| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.4

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| Review | Journal of Social History, 39.4 | The History Cooperative

REVIEWS

Private Life under Socialism, Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949–1999. By Yunxiang Yan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. xvi plus 289 pp. $19.95).
In the long and cold winter nights of Xiajia Village in the very north of China in Heilongjiang province, family life revolved around the stove-heated beds known as the kang. The room housing two kang also housed the whole family, visitors, lodgers and domestic animals. In this environment, privacy was restricted to the contact between the body and the beddings. The shortage of space permitted only one centre of attention: the father. Into this setting, came the Chinese family revolution of the 1950s.	1
The revolution spelled out at least three changes, as this excellent ethnography makes clear. The Marriage Law of 1950 said that women were equal to men; the land reform by the early 1950s said that all land was held in common; and the socialist state built more houses with the same structure for more families. It took a generation for these changes to unfold. By the 1980s, the new family fostered by this revolution had arrived, and no sooner, the next stage was to begin.	2
The oral reports on which much of this book is based led the author to believe that a pivot for change was autonomy given to young people in the 1950s. To be sure, parents continued to hold the key to marriage, but the younger generation had the right of veto. Stories of the exercise of such veto testify to the author's surmise that the attitude change was real even if the impact on marriage pattern was delayed.	. . .

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