Page 46 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

CHINESE WOMEN AND REFORM LEADERSHIP 33
after the establishment of the PRC. A graduate of the Central Party School, his daughter had
become a leading cadre after working in the hierarchy of the Youth League. Her husband
was also a CCP member and a technical worker, and the family were able to live
together. The other female leading cadre had been recruited to the CCP when a university
student in Shanxi, and had worked as a researcher in a technological area before moving
on to become a leading cadre at district level. Her husband was also a leading cadre,
though at provincial level, thus requiring them to live apart.
The twelve women entrepreneurs interviewed were active in a wide variety of economic
activity The companies they ran were involved in transportation; automotive engineering;
retail (a beauty shop, a clothes shop); a hotel; the manufacture of furniture, clothes, office
fittings and leather products; and seed production. Only one of the women entrepreneurs
was not married, and ten were long-term members of the CCP. Only one of the women
entrepreneurs was a university graduate, though two others had also received higher
education. All the rest had completed middle school.
The evidence from the interviews of the twelve women entrepreneurs suggests the
centrality of the party-state in the process of economic development, as was the case more
generally for the new rich (Goodman 1998:39–62). Only two of the women
entrepreneurs interviewed were not members of the CCP, and in every case membership
predated the involvement in enterprise management or development. The two women
entrepreneurs who were not CCP members themselves had parents who were not only
Party members but also leading cadres. Moreover, six of the eleven married women
entrepreneurs had husbands who were leading cadres, all within Shanxi.
The place of localism as part of the explanation of economic development is much less
certain for these female entrepreneurs, though it clearly played a role in determining the
marriage prospects for the interviewees. Of the eleven married women entrepreneurs,
eight had married a husband from their birthplace, and three of the couples had first met at
school. However, unlike the evidence from the interviews with the male members of the
new-rich about their wives, it would seem that husbands of women entrepreneurs did not
work with their spouses to the same extent as the couples to be found working together
where the husband was identified as the entrepreneur. Only three of the husbands of new
rich women entrepreneurs worked in the enterprise established by their wives; though
necessarily too much of a conclusion cannot be drawn from such a small sample. All the
same, none of the women entrepreneurs had a husband who was employed as an
accountant or bookkeeper.

Women in the leadership of social change
A survey of predominantly male entrepreneurs and leading cadres in Shanxi might at first
sight seem to be a most unpromising place to start looking for evidence of the role of
women in the leadership in reform. Clearly, there are methodological problems in
interviewing husbands about their wives’ activities, whatever those might be, and any
conclusions must consequently necessarily be kept in perspective. Nonetheless, the results
from that survey point not only to the importance of localism and the party-state in social