This article investigates fertility intentions and obstacles among young Chinese men and women after the lift of the one-child policy. Over a hundred in-depth interviews reveal that while having one child is viewed as the normative step following marriage, various obstacles remain for second-birth transition. Time and financial concerns are salient among both men and women, whereas labor market disadvantage and the perceived incompatibility between work and motherhood create additional hindrances for women. The gendered childcare leave policy, coupled with discriminatory hiring practice, leads women to view multiple childbirths and successful career as fundamentally incompatible. A universal 'two-child policy' without additional institutional measures that address work-life incompatibility for women may not successfully boost fertility level, but would rather exacerbate the existing gender inequity in China's labor market.

Since the 1990s, inter-provincial female migration for marriage has become important in central and eastern rural China. Using survey data from X County in rural Anhui Province, we explore the arrangement of inter-provincial marriages, as well as the characteristics of husbands and wives, marital satisfaction, and marital stability for these marriages. We find that inter-provincial marriage is an important option for local men to respond to the marriage squeeze and the increasing expense of marriage. It helps to relieve the shortage of marriageable women in the local marriage market. Because this kind of marriage is based on economic exchange, but not affection, it is often subject to a higher risk of marriage instability, and can lead to such illegal behaviors as marriage fraud and mercenary marriage.

Few studies of childhood poverty in China have considered social deprivations, and fewer still have considered deprivations in contexts beyond the household. In this article, the authors propose a multi-context poverty measure that includes economic and social deprivations in the family, school, and community domains. The authors compare this measure to standard money-metric measures of poverty using a 15-year longitudinal study of children from 100 villages in Northwest China. Nearly a quarter of multi-context poor children are not income poor, while almost three-fourths of the income poor are not multi-context poor. Social and community deprivations are only weakly associated with "money-metric" deprivations but are significantly linked with short and long-term welfare outcomes for children. The multi-context approach can be tailored to index household and community poverty alleviation targets.