Gender and Chinese Development

Towards an Equitable Society

Lanyan Chen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415467230
• eBook ISBN: 9781134035243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book takes a look beneath the surface of this "miracle growth", to explore the political economy of this process. Beyond the superficial macroeconomics of high growth rates, increasing GDP per capita and high trade volume, the book looks at what is happening to the very socioeconomic and political fabric of society; particularly in terms of the transformation of gender relations. Chen's study explores:

• 
  
  

• how the gender impacts of government policies shape the unequal realities of women,

• 
  
  

• how women have carried on in production and social reproduction and made efforts to improve their status, and

• 
  
  

• how women could potentially adopt a strategy to overcome the gender impacts so as to attain the equality and justice they have been promised by the Chinese government in a harmonious "well off" society.

This book is a core resource for all students of Chinese economics and development studies. The book is also relevant to those who are involved in research and teaching on gender and development and women's studies.

1 Gender and the ‘three rural problems’

The ‘three rural problems’ are: farmers’ life that has become difficult due to a decline of income and social security, obsolete agricultural production which is inept in the face of world competition, and rural areas that are underdeveloped because of an urban biased economic orientation. Among them, the inadequate increase of income and living standards is the primary concern while the restructuring and policies to bolster agriculture and to promote rural development that is socially equitable and economically sustainable are means to address that concern. After the implementation of the household land contract responsibility system, this concern about rural income is becoming a gendered concern as more and more of the agricultural labour force is made up of women often working isolated on their (most likely their husbands’ families’) contracted land. This system resulted in men from the countryside, moving to urban areas to seek employment and leaving women working on the land and taking the lion’s share of social reproduction but often without entitlements, resulting in the latter getting far less benefits from the overall economic growth. Increased world competition that came about upon China’s entry into the World Trade Organization has also contributed to a decline of income from agriculture that had started since the 1990s.¹

Proposals for a way to address these concerns have been many but most have neglected the role of women and failed to respond to the gendered nature of the problems. This chapter adopts a feminist political economy framework to examine the impacts on the lives of rural women of the interplay between gender and the above three ‘problems’, and seeks to address three questions. These are: a) how the gender impacts of government policies shape the unequal realities of rural women, b) how rural women have made efforts to overcome their isolation by forming economic cooperation and cooperatives, and c) how they can increase income through their participation in economic restructuring and the adoption of policies favorable to that restructuring. One key aspect of this restructuring is to help rural women move from farming and raising animals to processing and marketing of agricultural and animal products so as to increase the links of agricultural production with markets in agricultural and animal products. This chapter reaches this understanding by using the feminist political economy framework in the analysis of the dialectical relationship between the gendered impacts of government policies on rural women and women’s initiatives to influence decisions on rural restructuring as this relationship especially unfolded in the programmatic activity in Linfen.

The Conference in Linfen on Rural Women’s Development in Farming, Raising Animals and Processing on 7–9 August 2002 gathered rural women and local women’s federation representatives and local government officials from three provinces, the Linfen Prefecture in Shanxi, the Linqu County in Shandong, and the city of Suining in Sichuan. The participants spent the first two days visiting enterprises run by rural women, including a rabbit farm, a chicken farm, and a deer farm as well as with villagers and local government officials in four townships and a county named Hozhou (with a population of 80,000), a well-known animal husbandry base in Linfen, where a meeting was held at the biggest pig farm of the county, run by a woman, Yan Cuifeng. On the third day, the participants met together with the leading party and government officials of Linfen, leading county government officials, representatives of rural women entrepreneurs and village women as well as women’s federations at a conference hall in the Linfen government seat. After government officials discussed their plans for rural restructuring, representatives of rural women responded on the plans and raised the issues they had encountered. At the Conference there was the woman Vice Mayor of Linfen as well as women leaders of various women’s federations, including the president of the Shanxi Women’s Federation and a section chief of the All China Women’s Federation and directors of local Women’s Federations.² These women leaders soon found affinity with each other and formed an alliance on discussions of issues rural women face. These discussions revealed that rural women were aware of the need to overcome the existing rural structures that buttress gender discrimination and are a hindrance to their participation in rural restructuring and improvement of their competitiveness.³ They have learned from experience that restructuring to promote the development of modern agricultural production would affect not only the course of rural development but also the advancement of rural women. This development is more based on economic association and cooperation in technological application and industrial organization from farming to processing and sales. It also leads to a way to address the ‘three rural problems’, especially when the government increases agricultural subsidies, eliminates agricultural taxes, protects farmland and most of all addresses gender discrimination through restructuring the household-based agricultural production.⁴ Women participants especially pointed out that the government can help rural women overcome the challenges by increasing women’s access to resources, including land, credit, training, technology, information and government funded social assistance, and adopt policies to support women’s economic cooperation and reduce their burden for social reproduction. The government can also help rural women become equal partners in restructuring rural economies and adopting rural development policies to strengthen social security systems based on cooperative principles.⁵ Only when women are equal partners can they benefit equitably from economic advancement and can rural development be socially equitable and economically sustainable.

