China has undergone dramatic social and economic changes, which have also shaped Chinese marriages profoundly. This talk first describes trends in educational assortative marriage over the past century in China. It then introduces two sets of comparisons to reveal trends in the multi-dimensional matching and exchange between a couple’s educational status and their hukou and age in contemporary China. Methodologically, these longitudinal comparisons are made possible by measuring educational attainment relatively as an individual's percentile position in the birth cohort’s education distribution. We can, therefore, take advantage of census microdata and nationally representative surveys to study and compare trends using comparable, easy-to-interpret couple rank-rank correlations and the Exchange Index. On top of a steady increase in educational assortative marriage over the past century, empirical findings highlight the critical roles of social, political, and economic contexts in shaping recent patterns and variations of Chinese marriages.

About the Speaker:

Hao Dong is Boya Young Fellow Associate Professor at the Center for Social Research, Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. He worked as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University, and earned his PhD in Social Science from the HKUST. His research concerns family demography, social stratification and mobility, comparative historical demography, and quantitative methods. He is especially interested in understanding how family and social context shape demographic differentials and social inequality over individual life course, across generations, and from the past to the present. His work has appeared in American Journal of Sociology, Demography, Explorations in Economic History, Journal of Marriage and Family, PNAS, 社会学研究, 历史研究, and 人口研究, among other international and Chinese academic journals.

Departmental Seminar: Assortative Marriage in China

Date: 28 May 2025

Time: 11:00am - 12:00pm

Venue: CJT-9.29

Speaker: Professor Hao Dong

Registration: https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?ueid=100344