UCLA

The study of split households in China and elsewhere has tended to focus on rural-urban migration. But the phenomenon of split householding, in which members of the family live separately, is also common among urban-urban migrants, despite the relatively little scholarly attention this group has received. Against this backdrop, this research is concerned with urban and educated split households in China, with a particular focus on how women in these long-distance relationships negotiate relational power in their split households. This paper draws on a combination of 30 in-depth, semi-structured interviews and discourse analysis of public socio-political rhetoric, both historical and contemporary, regarding husbands and wives from split households to shed light on the contemporary relationships between urban, educated Chinese parents and patriarchal values rooted in the Confucian family system.

This research reveals that household-splitting is not only a strategy in service of a family’s economic goals, but also a site that potentially (re)shapes gendered values and norms. Split householding incidentally serves as an outlet for women to gain a sense of respite from their “wifely duties” and discover new forms of autonomy, and for men to more freely express emotions of pain and regret, challenging the convention that emotions are associated only with femininity. While such newly constructed freedoms are not a consciously engineered result, these findings support the notion that gender relations in China are at a crossroads between entrenched patriarchal ideologies and narrow spaces of alternative gender practices.