In Family Revolution, Hui Faye Xiao draws on a broad selection of Chinese novels, television series, and films to represent the problems and contradictions of contemporary marriage and domestic culture. Within this overarching concern with family dynamics, she is most interested in representations of divorce, and even more narrowly in the experience of middle-aged women. A very fine introduction explains how the legal, political, and economic shifts after 1976 altered family relationships and specifically how state promotion of no-fault consensual divorce made divorce easier and cheaper in China than in almost any other part of the world. Xiao's intellectual debts to Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, Ulrich Beck, Raymond Williams, and Pierre Bourdieu are explicit and establish the theoretical points of departure for her larger argument about the limits on the freedom of “the post-socialist subject” (p. 4).
Chapter 1, “Divorcing the Rural,” pivots on two...
