Martin King Whyte

Love Matches and Arranged Marriages: A Chinese Replication.

Data from a probability sample of 586 ever-married women in Chengdu Sichuan in the Peoples Republic of China are used to examine the transition from arranged to free-choice marriages in that society. Retrospective data on mate-choice experiences reveal that the role of parents has declined sharply while young people more and more dominate the process of spouse selection....Multiple regression analyses indicate that wives in...love matches are more satisfied with their marital relationships than their counterparts in arranged marriages regardless of the length of the marriage and that this difference cannot be attributed to the influence of other background factors that differentiate these two types of women. (EXCERPT)

The Chinese Family and Economic Development: Obstacle or Engine?

Perhaps the central problem in the social sciences is the riddle of economic development: Why do some countries, groups, and individuals prosper economically while others do not? One of the founding figures of sociology, Max Weber, spent much of his intellectual life attempting to explain why the Industrial Revolution had occurred first in England rather than in, say, China or India. The quest by scholars and policymakers toward an understanding of the sources of economic development remains no less pressing today. Over the years a variety of answers have been offered to explain the riddle of economic development. Weber, as is well known, focused on the role of the Protestant ethic in England in explaining why a small and not very rich country was able to leap ahead of more advanced countries in other parts of the world and into the industrial age. Others have focused on the role played by key inventions and by governments. I want to focus attention here on a variety of arguments that have been offered in regard to another factor-the role of the family in economic development, and the role of the Chinese family in particular. The claim that family patterns may have an impact on development represents a reversal of the more usual causal argument. We have abundant research on the ways in which economic development produces changes in dominant family patterns in societies around the world.1 Often, the family is seen as a relatively passive institution, buffeted and altered by powerful economic and political forces. The view that family patterns can affect whether and how rapidly economic

Cross-Cultural Codes Dealing with the Relative Status of Women

The purpose of this article is to present a set of codes dealing with the status of women relative to men, along with ratings for each code on 93 cultures. The codes were developed in order to investigate how womens status varies in preindustrial societies, and why women do better in some societies than in others. In the larger study for which these codes were developed (Whyte I978), they were used to test a wide variety of hypotheses dealing with variation in aspects of the status of women, and for this purpose associations with another set of codes for the subsistence base, political structure, and other organizational characteristics of each society were examined. Here we restrict ollr attention to the womens status codes themselves and their interrelations.

Dependency Theory and Taiwan: Analysis of a Deviant Case

The Case of Taiwan represents a challenge to two predictions from dependency theory: that foreign economic penetration leads to slow economic growth and also to heightened inequality. Since the early 1950s Taiwan has received massive foreign aid and investment, but it has also had one of the highest sustained rates of growth in the world, while income inequality on the island has decreased substantially. An examinatin of this deviant case is pursued by consideration of the various mechanisms dependency theorists claim are responsible for the linkage of foreign economic penetration to stagnation and inequality. In the Taiwan case, none of these mechanisms work out as predicated. Instead, a variety of factors-including the nature of the Japanese colonial experience, the emphasis on labor-intensive enterprise, and the absence of an entrenched burgeoisie-created a situation in which both rapid growth and increasing equality could occur. Consideration of Taiwan draws attention to flaws in the arguments of most dependency theorists and suggests a more optimistic picture for at least some developing societies that have to deal with foreign economic penetration.

The Social Roots of China's Economic Development

Why has China been so much more successful than the former Soviet Union and its East European satellites in making the transition away from a centrally planned economy? While other articles address a wide range of explanations of Chinas success, this one explores the possible contri- bution of Chinas grass roots social organization, and particularly its family and kinship structures. Attention is drawn to social factors by the obvious fact that China, through its spectacular recent growth, has taken its place among other Chinese (and Chinese cultural orbit) populations in East Asia, reinforcing the position of this region as the most dynamic portion of the world economy. Could China share with other Chinese populations, despite more than 30 years of collectivist socialism, grass roots social structures that are conducive to economic growth under the proper conditions - social structures that are different in strategically important ways from those in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe?

Continuity and Change in Urban Chinese Family Life

An attempt is made to summarize key results from a recently concluded project examining continuity and change in one particular dimension of family life in one particular city in the mid-1990s, along with selected comparisons with the same aspect of family life in urban Taiwan. The similarities and differences in urban family patterns in the 1990s are analysed in two ethnically Chinese societies that originally followed quite different development paths, the closed-door revolutionary socialism of the PRC and the market capitalism of Taiwan.

Bureaucracy and Modernization in China: The Maoist Critique

The Chinese critique of bureaucratic forms of organization is delineated, and the alternative Maoist organizational ideal is sketched. The adequacy of this Maoist alternative as part of a modernizing strategy is considered, both on logical and on (limited) empirical grounds. The Maoist conception seems to be neither a general solution to the organizational problems of developing societies nor totally inappropriate or utopian.

Inequality and Stratification in China

Vague and often somewhat contradictory impressions of equality and inequality in China abound. Some recent visitors to China have reported that income differentials there have been reduced to nominal levels. At the same time the recurring themes of the class struggle and the dangers of revisionism alert us to the continuing conflict within China over the inequalities that still exist. In this paper I try to draw together the scattered pieces of information already available in order to examine, first, the kinds of inequalities that do continue to exist in China, and then the policies designed to affect the transmission of these inequalities over time and from generation to generation, or, in other words, stratification. Although the available information is not precise enough to permit any systematic comparisons with other countries, I hope to be able to arrive at some rough impressions of the extent to which the Chinese elite has been successful in producing a society with more equality and less stratification than is generally the case elsewhere.

City versus Countryside in China’s Development

Perhaps the supreme irony of the Chinese revolution is that although China’s peasants were its moving force, most of the fruits of victory were reserved for urbanites. China still has a two-caste system, which generates injustice and resentments and wastes human talent.

Challenging Myths About China’s One-Child Policy

China’s controversial one-child policy continues to generate controversy and misinformation. This essay challenges several common myths: that Mao Zedong consistently opposed efforts to limit China’s population growth; that consequently China’s population continued to grow rapidly until after his death; that the launching of the one-child policy in 1980 led to a dramatic decline in China’s fertility rate; and that the imposition of the policy prevented 400 million births. Evidence is presented contradicting each of these claims. Mao Zedong at times forcefully advocated strict limits on births and presided over a major switch to coercive birth planning after 1970; as much as three-quarters of the decline in fertility since 1970 occurred before the launching of the one-child policy; fertility levels fluctuated in China after the policy was launched; and most of the further decline in fertility since 1980 can be attributed to economic development, not coercive enforcement of birth limits.