This thesis seeks to understand the role of gifts in bridging inter-class differences in marriage and family life by focusing on the fluidity of gifts in the process of kinship-making within the context of male phoenix families in China. The so-called male phoenixes are rural-to-urban male migrants who grew up in rural villages, obtained higher education in cities, and married into urban families. They are often stigmatised in Chinese society and tend to engage in lavish gift-giving to their kinship networks. The male phoenix is selected as the empirical case for this thesis due to its significant and distinctive role as a socio-cultural symbol in addressing issues of social mobility and kinship maintenance within the framework of unequal marriages and reverse dowry relationships in contemporary societies. My empirical exploration draws on a combination of over two-year ethnographic fieldwork and 25 in-depth interviews in Shandong Province and Shanghai, supplemented by a netnographic analysis of Chinese social media.
My findings extend existing theories in the following ways. First, the findings illuminate the role of gifts in individuals’ transition through stages of their relationships within the family. By employing a lifecycle multi-dimensional lens and comparing non-traditional power relation types of marriages – two-sided marriage (liang tou hun) and new-style matrilocal marriage – from a multi-dimensional perspective, this thesis highlights the diverse roles that gifts play in dynamic facilitating kinship relationships. This advances previous literature, which has often been confined to a static relationship phase or a single type of gift. Second, my findings exemplify how gifts can act as an elastic spring mechanism, with the degree of kinship elasticity varying according to the role and impact of the gift, influencing the entire network of relationships by facilitating role performances within these social structures in a given social context. Third, the thesis enriches our understanding of the process of gift-giving and social mobility within inter-class marriages. I propose a concept of sustained dynamic engagement to explain how continuous gift-giving engagement is crucial for maintaining social status mobility. Failing to sustain this engagement may result in the loss of mobility and achieved social status, leading to stigmatisation of the male phoenix within the family. Taken together, my thesis advances knowledge of the crucial role of gifts in sustaining social mobility as an ongoing process within the family.