Page 27 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

14 ANNE E.MCLAREN
consumption patterns and are designed with the decor and spatial configuration
appropriate for the ‘modern’ nuclear family. The age of information technology has
brought new opportunities for the managerial woman to network with transnational
Internet communities of women across the Chinese-speaking realms of Asia. Women
educators too adopt professional models based on competence in new media
technologies.
New ideas, together with new patterns of labour, now shape the consciousness of these
women. Village women, now serving as domestic workers in urban centres learn to value
independence from their natal family and the relative privacy of their new occupations.
Domestic critics of the Chinese government’s ambivalent policy towards prostitutes are
influenced by Western arguments about human rights, private sexual acts and individual
choice. Women managers in the private sector relish the challenge of greater occupational
choice and income than before, while seeking to adapt to a workplace defined as
inherently ‘masculine’. Women educators, when working with multi-media, base their
teaching on Western pedagogic models and Western content. ‘Spoilt’ products of the
One Child Policy are taught to survive like Robinson Crusoe in the countryside.
As for the role of the state, in many cases examined here it has intervened in a
developing market after the event rather than seeking to regulate it from inception. For
example, the trade in maids went from being a casual street encounter to one where the
state set up regulation and training agencies. In the case of prostitution, the role of the
state is more complex. It cannot regulate what must remain illegal but periodically seeks
to shut down enterprises that engage in activities deemed to be ‘non-regulated’. Issues of
public security and government corruption have spurred the state to take action. Women
play a minimal role in China’s Communist Party and political system but the state has
ambitious goals to increase their numbers. As in the past, the rhetoric of women’s
emancipation is of signal importance to the state, which relies for its legitimacy on
perceptions that under ‘socialism’, especially ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, the
equality of men and women is better protected than in the rampant capitalism of
the West.

References

Croll, E.J. (1994) From Heaven to Earth: Images and Experiences of Development in China, London:
Routledge.
——(1995) Changing Identities of Chinese Women: Rhetoric, Experience, and Self perception in Twentieth-
century China, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books.
Davis, D. and Harrell, S. (1993) Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era, Berkeley: University of California
Press.
Entwisle, B. and Henderson, G.E. (2000) Re-drawing Boundaries: Work, Households, and Gender in
China, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Gates, Hill (1996) China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press.
Jacka, T. (1997) Women’s Work in Rural China: Change and Continuity in an Era of Reform, Cambridge,
New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.