Chinese Women Organizing

Cadres, Feminists, Muslims, Queers

Ping-Chun Hsiung, Maria Jaschok, Cecilia Milwertz, Ping-Chun Hsiung, Maria Jaschok, Cecilia Milwertz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000181647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

In the process of helping women to help themselves, female activists have assumed a decisive role in negotiating social and political transformations in Chinese society. This is the first book that describes and analyzes the new phase of women's organizing in China, which started in the 1980s, and remains a vital force to the present day. The political and social changes taking place in contemporary Chinese society have, surprisingly, received scant attention. This volume enriches our understanding of the working of grassroots democracy in China by exploring women's popular organizing activities and their interaction with party-state institutions. By subjecting these activities to both empirical enquiry and theoretical scrutiny, a rigorous analysis of the exchange, dialogue, negotiation and transformation among and within three groups of political actors - popular women's groups, religious groups and the All China Women's Federation - is concisely presented to the reader. This book will be of tremendous interest to students of Chinese Studies, Political Science and Gender Studies alike.

PART I
Chinese Women Organizing In/Outside

Introduction

Maria Jaschok, Cecilia Milwertz and Ping-Chun Hsiung

In July 1999 a group of about fifty scholars, activists and donor organization representatives met for three days at Oxford University to describe, discuss and analyse women’s organizing activities in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the 1980s and 1990s. When we conceived of the Workshop, our ambition was to bring together a group that would present, and represent, the work of a diversity of women’s collective action. Whether secular or religious, formal or informal, small-scale or large-scale, rural or urban in nature, all these women’s organizing activities address social issues in Chinese society. Although the groups represented were varied in nature, the Workshop was by no means able to encompass all of the complex variations that pertain to women’s growing activism in contemporary China. But the organizing experiences shared at the Workshop, while not universally representative, do reflect and thereby provide an insight into some recent trends and tendencies in urban women’s organizing activities.

The organizing activities addressed in this volume have emerged in the post-Mao period of economic reform and of China’s so-called opening to the outside world that were initiated under Deng Xiaoping’s government in 1978. They have developed in reaction to contradictory effects that came with the gradual expansion of the market economy and in response to state withdrawal of employment security, as well as changes in provision of social welfare and education.¹

From the late 1970s and early 1980s onwards, the political leadership relaxed its control of the political sphere, thus allowing for the development of a wide range of (more or less controlled) activities in the sphere that has been theorized as civil society (White, Howell and Shang 1996) and public space (Yang 1999). Since these early beginnings, women’s popular organizing activities have multiplied. A new phase in the history of the Chinese women’s movement has taken shape in a context of political and practical support and constraint, of progressive and regressive developments, and of a plurality of actors and activities.² Urban women have exploited emerging spaces and have also created new political spaces to address gender-specific discrimination in relation to issues such as employment, education, and rural to urban migration. Activists have set up social services to support women in vulnerable situations related, for example, to prostitution, domestic violence and divorce. Over a period of ten to fifteen years, small discussion groups have reinvented themselves into psychological and legal counselling services, legal aid services, a Media Watch network, and rural development projects.

A vital, previously neglected part of the scholarship on political and social changes taking place in contemporary Chinese society, chapters in this volume contribute a series of in-depth descriptions and analyses of grass-roots activities which are at the core of processes of social and political change. The relationship between citizen and state, for example, is transformed as citizens expand their sphere of participation in social change, in turn affecting political change at other levels of society. This volume helps to close a gap in our understanding of the working of grass-roots democracy in China by exploring women’s popular organizing activities and their interaction with party-state institutions, including the All China Women’s Federation (ACWF). In the process of helping women to help themselves, these activists have assumed a decisive role in negotiating social and political transformations in Chinese society. The title of our Introduction – Organizing In/Outside – suggests the unique fluidity that has come to characterize Chinese women’s activism in relation to central structures of power: that is, situated both inside and outside the centre, yet sometimes preferring to negotiate in the interstices, the spaces in-between; working outward from the inside, but also influencing the centre from the outside; starting from positions of weakness and marginality and transforming these into mobility and strength. In the process these activists have been creating a borderland of social and intellectual movement which is leaving neither the centre nor the periphery unaffected and unchallenged.

