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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

small happiness, China, Chinese Communist Revolution, college students

College

Family, Home, and Social Sciences

Department

Political Science

Abstract

In an attempt to discover if attitudes toward female children are changing in China, I conducted interviews of 48 Chinese women in several areas of China and Hong Kong. My original plan included only two age-groups of women: women ages 60 and older, who were born before the Chinese Communist Revolution, and college-age women born after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms of 1978 (which included the one-child and birth-planning policies). In conducting interviews, however, I discovered that I was ignoring a crucial age-group: women of child-bearing age. Because China’s population is so large, enrollment at Chinese universities is limited; college students may not marry until they are finished with their studies, so the college-age women I interviewed, without exception, had no children of their own. Several of these women suggested to me that I interview Chinese mothers as well; as they themselves had no children and no pressures from in-laws or parents to have either boys or girls, they did not feel entirely qualified to speculate on whether they would have a preference for one or the other. The addition of this age-group, then, fleshed out the research in an important way.

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