Gender and Generation in China Today

Harriet Bjerrum Nielsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000429411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines how gender and generational relations have been influenced by the vast changes in the Chinese society since the start of the Reform era in 1978. It offers a short introduction to China's recent development and the relationship between Chinese and Nordic gender research. Three articles in the book focus on how the developments in the Reform era have produced generational changes in feminist politics, in the labour market, and between young people and their parents – and what impacts these changes have for gender relations. Two articles investigate changes in middle-class motherhoods and fatherhoods towards more emphasis on intimacy and love between parents and child, but often in asynchronicity with traditional gender roles among the parents. In addition, the book comprises a review of a recent volume about transforming Chinese patriarchy, and an essay reflecting on what the implications for Nordic/Western gender studies of China's increasing presence and influence globally as well as in the Nordic region could or should be.

This book is a significant new contribution to gender studies and politics, and will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Literature, History, Sociology, Politics, and Gender.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of NORA—Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research.

From “Non-governmental Organizing” to “Outer-system”—Feminism and Feminist Resistance in Post-2000 China

Qi Wang

ABSTRACT

In post-2000 China, both the frontiers and the landscape of feminism and feminist resistance have changed, and this change embodies a move away from the “non-governmental organizing” path that characterized the development of feminism during the 1980s and 1990s. This article addresses this “paradigm shift” in Chinese feminism by examining the “outer-system” political stand of post-2000 feminism and their domains of action through performance art, philanthropic volunteerism, and cyberfeminist articulations. These novel modes of feminist protest in the absence of a formal organizational structure challenge our understanding of feminism as a process of “non-governmental organizing” in public space and warrant a cultural analysis to shed light on how feminism engages in cultural contestation and subversion, often in semiprivate and semipublic spaces, in order to develop new and alternative cultural patterns and interpretive frames.

Abbreviations CPPCC The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference WF The All-China Women’s Federation

Question:You are a feminist and you are still quite young. Are you or do you consider yourself to be one of the young feminist activists in China today?

Answer:No, I am not one of them. I am a feminist, a scholar and a member of the Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). I put forward law proposals, focusing on how to bring about changes from within through changing governmental policies.

Interview with a Shanghai-based feminist scholar S

“I am a feminist from nowhere” (我是在野的女权主义者) (Zeng, 2016, p. 44). “If China one day allows more political parties to exist, I will set up a women’s party … I would like to be the Chairperson of the Women’s Federation so long as ten thousand people would vote for me.”

Ye Haiyan (Zhao, 2017, n.p.)

The two women cited above are obviously feminists in different ways. While the former resides within formal academic and political institutions and is engaged in making changes from within, the latter is a feminist of her own kind, giving no respect to the system. This micro personal-level difference not only epitomizes the changing landscape in feminism and feminist resistance in post-2000 China but also provides a clue for us to understand this change.

For decades since the reform period began, bottom-up feminism in China has followed the path of non-governmental organizing in order to address women’s issues and feminist concerns (Hsiung, Jaschock, Milwertz, & Chen, 2001; Milwertz, 2002; Milwertz & Bu, 2007; Wesoky, 2002). These women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs), together with many other social organizations that blossomed under the relatively relaxed political climate of the early reform period, have become a symbol of the emerging “civil society” and hence a promising sign of democratic development in China (Brook & Frolic, 1997; Howell, 2003). Since the new millennium began, however, both the frontier and the landscape of feminism and feminist resistance in China have changed, and this change involves a move away from the “non-governmental organizing” path that NGO feminists had travelled during the 1980s and 1990s. While the women’s NGOs from that time are still alive and active in their own ways, post-2000 feminism demonstrates a different political profile and new modes of action.

This article examines this “paradigm shift” in Chinese feminism by considering two sets of interrelated questions. Firstly, if the frontier of Chinese feminism has changed and “non-governmental organizing” no longer represents what the new feminism is, then where does the frontier lie now, what alternatives has post-2000 feminism developed, and how has the change come about? Secondly, if feminism in post-2000 China, especially in the 2010s, no longer follows the path of non-governmental organizing, then where and through what channels and in what forms does feminism(s) manifest its existence and struggles? In a way, the new feminism in China resonates well with the global trend of young feminist activism exemplified by, for instance, queer performance, the Femen movement,¹ Pussy Riot, and Guerrilla Girls in the United States (Channell, 2014; Rhyner, 2015; Rosenberg, 2016). This study elucidates the specific Chinese conditions for the rise of the new feminism and its implications in the Chinese context.

In the following, I will devote two sections to the first question and one to the second question, ending with a conclusion in which I will briefly reflect upon some of the theoretical implications involved in the understanding of post-2000 feminism in China. The study is mainly based on published sources, including academic works on Chinese feminism, online articles, web news, and blog posts. In the article, the terms “post-2000 feminism” and “new feminism” will be used concurrently to refer to the wide spectrum of feminist protest taking place over the last two decades, especially during the 2010s. Emerging in the post-2000 epoch, new feminism contains first and foremost a generational dimension. It is feminism of the new generation and feminism that springs out of the new generation. In talking about feminist generations specifically, however, the notion of “new feminism” has been mainly associated with the Feminist Five² and the groups of young action-orientated activists who played a central role in the series of feminist protest events that took place around 2012 (Fincher, 2016; Jacobs, 2016; Tan, 2017; Wei, 2015). But feminist protest in today’s China extends across a wide spectrum, and not all active feminists are included in this “action-oriented” category. In this article, the term “post-2000 feminism” or “new feminism” refers to both the high-profile, action-oriented Feminist Five and their associates and to other scattered feminist articulations and resistances in everyday life.

