Revisiting the Second Demographic Transition within a Patriarchal Context: Data, Methods, and Gender Divide

Abstract

This dissertation is about understanding union formation and childbearing choices in contemporary China. Recent scholarly work uses the Second Demographic Transition (SDT) theory to explain recent social change: delayed marriage entry, rising premarital cohabitation, a lowest-low fertility rate, and accelerated divorce. However, unlike the predictions of SDT, non-marital fertility in China remains low, and marriage is still considerably more stable in China compared to international contexts. Since SDT argues for the key role played by societal-level ideation changes of individualization and self-actualization, this dissertation attempts to build direct measurements of ideas and values around key SDT indicators using text data from a popular social media website, Zhihu. Building measurements from text data presents itself as a methodological challenge. Combining a qualitative reading of the texts, statistical modeling, Machine Learning, and Text Mining, this dissertation contributes to the method discussions on applying computational methods to the study of social demography. The study confirms that the elements of individualism and self-actualization are behind the observed changes, but these elements alone do not offer comprehensive explanations of the phenomena. The pursuit of a better self in China only comes hand in hand with struggles to confront male dominance and patrilineal norms. Looking deeper into one of the key SDT indicators on ideas and values around cohabitation, this study further reveals a gender divergence: females appear to possess stronger liberal thinking whereas males show deep entrenchment with Confucian-influenced patrilineal norms.