Page 36 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

CHINESE WOMEN AND REFORM LEADERSHIP 23
Table 1.1 Women in leadership positions: cadres and the new rich (number and percentage of
interviewees in Shanxi, 1996–98, by category)

its leadership only one woman, who is usually a Vice Governor of the Provincial
Government, and who equally usually has responsibilities for education, health care and
social services. Of the 225 entrepreneurs who were identified and interviewed as
examples of the province’s new rich, only 12 were women. By far the largest
concentration of these was the 9 interviewees who were owner-operators of private
sector enterprises.
While the 12 women entrepreneurs and 2 women cadres who were interviewed may
provide some information about the role of women in contemporary China, the interviews
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with the 201 married male entrepreneurs and the 52 married leading cadres also reveal
information about their wives that can additionally and possibly more usefully (because of
the larger number involved) be interrogated. This information is clearly not
comprehensive—there is, for example, almost no detail available about the social or
political background of the parents of the interviewee’s wives, unlike that for their
husbands, and details of the CCP membership of interviewees’ wives are patchy at best.
Moreover, there are clear methodological difficulties in asking husbands about their
wives and their activities. Only occasionally in the course of the interviews were wives in
attendance and even more rarely was it possible to interview or talk to them as well.
Nonetheless, in the absence of alternative sources of information, these interviews do
provide an indication of the background and roles of those women, and particularly their
involvement in the development of both reform in general, and more specifically the new
enterprises that have been at the heart of the process of change. While the survey was not
specifically designed to extract information about women’s role in reform, its findings on
this topic are so interesting that it seemed worthwhile articulating these results, albeit as
preliminary results and suggesting further research agendas.