Dr. Vanessa Fong, professor of anthropology at Amherst College, was the featured speaker at a China Town Hall program in the lecture hall of the Mohler-Faria Science and Mathematics Center on Monday evening, part of a local and national exploration of China-US relations.
“How Chinese Citizens Pursue Upward Mobility in China and Worldwide” was Dr. Fong’s topic, and following her presentation, a nationally-televised live webcast was shown, sponsored by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, where the topic “New Neighbors – Chinese Investment in the United States” was explored by Robert Rubin, former U.S. Treasury Secretary; Sheldon Day, mayor of Thomasville, Ala.; and Daniel Rosen, founding partner of the Rhodium Group.
In the Bridgewater segment, Dr. Fong was introduced by Dr. Wing-kai To, academic director of global studies and coordinator of the university’s Asian studies program. He explained how Dr. Fong has conducted extensive research on children born to families in China between 1979 and 1986 and has focused on education, gender, human development, transnational migration, demographics and psychological anthropology.
“My objective this evening is tell you about the lives of Chinese citizens whom I’ve been following since 1997,” said Dr. Fong.
“I spent over three years living with Chinese families and conducting participant observation, and between 2003 and 2014 I spent time following them from Dalian, China, to many other countries. In 1998 I surveyed 2,273 of them and continued to survey them between 2008 and 2014 when they were age 28 to age 35. So I’ve been following them since they were age 13 to 20 and now they’re age 28 to 35, and they now have children of their own.”
Dr. Fong said her research has continued with the most recent generation.
“As a result, I have been able to track many aspects of their lives, with special attention paid to trends in education, marriage, work and migration. This is a very interesting and unique generation because the group I studied is the first generation of Chinese youth born under China’s one child per family policy,” she explained.
“Under this policy, children born between 1979 and 1986 were the only children in their families, and as a result, 95 percent of them have no siblings. Originally these were working class families when I first met them but their incomes have moved up along with all of China.
“These children are unique – the only generation in human history of children without siblings,” she continued. “Now China has a policy of allowing families to have two children, so the people I originally studied will be the only ones who had to experience the one-child-per-family policy.”
This policy produced a generation of people who had to compete fiercely with their peers, Dr. Fong said.
“The policy affected so many aspects of their lives – not only their family life but their education, their marriage and career mobility. They were the first in China to experience unusually fast increases in upward mobility, educational attainment, transnational migration, gender equality and desires for low fertility,” she said.
“In countries such as the United States or Great Britain or countries in Europe, such changes usually took 100 or even 200 years but in China, because this was a generation of only children, this took only about three decades. They moved China from a developing country to a developed country,” she stated.
Because they are only children, she explained, “they are their parents main source of pride and prestige, and they alone will be able to provide elder care to their parents without siblings to help them.”
Equally important, since this was a generation of only children, families were able to invest all of their money to help educate them. “It’s really rare in the world for that to happen,” Dr. Fong said.
Every nation in the world has families where there is only one child, she continued, “but other families in the same towns, cities and nations have more than one child, so it all evens out. And because the Chinese children were only children, all of their competitors were also only children, so the hunt for the good jobs becomes much more intense, and so is the pressure on those children to get good jobs.”
Extreme competition among only children goes beyond more than the pursuit of the best jobs, she said.
“Since these children have been born, China’s economy has been expanding every single year because this generation drove this climb in upward mobility, and they also changed other aspects of China’s life,” she said. “The stakes are really high since there are no siblings to help hold up a family’s safety net, so these children are expected not only to get great jobs but also to marry – if possible – above their social class and, at a minimum, acquire as much education as possible to make them desirable socially as well as economically.”
She described their situation as “all or nothing” and said, “this is a generation desperate to be winners.”
For the nation as a whole, “this led to China transforming from a socialist economy to a market economy, which only further turbo-charged the effect of the one-child policy.”
Today young people in China are expected to find mates based primarily on their educational and economic status and, she said, “love comes later.”
This has major repercussions because females in China have higher rates of educational attainment. “This means there is a class of women at the top who cannot find marriage partners of equal or higher status and a large class of men at the bottom who cannot find marriage partners because so many women have moved up,” Dr. Fong explained.
“The one-child policy has really made finding a mate a high-stakes competition,” she said.
There remains in China today a strong desire for young people to go abroad, especially to the United States, because the experience overseas makes them more desirable as employees once they return home.
“In the study that I did, 17 percent of the 827 women I surveyed and 20 percent of the 719 men had studied abroad, and 60 percent of the 455 people I surveyed who had never set foot outside of China said ‘yes’ when asked if they would like to go abroad for ‘study, work or immigration.’ “
Following her presentation, and before the start of the nationally-televised webcast, Dr. Fong took questions from audience. (Story and photos by David K. Wilson, ’71)
