Apparently my boss is in the Wall Street Journal

China's Growth Strains Family Ties

 --- As Children Prosper, Leave Home, Parents' Role Dims; A Tight-Knit Clan Frays

By Kathy Chen
2,405 words
13 April 2005
The Asian Wall Street Journal/ A1/ English
(c) 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

To see the edition in which this article appeared,

click here http://awsj.com.hk/factiva-ns

NANCHANG, China -- This country's success is tearing the Fan family apart.

Fan Qun, a successful 39-year-old entrepreneur in Beijing, bought his parents a new apartment and takes them sightseeing in other Chinese cities. But he feels he has little in common with them anymore and less to say to them. His younger brother Fan Jun, 37, is reeling over a divorce, after his wife left him to pursue opportunities in southern
China. He is unemployed after a failed business venture and has been living with his parents for more than a year.

At a loss over how to deal with his family's situation, patriarch Fan Hanlin often retreats to his bedroom, usurped in his role of respected elder. His older son's social standing outstrips his, and his younger son ignores his advice. Mr. Fan's wife escapes by playing mahjong each afternoon with friends.

"Everyone is unhappy," says the elder Mr. Fan, 70.

For thousands of years, Chinese have made the family paramount, with generations often living together, and younger members deferring to their elders. Fathers were the head of the household. But opportunities born of China's move to a market-based economy over the past two dozen years are creating new wealth, new hierarchies and new strains. The scramble to keep up with neighbors, or one's own relatives, is testing
family ties, contributing to a rise in social problems.

Some 1.6 million couples divorced in China last year, a 21% jump from the year before, according to China's Ministry of Civil Affairs. In Beijing, there were 800 reported cases of domestic violence in 2004, double the number the previous year, according to the city's Bureau of Justice.

Younger Chinese are opting for privacy over extended-family living, and buying parents their own apartments. Others are putting their aging parents in nursing homes, as convenience trumps filial piety, an unheard-of violation of Confucian ethics. Over the past decade, the number of nursing-home residents has increased 40% to more
than one million.

Parents of young children are leaving their offspring in the care of relatives for years, as they seek better jobs far from home. Millions of peasants have left their rural homes for work in cities, while some professionals are going abroad. The trend is spawning China's own generation of latchkey children, numbering in the tens of millions.

In the Fan household, life followed traditional guidelines when the children were growing up. Mr. Fan, head of the household, taught physics at a high school and his wife, Luo Shuzheng, was an engineer in a state-run factory. They had three children -- two boys and a girl -- who excelled at school, and tested into prestigious universities.

Like other Chinese children, the Fans were expected to obey their father without question. "We required [the children] to sit still and didn't let them fool around," Mr. Fan says.

Usually, just raising his voice was enough, but Mr. Fan says he sometimes hit the boys. He still recollects with pride how, after he hit his younger son in an effort to improve his study habits, the boy scored so well on college-entrance exams that he ranked among the top students in Nanchang County.

The Fans were a tight-knit clan. Qun, the oldest, looked after his two younger siblings while their parents were at work. Many nights, their mother stayed up mending clothes and making cloth shoes for the children. Sundays were a rush of shopping, cooking and housework. Neither Mr. Fan's nor his wife's parents lived with them, but the couple
set aside part of their small income each month to give to their parents.

Like generations of Chinese, Mr. Fan and his wife, Ms. Luo, envisioned a life driven by filial duties for their own children: study hard, find a stable job, get married, produce offspring (preferably male) and support your parents in old age. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Fan children were graduating from college, China's economic overhaul was opening up all sorts of new opportunities, in job
choices, lifestyles and ways to get rich.

Qun jumped at the chance to do something different. Bucking the trend among college graduates at the time to take a state-sector job, he opted for a marketing position in a joint-venture company of SmithKline Beecham, now GlaxoSmithKline PLC. He learned about the pharmaceutical business and Western marketing techniques, befriended American colleagues and helped the company successfully launch its Contac brand of cold medicine in China.

In 1996, he started his own consulting company, advising drug companies on doing business in China. Today, he says his company employs a dozen people, including his wife, Li Chunhui, and generates annual revenue exceeding 10 million yuan ($1.2 million). He says the company's after-tax profit is 15% to 20% of revenue.

As Qun prospered, the distance widened between him and his family in Nanchang, a city of 4.5 million about 1,250 kilometers from his new home in Beijing. He shares few details of his life in the city with his parents. They don't understand his business, he says, and wouldn't necessarily approve of his lifestyle. He and his wife each drive their own car, dine out frequently and retain two housekeepers, including one just to look after Wrong Wrong, their pet Pekinese dog. This year, they moved to a two-story house in a wealthy suburb.

