Follow Father or Mother? Understanding the Monoethnic Identification of Biethnic Children in China

In China, children’s ethnicity is often decided by their parents at the time of birth or during childhood; individuals are only allowed to be identified by a single ethnicity. Ethnic identification is therefore a contested issue shaped by the intra-family power structures that determine which parent’s ethnic heritage will be passed down. In this paper, we use China’s 2005 and 2015 inter-census surveys to examine the factors impacting the ethnic identification of children in interethnic families. We find the likelihood that children are identified with their fathers’ ethnicity decreased between 2005 and 2015. Relative to children with a minority mother and a Han father, those with a Han mother and a minority father, and those with parents from different minority groups have higher odds of following their father’s ethnicity. Being a girl, being older, having more educated parents, having urban or migrant status, and living in prefectures with a higher concentration of ethnic minorities all tend to lower the odds of identifying with the father. Moreover, stratified models demonstrate that in families where the father is the only minority parent, Islamic heritage positively predicts boys’ adoption of fathers’ ethnicity, but negatively predicts girls’ adoption. Eligibility for bonus points on the college entrance exam is negatively associated with the odds of following father when the mother is the only minority parent, but the association turns positive when the father is the only minority parent. The results illustrate the nuanced social processes involved in the social construction of ethnic identification.