11

DIVERSIFYING CHINESE FAMILIES

AND FAMILY DESIRES IN THE
21st CENTURY
Sara L. Friedman

As I sat down to write this chapter, I kept returning to an event I witnessed in

the 1990s when conducting fieldwork in rural Fujian province along China’s
southeast coast. Fujian was a key site for the contradictory forces that marked
the second decade of post-Mao market reforms: strict enforcement of the
state’s birth-planning policy, together with the rapid opening up of rural soci-
ety through market forces and the revival of popular religion. These trends
coalesced in a 1996 village-wide pilgrimage to the birthplace of the deity
Mazu, goddess of the seas. Upon returning to the village, the palanquin bear-
ing the statue of Mazu veered off the path to the local temple and charged into
the village government compound, where officials had gathered to organize an
upcoming birth-planning campaign. The state’s birth-planning policy (known
colloquially in English as the “one-child policy”) was deeply unpopular in
rural communities where son-preference ran high, yet open resistance to the
policy was risky. On this occasion, the sedan chair carrying the god was borne
on the shoulders of young men of childbearing age, a fact not lost on the offi-
cials who knew all too well that this cohort faced the policy’s reproductive
consequences. As the conflict in the compound courtyard unfolded, however,
debate quickly turned from the looming campaign to the question of who
determined the movements of the sedan chair. Older villagers, women espe-
cially, represented the most vocal proponents of the view that Mazu guided
the sedan chair and the bearers had no choice but to follow. Village and town-
ship officials, on the other hand, contended that the “real Mazu” would not
have acted in such a confrontational manner, attributing control to the men
carrying the palanquin. These struggles redirected the larger conflict over
state intervention in villagers’ fertility, ultimately dispersing tensions in the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003358947-16
230 Sara L. Friedman

moment but doing little to deter the campaign or overall policy implementa-
tion. Despite Mazu’s apparent challenge to worldly official power, childbear-
ing continued to be limited to married couples who faced birth restrictions of
one child if a boy, and two if the first child was a girl (Friedman 1999, 2006).
Looking back on this moment from my current perspective in 2023, the
changes in state population policies and broader family-formation trends
could not be more striking. Now the government actively encourages both
urban and rural couples to have more children and denounces declining mar-
riage and birth rates. As a “rapidly aging society,” China faces a shrinking
labor force and growing care demands from what is soon to become the world’s
largest elderly population. The contrast with the situation in the 1990s grows
starker when I turn to recent news reports about central and local government
policies to incentivize increased birth rates. The government officially ended
the “one-child policy” in 2015, replacing it in 2016 with a two-child policy
and then, in 2021, a three-child policy to encourage all married couples to
have more children, with only limited results. An August 2022 announce-
ment by 17 government agencies laid out a comprehensive set of pronatalist
initiatives that underscored the “husband–wife unit” as the locus of desired
childbearing and advocated “healthy” marriage and family values.1 In a des-
perate effort to increase lagging birth rates, however, some local governments
extended maternity benefits to single mothers, despite the fact that this shift
contravened normative family models that wedded childbearing to hetero-
sexual marriage.2
China has long been characterized as a family-based society organized
around heterosexual marriage, childbearing, patriarchal and patrilineal fam-
ily values, and intergenerational networks of care and obligation. However, the
contrast between the two moments described above affirms that the post-Mao
reform era has witnessed significant changes to this “normative” Chinese fam-
ily model. Although the state’s strict birth-planning policies, in place for more
than three decades, encouraged relatively uniform family structures, simulta-
neous processes of global interaction and economic development also fostered
increasing family diversity in the twenty-first century. New family models
emerge from rising divorce rates and growing reluctance to marry, coupled with
declining childbearing desires, new ideals of individual and family “success,”
access to assisted reproductive technologies, and emerging trends of lesbian
and gay parenting. This chapter examines several examples of Chinese families
“from the margins” to offer insights into the expanding scope of possibility with
regard to family, intimacy, and care relationships in China today.
Rapid changes in family norms affirm that kinship is not a “disenchanted”
domain in a modern world defined by rational decision-making, nor is it an out-
moded bastion of traditional values shaped exclusively by gender and genera-
tional hierarchies (McKinnon and Cannell 2013). Instead, families spark what
 Diversifying Chinese Families 231

are often contradictory pragmatic investments and emotional attachments.

