No relatives

I've been working on a piece about demographics recently (more TK), and one of the great pleasures was interviewing Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. Mr Eberstadt is one of those rarest of creatures: a scholar at a think tank with a strong ideological identification, who is nonetheless greatly respected by people all over the ideological spectrum.

His op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last month, which I was just re-reading, is a case in point. It raises a question about China that I haven't seen phrased quite this way before:

In Beijing, Shanghai and other parts of China, extreme sub-replacement fertility has already been in effect for over a generation. If this continues for another generation, we will see the emergence of a new norm: a "4-2-1 family" composed of four grandparents, but only two children, and just one grandchild. The children in these new family structures will have no brothers or sisters, no uncles or aunts, and no cousins. Their only blood relatives will be their ancestors.

It is no secret that China is already a "low trust society": Personal and business transactions still rely heavily upon guanxi, the network of personal relations largely demarcated by family ties. What exactly will provide the "social capital" to undergird commercial and economic development in a future China where "families" are, increasingly, little more than atomized households and isolated individuals?

Having grown up with the kind of family where the copious extended relatives sometimes seem slightly surplus to requirements (Save the date: Fortieth annual Taylor Family Reunion is now set for July 17th, 2011!) I find it hard to wrap my mind around the idea of no sibling, no aunts or uncles, no cousins . . . no great aunts asking your grandmother in a stage whisper when you are going to find yourself a husband . . . umm, okay, well, it still sounds awful.

But what does it mean to be in a society where, essentially, every tie is voluntary? Do the ties that bind you to your parents get stronger--or weaker, because there is so little cross-reinforcement? Does trust in strangers grow, or erode because people get no practice in giving without immediate compensation? And without great aunts to attend your wedding and ask your grandmother in a stage whisper why you couldn't find someone who doesn't drink so much, who will support China's nascent chafing dish industry?

Comments

And who takes care of the elderly? Or gets together on holidays? I have a sister-in-law, mid 40s and the only child of a divorced couple, who is confronting some problems from her only child-ness. She's sole caretaker for an ailing father, and she's hostage to their Thanksgiving tradition because neither of her parents has anybody else with whom to celebrate. In comparison my own problems (where can I borrow extra chairs for Thanksgiving, will there be a free bed for me if I visit mom and dad this weekend) are much more manageable.

Posted by Mrs. H | October 15, 2007 4:16 PM

One obvious answer to the question "whom do you trust, if you have no family?" is "Your co-religionists." Have to see how that plays out in China.

Posted by y81 | October 15, 2007 4:26 PM

I've been thinking about this a lot as well due to my family situation. I grew up with a 9 relatives in my generation (1 brother and 8 cousins), 10 of my parents generation, and 3 grandparents. So using the description above I'm a 3-10-9. Plus my mom was a 4-27-75+, so there were a lot of 2nd cousins around.

However, my kids are currently on pace to be a 2-4-2. My brother and his wife are childless and may well stay that way, and my wife was an only child. This is one of the reasons I agreed to have a third kid. Plus it is one of the reasons that I place such a priorty living near my best friend, because he is the kids only other 1st generation 'relative' that they see more than once a year. Hopefully one of these days he'll date, get married, have kids, and then that'll bulk up the cousin situation a bit. Still, it is very weird for me to think about how little of my kids childhoods we'll be spent around relatives.

I can't speak to Chinese culture, but the main thing I worry about is the lack of heterogeneity my kids will experience. Just my 8 cousins include a pastor, pilot, auditor, Marine Colonel, nurse, and journalist and they live all over the country. It builds a lot of tolerance and respect interacting with those people over the course of a lifetime.

Posted by Lou | October 15, 2007 4:32 PM

I saw a version of the problem in Vienna in the early 70s. I rented a room in an apartment for a few weeks, that looked a lot like Harry Lyme's, from an elderly widow.

There were a lot of elderly widows in that building. You could see a lot more elderly widows walking about. Not many elderly men about.

It was weird.

Posted by Patrick R. Sullivan | October 15, 2007 4:42 PM

This sounds like a dream for a totalitarian government. The Chinese Communist Party hates anything that draws loyalty away from the state, be it religion, local community, club, or family. Who do they expect people to trust? The Party and the government, of course!

Posted by Kyle | October 15, 2007 5:35 PM

China isn't the only country that will experience something like this. While not as uniform, those Mediterranean nations that have sub 1.4 TFRs will have a lot of kids who don't have cousins, aunts, etc.

