Page 48 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

CHINESE WOMEN AND REFORM LEADERSHIP 35
wives in the current provincial elite (Table 1.3) indicates that is no longer the case. The
larger questions for the future are about the timing and speed of change, and the
consequences not only for husbands and wives, but also gender relations more generally
Necessarily, a micro-level study is limited in the conclusions that can be drawn, and is
likely to raise more detailed questions for further investigation. In the first place, Shanxi
has been examined in isolation. It has not been proposed as representative of China as a
whole, and comments about the characteristics of its development—such as, notably, its
parochialism—are offered in that context, not as relative descriptions compared to the
rest of the country. Further research is clearly required to locate Shanxi’s experience in
that of China as a whole, and preferably not simply through a process of replicating the
interviews of 1996–98 in other provinces.
The evidence of interviews in Shanxi during the late 1990s points very strongly to the
need to investigate further the relationships between women, power and work at the
level of the individual enterprise in greater detail, including interviewing the women
involved themselves. Some women may indeed be capable negotiators of their new and
complex circumstances, despite the sustained strengths of both patriarchy and family ties,
as the Shanxi study suggests. However, there is also a need to go beyond those findings
and the statistics, to enquire in greater detail about the gendered dimensions of leadership
in management, production and marketing, as well as divisions of responsibility and
decision-making within enterprises.
The family’s centrality to these questions highlights another and related focus for
further research, of general significance for understanding the processes of change in
China, as well as a determinant of women’s participation in public affairs. Studies of social
and economic change in the PRC have tended to concentrate disproportionately on the
state’s initiatives and actions. The Shanxi study suggests not only that the family is
potentially a most important source of social power and influence for women, but that it
may also serve that function more generally Under the system of state socialism, formal
state structures used to be the only locus for public activity It would seem at least possible
that with reform and the increasing complexity of society other forums—such as the
family—have come to be important for the exercise of power economically and
politically. This aspect of socio-political change indicates the need to enquire in greater
detail about the interactions between the family, lineage and local politics.

Notes

1 In March 2000, Zhu Rongji (Government Work Report for 2000 to the 3rd session of the 9th
National People’s Congress, 5 March 2000) publicly acknowledged that average GDP per
capita in the West was half that in the eastern and coastal provinces: in China Daily, 6 March
2000. By late 2000 average income per capita in the poorest province, Guizhou, was only 8
per cent of that in the richest provincial-level unit, Shanghai. According to Wang Shaoguang
and Hu Angang, ‘Measured by such human development indicators as education, life
expectancy, and infant mortality, for instance, the difference between China’s most
developed and least-developed provinces is comparable to that between the Western industrial
countries and the poorest countries in the world’ (Wang and Hu 1999–2000).