Organizer: Stephen B. Herschler, University of Chicago
Chair and Discussant: Timothy Cheek, Colorado College
The three papers in this panel discuss the transformative influence of the economic reforms in China on worker identity. They take as their starting point changes in discursive practices about the nature of the economy. The planned economy's vision of the economy as locally non-competitive communal struggle has yielded to a discourse of competition and self-interest. How do people in reform era China enact the discourse of competition and self-interest? How does it change their view of their past?
In her paper, Fennell studies how the perception that the market-oriented reforms have limited Chinese women's employment opportunities has forced many of them to 'xia hai,' jump into the sea of market competition. How has this arena of competition altered their assessments of women's skills and capacities to labor? Herschler's paper focuses on county administrators. The new discourse of economic competition coupled with devolution of power leads counties to appropriate the national agenda of building wealth and power and thereby subvert national aims. Using the institution of model workers, Junghans views the tensions and paradoxes economic reforms have produced in the lives of women whose iron ricebowls are provided by the state. How are the identities of exemplary labor heroines reconstructed to advance the values of market socialism?
Each paper is based on extensive field work and interviews in Nanjing and Beijing during 1993-1995.
What Can a Woman Do? Expert Knowledges About Women and Female Labor in Reform-era
Beijing
Vera Leigh Fennell, University of Chicago
In 1950, the Chinese Communist Party, the principal fact-maker on Chinese women, has already answered the title question in women's federation magazine Xin Zhongguo Funu: "whatever a man can do, a woman can do!" This view, that women's nature was malleable and could be overcome by doing what men do, formed the epistemological core of the CCP's policies on women's liberation.
This paper analyzes how Chinese women of various ages doing various jobs evaluate their own capacity to labor in the era of reform and opening. The era of reform and opening is important because changes in the Maoist state system of labor allocation have permitted both male and female workers to engage in economic competition finding their own jobs and, by taking a chance and working outside the state system, testing themselves. Presently, the Chinese working class is willing to articulate subjective assessments of skill and value.
Based on interviews conducted as part of dissertation fieldwork in Beijing during 1991, 1994-95, gendered notions of appropriate employment and subjective evaluations of skill among female and male workers in apparel production, food preparation, and transportation fields will be analyzed, along with additional evaluations and assessments from workers in other kinds of jobs. These evaluations and assessments about women's capacity to labor will be contrasted with expert knowledges produced at various sites-at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; at the national, municipal, and district branches of the women's federation; in the academy through the medical establishment and women's studies centers; and, lastly, through the newly-emerging media of commercial advertising.
Local Administrative Identities in the Transition from Plan to Market
Stephen B. Herschler, University of Chicago
The move from a command to a market economy necessitated ideological as well as institutional restructuring. This paper focuses on the impact such changes have had on county-level administrators' identity and practices in contemporary Jiangsu Province.
The move to a market economy has subverted previous hierarchical relations. First, by eliminating the political component of the Party's mission and replacing it with economic concerns, then the center's privileged vanguard status is implicitly challenged both by other countries as well as by economically-developed regions within China. Second, the market as conceptualized in contemporary China introduces notions of autonomous units with their own self-interests involved in a Darwinian struggle to achieve modernity, wealth and power.
Careful comparison of the discursive formulations of central and local officials shows that while they work from the same doxic model, county administrators have supplanted the country with the county as the key historical protagonist. These ideological reforms dovetail with institutional reforms granting local administrators greater autonomy. The result is administrators increasingly envision counties as independently engaged in a domestic as well as international competition to improve economic standing.
I differ from those arguing that increased domestic contention arises from a retreat or weakening of the state. Rather, I show that formulations coined by the central government to further its project of strengthening China in the international arena have been transposed and now are used by local administrators to characterize the domestic environment. That is, the state has played an active role in creating contemporary tensions.
Remodeling Model Railroad Workers
Lida Junghans, Harvard University
Since the first years of its rule, the Chinese Communist Party has broadcast the stories of exemplary individuals who were said to embody the progressive thought and action that, multiplied across the population, would enable the Chinese People's Republic itself to make rapid progress along the "road" to Communism. As models of and models for an anticipated socialist modernity, these celebrated individuals show how, from the state's perspective, "progress" in an individual life is linked to the "progress" of the nation. A dialectical relationship exists between the lifetimes of individual models and the world historical time of the nation: each is imagined to create the conditions of the other.
This paper examines the cases of two nationally-renowned women railway workers: Tian Guiying, who became a national heroine in 1950 as China's first female locomotive driver, and Hong Jie, a station attendant who was rewarded in 1989 for, among other virtues, her efforts in dissuading Beijing-bound students from joining the demonstrations in the capital. By considering the paradoxical experiences of women once celebrated as labor heroines, now living through radical transformations, this paper attempts to understand what China's embrace of market reforms means to women whose identities were forged when communal, collective ideals were most highly valued. I argue that the institution of model workers is more than an anachronistic survival from the planning era. Models who once served the people now serve as provocative "mnemonic sites" in an increasingly inegalitarian landscape.