Socialism and the Chinese Peasant Family

Though there have been in China since 1949 occasional deviations in the policy regarding family life, some ideals enunciated at the start of the revolutionary regime have remained constant. The dominant policy has been that the family should be retained and its strengths used. However, family commitments should not interfere with commitments to the state or the collective, and within the family feudal customs should be eliminated. The parents' stranglehold over the lives of their children should be broken. Children should be able to marry without parental interfence. There should be no buying and selling of brides, and big, ostentatious and wasteful wedding feasts should be stopped. In an effort to limit births, marriages should be delayed to age twenty-three for girls and age twenty-five for boys in rural areas. As part of the program for more equal treatment of women, parents should show no favoritism towards boys. Women like men should work in the fields, and nurseries should be established so as to help women join in productive work. At more sporadic intervals, young children have been urged to teach their parents about the thought of Mao Tse-tung in order to rid them of old feudal ideas.