Page 156 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

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Building for the future family*
Sally Sargeson

Oh for great mansions, with thousands of rooms,
Giving welcome shelter to the earth’s poor,
Unshaken like the mountains in the storm’s uproar…
(Du Fu, ‘Ode to my cottage,
unroofed by autumn gales’, 1985)
This chapter examines how young women’s aspirations for, and efforts to acquire new
housing are contributing to important changes in the economic and cultural conditions of
village life. Specifically, it argues that young women have given impetus to the following
interrelated trends. In the wealthier regions of China, including the Zhejiang villages that
are the focus of this study, young women often stipulate that they will only marry a man
who owns a new mansion. Most mansions are occupied by nuclear households. Their
construction has necessitated the rescheduling of intergenerational property transmission
and the migration of labour, and spurred the marketisation of China’s countryside. The
eclectic architectural designs of the new mansions intentionally signify the suburbanisation
of village communities, spatially reconfigure family relations and re-engender the
domestic sphere.
My representation of women as agents of these changes is a preliminary attempt to
respond to the recent challenge put forward by Arif Dirlik. Dirlik exhorted researchers to
attend to the ways that individuals—‘circumscribed by the very conditions they would
transform’—create distinctive cultures of consumption within and outside the realm of
global capitalism (2001:23). The proposition that people intent on their individual goals
collectively create the cultural practices that sustain capitalism is not novel (Creed 2000;
Douglas and Isherwood 1979). What makes Dirlik’s formulation particularly relevant to
scholars concerned with the lives of women in contemporary China is his argument that
while consumption might offer individuals a means of temporary liberation and self-
expression, it simultaneously enmeshes them in complex capital, labour and product

* Field research was funded by an Australian Research Council Small Grant, and Pacific Cultural
Foundation Grant SC8105. The research methodology, profile of survey respondents and research
sites are described in detail in Sargeson (2002). I am extremely grateful to Anne-Marie Medcalf,
whose insightful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter helped me to clarify my argument.