Yunxiang Yan, "Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village, 1949-1999," (Stanford University Press, 2003)

For seven years in the 1970s, the author lived in a village in northeast China as an ordinary farmer. In 1989, he returned to the village as an anthropologist to begin the unparalleled span of eleven years’ fieldwork that has resulted in this book—a comprehensive, vivid, and nuanced account of family change and the transformation of private life in rural China from 1949 to 1999. The author’s focus on the personal and the emotional sets this book apart from most studies of the Chinese family. Yan explores private lives to examine areas of family life that have been largely overlooked, such as emotion, desire, intimacy, privacy, conjugality, and individuality. He concludes that the past five decades have witnessed a dual transformation of private life: the rise of the private family, within which the private lives of individual women and men are thriving. East Asian Studies Podcast Chinese History Podcast Rural family life in China Private life transformation in China Anthropology in rural China Yan fieldwork on Chinese families Family change in rural China 1949-1999 Intimacy and privacy in Chinese families Social change in Chinese villages Emotional life in rural Chinese communities Conjugality and individuality in China Personal lives in rural Chinese history Post-1949 family transformation in China Chinese family dynamics Desire and intimacy in Chinese society Rural Chinese family structure Anthropology of Chinese private life Social change and family life in China Emotional and personal history of China Transformation of Chinese private sphere Fieldwork on Chinese rural communities Life in a Chinese village in the 1970s Chinese rural sociology and anthropology Cultural shifts in Chinese family life