What is made-in-China feminism(s)? Gender discontent and class friction in post-socialist China

ABSTRACT

Contemporary Chinese feminism has drawn much attention in academe and popular media, yet its ontological roots and the politics of naming has largely escaped scrutiny. This paper first demonstrates that China’s post-socialist transition has given rise to a new gendered structure of power, in response to which urban young women have assembled various discursive and material practices in their struggles. Second, the social rupture and shock caused by these practices have led to the popular perception that an undifferentiated “feminism” has been proliferating in contemporary China. Combining historiographical and ethnographic research, this paper maps out the overall landscape of women’s agitations and identifies two latent strands of “made-in-China feminism” – with varied sociopolitical significance – that engage with cultural norms at the grassroots level. In grasping China’s ongoing gender antagonism with its full complexity, this paper discusses the limitations of existing scholarly approaches to contemporary Chinese feminism. This analysis contributes to the ongoing conversation on imagining a feminist politics in non-Western societies that disrupts the political, economic, and cultural orders all at once.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• China
• neoliberalism
• gender
• class

Acknowledgements

Our thanks to Tamara Jacka and an anonymous reader for Critical Asian Studies for their thoughtful, constructive feedback, as well as Robert Shepherd’s editorial guidance. Over the four and half years of developing this article, our thinking has progressed thanks to invaluable input from Paula Chakravartty, Wang Zheng, Eileen Otis, Hae Yeon Choo, Katrina Quisumbing King, Janice Radway, Joel Andreas, Xiaohong Xu, Nina Luzhou Li, as well as the unyielding struggles of numerous Chinese women.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Angela Xiao Wu (Ph.D. in Media, Technology, and Society, Northwestern University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University. Wu is an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellow in China Studies. She investigates the connection between information technology and public cultures.

Yige Dong (Ph.D. in Sociology, Johns Hopkins University) is the Suzanne W. Barnett Chair of Contemporary China Studies and Assistant Professor in International Political Economy, University of Puget Sound. Dong is a Woodrow Wilson National Fellow in Women’s Studies. Her research lies at the intersection of gender, political economy, and contentious politics.

ORCID

Angela Xiao Wu http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9559-8225

Yige Dong http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4944-0245

Notes

1 Both posts, last accessed on December 12, 2017, are no longer available. https://m.weibo.cn/status/4094651981862386?luicode=20000061&lfid=4117696075051742, and https://m.weibo.cn/2870661324/4117696075051742.

2 Denyer and Xu 2015.

3 Kaiman 2016b.

4 Guo 2016.

5 Kaiman 2016a; Xiao 2015.

6 Sudo and Hill 2006.

7 There is no consensus about the nature and periodization of post-Mao China. Some scholars prefer “reforming” or “market socialism” to stress China’s ruling communist party and politically dominant state sector, yet others choose “state capitalism” to highlight China’s integration into global capitalism. We use “post-socialist” to capture both the change and continuity since 1978 in class and gender order.

8 Fincher 2018; Li and Li 2017; Liu, Huang, and Ma 2015; Tan 2017; Wallis 2015.

9 On the eve of International Women’s Day in 2015, five young women were arrested by the Chinese police in Beijing. After garnering enormous support worldwide, the “Feminist Five” were released after thirty-seven days of detainment and interrogation. Still subject to constant police harassment, these women have issued online statements reiterating their devotion to the feminist cause.

10 Chen 2016; Dong 2016; Huang 2016.

11 Particularly influential is Fraser’s “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History.” Fraser 2009. For this piece’s influence within the neo-left camp, see Spakowski 2018. Also representative of this line of work are Fraser 2013; 2017; Harris and Dobson 2015; Rottenberg 2013.

12 Ferguson 2017, 227–228.

13 Kumari Jayawardena advocates the use of “feminism” that goes beyond “movements for equality and emancipation which agitate for equal rights and legal reforms” to “[s]ignify agitation on issues concerning women” in a larger sense. Jayawardena 2016; 2.

14 Jayawardena 2016.

15 Liu, Karl, and Ko 2013.

16 Wang 1999.

17 Wang 2016.

18 Dong 2014; Wang and Zhang 2010.

19 McRobbie 1978; Mohanty 2013; Munford and Waters 2014; Taylor 2012.

20 Dong 2019.

21 For instance, the Feminist Five and Ma Hu are part of a bigger, looser group of self-described “young feminist activists” (qingnian nüquan xingdongpai) who use street art and popular theater to challenge sexist cultural norms.

22 Gramsci 1971. For a similar approach to feminist practices, see Aslan and Gambetti 2011. For a similar approach focused on the politics of naming, see Hall et al. 1978.

23 Patton 1993; 173.

24 Cooper 2017, 23. Historically, specific family values and gender norms have been functional for class stratification in various nationalist, modernization, and neoliberal projects. See Brown 2006; Cooper 2017; Jayawardena 2016; Radhakrishnan and Solari 2015.

25 Our following analysis takes the form of a “conjunctural analysis” that delineates how the multiple, potentially heterogeneous, historical forces operating in a society during a given period fuse together into a particular articulation. See Clarke 2010; Hall et al. 1978; Laclau and Mouffe 2001.

