International Handbook of Chinese Families Chan Kwok-bun, editor

The globalization and mobility trends of recent years continue to add new layers of nuances to the already diverse human experience.Nowhere is this clearer than the Chinese diaspora in the Pacific Rim and North America, which witnesses a wide variety of social issues from the effects of migration on family stability, to elusive concepts of identity among people living in non-Chinese communities, to complex gender and generation politics-issues that have also begun to affect life on the mainland.

The International Handbook of Chinese Families delves into these processes of social transformation in meticulous, far-reaching detail. Focusing on the family life cycle, parent-child relationships, family forms in transition including divorce and separation, migration, emerging research methodologies, and policy concerns,the Handbook highlights diverse populations, including mobile entrepreneurs, college students, fathers, immigrants and re-migrants, same-sex families, divorcees, and the aging. And since the coverage emphasizes families both on and away from the mainland, readers have uncommon access to immediate and long-developing issues, country-specific and worldwide patterns, and the conflict between longstanding tradition and rapid change.

A sampling of topics featured in the Handbook:

• Gender preference for children among Chinese-Americans.
• Mainland Chinese immigrant families in Singapore.
• Empowered or impoverished? Effects of divorce on urban women in China and Canada.
• Contemporary Chinese fathers in Canada.
• Social networks and family relationships in return migration.
• Impact of the one-child policy on Chinese families.

This vast array of subjects makes the Handbook a rich trove of findings for researchers studying family development, Chinese family and immigrantexperience, globalization, and related topics.

A landmark in Chinese family studies, the Handbook is unsurpassed in breadth and depth in its attempt to examine the intimate relations between social theory,research methodology and public policies. It sets the stage for how the Chinese family world-wide will be approached,studied, understood-for change in a quickly globalized world.

Chan Kwok-bun is Chair Professor of Sociology, Hong Kong Baptist University. He was former President, Hong Kong Sociological Association; former Head, Department of Sociology, and former Director, David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University. Between 2005 and 2008, Professor Chan has published seven books, and since 2005 has been the Editor of Social Transformations in Chinese Societies (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers), the official journal of The Hong Kong Sociological Association. His current research interests are in families in Chinese societies, Chinese business networks and Chinese capitalism; Chinese ethnic identities; migration, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and diasporas.

International Handbook of Chinese Families
Chan Kwok-bun, editor

The globalization and mobility trends of recent years continue to add new layers of nuances to the already diverse human experience.Nowhere is this clearer than the Chinese diaspora in the Pacific Rim and North America, which witnesses a wide variety of social issues from the effects of migration on family stability, to elusive concepts of identity among people living in non-Chinese communities, to complex gender and generation politicsissues that have also begun to affect life on the mainland.

The International Handbook of Chinese Families delves into these processes of social transformation in meticulous, far-reaching detail. Focusing on the family life cycle, parent-child relationships, family forms in transition including divorce and separation, migration, emerging research methodologies, and policy concerns,the Handbook highlights diverse populations, including mobile entrepreneurs, college students, fathers, immigrants and re-migrants, same-sex families, divorcees, and the aging. And since the coverage emphasizes families both on and away from the mainland, readers have uncommon access to immediate and long-developing issues, country-specific and worldwide patterns, and the conflict between longstanding tradition and rapid change.

A sampling of topics featured in the Handbook:

• Gender preference for children among Chinese-Americans.
• Mainland Chinese immigrant families in Singapore.
• Empowered or impoverished? Effects of divorce on urban women in China and Canada.
• Contemporary Chinese fathers in Canada.
• Social networks and family relationships in return migration.
• Impact of the one-child policy on Chinese families.

This vast array of subjects makes the Handbook a rich trove of findings for researchers studying family development, Chinese family and immigrantexperience, globalization, and related topics.

A landmark in Chinese family studies, the Handbook is unsurpassed in breadth and depth in its attempt to examine the intimate relations between social theory,research methodology and public policies. It sets the stage for how the Chinese family world-wide will be approached,studied, understoodfor change in a quickly globalized world.

Families are the cornerstone of Chinese society, whether in mainland China, in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, Malaysia, or in the Chinese diaspora the world over. Handbook of the Chinese Family provides an overview of economics, politics, race, ethnicity, and culture within and external to the Chinese family as a social institution. While simultaneously evaluating its own methodological tools, this book will set current knowledge in the context of what has been previously studied as well as future research directions. It will examine inter-family relationships and politics as well as childrearing, education, and family economics to provide a rounded and in-depth view.

A family affair: Migration, dispersal, and the emergent identity of the Chinese cosmopolitan.- The politics of migrant family drama: Mainland Chinese immigrants in Singapore.- Re-forming family among re-migrants:Hongkongers come home.- Social networks and family relations in return migration.- The uncanny feeling of homely and unhomely: gender and generation politics in return migrant families in Hong Kong.- A double-eged sword: Mobility and entrepreneurship.- Family and marriage: constructing Chineseness among long-settled Australian-born Chinese.- Families in the Chinese diaspora: Women's experience.- Female university students dreamning of becoming housewives.- Stepping out, stepping in.- The prejudicial portrayal of immigrant families from mainland China in the Hong Kong media.- To be or not to be: Chinese-Singaporean women deliberating on voluntary childlessness.- Fertility transition and the transformation of working-class family life in urban China in the 1960s.- Sex preference for children and fertility behavior of Chinese-Americans.- Social stratification and childrearing values in contemporary China.- Support and care for aging Chinese: A comnparison of Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Taipei.- Intimacy and its denial: When sons and daughters talk about fatherhood, marriage, and work.- Father, son, wife, husband: Philanthropy as exchange and balance.- Children and their fathers in Singapore: A generational perspective.- Moving fathers from the "sidelines": Contemporary Chinese fathers in Canada and China.- Listening to fathers.-The roles and contributions of fathers in families with school-age children in Hong Kong.- East and West: Exploration of the father-son conflict in Chinese cul…