How has migration changed the patriarchal family in post-Socialist China? Official figures suggest that there were 295 million rural-to-urban migrants in China in 2021. Among them 63% were male. Drawing on census and community survey data, ethnography and in-depth interviews with 240 rural-to-urban migrants in South China, this seminar discusses the effect of rural-to-urban migration on family and gender relationships with a specific focus on changes in men and masculinities. The findings show that migration has considerably transformed the patriarchal Chinese family. In particular, married migrant men have found it increasingly difficult to maintain the traditional dominance and privilege of the husband in the realms of marital decision making and domestic division of labor. The effects of mass internal migration on gender relationships and family lives reveal another side to the stories of China’s sweeping economic reform, modernization and grand social transformations.

Biography

Susanne Yuk Ping Choi is Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at University of Oxford, and Professor of Sociology/Co-Director of the Gender Research Centre at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include migration, gender, family, and sexuality in Asia. She received her D.Phil. in Sociology from Nuffield College, University of Oxford.  She was a RGC-Fulbright Senior Award recipient and visiting scholar at Department of Sociology, Harvard University, and a Senior Visiting Research Fellow at Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. Her lead-authored book Masculine Compromise: Migration, Family and Gender in China published by the University of California Press received the Best Book Award of the International Sociological Association’s Sociology of Migration Section (RC31)