by Peter Chai, Ph.D. Researcher at the Graduate School of Political Science, Waseda University

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The Value of Transnational Surveys

In the fields of political sociology, comparative politics, and public opinion, survey analysis is an important research method because it allows us to quantify citizens’ attitudes and empirically analyze the relationships among attitudinal and demographic indicators. Transnational survey data, which repeats similar questions across waves and in different regions, is an important resource because it makes comparisons across time and space possible.

Attitude to gender equality is one of the topics that can make use of survey data. Most of the existing studies in political science that apply the concept of gender on mainland China focuses on describing gender gaps in political participation and social movements. They do not focus on how citizens perceive the concept of gender itself.  To address this, I analyzed the latest three waves of a transitional survey database, the Asian Barometer. My findings showed that there has been no decrease in traditional attitudes to family and gender, and while age and education predict these attitudes well, income and urbanization do not in mainland China.

 

Questions About Family and Gender in Asian Barometer

The Asian Barometer has a “traditionalism” section that asks to what extent the respondents agree with traditional interaction styles and gender stereotypes in the family, classroom, workplace, and so on. I used four questions in this section about family and gender that ask the respondents to what extent they agree that (1)  for the sake of the family, the individual should put his personal interest second, (2) even if parents’ demands are unreasonable, children still should do what they ask, (3) when a mother-in-law and a daughter-in-law come into conflict, even if the mother-in-law is in the wrong, the husband should still persuade his wife to obey his mother, and (4) if one could have only one child, it is more preferable to have a boy than a girl. A good point about using these questions is that they refer to daily scenarios and are easy for the respondents to relate and imagine.

 

Changes in Attitudes to Family and Gender Over Time

I traced the responses to these four questions across the three waves. First, I did not find a decrease in the traditional family values and gender stereotypes represented by the four questions. Second, I found that there was an increase in those who agreed that wives should listen to mothers-in law. The percentage who somewhat agreed even reached around 70% in the latest Wave. Third, more than 50% of the respondents somewhat or strongly agreed that boy babies are preferred to girl babies in all the three waves. Lastly, more respondents agree with obeying their direct parents compared to prioritizing their family interests.

 

Attitudes to Family and Gender and Demographic Variables

I also tested the relationships between the responses to the four questions and four demographic variables including age, education, income, and urbanization through regressions controlled with gender and marital status. I found that the demographic vairbales do not perform consistently across the questions and waves. In general, age and education seem to have more consistent relationships with family and gender values compared to income and urbanization. In other words, while the younger and more educated citizens seem to express lower agreement for traditional family and gender values, wealthier citizens and those living in urban areas do not. Generational replacement and higher education seem to have made the respondents more aware of gender equality, but income and urbanization have not.

 

Filial Piety, Patriarchal Structure, and Confucianism

The absence of a decline in traditional family and gender values and the inconsistent relationships between demographic variables and these values show that filial piety and the patriarchal structure still matter in contemporary mainland China. Parents still play important roles in individual decision-making, and husbands and their mothers are endowed with more voice inside marriages. These results can shed light on the interactions between social agents and the power dynamics in the social hierarchy in mainland China.

Do the results mean that “Confucianism” is deep-rooted? This is a difficult question. Confucianism has a package of vague, multifacted, and even opposite doctrines. It has doctrines that support familism and collectivism and personal expression and autonomy, as well as the patriarchal structure and gender equality at the same time. Due to the lack of a single document and the diverse folk religious activities in the Greater China area, it is difficult to make a “Confucian values” index and empirically test its relationship with family and gender values. To improve sample quality and address attitudes to other aspects of family and gender, it is a good idea to use data from other survey databases and original survey experiments as well as interviews and fieldwork. It is also a good idea to compare the results from mainland China with other Asian societies with Confucian backgrounds.

 

Author Bio

Peter Chai, or Kai Shibata is a Ph.D. Researcher at the Graduate School of Political Science, Waseda University. He holds a BA in Economics and MA in Political Science from Waseda University. His research areas are political sociology, comparative politics, and public opinion. His research methodology is survey analysis, and his regional focus is East Asia.In particular, he uses transnational survey databases such as the World Values Survey and Asian Barometer to investigate how citizen attitudes to gender equality, environmental protection, and immigrants change over time and relate to socio-demographic indicators across societies.