Has anyone else here read "America Alone"?

Posted by Half Canadian | October 15, 2007 8:18 PM

I am not an expert on this issue but were it not for immigrants - many countries would face this situation . In the case of Shanghai - I believe it already leads the city rankings in terms of highest percentage of people without immediate relatives?

But no matter what the psychological and social implications - I suppose the founding fathers and mothers of America have lived through a similar period?

As China already houses more people than it can sustain based on increasing industrial agriculture and livestock "productions" - and as China is not strong when it comes to private pensions - China is affectively borrowing from the future even more than the US does.

Before it hurts - China will already have a higher GDP than even the US (in PPP anyway)? What then? The US and Africa will have to feed China (and India for that matter)? They could in theory but not in practice based on their own unsustainable production and consumption habits.

How will this look when the US becomes the Middle East and oil becomes food? I say - buy Africa - quickly. Africans will benefit and so will business man. If only it were a bit more stable.. We should have invaded all of Africa instead of Iraq!! Or even better - cut subsidies and introduce a CO2 tax locally and pronto!! This has much wider implications than many realize.

Posted by Hugo Pottisch | October 15, 2007 8:28 PM

Having lived and worked in Shanghai for nearly four years (two of which were spent teaching college students, who are the '2' stage in the 4-2-1 scenario) this is something I and my friends debated quite often.

One point that needs to be made is that the Chinese notion of family is far more expansive than we're used to. Chinese culture is extremely regional (nearly every town has its own fangyan- local dialect) and last names are considerably less diverse than in the west. This has given rise to the Chinese concept of the family that is actually closer to a clan than to the traditional western definition of the term. Greater migration and the one-child-policy are eroding these ties, but the more expansive definition of 'family' makes the traditional Chinese social system more resilient than most Americans give it credit for.

Which may not be such a good thing. Confucian social ethics, which remains the dominant philosophical school underpinning Chinese society, defines ethical burdens as proportional to familial relationship (direct family, extended family, then distant clan members, then town-brothers, then others from the same province and so on). Issues relating to justice and the distribution of resources are traditionally handled by appeals up the guanxi ladder, rather than through constructed legal mechanisms. China's lack of a legal system (prior to the late 70s) and current problems with corruption, malfeasance, and the rule of law are rooted in a deeply held reliance on interpersonal/interfamilial networks as the dominant stabilizing and organizing social mechanism.

The Confucian system works fairly well when it only has to mediate transactions in a nation of geographically isolated, small farming communities ruled over by a matrioshka doll network of inter-related administrator-nobility answerable to a central patriarch-executive, but it is subject to spectacular failures when asked to mediate interactions between distant, unrelated parties.

This is something that most of the smart, young, upwardly mobile shanghainese set seems to realize. While recognizing the importance of having friends in high-places, most of the younger crowd seems resentful of a society organized in large part around the issue of who knows who.

Posted by K. Larson | October 16, 2007 12:25 AM

Why would you hold such an event on a Sunday? Are all the Saturdays in July 2011 taken?

Posted by splenetic | October 16, 2007 2:29 AM

Lou -- while having three grandparents is possible, it's kind of weird, and certainly not possible within legal marriages.

Posted by BT | October 16, 2007 11:41 AM

Just because you have relatives doesn't mean you see them much. My parents have 4 siblings, and I have 13 first cousins - but starting from Kansas & Iowa, they scattered from the midwest to California, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Michigan, and New York, and now even to Austria and Australia. There have been visits back and forth, but it's been many years since I've seen most of my cousins, and I wouldn't recognize them if I ran into them.

Posted by markm | October 16, 2007 11:48 AM

BT wrote: Lou -- while having three grandparents is possible, it's kind of weird, and certainly not possible within legal marriages.

Uhm...wow. Does the street curb kind of loom over your mind these days?

He said he "grew up with....3 grandparents". Barring additional clarifying information, I think we can safely assume that somebody had died or left the family circle before Lou was either born, or else old enough to have "growing up" memories.

Posted by anony-mouse | October 16, 2007 11:53 AM

Anonymous -- Thnaks, I really shouldn't post before my 1st cup of coffee.

Posted by BT | October 16, 2007 2:13 PM

BT wrote: Thnaks, I really shouldn't post before my 1st cup of coffee.

Better safe than sorry, I say. I usually put away two or three before attempting any heavy lifting.

Posted by anony-mouse | October 16, 2007 4:28 PM