These include desires for: a certain quality of emotional and sexual intimacy
in couple relationships, access to having biological children, support and care
in one’s old age, and state recognition of one’s family relationships. They also
include desires not: not to marry someone you don’t love or aren’t well matched
with, not to have more children than you can afford to raise well or fewer than
you deem desirable, not to sacrifice post-retirement leisure years to care for
grandchildren, or not to settle for an opposite-sex partner simply to satisfy
your parents or resolve workplace pressures. Emerging family patterns reflect
shifting status and power hierarchies within China, as well as mobility trends
that situate family-formation strategies on an increasingly global scale as some
Chinese migrate temporarily or permanently abroad. These trends stretch fam-
ily ties across space and they diversify taken-for-granted family norms and ide-
als, sparking new patterns of interaction across generations, genders, and the
state–citizen divide. Intense state investments in population size and quality,
such as those described above, also expose a deep-seated governmental ration-
ality that manifests in policies designed to regulate family formation, sexu-
ality, and intergenerational care networks in the name of enhancing national
strength and security. Deepening ambivalence about the central role of family
and marriage in Chinese society appears in propaganda campaigns promoting
new models of filial piety and in public debates over kin-based time and labor
expectations or changing norms surrounding marriage and sexuality. What it
means to be a grandparent, a parent, a spouse, a sexual or romantic partner, and
a child are increasingly contested in contemporary China.
This chapter examines these contestations through three analytic lenses:
generation, gender, and sexuality. Generation looks to changing power rela-
tions and decision-making within multigenerational families and new ide-
als regarding family caregiving and well-being. Gender addresses growing
divides between men and women about the desirability of heterosexual
marriage and childbearing and asks how emerging goals of self-fulfillment
challenge conventional marriage and family expectations. Sexuality calls
attention to the heteronormative foundations of “good citizen” and “stable
family” models, highlighting alternative family configurations created by
lesbian and gay couples and parents. The chapter portrays a range of emerg-
ing family possibilities by drawing on recent literature on urban and rural
families and my own ethnographic research with both formerly urban middle-
class Chinese families and LGBT-parent families formed through intentional
childbearing. Affirming the continued relevance of family in contemporary
China, the chapter explores how increasingly diverse arrangements of inti-
macy and care reflect persistent party-state efforts to promote family models
identified with national stability and new social imaginaries fostered through
greater mobility and global engagement.
232 Sara L. Friedman

Generation
This section reconsiders the salience of intergenerational family relations in
Chinese society and the role of patriarchy and filial piety as two core values
that have shaped such families over time. These values underscore how power
relations are distributed across gendered and generational familial axes to enact
control over resources and life decisions and the pull (or lack thereof) of affec-
tive bonds. Changes in these key components of family life reflect the growing
reform-era emphasis on inward-facing investments in nuclear family ties—espe-
cially conjugal sexuality, intimacy, and the nurturing of fewer children—as well
as shifts in the public domain that affect the transfer of material and affective
resources within and across generations (for instance, changes in government
policies surrounding reproduction, marital property, and elder care) (Harrell and
Santos 2017). Despite these transformations, intergenerational family arrange-
ments remain critical for practical care needs and emotional support. In 2012,
the party-state reanimated propaganda campaigns promoting filial values and
amended the Elder Care Law to affirm adult children’s obligations to support and
care for aging parents through not only material assistance but also caregiving,
communication, and emotional connection (encouraging the law’s ironic popular
renaming as the “visit home often law”) (Zhang 2017; Zito 2019).
Although the care expectations that undergird filiality may now be less
explicitly patrilineal in orientation (but see Obendiek 2017), they are no less
gendered. As daughters and, less commonly, as daughters-in-law, women often
provide more hands-on care for the elderly (Harrell and Santos 2017:26). Across
the rural–urban divide, daughters are assumed to have stronger affective bonds
with their parents, a feature that makes having even a singleton daughter more
desirable (Shi 2017; see also Obendiek 2017; Shea, Moore, and Zhang 2020;
Zhang 2017). But in an increasingly mobile Chinese society, residential proxim-
ity also determines how care responsibilities are allocated, especially in fami-
lies with multiple siblings (Sun and Cao 2022; Zhang 2017). Jieyu Liu (2022,
2023) documents how a parent’s stronger emotional ties with some children
as opposed to others affect the quality of filial support, not whether children
performed care at all, underscoring the importance of parent–child affect even
among older generations. The performative elements of filial piety manifest at
the societal level, where displays of filiality are critical to adult children’s social
reputation (Liu 2022) and in public moralizing about quality citizen-subjects
(Zito 2019). Ethical displays of filiality pair with the power of affective bonds
to invert age-based status hierarchies, “the intimacy of family propinquity and
shared bio-nature” (Zito 2019:95) reaching its apex in the one-child generation
which is most likely to combine caring for (acts) with caring about (emotional
attachments).
Yunxiang Yan (2018, 2021) coins the term “neofamilism” to describe the
renewed emphasis on intergenerational family ties in 21st-century China,
 Diversifying Chinese Families 233