This chapter examines the literature on cooperatives and on challenges rural women have in reference to the discussions at the Linfen Conference. This examination provides an alternative perspective on the future of rural economic cooperative organizations to the existing literature presented by Chinese researchers and academicians (Jin Xiangrong 2002; Xia Yongxiang et al. 2002). These Chinese views, though they recognized the useful role of rural cooperatives voluntarily organized by farm households, were uncertain about whether these rural cooperatives, including rural shareholding cooperatives, could have a promising future. The reason is partly that many rural cooperatives, whether in farming, animal raising, processing or sales, cannot establish their legal status due, in large part, to a lack of legislation on rural cooperatives.⁶ They have to defend their operations against the influence of local governments, be it state owned agricultural regulators (companies), state influenced supply and sales cooperatives, or local government supported township and village enterprises (TVEs) and credit cooperatives. They also face competition from private companies and foreign conglomerates. Though these views vary from recommending the adoption of policy to protect the development of rural cooperatives (Huang Zuhui et al. 2002; Guo Hongdong 2002) to choosing to give priorities for development to TVEs and private companies (Xia Yongxiang et al. 2002), they commonly neglect one important factor in rural development in China today, namely the interest of rural women who are in the front line of agricultural production. This chapter will extend existing studies of rural women in China by both Chinese and western scholars as it considers the role of rural women not only in poverty reduction and rural economic reforms but also their role in modernizing agriculture and a more open and participatory rural society.⁷

Gender inequalities in rural development

In China in recent years, farm households have become more specialized in producing goods for markets. Specialized households have also started to cooperate or form shareholding companies, in order to meet market demands from in and outside of China, breaking through the boundaries of small-scale, household-based production and seeking higher economic returns and rural income. For example, there has been cooperation between households with technical expertise and those with land but perhaps without expertise or labour. Such cooperation allows farm households to reach a higher scale of production and to reduce costs and risks at the individual level in the access to markets. This cooperation has a potential to increase jobs as well as income from business and land lease. There are cooperative organizations that are voluntarily formed by farm households or organized with the support of local governments. Associations of specialized households are one kind of cooperative organization organized by farm households. They intend to meet the needs of farmers to work together to locate services that are necessary for them to enter markets. To meet farmers’ demands for cooperation in market information, technology, investment and skilled labour, local governments have also organized Township and Village Enterprises (TVEs) and local government agencies to provided needed services to support this marketization of agriculture. These local governments’ responses started off a process of restructuring rural economies with a goal to industrialize agriculture whose production is oriented towards open markets. This process of restructuring offers opportunities to rural women but there are also many challenges and obstacles to overcome.

One of the challenges is rural women’s unequal access to land and other productive resources. Local governments’ policies to promote TVEs or government agencies as ‘lead enterprises’ popularly known as ‘dragonhead enterprises’, in heading rural restructuring efforts also is a challenge to rural women. Such policies sometimes have a tendency to extend the gender disparity between women, who are concentrated in labour intensive farming and raising animals (apart from their social reproduction responsibilities), and men who dominate enterprises or agencies in processing and sales. Rural women thus remain at the lower end of the value chain of production while men dominate the higher end of this chain having bigger returns. Women’s income is not only comparatively lower than men’s but it is also used for covering the costs of social reproduction. The conference in Linfen indicated that this is a serious challenge not only to rural women but also to the growth of agriculture. To confront the challenges, there is a need for more conferences like the one in Linfen in order that rural women can participate in policy discussions. In this section, I will review the situations, in comparison with developed countries, with economic cooperation among rural farm households as they were discussed at the Linfen Conference. This review is followed by an analysis of the challenges to rural women in rural restructuring.

