Family and Marriage 婚姻与家庭

Traditions of Family and Marriage A key component of Chinese culture is the strong connection between parents and children. Chinese parents are very devoted to their children all life long. It’s common in China that parents give a huge amount of money to their grown children, take care of grand children, help with housework, etc. The culture emphasizes the hardship of raising children, resulting in a “debt” owed to the parents that the children can never really pay back.

Traditions of Family and Marriage Although almost all Chinese parents treat their children very well. However, previously parents had the right to do anything to their own children without being blamed. Even today there is no law against parents’ physical or verbal abuse of their children. Children needed to be absolutely obedient and respective to their parents. There’s an old saying: “Parents are never wrong.” Children also need to take care of their parents in their old age. Disrespecting one’s parents or mistreating them used to be a serious crime. In one instance during the Qing Dynasty, a person who beat his mother was punished by being skinned alive.

Traditions of Family and Marriage Previously, after getting married, a man still lived with his parents, brothers and underage sisters. A woman needed to live with her husbands’ family and remain there even after her husbands’ death. Woman had very low status in the family. Also, a man could have a wife and any number of “junior wives” (not “concubines”) who all lived together. Junior wives had an even lower status within the family. Chinese traditional culture never advocated the love between a husband a wife. A man was supposed to choose his parents, even brothers over his wife. It’s natural that a man’s nature might make him love his wife more than anyone else, and in that case, he couldn't say so; otherwise he would be considered to be a bad person. There’s an old saying “Married a woman, then forgot his mother” which is used to describe this sort of person – it’s negative and no one wants to be referred to this way.

Modern China Just as other countries, now only one wife is allowed per family. Now women have much higher status in their families and society as a whole. Chinese people are influenced dramatically by western cultures.