Embedded Generations - by Liu Jieyu (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

An interconnected, nuanced, and nonlinear view of Chinese family life since 1949

With Embedded Generations, Liu Jieyu offers a comprehensive examination of Chinese family life since the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. Grounding her account in the analysis of 260 life history narratives and rich ethnographic data, Liu traces the changing ways families have navigated such experiential milestones as childhood, courtship and marriage, sex and intimacy, and aging over the past seven decades. Using generation, the urban-rural divide, and gender as her analytical lenses, she provides an alternative narrative of Chinese family life, countering the dominant Eurocentric accounts of modernization and family change.

Liu proposes the concept of "embedded generations" to capture the ongoing relational and socioeconomic shaping of family life, taking account of variation within and across generations, and of both intergenerational transmission and individual adaptations to changing conditions of everyday life. Resisting the notion that social and family changes are linear historical progressions, Liu reveals a family portrait of complex change, continuity, and diversity. Rather than a straightforward transition from the traditional to the modern and postmodern, she argues, changes in Chinese family life have entailed the adaptation and "re-serving" of traditional ideas and practices to produce a bricolage of modern and traditional elements.

Review Quotes

"Exceptionally rich in empirical details and sweeping in its conceptual scope, Embedded Generations is a solid study of Chinese experiences in marriage, sex, and family relations spanning three generations. Liu's book significantly contributes to scholarly understanding of social and cultural changes in contemporary China at the individual and familial levels."---Huaiyin Li, Journal of Chinese History

About the Author

Liu Jieyu is professor of sociology and China studies at SOAS University of London. She is the author of Gender and Work in Urban China: Women Workers of the Unlucky Generation and Gender, Sexuality and Power in Chinese Companies: Beauties at Work and the coeditor of The China Quarterly.