now characterized by an “inversion” in generational power that weakens the

authority of the senior generation. He asserts a deepening intimacy between
adult children and their aging parents as both generations collaborate to
enhance the future success of family dependents (Zhang 2017; see also Figure
11.1). Yet recent scholarship exposes considerable ambivalence about the prom-
ise of intergenerational care embedded in this familial contract, with some
grandparents growing resentful of their adult children’s expectations and oth-
ers willingly relocating to provide childcare. We see these sentiments expressed
by rural grandparents charged with the care of “left-behind” grandchildren and
those who migrate to assist adult children and grandchildren in the city (Qi
2021; Santos 2017; Thomason 2021). Relatedly, some migrant parents question
the senior generation’s ability to “care well” for grandchildren or guide their
schooling, encouraging parenting “from afar” despite burdensome work sched-
ules (Santos 2021). Whereas many urban retirees assist with childcare, others
strategize about how to deflect their adult children’s demands on their time
and labor, instead prioritizing their own quality of life in the present over their
potential care needs in the future (Huang 2021; Zhang 2017).

FIGURE 11.1 2016 real estate advertisement promoting a larger apartment for a mul-
tigenerational family planning to have a second child with the new
two-child policy. Dalian city. Photograph by the author.
234 Sara L. Friedman

My own research on urban middle-class parents who choose to abandon the

comfort and competition of the city in search of slower-paced, more bucolic
rural lives suggests new configurations of intergenerational relations (Friedman
2023). This cohort of parents, born primarily in the 1970s, has rejected main-
stream markers of family success that prioritize wealth accumulation, profes-
sional advancement, and children’s educational achievement. They seek out
remote locations, such as Dali in southwestern Yunnan province, that offer
opportunities for adult self-exploration and children’s alternative education.
While parents’ motivations for relocating to Dali are more complex than I have
space to address here, there are two components that are relevant to this chapter.
One, migrant parents in Dali described a desire to pursue lifestyles that devel-
oped their own interests and abilities, explicitly rejecting life paths established
for them by their own parents. Feeling constrained by their lack of choice over
their schooling or employment trajectories, former urbanites portrayed their
migrations as “a war of resistance” or “rebellion” against their parents’ expec-
tations. They acknowledged that their decision to abandon successful lives in
the city meant prioritizing their own desires and values over the wishes and, at
times, explicit opposition, of the senior generation.
Two, migrating out of the city was also motivated by middle-class parent-
ing desires that centered on “accompanying children” (陪伴孩子) throughout
childhood. Former urbanites rejected the intense pressures of the state-spon-
sored educational system and children’s long hours at school, in after-school
“improving” activities, and completing homework (Kuan 2015). Instead, they
wanted their children to enjoy more carefree childhoods that prioritized the
“being there” quality of time spent together, cultivating shared interests and
meaningful parent–child bonds. The emphasis on the youngest generation was
equally a project of self-cultivation for parents who articulated their own alter-
native aspirations through relationships with their children. This configuration
of parent–child intimacy differs from the “descending familism” discussed by
Yan (2018), which marshals middle generation wage-earning and the “suffer-
ing” of the caregiving senior generation to achieve the “success” of the young-
est generation (Thomason 2021).
Certainly, this cohort of middle-class migrants to Dali has benefited from
class privileges that facilitated their “choice” of an alternative lifestyle, ena-
bling them to foster parent–child intimacy without the stresses of a competitive,
fast-paced urban existence. But parents also acknowledged that their decision
to migrate required giving up hard-earned, middle-class security. By funding
their new lives in Dali through savings or the sale of urban residences, they
potentially enhanced their own future insecurity as they aged. Parents’ commit-
ments to their children’s low-pressure, interest-focused educations also created
uncertainty about how the youngest generation would later transition to higher
education or adult careers. Despite many professing “not to worry” about the
future, formerly urban parents acknowledged that their children might not be
 Diversifying Chinese Families 235

in a position to care well for them as they grew older. The lifestyles pursued by
this cohort reveal new dimensions to the intergenerational familial contract:
individual happiness and self-realization are not opposed to familial care and
nurturance but are integrated within a nuclear family model that rejects, at least
for now, normative societal expectations of educational or professional success
and filial obligation.

