Page 33 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

20 DAVID S.G.GOODMAN
work, as well as cheaper, and less likely to make trouble in the workplace. Of course,
even successful negotiation of the opportunities that have emerged with reform may mean
simultaneously dealing with difficulties, as in this case where the circumstances and
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consequences of factory employment may be little more than wage slavery. While a few
commentators have continued to highlight only the disadvantages to women (Hooper
1998:167–93; Org 2001), it has become more usual to consider the double-sided impact
of reform on women in general, and even more, on women in specific situations and on
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specific groups of women, in particular. It is even clear that some women—such as the
cultural workers described by McLaren (1998) in the Lower Yangtze Delta—have been
able to negotiate their ways successfully through the dramatically changing social currents
to stake out territory for their own development.
All the same, at leadership levels the evidence would seem at first sight to be relatively
clear cut. Two decades of reform have considerably reduced the number and proportion
of women serving in senior positions of political leadership. There remain, as before, few
women who are senior leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), ministers of the
central government, or provincial leaders of the party-state. While women continue to
serve as deputy mayors in China’s cities, and hold a number of ministerial appointments,
and while every provincial leadership group has a required woman, their numbers remain
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low and the proportion of women on the CCP’s Central Committee has fallen. This lack
of leadership responsibilities also seems to have been mirrored in the ranks of the
emerging new entrepreneurs, exceptionally few of whom are women. Indeed, most of
the academic analysis of the developing private sector of the economy or of the new-style
capitalists readily acknowledges this gender imbalance (Gold 1989; Pearson 1997;
Guthrie 1999).
In contrast, the results of a survey of the local elite in Shanxi Province, North China,
during the late 1990s suggests that women’s lack of participation even in the leadership of
reform may have been more apparent than substantial. It was certainly the case that in
Shanxi women did not fill the positions regarded as those of economic or political
leadership in any significant numbers. At the same time the survey suggests that many
women played significant roles in the leadership of the new economy Most significantly,
the new enterprises of the reform era were often family affairs, at least to the extent that
they were based on the joint efforts of husbands and wives. Where the husband was
presented as the designated entrepreneur, the wife was frequently also active in the same
enterprise, in many cases acting as its bookkeeper and business manager. To some extent
the apparent lack of participation was a matter of definition, with women’s role in the
leadership of reform rarely if ever acknowledged within the PRC, and as a result less
likely to be reflected in any account of the process of change.
There was an inherent invisibility to this role of women in the leadership of reform that
is of course not confined by any means to the PRC. The invisibility of women in the work-
force, of specific kinds of ‘women’s work’, and of women whose domestic workload is
discounted (both those employed for wages outside the family home, and those who are
not) are all topics that have begun to be examined in the context of many societies around
the world, and not just by those who regard themselves as feminist economists (Waring
1988, 2nd ed. 1999; Ferber and Nelson 1993). At the same time the prevalence of the