Kinship Across Distances
Gender, generation and class dynamics in Chinese translocal families
Zhenwei Wang (Author)
Kinship Across Distances offers a richly textured ethnography of family life in an era of mobility, tracing how Chinese families sustain intimacy, obligation and care while living apart. Based on multi-sited fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2024 across urban Hangzhou and rural hometowns in eastern China, the book examines how kinship is actively made across distance through everyday practices of visiting, remittance, storytelling and digital supervision.
Introducing the concept of ‘translocal kinning’, Zhenwei Wang reconceptualizes family not as a static unit anchored in co-residence, but as an ongoing, care-centred process forged through movement, mediation and negotiation. The book shows how efforts to ‘do family’ across space both reproduce and reconfigure hierarchies of gender, generation and class. Women remain central caregivers, yet their agency is shaped by intergenerational support and classed resources; grandparents emerge as key brokers of emotional and practical care, and digital technologies reshape what presence, supervision and responsibility mean at a distance.
By foregrounding care as a multidirectional flow rather than a one-way obligation, this book challenges dominant narratives of family breakdown under migration. It offers a timely and original contribution to scholarship on kinship, migration and social reproduction, while providing a grounded critique of how private family struggles are entangled with China’s marketization reform.
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Kinship Across Distances
Gender, generation and class dynamics in Chinese translocal families
Kinship Across Distances offers a richly textured ethnography of family life in an era of mobility, tracing how Chinese families sustain intimacy, obligation and care while living apart. Based on multi-sited fieldwork conducted between 2020 and 2024 across urban Hangzhou and rural hometowns in eastern China, the book examines how kinship is actively made across distance through everyday practices of visiting, remittance, storytelling and digital supervision.
Introducing the concept of ‘translocal kinning’, Zhenwei Wang reconceptualizes family not as a static unit anchored in co-residence, but as an ongoing, care-centred process forged through movement, mediation and negotiation. The book shows how efforts to ‘do family’ across space both reproduce and reconfigure hierarchies of gender, generation and class. Women remain central caregivers, yet their agency is shaped by intergenerational support and classed resources; grandparents emerge as key brokers of emotional and practical care, and digital technologies reshape what presence, supervision and responsibility mean at a distance.
By foregrounding care as a multidirectional flow rather than a one-way obligation, this book challenges dominant narratives of family breakdown under migration. It offers a timely and original contribution to scholarship on kinship, migration and social reproduction, while providing a grounded critique of how private family struggles are entangled with China’s marketization reform.
‘This is an excellent ethnography of how the Chinese family today organises its moral and economic lives in the context of multidirectional mobility, changing technologies of care, and new moral dilemmas. Conceptually and historically grounded, it makes essential reading about contemporary Chinese society.’ Minh T.N. Nguyen, Bielefeld University
‘Wang skillfully analyzes the moral underpinnings of family life in China today under conditions of widespread domestic migration: what it means to provide care, preserve family harmony, and cultivate intergenerational family success, all as part of “doing family” from afar.’
Sara L. Friedman, Indiana University, Bloomington
