Wang Yu, Schwartz Christine R
Duke Kunshan University, China.
Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States.
Res Soc Stratif Mobil. 2018 Aug;56:28-39. doi: 10.1016/j.rssm.2018.06.002. Epub 2018 Jun 15.
is a key marker of status in contemporary China. Urban status confers large economic benefits such as preferential access to good schools, prestigious occupations, and state-subsidized welfare benefits. As such, trends in intermarriage convey important but underappreciated information about social mobility in China. This article examines trends in intermarriage between 1958 and 2008. We find that intermarriage is surprisingly common and has grown steadily since 1985. Hypotheses derived from Western contexts do little to explain this trend. Increased education, economic inequality, and availability each fail to explain trends as predicted in prior work. A common hypothesis is that increased inequality should reduce intermarriage by making it more costly to "marry down." We find the opposite-increasing inequality is associated with increasing intermarriage, particularly between urban men and rural women, which is consistent with the hypothesis that the costs of marrying down may be outweighed by the incentives to marry up in this context. Our results also suggest conversion plays a key role in increased intermarriage. These findings highlight the uniqueness of the Chinese context and suggest that standard hypotheses about assortative mating may not be applicable in contexts with strong state-controlled social boundaries.
是当代中国社会地位的一个关键标志。城市地位带来巨大的经济利益，比如优先进入优质学校、获得有声望的职业以及享受国家补贴的福利。因此，通婚趋势传达了有关中国社会流动的重要但未得到充分重视的信息。本文考察了1958年至2008年间的通婚趋势。我们发现通婚现象惊人地普遍，并且自1985年以来一直在稳步增长。源自西方背景的假设几乎无法解释这一趋势。教育水平提高、经济不平等加剧以及可获得性等因素均无法像先前研究预测的那样解释通婚趋势。一个常见的假设是，不平等加剧会使“下嫁”成本增加，从而减少通婚。但我们发现情况恰恰相反——不平等加剧与通婚增加有关，尤其是城市男性与农村女性之间的通婚，这与在这种情况下“下嫁”成本可能被“上嫁”动机所抵消的假设一致。我们的研究结果还表明身份转换在通婚增加中起到关键作用。这些发现凸显了中国背景的独特性，并表明关于 assortative mating 的标准假设可能不适用于存在强大国家控制的社会界限的背景。 （注：“assortative mating”可能是“选型婚配”之类的专业术语，原文未给出准确中文释义）
