Page 38 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

CHINESE WOMEN AND REFORM LEADERSHIP 25
Wives of the new rich
Contemporary magazines and television programmes in the PRC are prone to portray the
life-styles of the new rich and occasionally famous in terms of their houses, expenditure
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patterns and leisure activities. The wives play such a central role in this process that the
reader or viewer could be forgiven for thinking that most if not all of the wives of the new
rich were ‘non-working wives,’ a description preferred by the new rich themselves to
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that of ‘housewife’. This is not an unimportant distinction. ‘Work’ in this context is
very much conceptualised as paid employment outside the home. A non-working wife
(meigongzuo de furen or more colloquially meigongzuo de laopo) is seen as someone who has
the ability to obtain work, and may at some time have been in the workforce, but now
because of the family’s wealth (it is implied) chooses not to work. A housewife (jiating
zhufu or more locally in Shanxi, jiating funü) is regarded as someone of considerably lower
status, who has no experience of or ability to obtain work outside the home. On those few
occasions when interviewees indicated that their wife was ‘just a housewife’, the voice
dropped, and there was a hint of shame.
There certainly were wives of the new rich who were non-working and others who
were housewives. However, this is by no means the dominant characterisation of the
wives of the new rich in the Shanxi local elite that emerges from the survey of 1996–98.
On the contrary, the non-working wife appears as a minority in every one of the various
different categories of the new rich. The wives of the new rich were more usually
professionally active, often alongside their husbands.
Two important, and related, keys to understanding the involvement of the wives of the
new rich in reform are the extreme parochialism and the family basis of much of social and
economic development. The wives of the new rich not only came from similar
backgrounds to that of their husbands, but they often also came from the same location,
grew up together, and at least partly in consequence ended up working together.
Particularly as far as rural society is concerned this finding indicates considerable change
from earlier insistences on exogamous marriage (Stacey 1983:218). At times that
emphasis had even extended to a ban on marriages between people with the same
surname regardless of lineage relationships, despite the consequences given the limited
number of Chinese family names (Croll 1981:80ff.). Although such restrictions on
the definition of exogamy and its operationalisation were modified by the Marriage Law
of 1950, and although practices have clearly varied across China and with changes in the
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wider political and socio-economic environments, it remained the norm for women to
move away from their native place to get married. Collectivisation was built around and
reinforced patrilocal lineages, and at least in part native village exogamy was identified as
a major check on women’s ability to attain local positions of economic and political
leadership since they would subsequently lack the necessary local knowledge and access to
networks of influence (Diamond 1975:25; Johnson 1983:220ff). All the same, the social
emphasis on exogamy had clearly begun to change somewhat by the 1970s and 1980s,
when studies of rural areas in both South and North China indicated that in contrast to
previous practices it was not unusual for about a third of all peasants to be married within
the village. 16