Transitions Environments Translations

Feminisms in International Politics

Joan W. Scott, Cora Kaplan, Debra Keates

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135237639
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The essays in Transitions, Environments, Translations explore the varied meanings of feminism in different political, cultural, and historical contexts. They respond to the claim that feminism is Western in origin and universalist in theory, and to the assumption that feminist goals are self-evident and the same in all contexts. Rather than assume that there is a blueprint by which to measure the strength or success of feminism in different parts of the world, these essays consider feminism to be a site of local, national and international conflict. They ask: What is at stake in various political efforts by women in different parts of the world? What meanings have women given to their efforts? What has been their relationship to feminism--as a concept and as an international movement? What happens when feminist ideas are translated from one language, one political context, to another?

< part one >

Women and the State

After State Socialism

< 1 >

Finding a Language

Feminism and Women’s Movements in Contemporary China

Lin Chun

The pioneer literature bearing the new feminist consciousness produced by a few women scholars and novelists in China had a distinct voice in the general humanist and individualist turn of the country’s political and cultural discourse immediately after the Cultural Revolution in the late 1970s. But it was not until the mid-1980s that a more or less autonomous wave of women’s activities—organizational as well as intellectual—emerged.

There were, of course, existing government organs of “women’s work,” which were, however, never completely integrated into the state power structure. In fact, the first National Conference on Women’s Issues (1984), which addressed the social impact of economic reforms on women’s work and life, was jointly convened by the official All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF) and several universities and research institutes. The new market-oriented environment not only directly affected women, but also posed a challenge to the established ideology of gender equality. Indeed, it was expected that the Women’s Federation should side with its traditional constituency to resist, above all, the imminent threat of female unemployment. The next meeting with even more organizers and participants from nongovernment institutions or as independent individuals/collectives, was held in 1985. The first book series on women’s studies appeared in 1986, and the first university research center was set up in 1987; it was soon followed by a number of others. The first feminist international conference in China outside the reach of ACWF occurred in 1990. By the early 1990s, many more women, mainly urban but also rural, had been involved in what might be now called nascent women’s movements. These included self-organized discussion and support groups, training schools, conferences, telephone hotlines, radio talk shows, various cultural undertakings, oral history projects, professional associations, publication and translation initiatives, and the introduction of relevant college courses. Thanks to these developments, the government is now under greater pressure than ever before, since its reforms have been justified in terms of the interests of the entire population, including women.

Apart from the autonomous women’s movements, feminist politics is now also visible especially in the People’s Congress. Female deputies at both the national and local levels are in a stronger position to advocate prowomen policies and regulations. They make up 21 percent of the congress and, at the very least, are able to coordinate their efforts to speak on behalf of women in demanding realization of what the government has claimed or promised to do in various new laws and in commitments made to the international community to improve women’s conditions and to protect children. Also remarkable is that some deputies have been actively involved in women’s studies and other activities.¹

The fourth United Nations Women’s Conference, held in Beijing in 1995, was a far-reaching and unusual event for the Chinese. It was taken by the government as a matter of state, and the administrative and propaganda machines were duly mobilized to ensure its security and success (as seen by the authorities). This caused unexpected difficulties for those who were involved in the task of organizing, as well as distortions of the original intention and messages of the conference. But from a different perspective, the conference’s scenes and themes enjoyed a high profile and immense publicity. Consequently the “women question,” as it is customarily called in China, was further politicized and attracted attention from wide-ranging social circles throughout the country. Moreover, it was a rare chance for most Chinese participants (over five thousand) to exchange views with women from other parts of the globe. Another invaluable experience was to learn about NGOs: Although the word was familiar to the Chinese participants, both the literal meaning of the term and the discussion of NGO-type activities were introduced into China for the first time as a result of the conference. There were also other important gains at different levels, including increased legitimacy for women’s studies and increased pressure on the government to improve conditions of female existence. Thus, despite all the clashes and setbacks evoked around the conference, the Chinese women’s movements profited from it and, as a result, are continuing to advance with a greater sense of political and moral urgency.