Gender and the Marriage Bond/Bind

The literature on intergenerational relations in China suggests a broader recali-
bration of marriage as an intimate conjugal bond that nonetheless remains
deeply embedded in extended family relationships and material expectations.
Shifts in gendered and generational power dynamics have encouraged signifi-
cant transformations in marital ideals and decision-making processes. Whether
discussing the newly empowered role of daughters-in-law in families that gen-
erally retain a patrilineal orientation (Qi 2021; Santos 2017; Thomason 2021),
neolocal patterns of postmarital residence, or societal anxieties about delayed
marriage or lifelong singlehood, recent rural and urban studies document how
changing ideals regarding gendered self-worth, childbearing, and work–family
balance reconfigure the significance of marriage today.
The traditional heterosexual marriage model presumed that wives trans-
ferred their labor and reproductive capacities to support their husband’s pat-
riline, attenuating ties with their birth family. This model defined marriage as
a family decision with often greater consequences for intergenerational rela-
tions than same-generation conjugal intimacy. Despite reform-era recalibra-
tions of the independent value of conjugality, marriage remains an abiding
concern across rural and urban China and across the class spectrum. Parents
and children alike express deep investments in marital prospects, with the older
generation continuing to view a child’s successful marriage as fulfillment of a
core parental responsibility. For younger generations, the association of mar-
riage with love and romance enhances its affective appeal, furthered by its role
as a gateway institution to respectable adulthood, financial independence, and
childbearing. But demographic shifts and changing marital expectations create
growing obstacles for some young women and men who are unwilling to “set-
tle” for a less-than-desirable match only to satisfy parental desires or societal
pressure.
By the early 2000s, Zhang (2009) found that rural migrants to the cities were
making independent choices about marriage partners and where they would
reside as married couples. Although a migrant wife might temporarily return
to the countryside to give birth and care for an infant, migrant couples increas-
ingly resided separately from both sets of parents in the city or in a town closer
to their places of origin (Thomason 2021). This desire for urban residence after
marriage enhanced the social and material pressures faced by male migrants
236 Sara L. Friedman

who often struggled to live up to the expectations they faced as heterosexual

men (Choi and Peng 2016). For young urbanites, the financial demands of
marriage and the expectation that marriage would lead quickly to childbear-
ing encouraged many to delay marriage to pursue higher education and career
advancement. In their study of urban singletons born in the 1980s, Fong et al.
(2021) documented significant delays in the age at first marriage, with at least a
quarter of their survey respondents still unmarried by their late twenties (Davis
and Friedman 2014). Although both men and women in their study benefited
from continued parental support that enabled them to enjoy their lives as young,
unmarried professionals, they faced different gendered anxieties and pressures.
Young women are expected to marry well by finding a spouse who has urban
household registration (戶口) and offers financial stability, and to do so before
they “age out” of desirable childbearing years (Zavoretti 2017).3 Expectations
that a husband or his parents will provide a residence for a newly married cou-
ple put intense pressure on young men to prioritize their careers and accumulate
the resources needed to enhance marital eligibility (Fong et al. 2021). Davis
(2021) argues that marketization and privatization have “re-verticalized” urban
kinship to provide necessary support for a child’s marriage, renewing the inter-
generational contract by prioritizing the parent–child relationship over the con-
jugal bond.
Despite the financial and career pressures associated with marriage and
childbearing, both remain desirable, although fraught, goals for most young
people (Y. Liu 2023). Never marrying, however, produces different stigmatizing
consequences for women and men as seen in the derogatory labels of “leftover
women” (剩女) and “bare branches” (光棍) applied to women and men respec-
tively. Although “bare branches” are assumed to desire marriage but to lack
the resources to find a wife due to poverty or remote rural residence, “leftover
women” are presumed to be unmarried by their mid-to-late twenties because
they are too selective, too focused on their careers, or beset by a personality or
physical defect. The term emerged to describe highly educated, professional
urban women who enjoyed greater control over their life path (Fincher 2014; Ji
2015; Zhang and Sun 2014). This decision-making power, however, combines
with intense pressure to choose “correctly” to achieve educational and career
success while also assuming primary responsibility for the domestic sphere
(Nakano 2022:13). The term “leftover women” has also made its way to more
remote county seats, where educated women returnees face significant chal-
lenges in their quest for a desirable spouse, with many remaining single well
into their twenties and early thirties as they refuse to “settle” for a marriage
without love or shared interests (Ouyang and Ma 2019). The stigma of adult
singlehood interacts in different ways with gendered ideals for husbands as eco-
nomic providers and wives as successful child-rearers and managers of their
children’s education, with careers often relegated to a secondary role (Bram
2022; Kuan 2015; Yang 2018). These gendered models make marriage less
 Diversifying Chinese Families 237