26 Gilmartin 1995.

27 In the domestic realm, by decreeing a progressive Marriage Law (1950), the CCP mobilized the masses nationwide to transform people’s marital practices and their understanding of gender and family relations (Diamant 2000). In the workplace, massive industrialization and agricultural development incorporated an unprecedented number of women into the labor force, leading to a female employment rate above ninety percent (Jiang 2004). The 1954 Constitution and new labor regulations created equal pay for men and women, paid maternity leave, and public childcare service (Hooper 1984). For working women, comparable wages substantially reduced their economic dependence on their husbands. In this highly politicized society of general material scarcity, women chose their spouses based primarily on political trustiness and much less on economic capital (Croll 1981).

28 Women pursuing their own interests outside of the Party’s agenda and leadership were considered selfish and politically treacherous (Barlow 2004; Johns 2010). Instead, women’s issues were politically and organizationally subsumed to class-coded struggles (Manning 2006a). The CCP attributed women’s disadvantages to their class position, instead of gender, and maintained that the path to women’s liberation was to abolish private ownership and eliminate class inequality. The official denial of a female identity independent from class, together with the CCP’s commitment to its own gender-leveling projects and institutional arrangements, led to the socialist gender norms that silenced sexual expression, elided physiological differences between sexes, celebrated masculinized women, and downplayed conventional femininities. See Barlow 2004; Honig 2003; Manning 2006b.

29 Andors 1983; Hershatter 2011.

30 Wu 2014. Although the CCP established a largely (materially) egalitarian society through drastic measures, it continued to impose class distinctions among the masses based on different political and social origins. In official discourse, the masses of peasants, workers, and their offspring were represented by the Party and thus were the dominant power, whereas the old elites were the dominated class under the former’s surveillance and discipline.

31 Walder 2002.

32 Attané 2012; Hoffman 2010.

33 While estimates of the size of China’s middle class vary, depending on the definition, it ranges from 109 million to nearly 400 million. See Zhou 2018. For a discussion about laid-off and migrant workers, see Frazier 2010; Franceschini, Siu, and Chan 2016.

34 Anagnost 2008; Pun and Chan 2008.

35 Goodman 2008; Osburg 2013; Tomba 2004; Zhang 2010.

36 Du and Dong 2008; Liu 2007.

37 Barlow 2004.

38 Jacobs 2012.

39 Chen 2016; Evans 2008; Farrer 2002; Rofel 2007.

40 Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005; Song 2011.

41 Song 2011; Yan 2008.

42 Hird 2017.

43 Rural gender inequalities have also worsened. For more discussions, see Jacka 2014. From 1990 to 2010, the percentage of women without education decreased from 34.7 to 6.6 percent in rural areas and 10.9 to 3.5 percent in urban areas. For women with education, the average length of their education nearly doubled during this period, from 4.7 to 8.8 years, gradually narrowing the gap with men (6.6 and 9.1 years respectively). During this time, however, the employment rate for urban women fell rapidly, from 76.3 percent in 1990 to 60.8 percent in 2010. Attané 2012.

44 In the late 2000s, government institutions, commercial organizations, television programs and Internet portals started to concertedly push young women to marry at all costs, including foregoing their careers and entitlement to marital property. For further discussion, see Fincher 2014 and To 2015. This despite the fact that, compared with China’s neighbors, Chinese women are marrying younger, are more likely to be married, and are supposed to have more bargaining power given the sex-imbalance from selective abortion and infanticide. See Jones 2007.

45 For details about the newest Marriage Law (2011), see: http://www.loc.gov/law/foreign-news/article/china-supreme-peoples-court-issues-third-interpretation-of-marriage-law/

46 Greenhalgh and Winckler 2005.

47 Zhang, Hannum, and Wang 2008.

48 Erguang 2017; Tatlow 2017.

49 Hine 2015.

50 Marcus, quoted in Gatson 2011, 247.

51 See http://blog.sina.cn/dpool/blog/s/blog_48a2f5fd0102eahs.html?wm=3049_a111.

52 Wang 2014.

53 See Li, Luzhou Nina. 2016.

54 https://www.weibo.com/6593893685/HsiR8vi6O?refer_flag=1001030103_&type=comment, Accessed June 2, 2019.

55 The same “Young Feminist Activists” group was also involved in the campus production of the VWS.

56 Wei 2013.

57 Jaffe 2013.

58 Wei 2013; Zhou and Cao 2013. Unsurprisingly, the overwhelming majority of participants in this backlash, according to social media user base data obtained by investigative reporters, were men. See Zhou and Cao 2013.

59 Consistent with the widespread social tension and anxiety we have unpacked here, a systematic study of Chinese online neologisms has found that terms referring to women stress sexuality and for men, monetary capital. Szablewicz 2014.

60 Along these lines, the entrepreneurial strand may have the potential to “queer” the institution of heterosexual marriage. We thank Hae Yeon Choo for this provocative observation.

61 Also see Song and Hird 2014.

62 Evans 2008. For example, Chinese online protest culture, acclaimed for its excellence in undermining state authorities, is often riddled with sexist images and narratives. See Wallis 2014.

63 Dai 2006; 125–158. Wang and Ying 2010.

64 Hall et al. 1978; Ortner 2006, 41.

65 For a critique of such evaluation, especially against the global backdrop of neoliberalization, see Schild 2015.

66 See Spakowski 2018.