Page 32 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

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Why women count
Chinese women and the leadership of reform

David S.G.Goodman

Since the end of the 1970s, and the introduction of an incremental series of measures that
have sought to reform the previously existing system of state socialism, the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) has experienced a sustained period of rapid economic growth,
and dramatic social change. The clear winners in this process have been those in the new
rich socio-economic categories, who have emerged with and driven much of the change.
They include those who have established new kinds of enterprise that reach beyond the
previous economic structures, as well as those who have provided new services to meet
the demands of both the state and society in a period of rapid economic restructuring and
subsequent social change (Goodman 1996). The clear losers have been the peasantry in
the poorer rural areas, especially those located in the interior provinces of China’s West. 1
Although during the 1980s and early 1990s some external academic observers raised
concerns that the processes of change might leave women amongst the most
disadvantaged, the impact of reform has clearly been more mixed, and not susceptible to
such ready analysis. Certainly the absence of state protection for women economically and
the withdrawal of affirmative action supporting their participation in politics have resulted
in lower income, the loss of any substantive share of positions of formal political power,
and even weaker conditions of employment (Honig and Hershatter 1988; Hooper 1984:
317; Maurer-Fazio et al. 1999:55–8; Rosen 1994). However, more recent research since
the mid-1990s has highlighted the more complex picture that emerges with the
disaggregation of women by various social, political, economic and cultural criteria,
including socio-economic category, region, generation, and interaction with the networks
of relationships that bind family and locality with national and international processes of
production.
Some women have clearly been disadvantaged by reform, and often quite explicitly
because they were women. For example, those women workers in former state-owned
and -operated enterprises have found themselves the first put out of work as a result of
economic restructuring and down-sizing, on the grounds that women should not be
regarded as the principal income-earner in each family. At the same time, it is also clear
that the development of production lines in new light industrial enterprises in South and
East China has provided other women with new employment opportunities, and again
often explicitly because they were women. In this case the argument of their employers
has been some variation on a theme that women are more likely to be suited to this kind of