accessible to men who struggle financially or to women who prioritize careers

and spousal compatibility.
Rising divorce rates enhance the stakes of marital decision-making, espe-
cially as divorce increasingly generates unequal consequences for women and
men. Fong et al.’s (2021) survey respondents justified delaying marriage out of
concern that they might hastily choose an unsuitable partner and end up unhap-
pily married or divorced. Recent studies of divorce in China confirm these con-
cerns, particularly in cases of contested divorce or disparities in the economic
resources that spouses bring to a marriage. Marriage Law reforms in 2003 radi-
cally simplified the process of filing for an uncontested divorce by requiring
only that the spouses agree on the divorce conditions. However, these reduced
legal barriers to administrative divorce have gone hand-in-hand with enhanced
property rights that favor the interests of the party that brings resources into a
marriage, a provision that typically benefits the husband and his parents who
purchased the marital home (Davis 2014, 2021; Li and Friedman 2015). These
gendered divorce disparities become more pronounced in contested divorces
that end up in the courts, where primarily female plaintiffs encounter judges
who, since the mid-2000s, have consistently denied first-time divorce petitions,
even in cases of documented domestic violence (Michelson 2022). Subjected to
prolonged divorce litigation and often poor-quality legal representation, some
wives abandon their quest for a divorce while others sacrifice child custody and
marital property to secure a husband’s divorce consent (Li 2022; Michelson
2022).

Questioning the Heteronormative “Good Citizen”

Recent studies of intergenerational relations, marital decision-making, and
divorce litigation affirm the prominence of family harmony as a core compo-
nent of both governmental and societal discourse on social stability (Michelson
2022; Zito 2019). The state’s lifting of childbearing restrictions with the new
“three-child policy” has prompted intensified propaganda promoting an ideal
family composed of a married couple with multiple children who will also care
for aging parents (see Figure 11.1). At the heart of this family ideal is a heter-
onormative imaginary centered on romance, sex, and marriage (Engebretsen
2017; Kam 2012; Zhu 2018). In this final section, I ask how Chinese lesbians
and gay men (also collectively known as tongzhi, 同志) who refuse heterosexual
norms and aspire to maintain same-sex intimacies reconcile family desires and
caregiving with heteronormative family ideals.
To this day, many lesbians and gay men in China feel pressured to enter het-
erosexual marriages as the expected gateway to normative adulthood (Choi and
Luo 2016; Kam 2012; Wang 2019). For those residing in rural areas or smaller
towns and cities, especially in the interior, marriage to someone of the oppo-
site sex may seem inevitable, part of satisfying parental expectations, easing
238 Sara L. Friedman

pressures that parents face from their own social networks, and acquiring
desired economic and social security (Ji, Liu, and Yang 2021). But tongzhi living
in major urban centers have experimented with alternative pathways to adult-
hood, with some collaborating in the creation of heteronormative-appearing
families while others find ways to live together as same-sex partners, increas-
ingly with children of their own.
“Contract marriage” (形式婚姻), also known as “cooperative marriage”
(合作婚姻), has emerged as a popular strategy for lesbians and gay men to
forge marriage-appearing heterosexual relationships that satisfy parental and
extended family expectations while, ideally, enabling each partner to maintain
independent lives and same-sex relationships. With introductions to potential
contract marriage partners facilitated by social media networks, friends, and
online business sites, these marriage arrangements have mushroomed in the
new millennium (Choi and Luo 2016; Engebretsen 2017; Wang 2019). Given
widespread discrimination against homosexuality in Chinese society, contract
marriages are seen by many tongzhi as a more desirable option than deceiv-
ing a straight spouse or refusing to marry altogether. When the couple resides
in a city distant from their families of origin, they may perceive a contract
marriage as a simple solution to growing marriage pressure, requiring only
occasional “performances” as a heterosexual couple but otherwise leaving each
partner free to live as they choose (Choi and Luo 2016). However, as Elisabeth
Engebretsen (2017) argues, even contract marriages are subject to gendered
power inequalities that potentially disadvantage lesbians who are expected to
conform to the “good daughter-in-law” role, restricting their freedom to pursue
same-sex relationships and increasing care expectations and childbearing pres-
sures (see also Choi and Luo 2016:273–275; Wang 2019). Although contract
marriages may “potentially transform heteronormative family spaces from
within,” their outcomes differ by each party’s degree of economic independence
and their gendered and relational motivations for seeking a contract marriage in
the first place (Wang 2019:32).
Given the complications and costs of contract marriages, urban lesbi-
ans and gay men have also experimented with alternative family forms that
privilege nuclear families composed of same-sex couples with children or
single parents residing with or depending on senior generation caregivers.
Since 2015, I have been conducting research with tongzhi who have created
intergenerational families through intentional childbearing. To date, I have
interviewed 18 individuals or couples, ten of whom are lesbian mothers and
eight gay fathers, and most of whom were born in the 1980s.4 Although all
but one family resided in a major coastal city, more than half of the tong-
zhi parents had migrated to their current city of residence from elsewhere in
China for employment or higher education. Thus, they had a range of house-
hold registration statuses that influenced various features of their childbear-
ing decisions.5 Eight lived in multigenerational households with their child/
 Diversifying Chinese Families 239

