Page 57 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

44 CLODAGH WYLIE
childcare centres but these are only available to the small number who can afford it. As a
result, even women who hold positions equal with those of their husbands find that they
have a very heavy burden indeed compared with men.
My intention here is to continue exploring the issue of perceptions of women in the
‘masculinised’ private sector in China. My focus will be on how women working in this
sector perceive themselves rather than how others perceive them. How do these women
compete with men in the art of networking? Is guanxi in business contexts gender
sensitive? To what extent do these women perceive themselves as ‘modern women’ in the
sense portrayed in the Chinese mass media? To what extent do these women use the
Internet for networking and information and what is the impact of websites designed
specifically for women? What do they think of work in the private sector as a career
option and what do they regard as the attributes necessary for success in the private sector?

Survey of women in Beijing and Shanghai

In September 2000 I travelled to China to conduct interviews with female managers and
employees working in private-sector enterprises. I conducted nineteen interviews in
Shanghai and Beijing with women from a variety of private sector jobs (one state-sector
employee was also included) and ranging in age from their mid-twenties to early fifties.
The women I interviewed were contacted via friends and through the Shanghai American
Chamber of Commerce membership directory. Interviews were conducted in places of
work, teashops, eateries, shopping centres and private homes. The interviews lasted for
up to one and a half hours depending on the convenience of the participant. During the
interviews, I supplied participants with a questionnaire to look through while I worked
through the questions with them. At other times, participants chose to fill in the
questionnaire on their own after our discussion. Interviews were conducted in Chinese
and English, depending on the preference of the participant. In several cases, I was assisted
by a translator.
A limited timeframe meant that I was unable to interview participants more than once
and this made it difficult to establish a genuine sense of trust. Moreover, despite their
willingness to participate, many of the women displayed a degree of reservation in their
responses while being interviewed or answering the supplied questionnaire. The women
interviewed displayed a surprising level of modesty about their achievements, an
ambivalence noted also by Elisabeth Croll, who discovered confusion among Chinese
women in the light of an ‘absence of a single rhetoric defining proper female needs and
interests appropriate to a modern woman’ (Croll 1995:171). She also suggested that women
lacked direction and were looking for ‘cues, guidance and models in making sense of the
new opportunities for women’s social and self-expression in cosmopolitan China of the
1990s’ (Croll 1995:174, 176).
The women surveyed in Shanghai and Beijing worked in a variety of industries, and all
2
but one worked in private enterprises. The term ‘private enterprise’ is used here to
include privately run businesses, joint ventures and wholly foreign-owned companies
operating in China. Of the participants, three worked in the restaurant and hospitality
sector, two of them in management positions. Five of the participants were accountants