Types of rural cooperation in China

According to the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, there were a total of 1.4 million specialized cooperative organizations in 2002, among which 100,000 had reached a significant scale of operation having access to outside markets. These cooperatives were in farming (63.1 percent), animal husbandry (19.4 percent), manufacture processing (2.4 percent) and transportation (3.7 percent).⁸ They provided services that were largely centered on the provision of productive technology and information, and processing and sales of agricultural and animal products. Other services also include purchase of productive material, agricultural machinery and utilization of irrigation. There is, undoubtedly, room for growth of cooperative organizations in China both in widening its networks and in the integration of services. More growth is possible as is indicated by the cooperative development in the developed world, where modern agriculture expands on networks of integrated organizations, owned and governed by their members, providing diverse services to agriculture from farming through processing to sales.⁹ These services include the organizing and use of capital, technology and productive material as well as counseling on technological application, business management and information during production, and also in post production, processing, transportation and sales of products as well as analysis for planning and forecasting the next cycle of production. Japanese farmers, for example, on average borrow 60 percent of their loans from agricultural cooperatives; 80 percent if one takes into consideration government loans administered by the agricultural cooperatives. In France, farmers borrow up to 90 percent of their loans from credit cooperatives. In the United States, moreover, cooperatives supply 20 percent of total demand for agricultural productive material to farmers. In Japan, cooperatives provide farmers 42.1 percent of the animal feed, 93.8 percent of the fertilizers, 70 percent of the pesticides, and 47.5 percent of the agricultural machinery that farmers need. In France, cooperatives supply over half of the productive material to farmers. Further, in Japan, farmers sell 90 percent of the grain and 50 percent of the animal, fruit and vegetable products through cooperatives. Cooperatives in Europe also have a strong tradition in the sales of agricultural products. Cooperatives sell 70 percent of farmers’ grain in France, and in Denmark, 91 percent of farmers’ pork, 87 percent of milk and 65 percent of the fruit and vegetable are sold through cooperatives. In the United States, 80 percent of the farmers join marketing cooperatives, which handle one-third of the sales of agricultural and other related products.¹⁰

In China, the process of restructuring agricultural labour force from actual production to services for agriculture is just underway. As agricultural production becomes more based on technological application and as market demands grow for higher quality and more processed products, less labour will be needed in agricultural production but more will be needed in services before and after agricultural production. There have been more men than women moving from farming and animal husbandry to services in technological applications and marketing. Local governments have slowly recognized such a movement and their response to encourage women to participate has been even slower (Lanyan Chen 1999). Based on the discussions and the surveys conducted in each local area before the conference at Linfen, one can differentiate six types of cooperative organizations operating in the countryside, each of which could bring about women’s economic participation. They, however, challenge rural women especially when these women were pushed to the low paid, labour intensive end of the value production and assigned with reproductive tasks without government funded support.

The first type of cooperative organizations, the most popular and with a strong participation of rural women, is developed around a highly competent and ‘capable woman’ (‘Nu Nengren’ or ‘Nu Nengshou’), or man. This person is experienced in a line of production and has successful experience in marketing and most importantly, has leadership skills in influencing others and is willing to extend her skills and knowledge to other women. This ‘capable woman’ (or man) often led other rural women and men into cooperation upon forming an association of specialized households through which she extended her skills and knowledge. Other women and men who learned the technical skills and received material supply (such as seed, stock or piglets) and sales services were able to benefit from the cooperation with the ‘capable woman’ and achieved a higher level of economic return. Through such cooperation in some areas rural women and men were able to develop a chain of production from primary products to marketing and increased the socialization of services to agricultural production.

Cui Xiaofang of Zhang’s Village in Fushan County, Linfen, with whom the participants of the conference in Linfen visited, led one association of specialized households in raising rabbits and is a typical example. She invested 400,000 Yuan in a rabbit raising company with a capacity of producing good stock and raising 2600 rabbits. She mobilized 35 women in nine nearby villages to work together in an association. She provided these women, who worked from their own homes, with bunnies and the technical know-how to raise them. She then bought the adult rabbits from them to produce fur in her fur processing factory. Each household earned 30,000 Yuan that year and her company earned 150,000 Yuan.¹¹ Jinxing Company Group is another example in Linfen where the president, Zhang Shoufa, played an important role in forming the association of animal raising households. Through the association he reached out and organized many households specializing in raising animals to form a larger scale of production. He headed the biggest animal raising household in the township, which owned two feed processing factories. He benefited largely through the association when he sold feed to other members of the association, who in turn enjoyed easier access to markets through him and were supplied with feed at a competitive price. Associations like these not only engage in business among members but also provide linkages between members and other private businesses.

