Asian Families at the Crossroads: A Meeting of East, West, Tradition, Modernity, and Gender

• Author: Yingchun Ji
• Date: 01 October 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12223
• Published date: 01 October 2015

Y J Shanghai University

Asian Families at the Crossroads: A Meeting

of East, West, Tradition, Modernity, and Gender

East Asian societies have undergone major

changes in the past few decades, including sub-

stantial declines in marriage and fertility. This

article introduces the special section of Asian

Families in Context by sketching commonalities

and variations in patterns of marriage and

family behavior in this region. A discussion of

relevant theoretical frameworks from the West-

ern literature follows. The nal section briey

introduces the 6 empirical studies that com-

prise this section and discusses their relevance

for developing and rening theory relevant to

understanding family change in East Asia.

East Asian societies have undergone major

changes in the past few decades as their

relatively authoritarian and interventionist

governments have, ironically but enthusiasti-

cally, embraced neoliberalism in the process of

rapid globalization. As they have experienced

the powerful forces of Westernization and mod-

ernization, these societies have struggled to

maintain historical traditions. These traditions,

heavily inuenced by patriarchal Confucian

values, devalue women and restrict them to

the family domain. East Asian families thus

nd themselves subject to contradictory forces,

experiencing both rapid changes and stubborn

continuities.

School of Sociology and Political Science, Shanghai

University,Shanghai, China 200444

(yingchun_ji@163.com).

This article was edited by Kelly Raley.

Key Words: Asian context, Asian family, family transition,

gender,modernity, tradition.

Overall, these East Asian societies—which

here is being used as a cultural rather than geopo-

litical term, including China, Korea, Japan and

Singapore in this special section—show both

similarities and variations in terms of changes in

marriage and family. Still, these countries con-

tinue to constitute a cultural–institutional block.

Their social and familial changes tend to be sim-

ilar to one another and in some ways distinct

from other nations with advanced economies.

Like many parts of Europe, they have low fer-

tility and have increasingly postponed and likely

forgone marriage. Yet they differ from Western

Europe and North America in that they have rel-

atively lowcohabitation and a close link between

fertility and marriage.

This raises again an old question in family

studies and demography: Are family and demo-

graphic changes around the world converging

or diverging? Will East Asia follow what has

already happened and is happening in the West

today? How are family transitions in East Asia

related to the Second Demographic Transition

currently occurring in the West?

My aim in this introductory article is not

to settle the converging-versus-diverging

debate but to highlight the value of empir-

ical research that is attempting to capture

the sometimes-changing, sometimes-stable

attributes of Asian families and societies. I

further encourage the development of new

concepts and theories that are rooted in a deep

understanding of the complexity of cultural and

institutional contexts in Asian societies. Not

until we have more high-quality theoretically

informed research with a deeper understanding

of Asian contexts can we have a better sense of

Journal of Marriage and Family 77 (October 2015): 1031–1038 1031

DOI:10.1111/jomf.12223