How can we explain the emergence of autonomous women’s movements? They were certainly enabled by two parallel processes: a significant retreat of the state and a rapid expansion of the market. The current women’s movements would not have emerged without the post-1978 economic reform and its political and social consequences. The reform has had two basic effects: On the one hand, it has dismantled some of the actual policy arrangements for protecting women and thus also the ideology of universal emancipation, creating new barriers to liberation. On the other hand, the reform has also opened up unprecedented opportunities for women’s self-organization and self-realization in the autonomous spheres outside the state’s control. At first glance the negative side appears to be overwhelming. In the marketplace, women are more and more frequently turned into sexual objects, exploited, discriminated against, and abused. Dictates of “economic rationality” are beginning to prevail. Echoing the logical realities of the market, liberal intellectuals have emerged to attack the already diminished social commitment to egalitarianism. For them, the price of socialist gender equality has proven to be too high when measured by the efficiency principle, and henceforth gender inequality can and must be rejustified. On the grounds of a “natural” gender division of labor, these intellectuals suggest that women should happily return home “by choice”; that this is also the only way out of the now mounting umemployment predicament should be acknowledged.²

Women’s movements rejected these views and resisted regression in female working and living conditions. It is here that the positive side of postreform social changes also manifests itself. In the space no longer occupied by the state and its ideologies, autonomous activities, fresh information, unfamiliar concepts, and, indeed, free thinking flourish. Women welcomed these changes because they brought new possibilities for action. Their position is necessarily contradictory: They lost preferential treatment by the state but gained freedom and independence in their relationship to the state. It is in this space of contradiction that women’s movements in China have positioned themselves in order to explore and renovate the meaning of liberation.

“FEMINISM”

These developments, from the growth of women’s studies in the universities and other research institutes to the wider political-social activities for women’s rights and interests, are recent phenomena compared to what has taken place in Europe, the United States and many “third world” countries. The belated formation of women’s movements in China, and many of their peculiarities, can be explained only by China’s unique historical trajectory, which has precluded a separate feminist politics. Modern Chinese history was, at least in part, a history of simultaneous revolutionary struggles against both external imperialist powers and domestic “feudal” traditions. In these struggles women’s emancipation was synonymous with national and social emancipation. Consequently male domination has not been a separate problem for universal nationalist or socialist agendas. The idea of “modernization” has inspired many different movements. Both the earlier Republican revolution, which involved the heroic participation of educated women, and the later Communist mobilization of women workers and peasants claimed to be “modern.” The official postrevolutionary definition of women’s work and the present women’s movements for self-determination are also on the side of modernity. Modernization, without being linked with any particular theoretical or actual models in the West, has served the Chinese as a sign, signifying a just alternative to a traditional past when women were always at the bottom of society. The emancipation of women thus was an indicator of modernity. By this standard, the Communists can be seen as the most effective modernizers.

But surely “liberating women” differs from “women’s (self)-liberation,” and new research has revealed how “traditional” the Communists have actually been in their own gender politics.³ But the point here is that the country accomplished an epic revolution, one that made a tremendous difference in women’s lives. To begin with, there was a well-conceived unity but also a hidden tension between women’s and universal liberation, and this has haunted modern Chinese reformers and revolutionaries from the outset. Chinese Communism in its embryonic stage chose the figure of a woman as the icon for all that needed to be saved in an imminent social crisis. The nation was engendered in political discourse as a raped and crippled female now ready to rebel. The revolution took Confucian ethics as its principal target and strongly aligned itself with a political critique of ancient patriarchalism. In this configuration, women’s emancipation was to be essential to national salvation. A key step toward both was the abolition of a landlord system organized around clanship, which also formed the local regime allied with the imperialist power. Accordingly, overthrowing the oppression of women by clan authority and male domination in the family was an articulated goal of the revolution itself, in which vast numbers of women participated.⁴ In this sense the Communist revolution was also intrinsically “feminist,” although it was careful to distinguish its women’s emancipation from the “bourgeois” feminism of the West.

There are two rather contradictory outcomes of such a Communist feminism. On the one hand, there was the development of a socialist state that was women-friendly, but on the other hand, because this state took responsibility for women’s salvation, there also developed a dependence on the state that trapped the female population (along with the urban working class). After all, the postrevolutionary society did not achieve a democratic system capable of sustaining individual—either male or female—rights, civil liberties, or full citizenship. Thus, even if it is true that Chinese women enjoyed formal gender equality, they still shared with their fellow countrymen a place of dependency. The social consensus on equality expressed in official and popular rhetoric, as well as in legal and policy formulations, coexisted with the subordination of the people to the Party. As such, socialism was conceived in statist and paternalistic terms; women’s liberation, and for that matter all social liberation, was fundamentally limited.

