “one-child” policy initiated in 1979. The “one-child” policy was officially ended in October 2015. However, the three and half decades of policy implementation created a one-child generation and made the three-member nuclear family the norm in urban China.

The only child in middle-class families benefited from concentrated family resources. With a desire for Western affluence (Li 2010a; Fong 2004) and the increasing opportunity to go abroad, the number of Chinese students studying abroad has sharply increased since the turn of the century (from 17,662 in 1998 to 38,989 in 2001 to 459,800 in 2014 [National Bureau of Statistics of China 2015]). The majority of overseas Chinese students were postgraduate students in their 20s (Li 2010b) with the USA and the UK being the two most popular destinations.

A large number of graduates remained in the host country and extended their stay indefinitely. The PRC’s survey of the period 1978–2006 reported that 70 % of the Chinese who went abroad as students remained overseas after graduation (Jiang 2009). The return rate remained lower than half until shortly before 2010 (National Bureau of Statistics of China 2015). The increased return rate was the result of tightened migration policies and limited job vacancies in most Western student-receiving countries after the 2008 financial crisis, as well as expanding career opportunities in China. The Annual Report on the Development of Chinese Returnees (2013) indicated that among graduates aged between 24 and 30 who returned after studying abroad in 2012, 90.9 % of them chose “to be near parents” as one of their main reasons for returning (Wang and Miao 2013).

What about the one-child graduates who, for various reasons, did not return and could not “be near parents”? What will happen (or is happening) to their relationship with parents in China? Given the family-based parental long-term care in China, how will traditional intergenerational practices, such as filial piety, be re-interpreted in a long-distance family setting? The one-child transnational family phenomenon is a unique “transnational social field” (Levitt and Schiller 2004) in which to examine ageing and intergenerational relations in the context of modernisation and globalisation.

Between China and the UK: the post-education transnational field

Migration from mainland China to the UK has sharply increased during the past two decades (see Fig. 1). In 2012, China ranked as the top (non-EU) migrant-sending country to the UK for the first time (ONS 2013a). The arrival of the new Chinese migrants from mainland China has changed previous Hong Kong (Cantonese) dominance of the UK Chinese demographic. The percentage of the UK ethnic Chinese population originating from mainland China rose from 13 % in 1991 (Cheng 1994) to nearly 40 % in 2011 (ONS 2012).

Students aged 16 and over made up 45 % of the Chinese who arrived between 2001 and 2011 (ONS 2013b). By 2012 China provided the largest number of international students in UK universities, making up almost a third of non-EU students (Universities UK 2014; Home Office 2013). Based on the relative young age of the arrivals it is reasonable to assume that the majority belonged to the one-child generation in China who were born after the late 1970s. In this study all respondents but one arrived in the UK after 2000, and they were all below the age of 30 in the year of their arrival. The majority of the sample extended their post-education stay by switching to working status and most of these were working as professionals in various mainstream industries. Compared to the previous Chinese migrants this cohort had greater socioeconomic upward mobility in the UK. Compared to their counterparts in China, the overseas one-child cohort was believed to have obtained “First World” affluence (Fong 2004) given that overseas education was considered a “gateway to the ultimate goal of a life in a more open and affluent Western society” (Bodycott and Lai 2012).

However, parents of these one-child migrants showed a lower degree of mobility when compared to their counterparts in trans-Pacific families. Unlike middle-class parents from Hong Kong and Singapore, for whom international migration had been a central feature of their family history (Göransson 2009; Waters 2005; Skeldon 1994), mainland Chinese parents were deeply rooted in their home community. The Chinese border was closed during Mao’s regime, and private migration has been made possible only since the 1980s (Liu 2011; Liu 2006). Administratively, the parents’ generation had been embedded in the communist style Danwei (work unit) system, which monitored its members’ work and life (Hu and Peng 2015). Almost all the respondents participating in this study were the first generation in the extended family (from their grandparents’ generation) to have gone abroad, which has widened the generation gap between migrants and their parents.

