The Myth of Chinese Family Size

The belief that the Chinese family tends to be a large one, with several generation living under the same roof, has recently been challenged by field studies which show the average size of the Chinese family to be about five. The social emphasis on the father-son relation makes for a potentially larger family, but there is also always a potential cleavage centering around the husband-wife relation in the larger family. The poverty of the vast majority of the people of China may account for the statistical finding of a small family, for the large family tends to appear when the economic foundations of the family make such an expression practical. The large family is intimately connected with the rest of the social organization-with the yearning for a glorious ancestry and for an esteemed family group.