This study examines generational change in young women’s other-sex relations, drawing on interviews with 17/18-year-old Beijingers, their mothers and grandmothers. The change constitutes an “expressive turn” with Chinese characteristics. Individual emotional self-fulfillment—irrelevant to the “grandmothers” and important to the “mothers” mainly in relation to marriage—has for the “daughters” become an important part of being young and of marriage expectations. But there is stronger emphasis on pragmatic reasoning about marriage partners. The daughters are both more romantic and more means–ends rational in other-sex relations than their grandmothers and mothers were, showing a sophistication of the heart and mind. This “instrumental twist” in the expressive trend in post-Mao China adds contextual nuance to theorizing about other-sex relations under global modernization.
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