Balancing Accommodation and Authority: Husbands’ Family Strategies in Transnational Marriages in North-East China

This article examines South–South transnational marriages between Vietnamese women and Chinese men in North-East China, focusing on the strategies husbands’ families employ to sustain these unions. Drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of family strategies and in-depth interviews with 26 households, it develops a “departure-restraint” framework to explain how receiving families respond to the persistent possibility of a bride’s marital exit. The findings show that these strategies rest on a balance between limited accommodation and selective authority: Vietnamese brides are granted a degree of autonomy in everyday matters, while husbands’ families retain control over major household decisions. The article further argues that the relatively narrow economic gap between sending and receiving regions in South–South marriages reshapes household dynamics in distinctive ways. Under conditions of limited economic opportunity, husbands’ families maintain marital stability not through outright domination, but through calibrated negotiations over everyday autonomy and household authority.