Chinese Women Living And Working

Experts in gender, politics, media studies, and anthropology discuss the impact of economic reform and globalization on Chinese women in family businesses, management, the professions, the prostitution industry and domestic service.

Drawing upon extensive life history interviews, this book makes the voices of ordinary women workers heard and applies feminist perspectives on women and work to the Chinese situation.

This book presents significant new findings on new domains of employment for women in China's burgeoning market economy of the 1990s and the twenty-first century. Experts in gender, politics, media studies, and anthropology discuss the impact of economic reform and globalization on Chinese women in family businesses, management, the professions, the prostitution industry and domestic service. Significant themes include changing marriage and consumer aspirations and the reinvention of domestic space. The volume offers fresh insights into changing definitions of 'women's work' in contemporary China and questions women's perceived 'disadvantage' in the market economy.

Insulated from the dust, noise, and crowds churning outside, China's luxury hotels are staging areas for the new economic and political landscape of the country. These hotels, along with other emerging service businesses, offer an important, new source of employment for millions of workers, but also bring to light levels of inequality that surpass most developed nations. Examining how gender enables the globalization of markets and how emerging forms of service labor are changing women's social status in China, Markets and Bodies reveals the forms of social inequality produced by shifts in the economy. No longer working for the common good as defined by the socialist state, service workers are catering to the individual desires of consumers. This economic transition ultimately affords a unique opportunity to investigate the possibilities and current limits for better working conditions for the young women who are enabling the development of capitalism in China.

“Propulsive. . . . Highly enjoyable. . . . It sets up a sequel, one that I very much look forward to reading.” —The New York Times Book Review A fresh, smart, and fast-paced revenge thriller about a college basketball player who discovers shocking truths about his family in the wake of his father’s murder Victor Li is devastated by his father’s murder, and shocked by a confessional letter he finds among his father’s things. In it, his father admits that he was never just a restaurateur—in fact he was part of a vast international crime syndicate that formed during China’s leanest communist years. Victor travels to Beijing, where he navigates his father’s secret criminal life, confronting decades-old grudges, violent spats, and a shocking new enterprise that the organization wants to undertake. Standing up against it is likely what got his father killed, but Victor remains undeterred. He enlists his growing network of allies and friends to finish what his father started, no matter the costs.

The special focus of this book is the lives and experiences of women in China in the first half of the 20th century. Part One - Historical Interpretations - presents essays by Western-educated Chinese women and men, on the historical role of women in a time of great social and economic upheaval. Part Two - Self-Portraits of Women in Modern China - presents the views of women who experienced life in this period through essays and autobiographies that range from women as concubines to women as factory workers, from women suffering footbinding to women serving as nurses, from women in traditional role in a traditional family to women as scientists and teachers.

The 'State of the World's Girls' report has tackled many topics: girls in the global economy; education; girls affected by conflict and by disaster; the new digital world and its implications, both negative and positive, for girls' lives; the challenges and risks of increasing urbanisation; working with men and boys; and looked at attitudinal, structural and institutional barriers to gender equality.

Examining the employment lives of Chinese women living under different government systems at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the contributors to this volume present an overview of factors affecting the employment status of women. The volume includes chapters on the People's Republic of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore - nations that have common Chinese cultural experiences but very different economic systems and government structures. Policies and laws vary widely in Chinese societies from the egalitarian, socialist provisions of The People's Republic of China to the laissez-faire, capitalist policy the British advocated for the Hong Kong government before 1997. Employment of Women in Chinese Cultures provides a theoretical introduction from both Chinese and Western perspectives, as well as summaries of the effect on women's employment of government policies on taxation, health and safety, reproduction, childcare, and education in each nation-state. By juxtaposing the work of women of a similar cultural heritage living under different government systems, new insights are gained that can benefit Chinese working women wherever they live. Scholars and students of management, labor, gender, and China will find this volume of great interest. Government leaders will also find the research on women's employment lives a useful tool in future decision-making.

An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China. China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta. As she tracks their lives, Chang paints a never-before-seen picture of migrant life—a world where nearly everyone is under thirty; where you can lose your boyfriend and your friends with the loss of a mobile phone; where a few computer or English lessons can catapult you into a completely different social class. Chang takes us inside a sneaker factory so large that it has its own hospital, movie theater, and fire department; to posh karaoke bars that are fronts for prostitution; to makeshift English classes where students shave their heads in monklike devotion and sit day after day in front of machines watching English words flash by; and back to a farming village for the Chinese New Year, revealing the poverty and idleness of rural life that drive young girls to leave home in the first place. Throughout this riveting portrait, Chang also interweaves the story of her own family’s migrations, within China and to the West, providing historical and personal frames of reference for her investigation. A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.

Dramatic and far-reaching changes have occurred in the lives of Chinese women in the years since the death of Mao and the fall of the Gang of Four During the decade of the Cultural Revolution, attention to personal life was regarded as 'bourgeois'; in the post-Mao decade, abrupt turns in public policy made discussion of personal life imperative, and nowhere has this been more evident than in the debate about the role of women in Chinese society. This book is based on extensive personal viewing of urban women and study of contemporary literature and articles in the periodical press that touched on the problems of rural women. It is not only about the changes in women's lives but also about the excitement, confusion, and anxieties that Chinese women express as they contemplate the future of their society and their own place in it. Each chapter is devoted to one aspect of women's Lives: girlhood, adornment and sexuality, courtship, marriage, family relations, divorce, work, violence against women, and gender inequality. Giving a personal dimension to the issues discussed, the chapters close with a rich sampling of excerpts from the newly thriving women's press and other contemporary publications. Although many women in China still suffer discrimination in working life and mistreatment in the family, they can now raise questions that would have been unthinkable even ten years ago. Most notably, they can and do use the press to voice complaints, expose injustices, seek advice, and support or deplore the social changes of the 1980's.