ren, members of the senior generation, and sometimes a same-sex partner

or a contract marriage spouse; nine lived either alone or as a same-sex cou-
ple, all but one with their children. With the exception of one lesbian mother
who had divorced a straight husband (but continued to live with him and
their child), all had conceived children through self-insemination or assisted
reproductive technology (ART) use either in China or abroad. Those who
did so domestically utilized the cover of a contract marriage (engaging in
self-insemination or in-vitro fertilization [IVF] to conceive without hetero-
sexual intercourse) or arranged for underground surrogacy.6 Lesbian moth-
ers who pursued IVF abroad traveled either to Thailand or the United States
(U.S.), while gay fathers typically worked with fertility agencies to arrange
for legally protected egg donation, IVF, and gestational surrogacy abroad.
The costs of these various pathways to parenthood varied significantly, with
the expense of international ART use, and especially surrogacy in the U.S.,
vastly outstripping domestic costs, structuring lesbian and gay childbearing
options through class hierarchies (Wei 2021).
My interactions with tongzhi parents in China began with a serendipi-
tous encounter in a small Midwestern town in the United States, not far
from where I live. In August 2015, I met Ming, then in his late thirties, who
was spending a month in this town because a local surrogate had just given
birth to his son. Back in China, Ming lived with his parents in a mid-sized
coastal city to which he had migrated after college to run a marketing and
promotion company together with his oldest brother. Ming’s path to having
a child through international surrogacy and his decision to come out to his
parents reflect the limited options available to tongzhi who seek to create
family outside of heterosexual marriage and childbearing. From the age of
25, Ming faced constant pressure from his family to get married. Living in
an environment where he felt he could not reveal his sexuality openly, he
dared not burden his parents by sharing his secret with them. In his thirties,
he began preparations for a contract marriage with a lesbian who lived in
the same city, hoping to appease both sets of parents. Ming, however, grew
increasingly uneasy with their complicated discussions about the fine points
of the relationship, and he worried that divorce was inevitable. “Because
there isn’t any love between us, the marriage will definitely end in divorce.
It would be too hard to make it last.” But he was concerned about what
divorce would mean for a child. As a result, he began to ask himself, “why
not have a child that fully belongs to me?”
Ming’s decision to call off the marriage created months of intense conflict
with his parents. From their perspective, the two sets of parents had already
met, and the marriage was close to being finalized; after all, as Ming explained,
“a marriage is not between two people, it is between two families.” Ming felt
that his sexuality had become an unresolvable issue that stood between him and
his parents:
240 Sara L. Friedman

I don’t want to be the kind of child who hides things from his parents, do you
know what I mean? Although I am gay, I still want them to know this about
me. I don’t want to hide the truth from them forever … Maybe it’s because,
because I am Chinese, that kind of traditional thing, especially [the relation-
ship] between parents and children, between a father and son, between chil-
dren and parents. That kind [of relationship] is deep-rooted … it is a kind of
[familial] love [亲情] that permeates your bones. I am the child they love the
most; how could I hide this fact from them for their whole lives?

As Ming explained to me why he ultimately told his parents about his sexuality,
he emphasized the powerful bonds between parents and children in Chinese
families. It was this deeply rooted “familial love,” Ming suggested, that led his
parents, once they knew that he “did not like women,” to encourage him to have
a child who would care for him in his old age, just as they knew he would do for
them (Choi and Luo 2016:272).
Despite Ming’s portrayal of having a child as a “traditional” Chinese impulse,
the path he took to realize that goal was anything but traditional. Through
friends in the gay community, he learned of an agency in Shenzhen that pro-
vided assisted reproduction services to “single” men. Ming and his boyfriend, A
Hu, attended an information session in Shenzhen and, shortly thereafter, Ming
signed a contract with the agency. The agency worked with fertility clinics and
lawyers in the United States to help Ming find a suitable egg donor (he chose a
white donor) and a compatible surrogate. Ming first flew to the U.S. for sperm
donation at a clinic in Los Angeles in spring 2014. The ensuing sequence of egg
retrieval, IVF, and embryo transfer led to a successful pregnancy on the first
try. Less than two years after Ming attended the information session, he was
holding his newborn son in a small-town hospital in the American heartland.7
When I first visited Ming in China in late spring 2016, he was eager to intro-
duce me to his parents and boyfriend and to show me how he had integrated
being a father into his life. Ming and his parents lived in a modern, high-rise
apartment complex set off from the street by tall leafy trees. Ming had pur-
chased two apartments in the same building so his parents could care for his
son during the day while Ming took over in the evening. A Hu spent time with
Ming, his son, and parents on the weekends, but lived in his own apartment on
the other side of the city. Although Ming’s parents knew that he and A Hu were
in a committed, intimate relationship, they never spoke about it explicitly. But
they did joke with A Hu that he, too, should “go to the U.S.” to have a child.
When I asked Ming about his living arrangements during our first meeting,
he admitted that “when I’m with my boyfriend, I dream about our living together
… Of course, I will live with my parents and care for my son together with them
… [But I also imagine] how wonderful it would be for me and my boyfriend
to care for this child together.” The multigenerational living arrangement that
Ming had devised conformed to normative heterosexual family patterns in urban
 Diversifying Chinese Families 241