In addition, the tightening of UK immigration policy during the past decade made long-term settlement in Britain more difficult. Consequently and ironically, the “value” of permanent British residency (possessed by the younger generation) was increased and was more likely to be viewed as a “family asset” not to be easily given up. Indeed, several respondents regarded “getting a British permanent residency permit” as an important part of their overseas achievement. This kind of space-bound capital accumulation strategy reduced the transnational flexibility for both generations. Therefore, the contemporary middle-class migration pattern between China and the UK cannot be assumed to be “circuits of transnational migration”, which was how Waters (2005) described middle-class migration between Hong Kong and Canada. Rather, the UK-China “transnational social field” (Levitt and Schiller 2004) is more stable and bounded by national borders. Hence, it is likely to pose dilemmas for the two parties in renegotiating family obligations and responsibilities.

My empirical data derives from 40 semi-structured interviews (27 one-child migrants, 6 migrants with siblings, 7 sets of migrants’ parents) conducted in the UK and China during 2013–2014. Snowball sampling was used in conjunction with online advertising. These two strategies proved useful in overcoming the geographical barriers in reaching out to the potential participants, who were dispersed throughout the UK and China. The 27 one-child migrants were interviewed first and then asked if they would connect me to their parents in China. Eventually, seven sets of parents² in China took part in the research. Interviewing both child and parents from the same family is rare in transnational family research, largely because of the practical difficulty of accessing both children and parents. The six migrants who had siblings were interviewed as a supplementary resource to provide a point of comparison with the only-child families.

Interviews lasted between 1 and 3 h and were audio recorded. The word “children” is used for the convenience of analysing the parent-child relationship; in fact, these migrant “children” were between 22 and 38 years of age, and nearly a third of them had British-born offspring. The parents of the migrant children I interviewed were aged between 51 and 68 years. At the point of interview the majority of parents had not reached retirement; most were working as professionals and a few were business owners. The majority of the parents were not elderly (or ill) enough to need intensive care,³ but as parents continue to age, their need for physical care would become more pressing. This study may not observe the outcome of the physical care arrangements, but it captured how parents and children saw their roles in the intergenerational care arrangement during the process of negotiation.

The sample comprised 20 women and 13 men, which may reflect the gender balance among post-education Chinese migrants. While there is currently no reliable data on the gender ratio among middle-class Chinese migrants in the UK, more Chinese women than Chinese men graduated from UK higher education institutions between 2001 and 2011. Women outnumbered men in Master’s and undergraduate programmes by a ratio of 1.5:1 in 2008/09 (Iannelli and Huang 2013).

The participants came from a variety of regions in China, which is in keeping with what is known about the new mainland Chinese migrants: they not only came from coastal migrant-sending regions like Shanghai and Guangdong (near Hong Kong) but also from inland provinces which were not traditionally migrant-sending regions. The migrants had lived in the UK for 1–13 years and were at different stages of their lives; the samples included 5 postgraduate students and 27 post-education migrants; 14 were married and 19 were unmarried.⁴ That the respondents were at different stages in their career and marital status provided further material for analysing the impact of the life cycle on transnational families.

One-child migrants faced two challenges in terms of looking after their parents. The first and more pressing matter is to do with coping practically with any emergency in the life of the parents in China. As Ran (male, 27, software engineer) emphasised: “I need to be able to go back within a few hours’ time, not the next day. In some emergency situations it would be too late.” In comparison, Chuanli (male, 31, post-doctoral researcher, has a sister) thought his sister’s physical proximity to their parents gave him “peace of mind”. The other problem is the difficulty of having parents come to live with the child in the UK because of immigration policy and concerns about parents’ well-being in a new country. The British government has severely limited residency permits granted to “elderly dependent relatives”⁵ who come for family reunification. Furthermore, if parents were to settle in the UK, their lack of English, together with lifestyle changes, could constitute a potential threat to their psychological well-being by increasing their dependency on their child, thereby reducing their own mobility.

To what extent did these transnational family challenges impact on migrants’ settlement plans? It is important to look at this question together with other factors which shape the on-going process of migration decision-making (Mosneaga and Winther 2013). When the respondents arrived in the UK as students, few of them had a long-term settlement plan. Migrants’ decision-making process usually evolves alongside significant life events: study abroad, graduation/employment, relationship/marriage and becoming parents. Alongside these significant decision-making points, external factors, especially to do with job opportunities, migration policy and unexpected events, all had different levels of impact on their decision to remain or to return to China.

