Page 34 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

CHINESE WOMEN AND REFORM LEADERSHIP 21
family in enterprise development, and the related invisibility of women’s work within family
enterprises are also not new themes in the history of Chinese culture.
There is much in common with many, though not all, of the enterprises that were
described by interviewees in Shanxi during the late 1990s and those identified by Hill
Gates as examples of ‘petty capitalism’ both in China’s pre-1949 past and more recently
on Taiwan: essentially family-based and male-dominated enterprises, whose transactional
activities were characterised by personalism even when operating in an open market
(Gates 1996). Necessarily, in those enterprises, amongst other related qualities, women
were for the most part also economically invisible, even when, as in Taiwan after 1950,
they came to play a major role in the development of such enterprises alongside their
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husbands, often too as business managers and book-keepers. Moreover, commentators
on the development of the Taiwan economy have highlighted the extent to which working
women, even when not invisible, had their work, regardless of whether it was inside or
outside the household, defined as an extension of family duties.

Social change in Shanxi
The information on Chinese women presented here is drawn from a survey of social
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change in Shanxi Province undertaken during the period 1996–98. Shanxi is a North
China province that in 1998 had 31.7 million people, a GDP of 160 million yuan RMB,
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and a GDP per capita of 5,072 yuan RMB. Although it is, and has been for the previous
seventy years, one of the country’s major heavy industrial bases, with exceptionally large
and high-quality resources of coal, its reputation within China is one of peasant
radicalism. It was the site of the major front-line base areas against Japanese invasion
during the War of Resistance of 1937–45; and the later Mao-era model production brigade
of Dazhai is located in its east. Since the 1920s Shanxi has been an established major centre
for heavy industry, and it currently produces large proportions of China’s coal, coke,
aluminum, electricity and specialist steels. The lack of understanding of Shanxi’s local
conditions more generally is not too surprising given its mountainous topography and lack
of transport links with the rest of China. Other Chinese were effectively hindered from
visiting Shanxi, let alone doing business there, until a massive road-building programme
made the province more accessible during the mid-1990s. 8
Until the 1990s, provincial economic development had depended heavily on central
government investment, growing fastest during the mid-1950s and mid-1980s: it was only
during the mid-1990s that sustained, though still only moderate, above-national-average
rates of growth were achieved without that support. This less spectacular economic
profile, and other aspects of its economy, means that Shanxi has more in common with
many of China’s provinces—particularly those inland—than the more economically
advanced coastal provinces of Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu; as well as the large
municipalities of Beijing and Shanghai.
In the 1990s Shanxi’s economic structure ceased to revolve solely around the central
state sector, though it still played a sizeable role in provincial development. There was
relatively little foreign interaction with the province though there was considerable
domestic investment from and trade with other parts of China, particularly in the