As editors we reflect on the papers presented at the Workshop, the discussions that took place and the chapters that form the core of this book. Our aim is to revisit the Workshop to focus on issues that are developed in the chapters of this volume and to explore in greater depth issues only touched upon during the three days of debate. Our advantage as editors lies in the overall perspective we achieve by having an overview of the full set of Workshop papers and the full Workshop ‘conversations’. This means that we move beyond that which was explicitly stated and discussed at the Workshop. We elaborate on the background and development of women’s organizing activities in the 1980s and 1990s, and we bring religious organizing traditions into the social history of all Chinese women.

The book has been divided into six parts, five of which discuss developments in women’s activisms. We have also incorporated Other Voices – Other Conversations, which consists of excerpts from Workshop presentations, comments and debates. The excerpts, organized under sub-headings, are included to capture the lively debate at the Workshop, and to add diverse voices and perspectives to central issues addressed in the papers.³ In a few cases, we also include discussions of issues that were only touched upon at the Workshop. For example, the role of donor funding was not a central issue addressed in the papers presented at the Workshop. However, it was an issue that turned up again and again, an issue that due to its importance should be researched in the future. Throughout the volume reference is made to papers that were presented at the Workshop, and abstracts of Workshop papers not included in the volume are listed at the end of the book.

In the scholarship on Chinese women’s organizations and organizing processes, interesting and important shifts can be noted in the roles and identifications of local Chinese, Chinese academics in the Euro-North American diaspora and Euro-North American academics. In Chapter One, Elisabeth Croll describes the shift from predominantly English-language studies of women and gender in China written solely by this latter group, to the present multivocal community of international and Chinese scholars, with a significant number straddling Chinese and other cultures. The configuration of the fifteen authors of chapters in this volume illustrates this change. Ten authors are Chinese activists and scholars working in the PRC and three are PRC academics who have trained and now work in the USA. Two authors are British: one a first-generation scholar of Chinese women’s studies, and the other – illustrating that strict divides between women’s activisms in different parts of the world are being broken down – a researcher who has previously worked for a donor organization in Beijing and who was also during that time actively involved in local women’s groups (see Jolly, Chapter Three). The three editors, who were also Workshop convenors, consist of one Taiwanese/Canadian and two European academics.

In Part VII, the concluding section of the book, ten Workshop participants reflect on their personal experience of the meeting, adding voices of appreciation but also a note of critical appraisal of the facilitation and process of an ambitious undertaking that sought to provide a forum for cross-boundary dialog and exchange.

Women’s Organizing – a Process

Our central positioning in this volume of the term organizing reflects a feminist analytical approach as to how women organize themselves to address gender and other inequalities in society, and to improve their own and/or other people’s lives. The term organizing reflects a focus on the content and process of activities rather than on (fixed) structural features of organization. The typology of the many new forms of organization that have appeared since the mid-1980s in China, defined by Gordon White, Jude Howell and Shang Xiaoyuan (1996), provides a useful insight into a range of organizational features. However, empirical studies, as well as examples of organizing modes presented at the Workshop, demonstrate a variety of activities that go beyond this typology. For example, The Maple Women’s Psychological Counselling Centre (Beijing hongfeng funü xinli zixun fuwu zhongxin) (see Wang, abstract) in Beijing is not registered according to the Regulations on the Registration and Management of Social Organizations (Shehui tuanti dengji guanli tiaoli), but as a private enterprise; neither are two other Beijing organizations, the Centre for Women’s Law Studies and Legal Services (Beijing daxue falüxuexi funü falü yanjiu yu fuwu zhongxin) (see Guo, abstract) and the Migrant Women’s Club (Dagongmei zhi jia) (see Xie, abstract), registered according to the Regulations. In Beijing the only one of those organizations usually included in the group of so-called ‘new women’s NGOs’ that is actually registered according to the Regulations, is the Jinglun Family Centre (Zhongguo shehui gongzuo xiehui Jinglun jiating kexue zhongxin) established by sociologist Chen Yiyun.

