Elections Without Choice

Abstract

mother) which ensures the continuity of a patri-line. This involves the further paradox 'that, since men are always in principle members of property-holding units, their earnings being absorbed into these groups, women are the only individual property-owners in Chinese society' (p. 259). The assumption of a 'Chinese society' in which all these paradoxes exist is often thus asserted as an eternity. Certainly, it can be shown to obstruct the drawing of some of the logical conclusions from the complexity and contradictory tensions of the relations analysed. But the assertion is an article of a sociological faith no more questioned by