Liu Jieyu, Embedded Generations: Family Life and Social Change in Contemporary China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2025).
Progress matters. It is hard to look at a family, our own or anyone else’s, without a story of progress underneath it—the freedom to choose, to love, to build a household of one’s own making rather than be swallowed by one. Those freedoms are real. But progress rarely runs in line with our desires.
In a Tianjin factory in 1962, an apprentice made the first move. Grandma Chen was studying Mao Zedong’s thought when she noticed a workmate she liked and asked one of his friends whether he already had a girlfriend. He wrote her a poem in reply. When her family set up a matchmaking meeting with a tall military officer, she declined and stayed with the poet. Then the Party secretary told her that her chosen man’s family was a problem. His father was a small business owner, and if she wanted the Party she would have to give him up. She chose the man and gave up the Party. Sixty years later, asked whether she would pick him again in her next life, she did not hesitate: “Yes, he’d still be the one.” She still dreamed about him, she said, “especially the years when we were courting and when we just got married.”
Grandma Chen’s daughter married a man who won her by lying. He swore his father ran the railway bureau and could place her brother in a good job. She would not choose him again; she and her husband make do. Grandma Chen’s grandson married in 2016, after a string of girlfriends—at least ten, according to him. He chose his wife because they came from “matching households” (mengdanghudui). He did not expect love to survive the marriage. He told the researcher that he had never once seen couples in their fifties still in love. The grandmother raised under Mao is the romantic; the grandson raised in the market is the sceptic. Whatever progress did to this family, it did not move in a straight line.
The method of Liu Jieyu’s Embedded Generations lets it catch this reversal and others. The unit of Liu’s fieldwork was the family, not the individual. She gathered some 260 life-history interviews from grandparents, parents, and children in the same eighty households. Sitting with three generations at once, she could set a grandmother’s account of her own courtship against her grandson’s account of his, and watch what actually passed between them.
The book sees China from inside the living room. Its generational sequence design shows reversals that a cross-sectional survey cannot: a non-linear picture of how people court, marry, raise children, and bury their parents in the largest society on earth. Choice does not track progress. Her governing insight is quiet: choice is not the opposite of obligation but the form obligation takes as it passes down the generations.
Take Grandma Mu in Xi’an, who made choices at every turn. Born in 1942 to a Nationalist officer and a concubine eighteen years his junior, she joined the Communist Youth League at fourteen. She trained as a doctor. When she fell for a young soldier, her father’s Kuomintang past threatened his prospects in the army, so she ended the relationship to protect his career. She settled instead for a police clerk with a slight hunchback, partly to head off a match her mother was pushing. During the Cultural Revolution her husband arranged for her to be sent to his home village to nurse his widowed father, and she spent a decade there in hardship while he stayed in the city and climbed the ranks. She nursed him too, for fourteen years, until he died in 2013. Asked whether she would choose him again, she did not reach for warmth: “I think being single is the best option. All the hardships stem from marriage and family. If neither existed, there would be no suffering.” Grandma Mu was never powerless, but the exercise of her will took place in boxes, including those built by previous generations.
Chapter 3 addresses narratives of sexual liberation. One of Liu’s younger interviewees says flatly that anyone who waits until the wedding night “must have something wrong with them.” Underneath that surface the old order holds. This chapter, built partly from an unplanned focus group of 1990s-born sales workers in Xi’an, captures a double bind: men prize a woman’s virginity and also read a woman’s willingness to have sex as proof of love. Liu traces possible responses to this bind by placing two women next to each other. Ms. Kong, an only child from a professional Xi’an family, held off through her first two relationships and gave in to her third boyfriend at twenty-four; she found the experience “a form of torture, particularly for my mind.” She feared pregnancy despite the condom, and behind that lay something colder: “what if the parents of that future ‘someone else’ took issue with the fact that I wasn’t a virgin?”
Miss Lu, born the same year into a Shandong farming village, went the other way. She lost her virginity at twenty-two after a Christmas party and remembered it warmly, as “a pleasant sensation, leaving me desiring more,” and then found her way to Guangzhou, a circle of feminist friends, and a series of foreign lovers her mother could not talk her out of. The woman from the city is trapped and the woman from the country is free, which is the reverse of the map the reader brought in.
Harder evidence concerns the men. Pressed in interviews, a significant minority—around a third—described their first time with a girlfriend as something close to force. One put it without embarrassment. “Although my girlfriend said no, her body said yes.” The same men were breezy about their own virginity; one told Liu it was “trivial for men. It doesn’t matter.” This asymmetry shows the book’s claim that intimacy reproduces rather than dissolves inequality. New marital and sexual scripts bring old hierarchies back to life. Nor does the pattern stop at the bedroom door of the unmarried. Inside long marriages, a wife explains that “my mind has taught my body to be passive,” and a husband describes waking his wife in the night until she gets up, goes to the bathroom “to wake herself up, and then cooperate.”