As Naihua Zhang emphasizes in Chapter Eight, the variety of modes of registration, as well as lack of registration for some groups, points to the need to shift our focus from the structures of organizations to a focus on processes and connections within and between organizations. As Xiaolan Bao and Wu Xu note in Chapter Four: ‘while institutional changes are important, they do not necessarily lead to cultural change’. Sharon Wesoky’s somewhat exasperated statement at the Workshop: ‘I am a political scientist by training and profession but today I am starting to feel more like an historian. I guess that this is the hazard of dealing with a rapidly changing country’, reflects the difficulties academics have in analysing women’s organizing activities because the object of our inquiry – the activities, the actors and their understandings of issues – are in constant movement and by their very nature difficult to grasp. By privileging the term organizing, this volume emphasizes the shifting and dynamic character of women’s organizing activities that aim to create social change. It also redresses the problem noted among Workshop participants that organization rather than organizing had dominated presentations and discussion. This is a significant problematic that deserves more attention than could be given within the confines of this volume. It must also be noted that it is a problem for which there is no language. No verb for organizing exists in Chinese. (See Gao, reflections, for a revealing post-Workshop commentary on the relevance of such discussions.)

The term organizing furthermore indicates a focus on the process and movement of social innovation. The actors engaged in the process are related to many different groups and organizations. They are also, as demonstrated by several papers at the Workshop and chapters in this book, linked in networks that cut across groups and organizations and include or reach out to party-state institutions. Together they are involved in the ‘cognitive praxis’ of creating social change – a collective process of producing new forms of knowledge and practice. The ‘cognitive praxis’ defined by sociologists Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison (1991, 1998) in their studies of social movements focuses on what activists think, why they think the way they do, and how they proceed to action. Eyerman and Jamison define social movement as ‘a cognitive territory, a new conceptual space that is filled by dynamic interaction between different groups and organizations’ (1991: 55). Defined as ‘cognitive praxis’, the full range of women’s organizing in contemporary China – including new forms of organizing within the ACWF, new women’s organizations, and professional and religious organizing activities – can be defined as a social movement insofar as all share an overall objective of working for justice and (gender) equality in society. Activists’ identity formation is central to organizing and is dialectically linked to social action. In the cognitive praxis of addressing issues of societal inequality activists are questioning, challenging and transforming dominant (gender) identities, consciousness, discourse and knowledge, and they are moving ideological and political boundaries. The distinctiveness of the cognitive praxis of organizing lies precisely in the process, in the movement, in the production of new knowledge and practice. In Chapters Two and Three activists describe their own experience of cognitive practice. Later in this introduction we discuss the impact of indigenous practices on the process of organizing.

The process of creating new knowledge is the cognitive praxis of social movements and it is through this practice, which includes both knowledge production and action, that a collective identity is formed and through which new forms of self-knowledge and social knowledge are produced. Identities are ‘the motor of action’ (Camauër 2000: 302) and there is an ongoing interaction between action and knowledge transformation. In the words of Sasha Roseneil:

Feminist political action is forged through the construction of new consciousness and identities at the collective level. At the same time, new forms of consciousness and new identities, both individual and collective, are also the product and praxis of feminist political action. In other words, the challenging and reconstruction of consciousness and identity are both the medium and the outcome of feminist politics (Roseneil 1995: 136).

Although all chapters in this volume are to a large extent ‘successful cases’ of organizing, they also demonstrate how consciously and constantly shifting gears, evaluating directions, and balancing costs and effects of various initiatives have proven to be imperative (see Bao with Wu Xu, Chapter Four; Gao, Chapter Nine; Guo, abstract). Obviously, not all recent women’s initiatives have survived in such a complex political setting. More in-depth documentation and understanding of the activities that have not survived are needed before a more complete reality of women’s efforts to organize themselves is captured because it would be too simplistic to view these specific cases merely as ‘failures’.⁴ On the contrary, they constitute a ‘successful’ part of the overall cognitive praxis of women’s organizing in the sense that the experience accumulated by these activities forms part of the collective experience and identity and consciousness transformation that is at the core of collective organizing for social change.

Recent perspectives on and modes of addressing the issue of violence against women serves as an example of the role that organizing has played in the social shaping of knowledge. Domestic violence is an issue that was addressed by CCP revolutionaries in the 1930s. However, efforts to stem the violence against women waned after the early 1950s. Only in the 1980s did the Women’s Federation and the public press again focus public attention on violence against women (Honig and Hershatter 1988). Marianne Hester and Sharon Wesoky’s papers at the Workshop documented the issue of domestic violence (see abstracts; also see Hester 2000) and showed how changing perceptions of, and action against violence against women, have developed dramatically in the 1990s. Over the past ten years, the issue has been politicized, resulting in a shift from the private sphere of the...