Gender Dynamics, Feminist Activism and Social Transformation in China

Guoguang Wu, Yuan Feng, Helen Lansdowne, Guoguang Wu, Yuan Feng, Helen Lansdowne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429959868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios regionales

This book explores the extent to which women have been initiators, mobilizers, and driving forces of social transformation in China. The book considers how conceptions of women's roles have changed as China has moved from state socialism to engagement with capitalist globalization, examines the growth of women's gender and sexual consciousness and social movements for women's rights, including for marginalized social and sex/gender grouops, and discusses women's roles in society-state interactions, including many forms of social activism, cultural events, educational innovations, and more. Overall, the book demonstrates that women have not simply been passive receivers of the consequences of the forces of global capitalism, but that they have had a profound, active impact on social transformation in China.

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Introduction

Guoguang Wu and Helen Lansdowne

Women, gender relations, and China’s social transformation: the focus and features of this volume

Both the social transformation and the state of women in China have received tremendous attention in academic studies. What is overlooked, however, is women’s dynamic role in engendering the social transformation that has been taking place in China since the late nineteenth century. With the empirical focus on the latest stage of China’s transformation during the era of globalization, while taking into consideration the long-term history of the women’s movements of the past century, this volume attempts to address this often ignored aspect in both women’s and gender studies on China and research on China’s transformation, namely: how do women act as initiators, mobilizers, and driving forces of social transformation, while women’s fate, gender relationships, and feminist values have also been shaped and reshaped during such struggles in China?

China’s social transformation has tremendous implications for women’s lives and their relations with men, the market, and the state; however, the scholastic interests of international academia in this regard, though having flourished, are still insufficiently developed in at least two aspects. First, when women’s fate is concerned in scholastic work, the negative aspects of capitalist globalization are often highlighted.¹ This literature seizes on a major development in today’s China; its empirical findings are solid, rich, and enlightening, its theoretical contributions to understanding women and gender issues are substantial and profound, and its normative concerns are shared by the current volume. However, questions like these emerge: Are Chinese women simply passive receivers of the fate that global capitalism enforces over them? Are they only or mostly inactive victims to China’s economic prosperity under state capitalism? Have Chinese women made significant contributions to drive China’s transformation not only through their role as labourers but also, more importantly, as activists and citizens? How do they stand up and struggle for their rights when economic exploitation and social-political repressions are exercised over them? And, how can they do so, and what impact have they made?

Secondly, when attention is given to feminist activism in China’s social transformation, the focus has often been on gender relations, namely, relations between women and men, and between LGBTQ and conventional genders. Social transformation has been understood more in the contexts of cultural, familial, sexual, interpersonal, as well as political, terms.² This focus has been pioneering in exploring social change, where traditional Chinese cultural factors do join other factors in repressing women, as well as repressing other marginalized gender groups, regarding sexual orientation and gender identity.³ Such scholarship remains incomplete, however, in understanding both gender issues and social transformation. The current collection attempts to highlight a number of assumptions with regards to women and sexuality vis-à-vis social transformation: first, sexual relations must be understood in their interconnections and interactions with the state, the market, and in relation to China’s engagement with globalization; second, the wider spectrum of Chinese women’s rights and interests should be addressed, including but not limited to sexual issues, especially for the vast groups of rural and factory women; third, women’s roles in and the impact of gender awareness and sexual awakening on China’s social transformation go beyond the politics of the body, and feminist activism as a driving force of China’s transition from communism carries profound and multidimensional consequences.