The longer children remained in the UK, the more established their families and careers became, which meant that migrant children had more to lose when returning to China. In other words, the economic and social capital one-child migrants accumulated through overseas education and post-education experience may decrease following return migration. Unlike a Western university degree, whose “value” is transferable across borders, other forms of “capital” were not always transferable, including (some aspects of) work experience, professional/social connections, and the quality of the migrant’s family life in the host country.

As a result, married respondents generally expressed a stronger wish to settle in the UK; unmarried respondents (single or in a relationship) tended to speak in favour of returning to China. While career prospects were an important factor in respondents’ decision-making, two single men and one single woman saw parental needs as the dominating factor and had planned to return to China solely because of it. By contrast, the married migrants, especially those who had offspring, generally lived in the UK for a longer period and were more established in the host society. They regarded the next generation’s well-being in the UK as their primary responsibility.

In this complex decision-making web, as described by Demin, the influence of parental needs had clearly (temporarily) lost its once dominating position. It is worth noting here that the married women and men in the sample showed a similar pattern of commitment transfer from parents to their own nuclear family. However, with 10 married one-child women and only 2 married one-child men (in spite of attempts to recruit a gender-balanced married sample), it was difficult to make any meaningful gender comparisons in terms of the impact of marriage on a one-child migrant’s sense of filial piety.

The one-child migrants’ parents were relatively young, which enabled migrants to focus on their own child(ren) rather than on the care needs of their parents. By the time parents are elderly with decreased mobility (in their 70s and 80s), migrant children will be in their late 40s to 60s with grown up child(ren). This useful spacing was mentioned by a number of one-child respondents (married and unmarried) as a justification for making parental care responsibility secondary to the needs of their own family (or career) at the current stage of the respondents’ lives. The relative youthfulness of Chinese parents avoided the caring “squeeze” which is more commonly found in British families, in particular, among the higher educated women whose childbearing is delayed and who are more likely to face the expectation of “two-way” (“downward” to children and “upward” to parents) care (Agree et al. 2003).

This child-centred support flow put one-child migrants at an advantage in terms of socioeconomic mobility in the host country. However, for adult children, not being able to reciprocate parental investment in a direct and tangible way can result in serious frustration. In interviewing older Taiwanese migrants (aged above 60) who came to the USA when they were young, Sun (2014) found that these migrants’ care duties to their elderly parents in Taiwan were shared by their siblings. However, in spite of sending regular remittances to their parents and sibling, these migrants believed they still had unfulfilled moral obligations. In a similar study, Italian migrants in New Zealand were found to relinquish their claims to inheritance in order to compensate, financially and morally, for their sibling’s larger share in parental care (Baldassar 2007).

Such an understanding was in accordance with the traditional concept of filial piety that “a child’s achievement is not only a matter of personal success, it brings honour to the family” (Göransson 2009, p. 119). However, other aspects of filial piety, such as physical closeness and material support, are compromised in the transnational one-child families. It is not yet known whether one-child migrants’ responsibilities will shift towards parents in the future. Both parents and children in this study were struggling to come to terms with the new family contract in a fresh geographical setting. While the only child felt the practical and moral dilemma of remaining in the UK instead of returning for their parents, parents also had mixed emotions about the asymmetrical intergenerational support.

A Chinese adage says “raise children for old age care” (yang er fang lao), which implies a reciprocal principle of parents investing in children’s upbringing and well-being in exchange for old age care from children. The heavy investment in the only child observed among working class Chinese families in the 1990s was explained by Fong as a way to “enable singletons to achieve…success necessary for the fulfilment of their filial duties” (Fong 2004, p. 157). However, middle-class parents interviewed in this study explicitly spoke against this view by emphasising that such a concept belonged to “the previous generation”, that it was “not necessary or realistic nowadays”, and, most of all, the financially independent parents did not want to become a “burden” to their only child. Such attitudes confirmed Zhang and Goza’s (2005) findings, a decade ago, that well-paid professional parents did not want or plan to rely on their only child in their old age; they were willing to invest most of their income on the child, a pension scheme and a care home, but did not expect a financial return.