His parents don't have a car or a housekeeper, rarely eat out and take pride in saving. "If my parents saw me spending this kind of money, I'd be embarrassed," Qun says, as he and his wife grab a coffee at a Starbucks shop on the way home from the office. He notes the few hundred dollars they spend each month on such luxuries as fresh beef, imported cookies, dog sweaters and a sitter for their dog is more than the his parents' monthly income.

In the past, Chinese families revolved around fathers and sons. But like other younger-generation Chinese, Qun views his first allegiance as with his xiao jiating, or small family unit centered around his marriage.

The couple have resisted suggestions by Qun's parents for them to have a baby. Instead, Qun's wife insists their Pekinese should be recognized as a "grandson," proclaiming the dog's surname to be "Fan." Qun says this offended his mother, and she once complained that he should find a wife "who listens more." In traditional China, a son would have quietly accepted such criticism. But Qun says he told his mother that if she had a problem with his wife, she should tell her directly.


"My main family is with Linda," he says, using his wife's English name. Like many of today's middle-class Chinese, the couple also have adopted Western names, a practice that is viewed in some circles as a sign of being modern and sophisticated.

His mother says she doesn't care how they raise their dog, but "you still need to have a child. How will you get by when you are old? Dogs can't take care of you."

These days, Qun sees his parents only a few times a year. Conversations tend to be about Nanchang friends or family, since his parents have different views on other subjects. "They always complain about how the government is unfair and society is unjust," says Qun. "I try to influence them . . . but I think they'll never catch up to my way of thinking."

Min, the youngest Fan sibling, also resisted her parents' traditional expectations. Ms. Luo says she hoped her daughter, after graduation from college, would return to Nanchang. Instead, Min settled in the southern city of Guangzhou, where she is married, has a child and works at a major Chinese insurance company.

Jun, the middle sibling, is still figuring out his place in the new China. Growing up, he says the constant message from his parents and school was: "If you just listen, you'll be successful, and society will take care of you." After college, he accepted a job at the Nanchang subsidiary of the state-run China Machinery & Equipment Import & Export Corp.

Working as a trader, he exported engines to other Asian countries and the U.S. and earned more than $10,000 in bonuses, he says. But after more than a decade on the job, his salary changed little, totaling about $200 a month.

In 1993, Jun married a fellow office worker, Zhu Yifang. Their employer provided them with a small apartment and they had a son in 1995.

After the baby was born, Jun's mother spent long stretches of time living with the couple, a traditional Chinese practice. But Ms. Zhu says she resented her mother-in-law's presence, which she regarded as interference. "It would have been better if the older generation didn't live with us," Ms. Zhu says. "But I couldn't refuse," she says.

Unlike wives in pre-reform China, Ms. Zhu could walk away, with more freedom and job opportunities. In 1999, she went to southern China to work as the sales agent for a construction-material company, leaving her husband to care for their son, then 4 years old. In 2000, the couple divorced. Today, Ms. Zhu lives in Nanchang with a boyfriend and earns more than $500 a month, she says, teaching English at a university and running her own English-language class.

After the divorce, in 2001, Qun offered his younger brother a job at his company in Beijing to market a vitamin supplement and oversee a handful of employees. Jun quit his state-sector job and accepted.

But he felt uncomfortable leaving his son in his parents' care, he says. He couldn't get used to Beijing or his new job. He had a hard time persuading retailers to buy the vitamin supplement, and after a year, the venture had incurred more than $60,000 in losses. He says the company didn't spend enough to promote the product.

Qun says his younger brother "approached the job like he was still at a state-run company . . . He got up in the morning, drank a cup of tea, and then did only what I told him to." He says Jun "often complains and finds excuses. . . . We live in different worlds."

Jun says that by his older brother's standards, "I haven't succeeded . . . but the goals he chooses are different from mine." He thinks Qun "doesn't necessarily like what he does, but he wants to earn money." His own goal in life, Jun says, is to first be a good father.

Jun returned home and last year moved in with his parents. That is a reversal of Chinese tradition, in which grown offspring typically provide for their parents.

Sitting on the apartment patio on a recent day, Jun sipped tea from a beer mug and pondered his future.

"I haven't thought through a lot of things, like how to raise my kid, how to be a model parent and how to live with my parents," Jun says. "I'm just considering the question, `How successful should I be?' People drive a [Mercedes] Benz; I don't have a car."

Mr. Fan and Jun often squabble over how to raise Jun's son, now 9 years old. "I tell [Jun] his son should go to sleep at 9 p.m. or he'll be tired at school. But I talk and no one listens," says Mr. Fan.

Jun says his father "has lived this long, but doesn't know what family is. You need to show love to your kid, but [the elder Mr. Fan] doesn't express his emotions."

After initially rejecting his brother's suggestion that he look for a job outside of Nanchang, Jun recently had a change of heart. He says he plans to visit Shanghai to explore an opportunity to work for a trading company there.

Economic changes have given people in China more money, but are also causing "more pressure" Jun says. "Some contradictions always existed in our family," he says, "but when life was simple, we just lived with them."