Western life courses challenged in life stories collected in contemporary China

The life course describes the progression of life as a social role, from birth to death. Traditional Western life-history studies of the life course usually describe a continuous lifeline with occasional interruptions in between. The extraordinary temporal events of the Anti-Japanese War (AJW), Civil War (CW), Great Famine (GF), Cultural Revolution (CR), and the Reform and Opening-up of China in just few decades mean that the life history of contemporary Chinese older adults may be quite different from those of their western peers.

The study used qualitative research methods to conduct in-depth interviews with 16 older adults and collect their life stories through a standardized list of questions. Grounded theory was employed to condense, compare, conceptualize, and synthesize patterns within the collected data, approaching the investigation with a "naturalistic" perspective.

Based on a generalized analysis of the Interview transcripts, we can find that Chinese old adults' life stories were shaped by recurring exceptional and rapidly changing environmental conditions. The themes and sub-themes of Chinese old adults' life stories were focus on (1) violence, loss of family member, escape and unstable life in their early life which are related to AJW and CW; (2) poverty and starvation in daily life when they were adolescents and young adults which are related to GF; (3) discontinuity, timed opportunities, categorizations in order to split the social relationships and networks in CR. The data also suggest that education is an important part of the life story and that its value changes over time.

The discontinuity and instability of the life stories of the Chinese old adults are unexpected according to the dominant Western-influenced life course theories, which enriches life course theory and provides a new perspective for studying the individual life course in a society of constant and rapid change.