China (see Figure 11.1). Yet his “dream” of raising children with A Hu in a joint
household gestured toward a different future in which their family could poten-
tially be accepted by society. Some lesbian and gay parents I interviewed inte-
grated these two models by residing with their same-sex partner and their parents
(who provided childcare), although not always under conditions of full disclosure
about their sexuality. For Ming, this option was not feasible because A Hu had not
come out to his own parents, making their joint residence hard to justify. Within
a few years, however, A Hu had begun the process of having his own child in the
U.S. through egg donation and surrogacy. Moreover, Ming added excitedly when
he first shared this news with me in 2017, the children would be half-siblings,
because his American egg donor had agreed to provide her eggs for A Hu.
Ming and A Hu’s paths to fatherhood underscore both continuities and trans-
formations in Chinese families. Seen from one perspective, intergenerational
obligations and deep emotional bonds between adult children and their aging
parents encourage conventional multigenerational households in which the
older generation cares for the younger, and the middle generation cares for the
older. Moreover, Ming and A Hu’s decision to each have his “own child” affirms
both the salience of “reproductive desire” among China’s tongzhi community
(Wei 2021:327) and the persistent value of “blood” ties in Chinese families.
Yet reproductive technologies also create new forms of biogenetic relation that
deviate from conventional patrilineal kinship, as seen in the couple’s intentional
choice to use the same egg donor so that their children will be partial biological
siblings (by our last meeting in 2018, A Hu had not yet succeeded in his child-
bearing quest). Some lesbian co-mothers similarly created a biogenetic founda-
tion for shared motherhood through the practice of reciprocal IVF (known in
Chinese as A卵 B怀 ), in which one partner’s egg is fertilized with donor sperm
and the embryo is implanted in the other partner, who carries the pregnancy
and gives birth. The shared biogenetic tie is perhaps more valuable precisely
because lesbian and gay couples in China currently have no means to secure
legal recognition of their own relationship or co-parental status.

Conclusion
Examples of tongzhi parenthood, both realized (Ming) and aspirational (A Hu),
reveal the diversification of nuclear and multigenerational families in China
today. Regardless of sexual orientation, the normative family is undergoing
significant transformations, creating openings for a more varied array of same-
generation intimacies together with new configurations of intergenerational
affect and caregiving. Through insights garnered from the perspectives of gen-
eration, gender, and sexuality, this chapter has shown how ostensibly traditional
values such as patriarchy, filial piety, and patrilineality shift in meaning and
salience with newly emerging family forms. Negotiations over intergenera-
tional caregiving obligations recalibrate expectations for sons and daughters,
242 Sara L. Friedman

multiple siblings versus singletons, and lifestyle desires among retirees and
parents of young children. Although affect and care continue to dominate inter-
generational relationships, they are increasingly experienced differently within
and across generations.
As much as romance, sex, and love constitute key signifiers of ideal marriage
among younger generations, both women and men remain keenly aware of the gen-
dered role expectations that define spousal desirability and the work–family bal-
ance. These gender dynamics influence decisions about who to marry and when,
and they shape subsequent choices about postmarital residence, childbearing, car-
egiving, and career priorities. Parents play a continued, although changing, role in
their children’s marriages, with rural parents increasingly less involved in marital
decision-making, especially when children have migrated out of the countryside.
Urban parents, however, “have become ever-more deeply involved in the lives of
their adult children,” a role that extends from the choice of a spouse to manag-
ing divorce procedures or dividing conjugal property (Davis 2021:51). Rather than
viewing conjugality and intergenerational kinship as necessarily oppositional com-
mitments, we see the recalibration of both relational scales through renewed affec-
tive, care-based, and material considerations. The middle generation increasingly
bears the brunt of these changing considerations: sandwiched between work–fam-
ily pressures that reflect multidirectional care burdens, some middle-class parents
have chosen to “opt out” of success-oriented trajectories to pursue lifestyles that
value quality relationships in the here and now.
Dramatic changes to the state’s birth-planning policies, as outlined in the
introduction to this chapter, affirm continuing state investments in population
size and quality, part of multidecade, reform-era initiatives to cultivate a prop-
erly producing, consuming, and reproducing national body. Instead of openly
contesting such policies, certainly one interpretation of the Mazu pilgrimage
outcome that I observed in 1996, young people today find alternatives to new
state inducements to bear children: ignoring calls for second or third children,
delaying childbearing altogether, or even refusing to marry. Although China’s
previous birth-planning policy stood out for its draconian state interventions,
the looming demographic crisis that has ensued puts China in line with other
East Asian countries facing below replacement fertility, delayed or refused
marriage, and deepening care demands. Nor has the end to China’s population
policy necessarily unsettled the heteronormative family model as the presumed
core of a biopolitical project to foster societal stability. Lesbian and gay indi-
viduals and couples, who remain excluded from the state’s celebrated vision of
national reproduction, must develop creative strategies to satisfy their reproduc-
tive desires through working with and around heteronormative family models.
As Wei Wei (2021) notes, tongzhi journeys to parenthood do not chart a path
outside of state governance; instead, lesbian and gay parents may support state
fertility goals while subverting normative assumptions about what kinds of
families or models of familial harmony are most conducive to societal stability.
 Diversifying Chinese Families 243

