Page 47 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

34 DAVID S.G.GOODMAN
and economic change, but also to the role of the family in enterprise development and to
the roles of women in the leadership of reform.
Shanxi Province is usually regarded by Chinese as a socially conservative part of the
PRC, as well as less economically developed. These two features may necessarily be
mutually reinforcing, not least because in Shanxi itself they are recognised not without
some pride. Regardless of such considerations, it was clearly the case that in Shanxi few
women were to be found publicly identified as the leaders of either local politics or
economic development during the late 1990s. However, this does not mean that women
might not have had a role to play in reform, or even in the leadership of reform, albeit
less publicly acknowledged.
In Shanxi Province during the 1990s social and economic change was characterised by
an intense parochialism. It was manifested most obviously from a social perspective by the
numbers of leading cadres and members of the new rich who married spouses from their
own backgrounds, and even from their own birthplaces. One important consequence was
that this parochialism then contributed to the operation of the party-state’s central role in
both promoting economic development and providing the social and political networks to
support reform in general and enterprise development in particular. Another, equally
important consequence was that this parochialism was associated with the emergence of
family enterprises in which husbands and wives worked together. It is these consequences
of parochialism that highlight the role of women in reform, and that placed many women
in effective if not formal positions of leadership in economic development.
The evidence of the survey is that the wives of the new rich played a leading role in the
development of the enterprises for which their husbands were better known. This was true
across most of the different types of new enterprise generated by reform, but particularly
the case for private sector enterprises, where it was the norm for the husband to become
the operations manager and the wife to become the business manager. Of course while
structurally these women might have been in positions of leadership, there was no
symbolic recognition of their roles, so it would be doubtful that even they would think of
themselves other than as wives.
Of less significance, although cadres’ wives were less likely to play effective leadership
roles of that kind, they nonetheless also played a central role in reform. In particular,
cadres’ wives ensured the provision of essential services to the processes of social and
economic change. Many were either cadres or professionals such as doctors, engineers,
accountants and teachers. While by 1998 very few had been selected by the CCP—of
which many cadres’ wives were members—to go on and become leading cadres
themselves, they almost all contributed to the development and maintenance of the
human and physical infrastructure for reform.
An explanation of women’s role in reform based on parochialism, essentially a cultural
argument, does not of course mean that there has been no change, or for that matter that
there is no potential for further change. It is clear, for example, that the divorce rate for
urban women even in Shanxi has increased as women have come to find their own
economic and social independence. To take another example: in the past in Shanxi it was
more usual in many parts of the province for wives to be at least two years older than
their husbands at marriage. Yet the evidence from the comparative age of husbands and