Doris Anderson is right in saying that “the [feminist] movement was a response to a society in the process of transformation.”⁴ We, however, want to further point out that the feminist movement is at the same time a driving force in a society for transformation. This volume, therefore, is designed to explore a central question that is: how do Chinese women act as initiators, mobilizers, and driving forces of social transformation in China? It highlights women’s position in China’s social change not only as recipients but also, more importantly, as actors who affect, initiate, and facilitate change, first concerning their own fate, while also reaching out to the entire society. It accordingly works at a series of conjunctures to examine and understand women and gender issues of contemporary China. In terms of the subjects under investigation, it highlights a conjuncture between women being exploited and repressed, on one hand, and women being awakened and taking actions for their rights, on the other. Furthermore, it attempts to offer a coherent coverage of different groups of women and other marginalized groups and make connections among multiple aspects of women and gender issues, and between these issues and general issues in China’s social transformation. Regarding the scholarly approaches employed for investigation, it makes efforts to gain a constructive dialogue, and inter-fertilization between cultural inquiries, sexual studies, and middle-class oriented perspectives, on one hand, and political economy, institutional analysis, and working-class politics, on the other. And, in terms of historical depth and theoretical backgrounds, it crosses different historical periods of Mao, reform, post-reform, and globalizing China, while bringing the conceptual streams of political liberalism, Marxism, and postmodernism into a collective endeavour of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary cooperation. The contributors to the volume come from different disciplines and specialties ranging from women and gender studies, sociology, social work, political science and political economy, and legal studies, to education, literature and theatre studies, mass communication and social media, and development studies. Moreover, many of the contributors are not merely scholars within the ivory tower; reflecting the inherent feature of feminism as human values in social movement and practical action, they are scholar-activists and/or activist-writers who have been engaged in China’s women’s and feminist movements for years. They live and work within China and are able to bring first-hand, often grassroots, accounts of women’s movements and feminist activism in today’s China to the world.

With a clear focus on exploring how gender relations in China have been changed in the face of globalization through women’s struggle to gain rights and increasing feminist activism, and how such changes engender wider social transformation in China, the scope of the volume covers on four aspects, which are: (1) The change of political, social, cultural, and ideological/ideational sources of feminism in China from Mao Zedong’s state socialism era through post-Mao reforms to China’s engagement in capitalist globalization; (2) Prominent issues regarding the political economy of gender (in)equalities and women’s rights, on one hand, and their interconnections and interactions with economic marketization, political authoritarianism, and globalization on the other; (3) The rise of women’s gender and sexual consciousness and its feminist expressions and empowerment, especially in traditionally marginalized social and sex/gender groups such as LGBTQ, and how their concerns, voices, and actions open new horizons for China’s social transformation; (4) All of these issues in state-society interactions, especially through channels and forms of social activism, legal actions, digital facilities, cultural events, and educational experiments incorporate gender dynamics into the state in particular and social transformation in general.

Highlighting feminist activism: some reflections on the common concerns of the chapters

What connects and actualizes gender dynamics to social transformation is feminist activism. Yes, the very nature of feminism is praxis; to do feminism means to take action and to advocate, such as joining a protest, participating in a debate, seeking the like-minded to form task forces, mobilizing community online and/or offline, and influencing agenda setting. In any case, a feminist lives her politics rather than takes an “armchair” approach. Over the decades of feminist theoretical development, the approaches to gender equality and women’s emancipation have enriched and expanded, making today’s feminism and feminist activism multifaceted and, especially important to our case of China, historically positioned in a nation’s own feminist experience. This book takes an approach that emphasizes social movement and theoretical multiplicity in the understanding of feminism in social transformation while covering various gendered issues; to provide some threads for a reader navigating through these issues analyzed by individual chapters, the following comments will be made on a number of prominent themes.

Let’s start with the feminist activist. Conflicts of exclusion and inclusion that are part of global feminism are very much part of the discussion surrounding Chinese feminism. This may trouble an observer in identifying who is the feminist activist that is referred to in such a collective volume. Are we referring to historically imbedded actors or contemporary players? Are these people young, urban, educated women or are they elder, rural, uneducated people? Do they define themselves as feminist activists, or do they make use of alternative language in describing themselves as a means to ensure success at bringing about change? What emerge throughout this book are divides within Chinese feminism, including between those whose voices are heard, who wears the label of Chinese feminist activist and whose histories are told, and those who may not gain such visibilities. In recognizing the divisions, varieties, and diversities within Chinese feminist activists and appreciating individual chapters’ particular focuses on specific types of them, the book as a whole, however, intends to highlight the multiple identities of those who experience and/or seek to change gender inequalities, both historically and currently, in China with different ideological affiliations and practical priorities.

