Page 41 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

28 DAVID S.G.GOODMAN
differences in the proportion of wives of the new rich with the same birthplace as their
husbands were presumably a function of social mobility. Managers of state sector
enterprises usually have a career pattern that sees them move away from home at an early
age, with the opportunities often denied others to meet spouses from another location. 18
As Table 1.3 indicates, while the wives of the new rich were generally less educated
than their husbands, from the perspective of the distribution of the highest level of
education achieved, the difference was certainly not great. Fewer wives had graduated
from university, but the numbers of husbands and wives who had participated in higher
education of all kinds was roughly equal. In the case of private-sector entrepreneurs, the
proportion of wives who were graduates from higher education (university and college
combined) was actually higher than that of their husbands.
The educational link, and particularly at an early age, is clearly important for
understanding some of the dynamics of husband and wife interaction in the new economy.
Table 1.5 lists husbands and wives who first met through being in class together in the
formal system of education. Almost half of the new rich couples had first met this way.
Remarkably, almost four in every ten couples had first met in kindergarten. Given the
high proportion of couples who, as already noted, had married within their county, this
might have been an expected consequence of the emergence of enterprises in the rural
collective and private sectors of the economy, where development was fuelled by a rhetoric
of local identification and motivation (Goodman 2003). However, the proportion of
couples who met in kindergarten was not low in any category of the new rich.
Table 1.6 provides information on the workplace of the wives of the new rich, and
Table 1.7 on the occupation of the wives of the new rich and cadres, as revealed through
the interviews with their husbands. As Table 1.6 indicates, almost half of all wives and
husbands worked together in the same enterprise. Necessarily, there were different
proportions of husbands and wives in the same workplace across the different categories
of the new rich. In the private sector, owner-operators and their wives almost always
worked together; elsewhere the proportion was more usually four in every ten. The
exception was the urban collective sector where only one in five couples worked in the
same enterprise.
As the information presented in Table 1.7 suggests, wives were often employed as
accountants and bookkeepers, not only, as already noted, in the running of family
concerns in the private sector but also in other types of enterprise. Because of their
interchangeable usage in contemporary Shanxi, and mostly elsewhere in China (though it
would seem that this started to change somewhat during the late 1990s), no distinction
has been made between ‘bookkeeper’ and ‘accountant’.
The notion that the wives of the new rich were ‘non-working’ is flatly contradicted by
Table 1.7. Not only were a quarter of the wives of the new rich employed as bookkeepers
and accountants, but goodly proportions were also employed as teachers and cadres.
Altogether, professional or white-collar work accounted for 67 per cent of the occupations
of the wives of the new rich. The number of wives who were teachers are distributed
across all categories of the new rich, but those who were cadres were largely wives of
managers of state sector enterprises, reinforcing the role of that kind of enterprise as socially
a part of the party-state, even when reformed (Steinfeld 1998). Indeed, regardless of their