Starting again in rural west China: stories of rural women across generations

摘要

Rural China is being remade in the wake of a massive exodus of young people to work in the cities and coastal areas. The core rural population is now middle-aged, and is caring for both parents and grandchildren. In this process, women and men are creating new patterns of kinship and social ties across distance and generations. This article draws on research that combined household analysis with focused life-history methods to explore these departures through a focus on three illustrative cases from upland west China.