Page 21 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

8 ANNE E.MCLAREN
and on officials who have misappropriated public funds. Jeffreys concludes that, contrary
to the views of ‘pro-sex work’ advocates, and notwithstanding the anomalies and
imperfections in the current system, the Chinese state has come up with a particularly
Chinese solution to this egregious problem. Instead of relying on Western notions of the
rights of the individual and civil liberties, the Chinese state has chosen instead to exploit
the ambiguities of a situation where the sale of sex in China is considered as neither a
‘crime’ nor ‘an accepted social practice’.
With the study of ‘Women in the Professions’, we turn from China’s new private
sector and market competition to the public sector, the realm of the Communist Party
and the Chinese state. In her chapter, Louise Edwards deals with women’s agency in a
very public domain—that of politics. In imperial China politics was almost entirely the
domain of men, the rare Empress, Empress-Dowager or favoured consort of the Emperor
excepted. The late nineteenth century marks the emergence of women into the political
arena of a modernising state. As Louise Edwards argues here, the relative visibility of
women as politicians has become one of the most important signifiers of ‘the relative status
of women internationally’.
After 1949 women’s political work, like that of men, was inevitably party political
work, the party in question being the Chinese Communist Party. Edwards describes in
detail what this ‘subordination’ of feminist activists to Party discipline meant in terms of
women’s political interests and influence. In a country where traditions of male work (in
public space) and women’s work (in domestic space) were deeply ingrained, it is perhaps
not surprising that women’s work in the political arena was delimited by the term
‘women’s work’ (funü gongzuo). The effect of the notion of ‘women’s work’ was to limit
women’s political influence to the mobilisation of women to work for the good of the
Party Care was taken by the Party leadership not to alienate men with the threat of
women’s emancipation. For this reason women activists worked within separate women’s
departments within the Party This suggested that the agenda for women ‘would remain
contained as women’s business and not spill over into the broader social and politi-
cal scene’.
For much of the socialist period, Edwards argues, women followed the shifting
campaigns of the Party leadership without demur, serving as no more than ‘political wives
to the male Party machine’. She discerns a shift, however, by the late twentieth century.
‘Women’s work’ within the Party retains its importance not so much to mobilise the
masses for the latest campaign but to demonstrate the ‘superiority’ of socialism and to
give the appearance that the Party leadership still maintains ‘close relations’ with the people
it governs. China’s international reputation, as with the case of debates about
prostitution, is also of concern to the central government. In 1995 the State Council
brought out its Program for the Development of Chinese Women (1995–2000), which
called for an expansion in the numbers of women in leadership positions in state posts. In
2001 a further ten-year plan was released with a similar set of ambitious goals for
women’s political participation. By the turn of the century the rhetoric of women’s
emancipation had changed significantly from the pre-reform period stress on
subordination to Party goals to one of self-expression and self-actualisation. Participation