Ebook: International Handbook of Chinese Families

Families are the cornerstone of Chinese society, whether in mainland China, in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, Malaysia, or in the Chinese diaspora the world over. Handbook of the Chinese Family provides an overview of economics, politics, race, ethnicity, and culture within and external to the Chinese family as a social institution. While simultaneously evaluating its own methodological tools, this book will set current knowledge in the context of what has been previously studied as well as future research directions. It will examine inter-family relationships and politics as well as childrearing, education, and family economics to provide a rounded and in-depth view.

International Handbook of Chinese Families
Chan Kwok-bun, editor

The globalization and mobility trends of recent years continue to add new layers of nuances to the already diverse human experience.Nowhere is this clearer than the Chinese diaspora in the Pacific Rim and North America, which witnesses a wide variety of social issues from the effects of migration on family stability, to elusive concepts of identity among people living in non-Chinese communities, to complex gender and generation politics—issues that have also begun to affect life on the mainland.

The International Handbook of Chinese Families delves into these processes of social transformation in meticulous, far-reaching detail. Focusing on the family life cycle, parent-child relationships, family forms in transition including divorce and separation, migration, emerging research methodologies, and policy concerns,the Handbook highlights diverse populations, including mobile entrepreneurs, college students, fathers, immigrants and re-migrants, same-sex families, divorcees, and the aging. And since the coverage emphasizes families both on and away from the mainland, readers have uncommon access to immediate and long-developing issues, country-specific and worldwide patterns, and the conflict between longstanding tradition and rapid change.

A sampling of topics featured in the Handbook:

• Gender preference for children among Chinese-Americans.
• Mainland Chinese immigrant families in Singapore.
• Empowered or impoverished? Effects of divorce on urban women in China and Canada.
• Contemporary Chinese fathers in Canada.
• Social networks and family relationships in return migration.
• Impact of the one-child policy on Chinese families.

This vast array of subjects makes the Handbook a rich trove of findings for researchers studying family development, Chinese family and immigrant experience, globalization, and related topics.

A landmark in Chinese family studies, the Handbook is unsurpassed in breadth and depth in its attempt to examine the intimate relations between social theory,research methodology and public policies. It sets the stage for how the Chinese family world-wide will be approached,studied, understood—for change in a quickly globalized world.