Page 54 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

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Femininity and authority
Women in China’s private sector

Clodagh Wylie

China has undergone rapid economic and social changes since the beginning of the reform
period in 1978. The growth of the private sector is one significant change that has been
the subject of considerable study. Women’s participation in this expanding sector,
however, has received relatively little attention (Gates 1991: Kitching 2001). In the
complex environment of China’s burgeoning private sector, women are renegotiating
gender stereotypes and constructing their own space. These educated, urban professional
women are also playing an important part in shaping business networking practices by
discovering and developing the tools with which they can most successfully negotiate
relationships in the workplace. This study, based on a survey of women in Beijing and
Shanghai, examines how women are responding to the pressures to conform to female
stereotypes in their professional and domestic lives and how they express agency through
their interpretation of and resistance to mass-media models of femininity.
Described as white-collar ladies, office misses and female bosses, these women form a
unique and privileged sector of society and are redefining notions of modern femininity.
Members of this group appear to show little desire to be perceived as anything ‘special’ or
out of the ordinary, yet their access to education—and therefore employment
opportunities, as well as their potential for promoting changes in gender role subscrip-
tions—prove that they are indeed a ‘unique’ group.
It is not easy to establish how many women are working in the Chinese private sector
and definitions of ‘private sector’ often vary. According to the Pan Pacific East Asian
Women’s Association, in 1997 there were 20 million private entrepreneurs in China,
25 per cent of whom were women (Buscombe 1997). According to the State Industry
Bureau, in 1998 more than 18 million women were registered as private enterprise
owners, making up just over 40 per cent of the total (Wang 2000:72). This figure could
include women registered as private business owners who are selling goods on the streets
or in small shops. A considerably lower figure is given in the China Statistical Yearbook
for 1999, which records a figure of 7.5 million women employed in enterprises of
ownership other than state-owned or urban collective-owned (2000, 132–3).
Another useful indicator is the number of women in professional associations. For
example, the Beijing-based China Association of Women Entrepreneurs, established in
1985, has 7,000 national members (Smith 2000:1). The Shanghai Women Entrepreneurs
Association was established in the late 1990s and more than 100 female enterprise