Are Chinese Families “Flexible”? Family Strategies, Post-Patriarchy and the Enigma of Individual Ethics in 21st Century PRC

Recent years have seen renewed, at times seemingly contradictory, trends in socio-anthropological studies of Chinese urban families, in which the places of the individual, filial piety, and patriarchy have remained theoretically unsettled. These transformations have renewed the conversation around the early anthropological studies that made Chinese society a cornerstone of kinship and social theories. Taking the form of a critical essay, this text engages in depth with the recent literature on the transformation of families—read alongside brief fieldwork revisits carried out in Chengdu and Guangzhou in 2024—and questions the tendency to set a prototypical Chinese family against a so-called Western model. Three trends are examined: the first is the flexibilization of family models; the second is the renewal, reinvention, or reversion of earlier “patriarchy”; and the third is an affective transformation of earlier “filial piety” with the appearance of a puzzling “intergenerational integration of personhood” associated with a return of “familism,” paradoxically happening in parallel with a rise of “individualization.” Situating these trends within the political conditions that allow increased individual autonomy to coexist with the renewed family influence over their members’ fates, the article advances three arguments: that “Chineseness” here designates a political and economic situation rather than a cultural given; that what has been called “altruistic individualism” is better understood as a pragmatic familism, familism and individualism serving as alternative solutions to the same practical problems; and that, extending Foucault’s account of the individual as a political technology, the family itself can be read as a form shaped by state objectives. Kinship here appears to be as much politically bonded as culturally defined.