A study on Chinese bulletin board system forums: how Internet users contribute to set up the contemporary notions of family and marriage

The family has always functioned as mediator between the individual and society in China, but in the last three decades, marriage and the family have taken on diverse trends in China’s rural and urban regions. This paper aims to map out how online bulletin board system forums, with their open access, interaction, and anonymous nature, are contributing to a change in the concepts concerning family and marriage in contemporary China. From a large database, we selected 46 threads (with 100,932 messages posted by 14,097 accounts) that discuss family and marriage, adopting a lexicometric approach to map online contents. Results indicate that in online debates traditional Confucian values are conflicting with new individualistic trends, with traditional ideals complicated by social factors, including the policy-induced urban-rural divide, corruption, and extra-marital affairs.