The Sociology and Social Anthropology Seminar Series: Liu Jieyu

Embedded Generations: Family Life and Social Change in Contemporary China

Liu Jieyu

Professor of sociology and China studies at SOAS University of London. 

With Embedded Generations, Liu Jieyu offers a comprehensive examination of Chinese family life since the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949. Grounding her account in the analysis of 260 life history narratives and rich ethnographic data, Liu traces the changing ways families have navigated such experiential milestones as childhood, courtship and marriage, sex and intimacy, and aging over the past seven decades. 

Using generation, the urban-rural divide, and gender as her analytical lenses, she provides an alternative narrative of Chinese family life, countering the dominant Eurocentric accounts of modernization and family change.