Changes in Marital Dissolution Patterns among Chinese and Chinese Immigrants: An Origin-Destination Analysis

Among the concerns about the assimilability of new immigrant groups from Asia and Latin American countries, one unchallenged, unstated assumption is that these groups bring the strong family values and family ties into American society. Whether new Asian immigrant groups assimilate into American divorce culture the longer they stay in the U.S. is not well studied, nor is it clear how marital dissolution patterns change across immigrant generations. My research goal is to examine the current trends and patterns of marital dissolution (divorce or separation) among Chinese and assess whether Chinese immigrants to the U.S. have more stable marriages than the Chinese in China. The specific analyses conducted are designed to test hypotheses based on the assimilation, selection and abruption effect frameworks (Singley and Landale 1998). Several data sets, including the China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) and the China 1990 and 2000 Censuses, were used to examine the complexity of marriage and divorce in China. For the Chinese immigrants in the US, the 1990 and 2000 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) were used. Unique to my study were that the hypotheses I tested differentiated the selection, abruption and assimilation effects by mode-of-entry of Chinese immigrants. Overall, despite much speculation about rising divorce rates in China, the rates remain relatively low. In general, my findings show that Chinese immigrants, especially the newly-arrived female immigrants from China, are more likely to divorce/separate. Unlike women in China, Chinese female immigrants overtake their male counterparts in terms of marital dissolution rates for almost every generational status. This suggests that U.S. society has given women more leverage and room to choose their spouse and to be less tolerant of bad marriages. There was also some evidence of an abruption effect among the less-educated Chinese male immigrants as they displayed even lower divorce rates compared to their male counterparts in the immigrant-sending regions in China. Also, there is some weak evidence for the assimilation hypothesis among the Chinese men over the generations, but the pattern does not hold for Chinese women. Moreover, there is no evidence for the segmented assimilation hypothesis, as the divorce rates among the highly educated Chinese are not similar to the upper middle class Americans, and the divorce rates among the less-educated Chinese do not resemble the divorce patterns of working class Americans either. Furthermore, mixed marriages involving Asians in general are less stable than Asian endogamous marriages. For Chinese, however, the most unstable marriage is between foreign-born and American-born Chinese or Chinese with American citizenship. This suggests that there are Chinese who are trying to take advantage of the American immigration system and use marriage as a tool to achieve their goal of immigrating to the U.S.

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