The middle-class parents in this study (and in Zhang and Goza’s study) were very similar to their counterparts in Singapore: middle-class Chinese Singaporeans born in the 1960s and 1970s, who Göransson (2009) described as the “sandwich generation”, attained affluence as a result of the rapid economic growth in the late twentieth century. “Sandwich” here does not mean the mid-age couple struggling between the needs of the elderly and the young; the term refers to the generation between the “old traditions” and the “modern world”. Like parents in this study, the Singaporeans “sandwich generation” in the twenty-first century enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle and were able to provide high-quality material and educational resources for the next generation. Such a lifestyle stood in sharp contrast to their childhood experience. When faced with “intergenerational discontinuity” (Göransson 2009, p. 35), Singaporean parents used strategies to manage generational difference in everyday interactions with their children and their parents. However, parents in my study lacked the everyday physical and social space to bridge the generational gap.

As Göransson pointed out, the so-called sandwich generation was a class-related phenomenon and did not apply to all members of that age group. Likewise, in China, the middle-class parents were the minority of the generation born between the 1950s and the 1960s. Furthermore, the number of middle-class parents whose only child remained overseas made up an even smaller proportion of that generation. Therefore, parents of one-child migrants became the “modern minority” in comparison to “the more conventional majority” in their community.

Most parents interviewed in this study were aware of their “difference” from “other parents”. For example, they promoted “modern elements” of family relations, such as a more “open, democratic” parent-child relationship and a less dependent older generation, in contrast to their observation of more “traditional” families around them. However, the parents’ tendency to hide negative feelings from me (sometimes from their child as well) may have obscured the other side of the “modern story”.

Given that filial piety is “everybody’s business” (Ikels 2004, p. 5), parents of one-child migrants risked negative peer pressure in a society where the importance of family members’ “physical closeness” was still pervasive. One mother cited her colleague’s “half-joking” comment on the “side-effect of sending the only child abroad” to show that by letting her daughter remain overseas, she became the “different” minority among her peers. While parents may have promoted their “modernness” to me or took pride in it to justify the transnational relationship with their child, there could be more serious struggles between the “more modern individual” and conservative social norms in the local community.

This parental struggle with peer pressure was more likely to be found in more conservative regions in China (like Zhaohui’s home town), whereas parent respondents from big cities tended not to report direct social pressure. However, in spite of the dominating positive feelings parents reported about the “generational leap” (Göransson 2009, p. 52), there was still a sense of disappointment among parents.

Because of the limited size of the parent sample, it was unclear to what extent parents felt negatively about the generational difference. Nevertheless, the evidence from the interviews indicated a degree of struggle in coming to terms with the generational changes not only in comparison with the previous generation but also in comparison with their peers in the same generation. However, parents expressed feelings of unfairness and disappointment significantly less than the satisfaction they gained from their child’s achievement and how they (parents) had contributed to it.

While children’s addition to family honour by being successful is also a form of filial piety, transnational one-child families face a dilemma: migrant children’s careers and their own nuclear families’ well-being were geographically bound to the UK. The children’s success in the developed host country meant compromising physical care (and some emotional care) towards parents in China. Therefore, in one-child households separated by long distance, some criteria of filial piety came into conflict with others. In such circumstances, distance plays a significant role in modifying filial obligations and expectations.

“Distance lends enchantment” (or “absence makes the heart grow fonder”)⁶; such proverbs describe how interpersonal attraction may be enhanced by individuals being away from each other. While a study of 63 dating couples in the USA supported such a claim (Jiang and Hancock 2013), there is no similar research about parent-child relationships. Nevertheless, evidence in this study suggested that both parents and children were aware of the role distance played in smoothing their relationships. The majority of both child and parent respondents indicated the importance of not living together under the same roof. Both generations’ wish to live independently is not new. Surveys in the 1990s indicated urban Chinese residents’ support for parents and children to “live close by but not necessarily together” (Ma et al. 1994; Hu and Ye 1991).

