China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer and Chair: Nicole Constable, University of Pittsburgh
Meei-Hwa Chern, Temple University
By contextualizing the images of Buddhist nuns in the early postwar Taiwan setting, this paper will attempt to explore the power relations reflected in those images. How are women indoctrinated to aspire toward playing some certain social roles—i.e., daughter, wife, and mother—by the dominant male-centered Confucian tradition in Taiwan? I will first discuss the meanings of the Chinese term jia—the "family"—from its social and economic perspectives, in order to bring out the notion that Buddhist nuns are not perceived as fulfilling culturally and socially defined expectations. Secondly, by a discussion of two prevailing images in early postwar Taiwan, based upon Shiu-kuen Fan Tsung’s fieldwork—that nuns are women whom no one (no man) wanted, and those who are "failures" in love life and/or married life. I will draw out the similarities implied by these images, and link them with Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s self-critique of third world mid-class feminists envisioning their rural sisters as "victims."
And finally, I will bring the notion that, in Talal Asad’s terms, these images should be "the historical product of discursive processes." These historical products are the consequence of power relations operated by different social-cultural structures. In addition, I will conclude by discussing what marriage and discipline mean to a woman, in light of a piece of Michel Foucault’s theory—i.e., the notion of "the use of pleasure"—as well as his theory of "power of life and death."
Maria Rost Rublee, George Washington University
Given the sweeping changes in the wake of post-Mao reforms, how do women in China fare today? Much of the common wisdom suggests that women lost ground as the party shifted its emphasis from ideology and equality to economic reform. Few argue that increased economic freedoms have benefited Chinese women. Evidence for the debate, however, remains largely restricted to anecdotes and raw statistical data, making an assessment of claims quite difficult.
This paper seeks to shed light on these questions through a statistical examination of the 1988 Chinese Household Survey Project, conducted by principal investigators Keith Griffith and Zhao Renwel.1 The survey was nationwide and documents income, employment, educational, and personal characteristics for individuals in both rural and urban China. This paper examines data only for urban residents.
The paper focuses on changing patterns of inequality by measuring the male-female gap across different age cohorts in four different arenas: educational achievement, income, employment sector, and job type. Because the survey data is individual-level, the analysis is able to hold constant any possible confounding variables (including age and party membership), and thus pinpoint gender-specific inequalities.
This paper finds that as of 1988, capitalist reforms did not increase women’s oppression; on the contrary, women in the reform period consistently do better than their older counterparts and in some cases significantly close the male-female gap. While the results must be interpreted with caution—since they represent only one point in time—they do offer at least some hope for the future of urban women in China.
1. Griffin, Keith, and Zhao Renwei, Chinese Household Income Project, 1988. New York: Hunter College Academic Computing Services and Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, 1988.
Feng Xu, York University, Toronto
This proposed paper is part of my dissertation based on two and a half months of fieldwork in Sicheng,1 Jiangnan in 1996. Internal migration challenges the state’s desire to maintain "social order" and, at the same time, meets its need to tap the economic resources of migrant workers. Internal migration is also changing the family, and village and urban life. More specifically, gender relations in China are being transformed by the beginnings of large-scale women’s migration.
This paper sheds some light on the above-mentioned problem of internal migration in China. It looks at the social control of women migrant workers in Sicheng by state systems of regulation and control by social discourse. The additional social control of women migrant workers is seen as necessary by the state and society to replace absent parents or village elders. The state control and regulation is primarily achieved through the mandatory provision by the workplace of dormitories and recreation activities. This less repressive kind of social control, interacting with the more generalized control of women’s reproduction and shop floor management, is one of the main reasons why parents of unmarried migrant workers agree to send them to Sicheng. The social control is also achieved through social discourse. These discourses constitute both local residents’ and migrants’ experience of reality. Throughout the paper, I use personal stories of migrant workers to detail their social self-regulation, but also their resistance to social control and regulation.
1. Sicheng is a pseudonym.
Rebecca Matthews, Cornell University
Since the early 1980s Dengist labor reforms have aimed incrementally to build a market for urban labor in China, by allowing labor mobility; legalizing foreign investment, private-sector employment and entrepreneurship; revamping the social security system; and dismantling labor allocation programs. This paper tracks reform-era employment patterns in the cities of Shanghai and Guangzhou, asking whether and how labor markets have emerged there. The paper relies both on extensive ethnographic interviews with residents of these cities in 1995 and 1996, and on quantitative data collected in 1994. While labor markets had emerged in these cities by the mid-1990s, they did not follow directly from the implementation of labor reforms. New codes legalize some employment behaviors and forbid others, but still leave urban Chinese with a very large number of possible, legal employment choices they might make, and therefore a great deal of uncertainty in how to act upon these legal changes. To resolve these uncertainties urban Chinese also look to the ways that legal reforms mark distinctions among broad social groups, treating each differently under the law. By identifying as a member of one of these social groups and making predictions about how legal demarcations make their own labor costly, risky, or desirable to employers, urbanites are able to make choices about how best to respond to Dengist reforms. Through this process, broad pools of individuals who strategize employment paths in similar ways, and whose boundaries coincide with broad urban social groups, have also emerged in these cities. The paper discusses labor market pools based on age, residency status, and "talent" (rencai) distinctions.
Sharon R. Wesoky, Cornell University
Despite the recent trend celebrating the emergence of a "global civil society," there are particular cultural, historical, political, and normative reasons why "civil society" is not truly present at a "global" level. For instance, one question that arises is the applicability of a concept like "global civil society" to a non-democratic system. Drawing on Beijing-based research, this paper will examine the linkages between Chinese women’s and transnational organizations, in an effort to examine the ways in which Chinese women’s organizing strategies have been influenced by global ties, and, alternatively, the ways in which they are rooted in local cultural, social, and political circumstances. In particular, I will focus on the ways in which China’s economic reforms have created structural preconditions for the emergence of more independent social forms as well as the need for a more activist women’s movement, but also on the ways in which transnational factors, such as the role of the Ford Foundation and the Fourth World Conference on Women, have influenced the organizational forms of the Beijing women’s movement. In this way, a better understanding can be gained of the role played by transnational ties in the formation of social movements in non-democratic contexts. Thus, this paper will assert that consideration of "global civil society" needs to better account for local political and cultural conditions.