""Divorce in China" explores institutional constraints and gendered outcomes of divorce in China"--

Explores how China's divorce courts have generally done less to protect abused women than to empower and enable their abusers.

A new look at the impact of the Communist Revolution on Chinese family structure.

Based on China’s recently released 2010 population census data, this edited volume analyses the most recent demographic trends in China, in the context of significant social and economic upheavals. The editor and the expert contributors describe the main features of China’s demography, and focus on the details of this latest phase of its demographic transition. The book explores such striking characteristics of China’s demography as the changing age and sex population structure; recent trends in marriage and divorce; fertility trends with a focus on sex imbalance at birth; the demography of the ethnic minorities and recent mortality trends by sex. Analysing China's Population: Social Change in a New Demographic Era examines and assesses the impact of changes that in the coming decades will be crucial for individuals, and the larger society and economy of the nation.

As state control of private life in China has loosened since 1980, citizens have experienced an unprecedented family revolution—an overhaul of family structure, marital practices, and gender relationships. While the nuclear family has become a privileged realm of romance and individualism symbolizing the post-revolutionary “freedoms” of economic and affective autonomy, women’s roles in particular have been transformed, with the ideal “iron girl” of socialism replaced by the feminine, family-oriented “good wife and wise mother.” Problems and contradictions in this new domestic culture have been exposed by China's soaring divorce rate. Reading popular “divorce narratives” in fiction, film, and TV drama, Hui Faye Xiao shows that the representation of marital discord has become a cultural battleground for competing ideologies within post-revolutionary China. While these narratives present women’s cultivation of wifely and maternal qualities as the cure for family disintegration and social unrest, Xiao shows that they in fact reflect a problematic resurgence of traditional gender roles and a powerful mode of control over supposedly autonomous private life.

Based on the author's doctoral dissertation (submitted to Brussels Free U. in March 1986) and subsequent research, presents an overview of the demographic profile of families in China, discusses the construction and validation of a general family status life table model (which is an extension of Bongaarts' nuclear family model), and deals with the application of the model and presents new findings concerning family dynamics in China. Paper edition (unseen), $15.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR