La solidarité familiale à l’épreuve des pénuries : circulation des biens et de l’entraide dans une famille chinoise entre 1960 et 1980

This article is based on a Chinese family correspondence that took place from the 1960s to the 1980s. The main protagonists are the couple composed by Jiang Zhenyuan and Lu Qingsheng—two executives at the Ministry of Metallurgical Industry in Beijing—and members of their families living in the countryside. The authors aim to analyze the establishment of remote family solidarity in times of scarcity, by studying, on the one hand, the circulation of material goods and domestic work, and on the other hand, the roles of each one in the mutual aid system. The letters exchanged between the protagonists are not only intended to discuss daily life or to maintain romantic ties with the young couple but also to consolidate attachments and commitments between family members, nuclear or extended. Thus, the first part of the article, focusing on the circulation of clothing and letters within the nuclear family, focuses on how the domestic economy is organized between vital needs, moral obligations, and relationships of the affects of the couple. The second part, extending the study to the scale of the extended family, relies on the circulation of money and domestic work between several members, therefore making it possible to question the notion of jiali 家里 , while recalling certain scientific notions concerning the domestic economy. Indeed, jiali, an indigenous notion that we were able to extract from this correspondence, offers a fine illustration of the dynamic character of flexible kinship. The definition of the family and in particular the way in which it expands, shrinks, or reconfigures itself according to events thereby constitutes a major point of reflection in this study.