Ke Li's "Marriage Unbound"

Ke Li is Assistant Professor of Political Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the City University of New York.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Marriage Unbound: State Law, Power, and Inequality in Contemporary China, and reported the following:

On page 99, I spotlight a major historic event: on February 26, 1989, in meeting with the U.S. president George H. W. Bush, China’s top leader, Deng Xiaoping, enunciated a new challenge in front of the country’s ruling elites. China’s “overwhelming need is to maintain stability. Without it, everything would be gone, and accomplishments would be ruined,” Deng insisted.

Deng’s claim marked a watershed in the eyes of many studying the People’s Republic of China (PRC) (1949-present). From then on, the PRC has been consolidating a sprawling state apparatus, operating with one overarching imperative: stability maintenance (维稳). In the decades to follow, ordinary Chinese would have to wrestle with this state apparatus, which, in various ways, interferes with their daily lives, including marriage and family life.

The Page 99 Test does not serve me well. My book contains over 300 pages. No single page can nail down what I try to achieve in this book.

To me, page 99 registers a rather illuminating moment in a decade-long research process. As a sociologist who studies Chinese marriage, divorce, and family law, I did not exactly start out in research anticipating that someday I would write about “high politics”—the kind involving top leaders from China or the U.S. After all, neither marriage nor divorce appears intrinsically political; many in the west tend to view them as private matters between two individuals, two families.

Yet, as my research unfolded, it became increasingly clear: in contemporary China, marriage was and has continued to be political, and so is divorce. I say so, because Chinese family has continued to serve as a key vehicle with which the state advances its demographic, socioeconomic, and ideological agendas. In other words, to understand ordinary Chinese’s experiences in marriage and family life, to make sense of their struggles to exit unhappy marriages, we must situate such experiences and struggles in larger social contexts, with a sharp focus on the links between (high or low) politics and citizens’ intimate lives. In that sense, page 99 illuminates something at the heart of my work: the personal is indeed political, and likewise the familial.

Learn more about Marriage Unbound at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue