The Construction of the Double Burden: Gendered Childcare System in Post-Mao China

Abstract

This paper examines the shift of the childcare system in post-Mao China, by reviewing the “children's project” (ertong gongzuo) during the 1980s and the early 1990s from a gender perspective. The children's project is a comprehensive child welfare project including nurseries and preschool education. It was assigned to the All China Women's Federation (ACWF) after 1981. In the earlier years, the ACWF mainly addressed women's contribution on Socialist Modernization, and paid less attention to child welfare. Official statements, documents, and personal memoirs at that time reveal that there were disputes among ACWF cadres on whether and how they should “balance double burden on a yoke”. That is to say, ACWF itself was facing the “double burden” on their policies, when the well-known “Women-Go-Home” (funü huijia) debates retargeted women to take the double burden of production and reproduction. Moreover, presumably ACWF had a small budget for this policy under the reduction of public investment. Local women's federation encouraged jobless youths and retirees to run “home-based nurseries” (jiating tuo'ersuo), which required a smaller budget. This paper shall discuss how the double burden was politically constructed and how the cost of reproduction was controlled in the gendered economic regime of post-Mao China.

Keywords:

• gender
• double burden of production and reproduction
• the children's project
• Women's Federation
• home-based nurseries

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fumie Ohashi

Fumie OHASHI has been an assistant professor at Graduate School of Asia Pacific Studies, Waseda University since September 2012. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow of Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) (April 2010-August 2012) and a research fellow of Institute for Gender Studies, Ochanomizu University (September 2009-March 2010). Ohashi received her Ph.D. in China Studies and Gender Studies from Ochanomizu University in September 2009. She was a visiting scholar of Women's Studies Center of Peking University from April 2011 to March 2012. Her research interests include migration and gender in China and East Asia, globalization of reproductive sphere, transnational feminisms in Asia. Ohashi's publication Migrant Domestic Workers in Contemporary China: The Politics of Reproductive Labor in Rural-Urban Relations (in Japanese, Ochanomizu Shobo, 2011) was awarded The 31^st Yamakawa Kikue Award in 2011.