Different levels of tension with parents were reported among the migrants who for some reason shared a house with their parents over a substantial period of time (for example, when parents were helping to look after their grandchildren or when migrant children went back to China for a long holiday). The causes of arguments ranged from everyday nitpicking to disputes about child rearing. Conversely, not being able to see parents often made co-presence more precious. Ran (male, 27, software engineer) had authoritarian parents, yet he felt much closer to his parents during each home visit: “When you meet only two weeks a year, you tend not to argue with each other, you tend to feel closer.” Chuanli (male, 31, post-doctoral researcher) who has a sister, also articulated a similar feeling regarding parents: “When you see parents on a daily basis you won’t treasure that feeling [between parent and child]. I appreciated filial piety more after I left China.” Overseas children were likely to develop a romanticised outlook on the parent-child relationship, therefore increasing the likelihood for them to support the notion of filial piety. Migrants’ emotional support for parents was a significant element of the changed meaning of filial piety for them following overseas settlement.

Although the long distance between China and the UK limited the migrant children’s practical support for their parents, they showed emotional support by practising “long-distance intimacy”. The term “long-distance intimacy” was developed by Parreñas (2005) to describe the transnational intergenerational relations between Filipino migrant mothers and their young adult children left at home. As migration literature on transnational intergenerational relationships tends to focus on the migrants’ relationship with their younger family members, such as children, research rarely addresses “intimacy” with older generations of families who are also separated from the migrants. Even less academic attention has been paid to middle-class migrants’ relationship with their middle-class parents living in the home country.

“Empty nest” middle-class parents showed a significantly higher demand for emotional than material support. The development of International Communication Technology (ICT) in the twenty-first century has been celebrated for “generating new ways of living together and acting transnationally in the digital era” (Nedelcu 2012, p. 1339). Migrants in this study reported using ICT to maintain “long-distance intimacy”. Both parents and migrant children could message, talk, and video chat with each other on a “smart phone” at a very low cost. Apart from a small number of respondents whose parents sometimes had to work at a weekend, the majority kept a routine of video chatting/telephoning with parents at least once a week at the weekends. The length of video chatting/telephoning typically lasted for around 1 hour each time, as reported by respondents. Video chatting happened more frequently among migrants who had child(ren) as the parents also wanted to “see” the grandchild(ren). Furthermore, other means of communication, like messaging (text or photo), took place even more frequently; in some cases, the respondents reported daily communication with parents.

However, not all the respondents enjoyed this kind of frequent communication with parents; a small number found such communication with parents psychologically demanding or practically difficult to balance. For example, Zhaohui (female, 23, student) found it difficult to express intimate emotion to her father; Ran (male, 27, software engineer) felt guilty: “if my Mum don’t call me, I’d forget to call her, then she’d be unhappy about it.” Dahong (female, 27, market analyst) kept daily messaging with her parents but said the content of the exchange was sometimes “boring” and “trivial”. Nevertheless, in spite of the negative experience, these respondents still felt morally obliged to fulfil their parents’ emotional needs by committing time and patience to long-distance communication.

Long-distance intimacy did not only manifest itself in how often the child and parents talked, or what they talked about but it also had to do with what was not said by parents and children. The respondents rarely contacted parents for their own emotional support, i.e. when they felt sad or anxious, they tend to rely on their spouse or friends (in the UK or in China) for emotional support. “Only tell parents good news” was the “golden rule” mentioned frequently by the respondents; any emotional distress expressed by the migrant child would also bring anxiety to parents, and thus it was wiser not to reveal negative emotion to parents.

The golden rule of only tell good news was also practised by some of the parents of one-child respondents. For example, the incidences of a close relative’s death or parents’ own illness was not revealed to the child until a few months later. The earlier remark from Bolin (female, 38, export manager), “they [parents] fear to trouble me with anything”, also indicated the parental tendency to look after their child’s emotional well-being by not becoming an emotional (and practical) liability. Because of the limited parent sample, it was not clear how common, or to what extent, parents hid their negative emotions in their communication from their migrant child. Nevertheless, the existing cases in this study showed the delicacy of long-distance intimacy: because of the lack of alternative means to learn about each other’s life (e.g. physical visits), what parent and child chose to include, or not to include, during their communications was likely to have a greater psychological impact on each family member than in families who are not separated by distance and borders.

