El nucli familiar tradicional i els canvis imposats pel maoísme i per la política del fill únic

HUANG, S.-m. (1998). The Spiral Road. Change in a Chinese Village trough the eyes of a Communist Party Leader. Boulder, Westview Press. Pàg. 3

The most stabilizing factor in Chinese peasant social life was concern for the family. A family, in the traditional peasant world, implied not just a homestead in a materialistic or economic sense in which one found food, comfort, protection, security, and old age support. The family was even more important: It was the social, ideological, and ritual entity in which the peasants found continuity in time and a place for self in the afterlife. A family in this sense was more than the sum total of all its living members. A family was the converging point in the temporal sense where the ancestors, who begot the living members, and the offspring, who were yet to be conceived and raised, interfaced. A man's place in the universe was thus defined by his ability to provide the proper linkage between the past and future. For his ancestors, he should provide proper burial and ceremonial sacrifices to appease them. For his descendants, he was obliged to ensure them a place to live and a proper marriage to produce sons.
This family concern, as many scholars have pointed out, motivated traditional Chinese peasants to work hard, to compete relentlessly, and to defer immediate consumption needs for long-term interests. Each family acted as a collective entity in which all individual capabilities were carefully measured, weighed, and prioritized, and a long-term strategy was charted out to maximize this shared potential. The success of a family gave the members both security in this life and definable positions in the spiritual world. This concern for family continuity motivated traditional Chinese peasants to be ready to settle down, build a homestead, toil in the meager fields, and accumulate whatever possible for long-term needs.

The most controversial practice the Chinese government attempted in modern China was to remake the peasant family into a simple economic and social unit, depriving it of its traditional ideological, spiritual, and ritual significance. The attacks waged by the government against ancestral worship, lineage organization, geomancy, and patriarchal authorities, all lumped together as "feudalistic practices," represent such efforts. Most of these policies have been successful only superficially and have merely driven these traditional practices underground. The family and its continuity still occupy the focal point of peasant life.
The real challenge imposed by the government, which may ultimately weaken or even fundamentally change the traditional peasant family, has been the birth control campaign implemented under the one-child-per-family policy in rural areas since the early l980s. Since each family was allowed to have only one child, regardless of sex, most peasants immediately recognized the threat this policy posed to them. Socially and economically, the well-being of a couple with only a daughter, who typically moves out to live with her husband after marriage, would be endangered when they could no longer carry out manual labor on their farm. Without adequate retirement pension or old-age welfare programs, the best insurance aging peasants have is still a filial son with two economically productive hands.
Similarly, in the spiritual sense, a family without male issue would be terminating the family line that stretches back to time immemorial. Without descendants to continue ancestral worship, a man's place in the universe would be permanently lost. Worse still, all the ancestral spirits that previously were attached to this family line would be turned loose and become unattended, unfed, and wandering ghosts.
These concerns explain the vehement resistance of the peasants to this one-child-per-family policy. From the government's perspective, as an attempt to reduce the population growth rate and hence to postpone the potential human-land collision, it was necessary to ensure this policy's success through whatever stern measures were required. Thus a perplexing situation developed. Although the overall trend under the current rural reform has been toward decentralization and relaxation of control in people's day-to-day lives, the severity of the birth control campaign appeared to be astonishing. Tragically, female infanticide was practiced widely by peasants to solve their problems. Naturally the government could not escape from its share of the blame for imposing this policy so drastically.
With increased geographic mobility and wealth in rural China now, the peasants will be more capable of resisting government pressures to conform with this policy. A new round of human-land conflict may develop, but it will be under modern social, technological, and international contexts. How this new drama unfolds could have significant impact on China and the world in the next century. No matter what the outcome will be, the seeds of change have already been sown today. What we see in Lin Village now permits us to have a better understanding of rural China today and into the future.