The lessons we may draw from the ambiguous experiences of Chinese women include this: Socialism ought to be analyzed not in terms of its suppression of any “genuine,” essential female subject, but in terms of its core internal contradictions between the ideas of liberation and subordination, self-mastery and selfless submission, democratic participation and passive dependence. However, it is not the case that the twentieth-century trajectory of Chinese women through the revolutions and socialist experiments is a story of top-down “imposed” liberation, as some argue these days. It is fairer to acknowledge women’s own contribution to the Party-led liberation process and its real achievements as well as its fundamental limits. To realize that voluntary and political participation does not necessarily imply empowerment is to see how the language and project of liberation got lost or hijacked by the ideology of “inevitable socialist advancement.” This explains why a collective consciousness that might have been described as feminist did not arise in China until very recently. Feminism had little space to develop in a society where a monopolized political education embraced the principle of gender equality and deemed its female members to be already liberated. It is therefore understandable why all but a tiny minority of urban intellectuals under Western and/or Russian influence (mainly in the 1910s and the 1920s) found feminism an alien concept.

LIVING WITH CONTRADICTIONS

As mentioned earlier, the current women’s movements in China are a product of the contradictory social conditions brought about by recent economic and political reforms. These reforms have changed the relationship between the project of women’s liberation and the state, both of which are undergoing transformation. These conditions, in turn, shape and are reflected in the patterns of conflict within the movements.

The changing relationship between women and the state is best exemplified by the changes of and uncertainty felt among those who are involved in women’s studies and gender politics. What is to be made of such government statements as “the All-China Women’s Federation is a Chinese Communist Party mass organization… [and] is the largest women’s NGO in China” (February 1995)? Historically the Women’s Federation has been either powerless when it lacked official sponsorship or powerful when it had the backing of the state (as during the land reform campaigns) or served as its representative (as during the 1995 UN conference). The ACWF was never part of the state machinery, but could be an extension of it. Still, the process of having actually prepared the NGO forums for the UN conference began to transform the Women’s Federation into an NGO. It seems possible that, coincident with a more general liberalization and decentralization process, the ACWF would become a more or less independent women’s association on a par with other organized groups and NGOs. Indeed, compared with the still politically paralyzed All-China Federation of Trade Unions, another “Communist Party mass organization,” the ACWF seems to be well on the track to autonomy and real empowerment.

Ever since the campaign for “protecting the rights and interests of women and children” was launched by the Women’s Federation, the growing women’s movements in China have benefited not only from the strong and devoted participation of their many members, but also from the institutional support that the Women’s Federation and its nationwide network could supply. Yet the gap between a state-sponsored organization and those individuals and groups who seek political independence remains deep and inevitable. There are divisions, and at times also bitter disputes, between the ACWF’s central office in Beijing and activists who collaborate with the provincial and local branches of the Women’s Federation. Retaining their inherited ties with the official institutions whose support is often still crucial, the women’s movements on the whole are no longer directed by the Party. They have created a space for independent thinking and communicating, for political initiatives and activity—a “public sphere” (the term is just beginning to make sense for the Chinese)—and hence for a truly democratic citizenship. In contrast to what is happening in Eastern Europe, these new public spheres in China appear to have, at least at this stage, a feminist rather than a masculinist character.

It is worth noting that women’s studies in China has been for the most part oriented toward empirical research and aimed at the production of immediate policy formulations or reformulations in the People’s Congress and the State Council. They have taken up issues such as discrimination in job recruiting; effects of village and township enterprises on the lives of rural women; conditions for women migrant workers and ethnic minority women; the dropout rate of schoolgirls; women’s education, health and labor conditions; domestic violence and other forms of abuse that particularly affect women; women’s human rights and legal reform; sexuality, marriage and the family (particularly questions of population...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• < part one > WOMEN AND THE STATE
• < part two > ECONOMICS AND ENVIRONMENTS
• < part three > RACE AND DIFFERENCE
• < part four > WOMEN'S STUDIES/GENDER STUDIES
• Contributors