Gender And Work In Urban China

Drawing upon extensive life history interviews, this book makes the voices of ordinary women workers heard and applies feminist perspectives on women and work to the Chinese situation.

This book examines a three-way interaction among market, state, and family in China’s recent market reform. It depicts transformations in urban women’s experiences with both paid and non-paid domestic work. The book challenges China’s free-market approach and demonstrates its negative impacts on women’s work and family experiences by revealing labor commodification processes and work-to-family conflicts as the state abandons its commitment to public welfare. Using interview data collected from 165 women of three different cohorts in urban China during the 2000-2008 period, this study uncovers the revival of traditional gendered family roles among urban women and men as one of their strategies to resist market brutality and their struggles to balance work and family demands. The book also explores urban women’s non-market definitions of marital equality, and highlights theoretical and policy implications concerning market efficiency, marital equality, and the state’s role in protecting public good.

Based on in-depth ethnographic research - and using an approach that seeks to understand how migration is experienced by the migrants themselves - this is a fascinating study of the experiences of women in rural China who joined the vast migration to Beijing and other cities at the end of the twentieth century. It focuses on the experiences of rural-urban migrants, the particular ways in which they talk about those experiences, and how those experiences affect their sense of identity. Through first-hand accounts of actual migrant workers, the author provides valuable insights into how rural women negotiate rural/urban experiences; how they respond to migration and life in the city; and how that experience shapes their world view, values, and relations with others. The book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the relationship between gender and social change, and of the ways in which globalization and modernity are experienced at the most personal level.

This book offers a systematic analysis of the impact of work organization on the social stratification of individuals in urban China. It explains why economic and labor market segmentation is possible and necessary in state socialism at a certain stage of its development, as in market capitalism, and how important one's work unit or danwei is to the life of socialist workers in Chinese cities. Based on survey data, personal interviews, and official statistics, the author shows that structural allocation, status inheritance, educational achievement, political virtue, and interpersonal connections (guanxi) interplay in determining an individual's opportunities for entering and moving into a desirable place to work, for obtaining Communist party membership and an elite class status, and for receiving material compensation such as wages, bonuses, fringe benefits, housing, and home locations.

This book examines the dynamics of power within the families of married women who have migrated from rural areas to China's Dalian Economic Zone. Engaging the question of whether waged work gives women power in their families, this ethnographic study finds that women do indeed use their new positions and urban status to negotiate their family status. However, women use these new resources not necessarily to promote their own individual liberation, but rather to strengthen their contribution as wives and, especially, as mothers. Thus, this new modernity provides a space for the re-inscribing of traditional roles, even as it may work to give women new-found power within their families. How and why this process occurs is related to the dual inequalities these women face as rural migrants and as women.

This book studies the relationship between Islam, family processes, and gender inequality among Uyghur Muslims in Ürümchi, China. Empirically, it shows in quantitative terms the extent of gender inequalities among Uyghur Muslims in Ürümchi and tests whether the gender inequalities are a difference in kind or in degree. It examines five aspects of gender inequality: employment, income, household task accomplishment, home management, and spousal power. Theoretically, it investigates how Islamic affiliation and family life affect Uyghur women’s status. Zang’s research involved rare and privileged access to a setting which is difficult for foreign scholars to study due to political restrictions. The data are drawn from fieldwork in Ürümchi between 2005 and 2008, which include a survey of 577 families, field observations, and 200 in-depth interviews with local Uyghurs. The book combines qualitative and quantitative data and methods to study gendered behavior and outcomes. The author’s study reinterprets family power and offers a more nuanced analysis of gender and domestic power in China and makes a pioneering effort to study spousal power, gender inequality in labor market outcomes, and gender inequality in household chores among members of ethnic minorities in China. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of ethnic studies, Chinese studies, Asian anthropology and cultural sociology.

The essays in this volume explore various aspects of work in China, including the nature of work, gender inequalities in work, gender and work in the context of migration, and the reciprocal influences of households and work organization.