Chinese Women's Autonomy: Parenthood as a Choice

Numerous Chinese studies point out that Chinese youth are transforming the meaning of filial piety, China's highly esteemed moral code used to structure intergenerational relationships. We wanted to understand the extent to which college-educated women are redefining what it means to be a filial woman in contemporary Chinese society. To this end, we set up a research design that probed whether men and women continue to think becoming parents is an essential attribute of life satisfaction using a pen-and-paper survey with college students in Shanghai and Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. A Principal Components Analysis (PCA) on Likert-scaled questions resulted in two factors: Customary Ideology and Autonomous Self. As anticipated, students who reported their intent to parent were more likely to agree with items in Customary Ideology, whilst students who reported not intending to have children or were uncertain were more likely to agree with items in Autonomous Self. Most telling, an overwhelming number of respondents from each university reported agreement with the statement, “Having children is a personal choice” (97.6% at Fudan University; 76.4% at Inner Mongolia University). We discuss the implications of these findings as the singleton generations renegotiate expectations of these intergenerational bonds.