>I have seen zero evidence of that in my travels through China The parent comment said: "The Chinese, for example, practiced until recently strict exogamous ma

>I have seen zero evidence of that in my travels through China The parent comment said: "The Chinese, for example, practiced until recently strict exogamous marriage [...]". This explains your experience. >Do you have any sources for that? Try searching "Chinese exogamy" in Google Scholar. Surname (i.e. "clan") exogamy is fairly well-known and still practiced. Here's a passage from Rubie S Watson's afterword to the 1991 book on Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society that she co-edited: >In China, most unions have involved the transfer of the bride to her husband's household, which, at least initially, has often been headed by her husband's father or a senior agnate. Although not all newly married couples have lived patrilocally, residence with the husband's family has remained both numerically and symbolically significant. This has been especially the case in rural areas where more than 80 percent of the population live and where village exogamy has remained the usual practice. If you're reacting to the statement that "[w]omen were forbidden to have contact with their biological family after marriage", this was not necessarily a strict prohibition. Because exogamy typically involves moving to a faraway village, it was usually a hassle for the bride to travel back to their biological family, and so if she actually did it, it could be interpreted as a breakdown in the marriage. Until recently, the practice of adopting a pre-adolescent girl to be the future bride of a pre-adolescent son (tongyangxi) was also a common form of arranged marriage in China.[1] The practice can also go in the other direction, and is known as zhaozhui, or "son-in-law adoption". [0] https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6p3007p1&chunk.id=d0e21944&toc.id=&brand=ucpress https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft6p30... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongyangxi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongyangxi