The Chinese Womens Movement Between State And Market

This is the story of how the women's movement in China took advantage of the government's official efforts to position women in the rural economic reforms of the 1980s to achieve a significant and ever-increasing role in China's developing turn toward a market economy, which was not the state's intent.

How are the public and political lives of Chinese women constrained by states and economies? And how have pockets of women's consciousness come to be produced in and disseminated from this traditionally masculine milieu? The essays in this volume examine the possibilities for a public sphere for Chinese women, one that would both emerge from concrete historical situations and local contexts and cut across the political boundaries separating the Mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the West. The challenges of this project are taken up in essays on the legacy of state feminism on the Mainland as contrasted with a grassroots women's movement challenging the state in Taiwan; on the role of the capitalist consumer economy in the emerging lesbian movement in Taiwan; and on the increased trafficking of women as brides, prostitutes, and mistresses between the Mainland and wealthy male patrons in Taiwan and Hong Kong. The writers' examples of masculine domination in the media include the reformulation of Chinese women in Fifth Generation films for a transnational Western male film audience and the portrayal of Mainland women in Taiwanese and Hong Kong media. The contributors also consider male nationalism as it is revealed through both international sports coverage on television and in a Chinese television drama. Other works examine a women's museum, a telephone hotline in Beijing, the films of Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui, the transnational contacts of a Taiwanese feminist organization, the diaspora of Mainland women writers, and the differences between Chinese and Western feminist themes.

This volume will look into some macro factors that have an impact on gender conceptualizations in China. First, China is a highly-centralized state with a one-party political system that is also an authoritarian strongman regime. Thus, policies (including those related to gender) from the center are promulgated centripetally to provinces, cities, towns, villages, and local areas effectively.In terms of policy-making, the Chinese government noted that they have strengthened the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) guide for women's work, enacted/upgraded rights protection law in the National People's Congress (NPC), actualized mechanisms for women's cause in the Chinese People's Political Conservative Conference (CPPCC), streamlined work systems for effective implementation of national gender equality policies, and augmented the Women's Federation as an intermediary between the Communist Party of China (CPC), the state, and all Chinese women.As productive forces, Chinese women in the socialist era were exemplary models of mothers and career women who treated family life and work as equally important priorities. They were upper middle class to high net worth individuals who showed their successes in juggling both as objects of moral suasion for other Chinese women in state-led publicity. Some of them were touted by the state as ideal modern Chinese women in state media, moral suasion campaigns, and/or propaganda.

A rare window for the English speaking world to learn how scholars in China understand and interpret central issues pertaining to women and family from the founding of the People’s Republic to the reform era.

First published in 1978, Feminism and Socialism in Chinaexplores the inter-relationship of feminism and socialism and the contribution of each towards the redefinition of the role and status of women in China. In her history of the women’s movement in China from the late nineteenth century onwards, Professor Croll provides an opportunity to study its construction, its ideological and structural development over a number of decades, and its often ambiguous relationship with a parallel movement to establish socialism. Based on a variety of material including eye witness accounts, the author examines a wide range of fundamental issues, including women’s class and oppression, the relation of women’s solidarity groups to class organisations, reproduction and the accommodation of domestic labour, women in the labour process, and the relationship between women’s participation in social production and their access to and control of political and economic resources. The book includes excerpts from studies of village and communal life, documents of the women’s movement and interviews with members of the movement.

What have given rise to the emergence of a large number of self-initiated women's organizations in China since the 1990s? How did these organizations interact with the Chinese state in a non-democratic political system? My case study of the contemporary Chinese women's movement tests the utility of the political process theories originally developed in the context of advanced industrial democracies. I found the three factors identified by the political process model--openings in the political opportunity structure, mobilization structures and framing processes can explain the emergence and development of the Chinese women's movement to a large degree. Yet the fact that this movement has existed in a context that is characterized by the continuing dominance of the party-state in society also calls for our attention to many dynamics that are not common in most Western social movements. Generally speaking, as a response to the structural biases in the classic political process model, my research has suggested that all these three factors are neither static nor invariant, and they are shaped by the strategic considerations and choices of movement activists who are constantly in interactions with other players, especially the state. My dissertation on the Chinese women's movement also contributes to a greater understanding of state-society relations in contemporary China. I contend that we should not view the interactions between these women's organizations and the state in the light of conceptualizations such as civil society and corporatism, which provide only a broad overarching picture of contemporary state-society relationships in China, but fail to capture the underlying nuanced dynamics in a highly contingent and complex transforming process which China is now undergoing. Alternatively, I argue that the degree of autonomy from the state differs considerably from one organization to another. More importantly, these organizations and the activists within them have made strategic choices to create the best linkage, whether it be more autonomous or more dependent, between each individual organization and the state.

This introduction to Chinese society uses the themes of resistance & protest to explore the complexity of life in contemporary China. It draws on perspectives from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history & political science, & covers issues including women, labour, ethnic conflict & suicide.