Sinologists have long agreed that many aspects of Chinese culture vary widely from region to region and even from valley to valley and town to town. The question for contemporary scholars is why and with what consequences. The problem we face is that while evidence from widely scattered communities is adequate to demonstrate the fact of regional diversity, it is not adequate to test hypotheses concerning its causes and consequences. What we need are detailed maps of the distribution and frequency of such practices as male adoption, uxorilocal marriage, cash bride-price, double burial, and foot binding. The only chance we have of discovering why Chinese culture varies is to see how that variation relates to the location of such likely causes as relations with non-Han peoples, the strength of state control, and the balance of forces in local modes of production.

In pre-industrial Taiwan, an uxorilocal marriage, in which a man moved in with his bride's family, was a familial strategy used to continue family lineage and to enhance family farm labor. We examine the prevalence and circumstances in which a family would call in a man for one of their unmarried daughters. Using data from the Taiwan Historical Household Registers Database (THHRD) from 1906-1945, we identify the individual-level factors (including parental status, sibling status, household heads' occupations, and the capacity of the family labor force) and community-level factors (including ethnic demographics and the prevalence of uxorilocal marriages by region), which are predictive of uxorilocal marriages. Our analyses first show that women without siblings and women with only female siblings were more likely to adopt the uxorilocal form of marriage. In addition, the effects of number of siblings' were moderated by the presence or absence of parents. For women without any male siblings with at least one parent, especially a father, residing in the household, the likelihood having an uxorilocal marriage was higher than for those without any parents. Second, an uxorilocal marriage was more common in families without men in the labor force to fulfill the manpower needed for farming. Third, uxorilocal marriage was more likely to occur in families living in the poorest socioeconomic conditions, especially those families in which household heads did not own land and had to sell their labor for agricultural production. Our findings imply that the adoption of uxorilocal marriage varied not only from place to place but also from time to time; it was conditioned by the modes and the means of labor production.

Marriage in Taiwan in the early twentieth century was a very diverse phenomenon. Marriages could be in the "minor" fashion, in which the bride was adopted at an early age by her parents-in-law. They could also be of the virilocal "major" type, in which young adults married and lived in the household of the husband's parents. Finally, they could be "uxorilocal," in which the husband came to live with his in-laws. The diversity of types reflects a complex mixture of motives on behalf of parents, who aimed to secure the patrilineage, but in the meantime were motivated to save on wedding expenses, safeguard their hold on the younger generation, forge alliances between clans, and bring in additional labor. In our paper, we assess the relative importance of these parental motives by applying a competing risks analysis on household registry data from nine Taiwanese communities. By combining data on the levels of the individuals, the composition of their households, the characteristics of their communities, and economic fluctuations, we demonstrate the remarkable flexibility and adaptability of Taiwanese marriage within the overriding constraint of producing male offspring.

This study utilizes the Taiwan colonial household registration data to study the cause of uxorilocal marriage in Taiwan during the period of Japanese colonial rule and, simultaneously, to compare the prevalence of uxorilocal marriage in urban (Taipei) and rural (XinChu) communities. The socioeconomic status of the bride and groom's family, and ethnic and urban-rural differences are the main issues in this research. In addition, the viewpoints of Wolf and Huang and Pasternak will be rechecked vis-à-vis regional differences. The results of this study will be presented by statistic analysis and geographic information system. In Taiwan, compared to major and minor marriage, uxorilocal marriage had a higher ratio in Taipei and XinChu. In uxorilocal marriage, the age of brides and grooms is older in Taipei than in XinChu. In addition, our research indicates either daughters or adopted daughters, if they had fewer siblings or no brothers, had a higher probability of entering into uxorilocal marriages. Moreover, uxorilocal marriages were found to be less prevalent in later birth cohorts while ethnic groups and parent's marriage types had no direct effect on uxorilocal marriage.