Not every marriage runs this way. One granddaughter speaks with real pride of a husband who both earns and cooks, who shares the childcare, and whom she would marry again without hesitation. Sometimes the equal, companionate marriage the modern story promises does arrive. But consider the story’s deepest promise, a love that answers to nothing but itself, which turns up in this book in the unlikeliest place. It survives in the affair. Ms. Tian, married at twenty-three into a violent household in Shandong, cannot leave: divorce might drive her migrant husband to harm her children or her parents, and she needs the twenty thousand yuan a year he brings in. So she conducts a hidden romance with a married party official, the one relationship she chose freely and the one cleared of any family obligation. “Whatever I can’t get from my husband,” she says, “I can get from him.” They have promised to live together when they are eighty. The freest love in the book is the one that had to hide—from regimes of intimacy that have decided in advance what love is permitted to be.
Liu’s approach cannot easily reach into the intimate realm. This chapter abandons the multigenerational structure because it is difficult to get all members of one family to speak about sex. The book’s larger claim to trace “the whole gamut of family practices over the entire course of life” within families therefore has a hole at a generative and most intimate point.
Chapter 4 delivers an insight that is easier to develop within the book’s frame. Almost everyone reads the grandmother raising the grandchild as ancient Confucian custom. Liu’s three-generation structure shows the opposite: “while grandparenthood is traditionally honored in Chinese families, far from being rooted in Chinese culture, grandparenting is quite recent in origin.” The mass shift from grandparenthood (honored status) to grandparenting (childcare as duty) is a product of the last two generations. Kinship has no essence that persists. Grandparenting is a contested and desired good fought over between and within generations.
Consider Mother Huang. Costed at a live-in nanny’s rate, her unpaid childcare saved her adult children some 300,000 yuan, more than the wealthy paternal grandparents contributed in cash, and it counted for nothing, because care performed inside a family is treated as natural and therefore free. Multiply Mother Huang across the country and you have the care infrastructure the state chose not to build. Mao-era urban grandmothering began because the state put women in full-time jobs then retired them early—fifty or fifty-five, while their daughters were working—which manufactured a cohort of available grandmothers who hadn’t existed in that form before. In the reform-era, the near-absence of public childcare created a void between the end of maternity leave and the start of kindergarten that conscripted grandmothers as unpaid carers. Housing arrangements confirm childcare arrangements—Mother Huang moved into her child’s second bedroom while Father Huang stayed in the family flat fifteen minutes away, so she is physically installed in the site of expectation.
We’ve encountered the romantic Grandma Chen and her grandson the skeptic; the book shows how the idea of progress as linear change fails in this family, and in Chinese family life more broadly. Liu’s move is to compare across generations rather than across space, which would smuggle back the track of progress that she refuses. She asks us not to read China through tired stories of modernity, especially the one where industrialization pulls the world towards the nuclear, conjugal family. But the book draws heavily on British sociology and she is comfortable exporting this vocabulary to Xi’an work units and Shandong farms. Her interrogation of Western concepts is selective: sustained when it comes to the grand theory, barely when it comes to working analysis.
This selectiveness has a cost at the very end, when Liu makes a bold claim that lifelong intergenerational interdependence is China’s “most distinctive feature.” Liu’s method handles the myth-busting well: China is not on the Western track, and the track is a myth. But it cannot establish the positive claim. Of the comparators that would test it, some never enter (e.g. Southern Europe), and some appear in the footnotes but never in the argument (e.g. the rest of East Asia). The problem isn’t ignorance of these cases—it’s a division of labour in which the West generates the concepts and the rest only does corroborative work. We never learn what is distinct about China set beside other “off-track” societies, let alone what is “most distinctive.”
The family is not an autonomous social institution that the state acts on; it is made substantially of state policy. Liu’s chapter on grandparenting is not the only time when “family tradition” turns out to be the result of administrative decisions. Take the expectation that the husband’s family provides the marital home. Liu shows this is not timeless custom but “effectively adapting the patrilocal custom to the twenty-first century”—the same gendered outcome delivered first by the work unit’s allocation of flats to married men, then by the market’s transfer of that cost to the groom’s family. Policy does more than disguise itself as custom; it also produces what it never meant to. The 1950s settlement is the sharp case. Near-universal female employment and early retirement undermined the patrilineal bias of urban families—and, a generation on, manufactured the cohort of retired grandmothers the reform economy would conscript. The same policy modernized the family and, in time, re-traditionalized it.
What policy can do is reshape the family’s internal structure, or restrict decisions—fewer births, later marriage. What it cannot do is add demand, because addition depends on desire, especially in a state that has spent decades building instruments to subtract rather than instruments to create. In this fundamental sense, the family cannot escape the state’s reach, and neither is its future something that the state can design.
Lucas Tse is a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford