This book presents comparative empirical findings on the behavior of families in Taiwan and Southeast China. The results are based on a panel data set, currently conducted by Academia Sinica, of a stratified random sample of households in Taiwan who were first interviewed in 1999. New households were added in later survey years. In 2004, Academia Sinica collaborated with the Chinese Academy of the Social Science to conduct a comparable panel survey of households from two coastal provinces, Fujian and Zhejiang, and a city, Shanghai. The Chinese provinces have similar ethnic composition to that of Taiwan. The comparative project is the most ambitious and comprehensive of its kind. The authors study fertility behavior, parental investments in education, marriage matching behavior, intergenerational mobility, and several measures of adult children and parents interactions.
In terms of findings, the book shows that economic development had similar effects on families in China and Taiwan as those of other countries in terms of decline in fertility, less gender specialization in housework, increases in educational attainment, and formation of nuclear families. On the other hand, son preference and expressions of filial piety, while declining, remain salient concerns among many Chinese and Taiwanese families.
Using 1950 as a starting point, both countries were and remain developing countries. Since then, Taiwan has had steady economic growth based on a market economy and democratic government. Social policy, including family planning, is also voluntary. The current fertility rate is below replacement.
China has had more variable political and economic paths. The urban economy was the first to be socialized. The Great Leap Forward in 1958-61 collectivized agriculture. It resulted in the largest famine in China in the twentieth century. Failures in economic policies resulted in political upheavals. The most extreme was the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, which resulted in the closing of universities and forced relocation of urban youths to rural communities. Economic reform (liberalization) in the countryside began in 1978, subsequently spreading to urban areas, and is continuing. Since economic reform began, the Chinese economic growth rate is one of the highest in the world. After different attempts at family planning, the one child policy began in 1979 and is enforced in urban areas, less so in rural areas or among minority groups. The current fertility rate is also below replacement. Political liberalization has also occurred. Still, the current Chinese state is more involved in many aspects of family and economic life than in Taiwan. In the last two decades, cross border trade and economic integration between the two countries has also proceeded rapidly.
A distinctive feature of household composition in both countries is that many adult children reside with their parents (over 20 percent in rural and less in urban household). In recent years, due to economic development, the coresidence rate has been declining. In both countries, as the husband's income rises, the couple is more likely to live with his parents and not with his wife's parents, and vice versa. Also, coresidence is less likely if the couple has more siblings. These findings point to the importance of couples and their siblings jointly solving the problem of coresiding with their parents.
There is positive assortative spousal matching by educational attainment in both countries. In China, there is intermarriage between children of political and business elites in recent years, presumably reflecting the increasing interactions between these two groups.
In terms of within family division of labor, Taiwanese women specialized more in housework than Chinese women, reflecting the higher labor force participation rate of married women in China. In both countries, wives did more housework if the husband's parents were coresident but not when the wife's parents were coresident. And as is the case with other countries, the share of housework declined with an increase in own resources.
Parents provided more inter vivos transfers and bequests to sons relative to daughters. Based on instrumental variable estimation, the authors provide evidence of parental substitution between investment in schooling versus other assets for boys but not for girls in Taiwan. Sibsize affected daughters' educational attainment negatively but not sons. In Taiwan, older daughters were disadvantaged in schooling attainment when they had younger brothers. The negative effects on daughters is more modest in China.
Intergenerational mobility in educational attainment for Taiwan is comparable to the United States. Sons of educated fathers were less likely to be educated in China, reflecting the effects of the Cultural Revolution. Thus the estimated intergenerational mobility index for educational attainment in China may reflect historical circumstances rather than a long-run trend.
Two way transfers between adult children and their parents reflect reciprocity in wealth transfers. In particular, adult children transferred more resources to their parents when the parents helped the children out more in transfers and childcare when the adult children were younger. This is an original and interesting finding. Parents were also more likely to transfer all their wealth to their adult children before they die. These parents also received more visits from their adult children and the children also live nearer to them.
Differences in behavior between Chinese and Taiwanese families may be due to a combination of differences in initial conditions, in urban rural proportions, and in economic and political conditions. Due to lack of microdata before the 1990s, it is difficult for the authors to quantify the contributions of different causes of the various cross country differences discussed in the book.
Aside from the specific findings, a lasting contribution of the book is that it presents to readers a rich and comprehensive ongoing panel data set on family behavior in Taiwan and Southeast China. In addition to its unique data, the book applies modern empirical methods to obtain causal estimates of different aspects of family behavior. Thus this book speaks to many possibilities for further research in this area using this data set.