Here the concepts of intersectionality and assemblages can be connected to one another to help to elaborate the point. In looking at the mutual conditioning of race and gender in Black women’s lives in relation to civil rights in the United States, Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality emphasizes that multiple identities of a person need to be recognized and understood in order to truly understand forces of discrimination, and brings to light that

many of the experiences Black women face are not subsumed within the traditional boundaries of race or gender discrimination as these boundaries are currently understood and that the intersection of race and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately.⁵

In addition, Puar has contributed the notion of assemblages, which, “as a series of dispersed but mutually implicated and messy networks, draws together enunciation and dissolution, causality and effect, organic and nonorganic forces.”⁶ Puar argues that “categories – race, gender, sexuality – are considered events, actions, and encounters between bodies, rather than simply entities and attributes of subjects.”⁷ These notions, as Zhang warns regarding “intersectionality,” “cannot be simplistically transplanted into a different context,”⁸ but their critical application in China’s gender studies is possible. One of our chapter contributors, Xiying Wang, in her earlier work, in fact, did discuss Chinese intersectionality that includes state, market, and cultural discourses in the gender analysis matrix for gender-based violence research and Chinese feminism. She points out that this approach “acknowledges not only the gender difference, but the differences between women as well, by including all kinds of lenses of analysis beside gender, class, race, sexuality, state, market.”⁹ In emphasizing that gender analysis alone cannot capture the multidimensionality and complexity of social reality and that social location and the lived body are epistemologically significant, the application of this concept requires that Chinese feminists seek a positionality between local (post)modernity and globalization, interlocking the political economy of gender analysis with new dimensions of class, race, and ethnicity, and at the same time endowing these terms with their new meanings in China.¹⁰ In a similar vein, for many of the situations examined by the chapters that follow, assemblages are at work, creating tensions, frictions, and divisions between generations, locations and histories. The activists of the 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence, examined by Di Wang (Chapter 9; also Feng, Chapter 11, and Xiying Wang, Chapter 13), are representative of contemporary China, both in their presentation of self – ambiguous, powerful, and graphic – as well as the methods used to bring about change. Moving beyond petitions and formal displays of protest, the new feminist activist makes easy use of technologies that were not available to the earlier feminist. However, there is no single construction of the contemporary Chinese feminist activist. This same media-savvy activist is working within a particular geographic location, the online world, and may well be working very differently, as some of the following chapters bear out, from other feminist activists who choose other platforms and locations of protest. On the other hand, the Chinese feminist activist may well be an older woman who has never thought through a feminist lens and yet undertakes a feminist fight through discourses that feel subjectively legitimate, as showed by Zhou’s study (Chapter 5). The feminist activists in contemporary China, therefore, live and take actions with intersectionality and assemblages, not any one-dimensional identity and/or any single, simple strategy.

The language used to convey Chinese feminist activism is also riddled with complexities. Moreover, the words used transnationally do not necessarily translate easily within the Chinese context. Even the most fundamental question of who gets to wear the label of “Chinese women,” as Huang (Chapter 1) shows, is a complicated issue. This question becomes even more complicated with the post-Mao transformation, as the division between those who wish to wear the label “female” (nüxing) and those who oppose the term emerges. Correspondingly, as Woodman (Chapter 3) points out, the use of language such as “human rights” and “feminism” also rattled the Chinese state that chose to see such terms as foreign imports that had no usefulness to China. The concept of human rights is juxtaposed with communal principles of filial piety, read as the Chinese state/party as the head of the household with all Chinese citizenry being the family members, where belonging to this family means utter devotion to it. Here the use of nationalism plays a useful role in stirring up and maintaining sentiments of belonging despite a lack of individual rights and freedoms.¹¹ However, defiantly chosen language, or the omission of certain words, can be analyzed as a shrewd approach to feminist activism. In Zhou’s study (Chapter 5), for example, forestry workers choose to adopt non-gendered language when engaging in their battles for pension rights. Such an approach was a cunning way of making use of the state’s own discourse to champion their fight. Some people battling against gender inequalities may not have an available language that conveys the discourse of feminism, such as the forestry workers, but nonetheless must be a subject of inclusion as the feminist ac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Chinese feminisms in multiple contexts
• PART II Gender equalities in political economy
• PART III Gender awareness on peripheries
• PART IV Chinese feminists in action
• Conclusion
• Index