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.
Filial piety and twenty-first century urban families
In Chinese families, the notion of filial piety has been the dominating “cultural logic” for more than 2000 years (Zhan and Montgomery 2003). It is arguably one of the oldest forms of family contract. The definition of filial piety in the twenty-first century varies slightly according to different scholars in different contexts (Schans and de Valk 2011; Chow and Chu 2007; Croll 2006; Ikels 2004). In general, filial piety requires children to fulfil parent’s practical and financial/material needs and look after a parent’s emotional well-being; it also traditionally prescribes obedience and respect from the younger to the older generation regardless of an individual’s age (Keller et al. 2005).
However, findings in Asia from the late 1990s indicated a declining emphasis on reverence and obedience but a trend towards renegotiating intergenerational filial expectations based on more egalitarian intra-familial exchanges (Croll 2006). The more recent evidence suggests a gradual shift in filial practices from gender specific to relatively gender flexible (Shi 2009; Xie and Zhu 2009; Wang 2004). Thus, filial piety and family values should be understood in their specific sociocultural contexts (Hu and Scott 2014).
Outside the family, filial piety requires “conducting oneself so as to bring honor and avoid disgrace to the family name” (Chow and Chu 2007, p. 93). Likewise, an individual’s “filial demonstration” towards his/her parents establishes him/her as “a reliable, trustworthy and honourable person” in the eyes of others (Ikels 2004, p. 5; Whyte 2004). In contemporary Asia, urbanisation has reduced to some degree the direct enforcement of filial piety by local patrilineal communities. Nevertheless, indirect social pressure to conform to the culturally prescribed filial norms is still pervasive, as the findings of this study indicate.
Apart from families and communities, the state has promoted the traditional family contract through legislation on children’s responsibility of parental careFootnote 1 and minimising the state’s role in long-term care for the elderly (Feng et al. 2011; Zhan et al. 2008). To date, there is no functioning elderly care system in China. Long-term care institutions have varied standards and policies. Government-funded care institutions accept only the very desperate elderly (Wu et al. 2008), while high-quality (private) care homes cater for only very affluent clients (Zhan et al. 2008).
A gap remains for the vast group in the middle: 90 % of the elderly still relied on familial care in 2012 (Zhang 2012). In 2014, there were more than 36 million bedridden or semi-bedridden elderly people in China but only 356,000 care staff and 50,000 certificated carers for the elderly (Wang and Tian 2015). These realities are likely to pose long-term care problems even for middle-class urban residents. It is important to note here that parents of the one-child migrants, at the time of the research, were not yet elderly enough to need intensive care. However, the availability of non-familial care in the near future should not be taken for granted.
This article aims to further the understanding of the twenty-first century Chinese family contract by studying not only what family members do to reciprocate intergenerational support but also how they perceive their (expected) filial behaviour. Rather than assuming that modernisation/globalisation and traditional family values are two opposing elements (the former erodes the latter, the latter slows down the process of the former), this research investigates how contemporary Chinese family contracts (mainly to do with filial piety) are being reconfigured and renegotiated in “the age of migration” (Castles and Miller 2009).
Chinese middle-class transnational families
Studies of affluent Chinese transnational families have been based largely on trans-Pacific families: Chinese families from more developed regions in Asia (such as Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan) migrating to North America and Australasian countries (Lin 2011; Waters 2005; Chee 2003; Ong 1999). This migration included the phenomenon of the “astronaut family”, where one parent accompanied the child to the host country while the other parent (usually the father) stayed in the home country to earn money and travelled regularly between his family and work (Tsong and Liu 2009; Huang and Yeoh 2005; Ong 2003). Similarly, widely used terms like “Pacific shuttle” and “parachute kids” (Ley 2010; Tsang et al. 2003; Zhou 1998) also reflected an education-motivated, child-centred trans-Pacific migration arrangement. These family members were described as being highly mobile, flexible “global citizens” (Ong 1999) for whom notions of the “nation-state” became irrelevant (Yang 2011; Wong 2003).
Such narratives located the transnational dispersion of middle-class families within “late capitalism” where the “speedup of all aspects of economic life” generated new flexible production, consumption and accumulation of capital (Ong and Nonini 1997, p. 10). People worldwide “no longer see their lives as mere outcomes of the givenness of things, but often as the ironic compromise between what they could imagine and what social life will permit” (Appadurai 1996, p. 54). Although this approach explains the “new” Chinese mobility as an active family capital-accumulating strategy, it risked over-simplifying middle-class Chinese families’ transnational practice by assuming a similar (high) level of flexibility and sustainability.
By pointing out the difference between Singaporean and other new East Asian migrants, Lin (2011) argued for the “possibility of alternative realities within many Chinese transnationalisms”. The rising participation of middle-class families from China at the turn of the century has certainly further diversified the profile of the new Chinese transnational families. Unlike trans-Pacific astronaut families, the typical pattern of the one-child transnational family in this study is that both mother and father live in China while the only child lives overseas. Compared with the astronaut families, the one-child families have a lower level of transnational flexibility given the lack of a sibling to share parental care in the long term. Following this, I argue for a micro-level approach to examining Chinese families’ transnational mobility by focusing on the relationship between ageing parents and migrant children.
So far, approaches to Chinese transnationalism have largely regarded the parents as supporters of the new Chinese mobility and their offspring as the beneficiaries, which assumes an on-going parent-to-child transfer. However, intergenerational transfer is not always a one-way process. Family support dynamics change as the two generations age. What the literature lacks is a two-way perspective, which examines the sustainability of Chinese transnationalism as family members grow older (including parents becoming retired and elderly, as well as children leaving home and having families). Life cycle plays a crucial role in determining individuals’ emotional/material needs and migration decisions (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002; Lee 1966) and also transnational families’ migration strategies (Waters 2011). In the case of the one-child transnational families, where parents and only children are separated by distance and borders, the tension between the needs of ageing parents and a child’s overseas settlement is likely to be increasingly accentuated.
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.