Both Ming and his parents, for instance, collaborate in a “performance” of het-
eronormative family by responding to queries from inquisitive neighbors about
Ming’s son’s missing mother with a ready response that affirms the value of
whiteness for a global and globalizing Chinese middle-class (Wei 2021): “his
mom is in the United States.” Greater middle-class mobility across borders jus-
tifies this response, as does an expanding horizon of imagined possibilities for
family structures and values. And yet Ming’s strategy for deferring questions
about his son’s parentage or his own sexuality does little to promote greater
societal acceptance of tongzhi family-making, as seen in his and A Hu’s ongo-
ing struggles to create a joint household. Nor does it challenge legal frameworks
that define family rights and recognition in exclusively heteronormative terms.
Behind the growing presence of tongzhi families in China today lies a host of
accommodations that raise even more questions about the scope of existing
family variation and the pressing need to make diverse family desires achiev-
able across China’s gendered, classed, and geographic divides.

Notes
1 National Health Commission and National Development and Reform Commission,
“关于进一步完善和落实积极生育支持措施的指导意见,” August 16, 2022, http://
www.nhc.gov.cn /rkjcyjtfzs /s7785/202208 /9247dd6 4744 c42d f952 2c4f a2cb78e42
.shtml.
2 “国家医保局: 未婚已育女性办理生育津贴不需要结婚证等材料,” August 17,
2022, https://www.thepaper.cn /newsDetail_forward _19492357); see also Meihan
Luo, “As Birth Rate Falls, Sichuan Lets the Unmarried Register as Parents,” Sixth
Tone, January 31, 2023, https://www.sixthtone.com /news/1012193/As%20Birth
%20Rate %20Falls, %20Sichuan %20Lets %20the %20Unmarried %20Register
%20as%20Parents/; Caini Yang, “Chinese City Announces Maternity Insurance
for Unmarried Mothers,” Sixth Tone, November 22, 2022, https://www.sixthtone
.com /news/1011714/Chinese%20City %20Announces%20Maternity %20Insurance
%20for%20Unmarried%20Mothers%20/.
3 China’s household registration system divides citizens into rural and urban residence
statuses that grant unequal access to social and economic benefits and services.
4 I have followed six of my interviewees over the years with repeat interviews through
2019. This pattern has enabled me to meet new partners, interact with extended fam-
ily members, and track ongoing childbearing decisions.
5 Given that LGBT parents often resided in cities where they did not hold local house-
hold registration, many had to strategize about how to secure a desirable household
registration status for their child. These decisions often determined which partner
was the biological or legally recognized parent (these roles might not coincide) or
whether a partner entered a contractual marriage. New State Council regulations
issued in 2016 benefited single parents by granting household registration access
to children born outside of marriage or in violation of the birth-planning policy
(“国务院办公厅关于解决无户口人员登记户口问题的意见,” http://www.gov.cn /
zhengce/content /2016 -01/14/content_10595.htm).
6 Access to IVF and other ARTs in China is legally restricted to married heterosexual
couples. Surrogacy is technically illegal, although an underground fertility industry
assists those who seek egg donors and surrogates within China. Two of my inter-
viewees became fathers through domestic surrogacy, but the lack of legal protec-
tions for all parties makes this option risky (Ding 2015; Wei 2021).
244 Sara L. Friedman

7 These arrangements can cost from 100,000 to 200,00 USD or more, depending on
individual circumstances. Therefore, only men with considerable personal or famil-
ial resources have the option to pursue this path to fatherhood in the United States.

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