How do parents perceive the implication of long-distance communication with their child? Bolin’s parents regarded frequent telephone contact as a sign of their daughter’s filial piety to them. Bolin’s mother cited an occasion as an example of her daughter’s care for parents: Bolin shortened a Sunday family outing with her sons in order to get back on time to video chat with her parents. Although Bolin’s parents took emotional comfort from the indication that they were their daughter’s priority on that occasion, they had tried nevertheless to “push Bolin away”. Bolin reported in her interview that sometimes while she was online chatting with her mother, her mother would ask her to stop the conversation and spend more time with her own children; thus, Bolin felt a sense of “selfless care” from her parents.

In this way, the international daily communication became a “dynamic of intimacy”. It was important for children to contact parents in spite of inconvenience to show their filial piety, while it was also appropriate for parents to reject their child’s “sacrifice” and not to impose parental emotional needs on children. Nevertheless, the children’s failure to keep up with frequent communication caused parental anxiety or disappointment; as a result, the children’s availability for international communication was vital to parents’ emotional well-being. Thus, the cycle continues: between one-child migrants and their parents, it was the two parties’ “sacrifice” and “anti-sacrifice” pattern that drove the dynamic of the intergenerational intimacy.

Dai and Diamond observed in the 1990s that, compared to American culture, which regarded limited responsibility from children to parents as the norm, Chinese culture encouraged unlimited responsibility and devotion to parents or family (1998). However, how parents and children perceive and discharge “unlimited responsibility” is clearly changing in the twenty-first century. An increase in investing in the younger generation and a decrease in the taken-for-grantedness of care-in-return of the older generation has been consistent across Asian societies (Lee 2010; Göransson 2009; Croll 2006; Park et al. 2005). In the context of the middle-class one-child transnational family, children had very limited material responsibilities towards parents, and future care expectations were unclear. For now, it is the willingness to commit oneself to caring for parents’ well-being, not necessarily the observable filial actions, that has been regarded by both generations as the priority of being filial.

In the age of migration, the aspirations and opportunities to pursue transnational mobility encouraged the movement of capital and population on a global level. Consequently, more and more families from traditionally family-oriented societies find themselves in a situation where parents and children are separated for a longer time and by a greater distance.

One-child transnational families are a minority (and new) family type in the context of a Chinese society which still regards “physical closeness” as the norm. Transnational family members are under social pressure to compensate for the “physical separateness” with a more pervasive emotional unity. Such emotional obligations of intergenerational reciprocity may be less visible in terms of how migrants and their parents behaved, but they still affected how they expressed their feelings about their (expected) filial behaviour.

Parents’ and children’s ambivalence about their situation, suggested a family contract in transition. First, in spite of evidence of a commitment shift after marriage in the UK, one-child migrants still regarded being filial to their parents as a moral obligation. Second, parents of the one-child migrants were caught between a more traditional reciprocal relationship with their own parents and a “reconfigured reciprocity” (Sun 2014) expectation from their only child. Finally, both parents and migrant children are the “minority” in their respective local societies. Separately, the two generations had to develop coping strategies against social pressure in China and in the UK. Therefore, the complex interpretation of family contract(s) was arguably the outcome of both generations coming to terms with the changing family form through a changed space (because of migration) and time (life cycle of family members).

It is important to note that the filial piety migrant children referred to was by no means static. When children were still in the phase of receiving support from their parents, they were more likely to indicate a willingness regarding filial support (Schans and de Valk 2011). Parents in this study were in reasonably good health, and their migrant children were largely the recipients of parental financial and care support. It should not be taken for granted that the offspring would be willing and able to return the parent’s favour in the future. Therefore, the one-child generation and their parents have had to adapt themselves to new rules and dynamics of intergenerational support given their specific and likely future circumstances. In addition, when separated by long distances and faced with possible permanent household separation, only children and their parents faced unique challenges. There was no longer a standardised Chinese family contract. The changing environment enabled families to evolve into distinctive forms and acquire new mobilities which were formerly restricted because of economic, political and social conditions. At the same time, families in transition had to re-negotiate a new family contract.