Women Hold Up Half The Sky The Political Economic And Socioeconomic Narratives Of Women In China

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.

In the early years of the People's Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations. Yet those gains have been steadily eroded in China's post-socialist era. Contrary to the image presented by China's media, women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of rights and gains relative to men. In Leftover Women, Leta Hong Fincher exposes shocking levels of structural discrimination against women, and the broader damage this has caused to China's economy, politics, and development.

These 21 dynamic articles by Chinese women scholars explore the limitations on women's lives in premodern China, detail their involvement in the great political movements of the 20th century and examine how new laws have improved women's status, yet have left them open to exploitation as China enters the global economy. With statistics and reports otherwise unavailable, they give a refreshing outlook on China's women that is breathtaking both for the problems it confronts and for the spirit of struggle it embodies.

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A passionate call to arms against our era’s most pervasive human rights violation—the oppression of women and girls in the developing world. From the bestselling authors of Tightrope, two of our most fiercely moral voices With Pulitzer Prize winners Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn as our guides, we undertake an odyssey through Africa and Asia to meet the extraordinary women struggling there, among them a Cambodian teenager sold into sex slavery and an Ethiopian woman who suffered devastating injuries in childbirth. Drawing on the breadth of their combined reporting experience, Kristof and WuDunn depict our world with anger, sadness, clarity, and, ultimately, hope. They show how a little help can transform the lives of women and girls abroad. That Cambodian girl eventually escaped from her brothel and, with assistance from an aid group, built a thriving retail business that supports her family. The Ethiopian woman had her injuries repaired and in time became a surgeon. A Zimbabwean mother of five, counseled to return to school, earned her doctorate and became an expert on AIDS. Through these stories, Kristof and WuDunn help us see that the key to economic progress lies in unleashing women’s potential. They make clear how so many people have helped to do just that, and how we can each do our part. Throughout much of the world, the greatest unexploited economic resource is the female half of the population. Countries such as China have prospered precisely because they emancipated women and brought them into the formal economy. Unleashing that process globally is not only the right thing to do; it’s also the best strategy for fighting poverty. Deeply felt, pragmatic, and inspirational, Half the Sky is essential reading for every global citizen.

The Communist revolution promised Chinese women an end to thousands of years of subjugation, an equality with men in all matters legal, political, social, and economic. This book examines the extent to which this promise has been kept. Based on nearly a year of field research and interviews with over 300 women in six widely separated rural and urban areas, it gives us a vivid picture of Chinese women today - their day-to-day lives, their views of the present, and their hopes for the future. To date nothing approximating equality has been achieved: in working conditions, in pay, in educational opportunity. In the cities, and to a lesser extent in the countryside, women are better off than in pre-revolutionary China. But nowhere except in the rhetoric of the regime are they equal to men. Nor does the immediate future look much brighter, given the continuing social constraints, the government's controversial family limitation program, and the nature of the new economic policies introduced in 1980. So far as possible, the women interviewed are allowed to speak for themselves. Some take refuge behind government slogans, some are shy or wary, but a surprising number are quick to give their own opinions despite an ever-present government cadre. These opinions, combined with the author's astute observations on their local and national context, add up to a wholly new perspective on an all too familiar problem.

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.

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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.