The second type of cooperation is based on a ‘lead enterprise’ that heads a line of production by its comparative advantage in raw material supply, technology, and/or marketing. This enterprise has strong capacity in technological development and market expansion. It forms cooperation agreements with farm households through contracting or subcontracting, both the enterprise and the farm households are independent entities managing resources on its own. The farm households receive from the enterprise orders of supply and the enterprise helps farm households with marketing, technology and market information. This type of cooperation is sometimes initiated by the ‘lead enterprise’ and other times with the support of local governments.

Li Xiulan, and her Qingqing Food Processing Company Ltd. in Linfen is a good example. Ms Li’s private enterprise formed cooperation agreements with farm households in the area to turn some 800,000 tons of fresh fruit into marketable drinks and candies or dry fruit. Li in 1987 thought of starting a factory to make biscuits utilizing local wheat in the Dongzhuang Village, into which she was married. No one in her husband’s family supported her idea and even had doubts that she, as a woman, could set up a factory. She went to Wenzhou in Zhejiang province to learn the skill with 2000 Yuan she borrowed from her relatives and started an operation in her natal village in Houma Town. By the end of 1998 she earned accumulatively 1.5 million Yuan and was celebrated as a successful woman entrepreneur and invited to become a member of the local Political Consultative Conference. Through her participation in political consultation, she decided to start a fruit processing operation when she witnessed nearby farm households experiencing a drastic loss of income from overproduction. She built a factory for three million Yuan in Houma Town in 1999 and used local products including apples, apricots, pears, peaches, walnuts, dates, potatoes and yam totaling 30 million tons in 2001. She created her own brand and made a profit of 1.34 million Yuan in 2001 and donated 150,000 for poverty reduction and building roads. She helped farm households earn a total of eight million Yuan. More and more farm households from other towns wanted to sell their fruits to her factory. She also created jobs for 40 local unemployed youth, 20 laid off workers and ten disabled persons, 80 percent of whom were women.¹²

Another example of this type of cooperation is from mountainous Fenxi County, one of the targeted counties in the state poverty reduction programme, where the participants of the conference in Linfen visited. In 2001, the Fenxi government started the poverty reduction project to encourage village women to develop a courtyard production that made use of the biogas generated by the fermentation of animal and household wastes.¹³ This project improved the farm households’ living conditions with the use of biogas lighting, a more sanitary latrine, and a biogas stove to replace the open hearth. The county government used its technical extension programme to set up a technical team to help individual households design and build a fermentation cell nearby a stable, an orchard and/or a greenhouse. When village women began to earn an income from selling their products, including pigs, fruits and vegetables, the county government decided to start a food processing operation to help the village women with processing. This food processing operation set up by the county government encouraged more village women to join the poverty reduction project and to start a courtyard-based production.¹⁴

The third type of cooperative organizations is organized largely by local women’s federations for the development of cooperation focusing on software, such as information and technology. This type of cooperation is headed by women technicians who are farmers themselves but supported by local governments’ technological research agencies, such as the County Bureau of Agricultural Technology, or in the provincial capitals’ universities and research institutes. Through these women technicians who teach skills and do field demonstrations, other rural women receive technical guidance and services and increase their agricultural production with the application of science. This type of cooperation tends to be organized around facilitating cooperation in production, technological research and training, business and free services and advice. With the support of local women’s federations these nonprofit associations are able to reach out to more rural women and operate regular discussions and demonstrations. These associations first arose during the campaign on ‘Double Learning and Contests’ beginning in the mid-1980s by the All China Women’s Federations all across the countryside, in which rural women were encouraged to learn how to read and understand technical information and to compete for higher skilled jobs and contribute to local development (for example, see Ellen Judd 1994; Chen 1999). This organized learning among rural women became widespread in all the provinces, including the three represented at the conference in Linfen, and provides an example of how rural women c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Gender and the ‘three rural problems’
• 2 Gender and industrial reforms: from ownership restructuring to social protection
• 3 Gender and the family planning policy: ‘population security’ free from sex selection
• 4 Chinese women in decision making: from grassroots governance to national politics
• Conclusion
• Notes
• List of abbreviations
• Bibliography