Non-governmental organizing and “embedded activism”—the legacy of the older generation

Bottom-up feminism in China emerged during the process of opening-up and economic reforms in the 1980s. Set in motion by the post-Mao Chinese leadership to spur economic development, the reforms soon resulted in a retrenchment of state control and growing spaces for societal and economic lives, which in turn catalysed the sprouting of non-state-initiated feminism. Post-Mao bottom-up feminism comprises two wings: one is the academic Women’s Studies in the form of research centres and teaching programmes (Du, 2001; Hsiung, 2001; Li & Zhang, 1994; Min, 1999), and the other is the project-based women’s NGOs (Howell, 2003; Milwertz, 2002; Milwertz & Bu, 2007; Zhang, 2009). The latter began to emerge during the 1980s but gained momentum in the aftermath of the UN Fourth Women’s Conference in Beijing in 1995 (Hsiung & Wong, 1998; Wang, 1997; Zhang & Xu, 1995). In both cases, the development has followed a “non-governmental organizing” path through which feminists set up organizations and institutions and leveraged these organized platforms to address gender issues, educate the public, provide services, support women in vulnerable situations, and, ultimately, create social change.

Non-governmental organizing, however, has never been a smooth, straightforward, or even process. Not all organizing attempts have given birth to an organization, and not all the organizations that sprang up have developed equally tangible or solid forms. Some of the Women’s Studies centres and institutes, for instance, existed only on paper, with “no office, no budget and no administrative staff” (Hsiung, 2001, p. 441; Du, 2001), while others did not manage to survive for long. Nevertheless, decades of tenacious organizing efforts have left a clear imprint on the organizational landscape of reform China. Never having existed and impossible to exist before, Women’s Studies societies, associations, centres, and institutes proliferated, while project-based women’s NGOs mushroomed across the country. Some of these NGOs, with funding from international donor agencies, have grown into routine, robust, and influential players of gender politics. For the sake of simplicity, post-Mao feminism following the “non-governmental organizing” path can also be referred to as NGO feminism.

While feminist organizing disrupts the state ideological and organizational monopoly on women’s issues, the relationship between NGO feminists and the state is a symbiotic one. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the remarkable female individuals who rode the wave of non-governmental organizing were all formal state employees, as either university teachers/researchers or cadres from the state institution of women, the Women’s Federation (WF) and WF local branches. They were on the state payroll and enjoyed lifelong employment, which in Chinese is metaphorically known as having an “iron rice bowl”.³ Since the state did not pay them for running NGOs, these women simply moonlighted NGOs while performing their normal work duties (Du, 2001; Hsiung, 2001; Min, 1999). In doing so, they skilfully exploited their positions and the possibilities within the “the old socialist system” to the advantage of their NGO activities (Hsiung, 2001, p. 441). In the words of Li Xiaojiang, the pioneer of Women’s Studies in Chinese academia during the mid-1980s, “we were all parasitical to the old system”. And it is largely owing to this “parasitical relationship” that many of the emerging Women’s Studies programmes and NGOs at that time “could survive and develop” without “additional administrative cost, human and financial resources” (Hsiung, 2001, p. 441).

Thus, “an essential aspect of Chinese women’s organizing … entails a subtle choreography of exploiting opportunities, seizing new grounds, and floating with the current within as well as in-between Women’s Federation spaces” (Hsiung et al., 2001, p. 12). In the non-governmental organizing process, post-Mao feminists had cooperated to various degrees with the Women’s Federation, the state institution of women, and capitalized upon the resources and networks within the WF system. The Women’s Studies movement, for instance, had strategically utilized the “intraorganizational relationship” (Hsiung, 2001, p. 440) with the WF in order to carve out a space for the popular Women’s Studies programmes. Li Xiaojiang coined the term “two-route approach” to typify this feminist strategy of creating something new by taking advantage of the old system (Hsiung, 2001, p. 441). Post-Mao NGO feminists thus remained “non-governmental” in creating new organizational platforms, but the organizing process was premised on the condition that they were embedded in the state workplace system and cooperated with the party-state. Li and Li term this mode of feminist mobilization “embedded activism” (Li & Li, 2017, p. 57).

To stay “outer-system”: the new generation and the changing frontier in feminism

When post-2000 feminists entered the central stage of feminist protest in China in the new millennium, they acted upon a different political stand to distance themselves from both state feminism and the “embedded activism” of NGO feminism. Although “embedded activism” was neither state-driven nor a part of state feminism, the young feminists saw “embeddedness” as a problem in itself and refused to take on this “heritage”. They preferred to pursue their feminist activism on an independent and self-determining basis. This ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Gender and Generation in Times of Change in China
• 1 From “Non-governmental Organizing” to “Outer-system”—Feminism and Feminist Resistance in Post-2000 China
• 2 Increasing Employment Precariousness in Post-socialist China: Everyone Equal in a World of Uncertainty?
• 3 Filial Daughter? Filial Son? How China’s Young Urban Elite Negotiate Intergenerational Obligations
• 4 Feeding Mothers’ Love: Stories of Breastfeeding and Mothering in Urban China
• 5 Chinese Fathers in the Twentieth Century: Changing Roles as Parents and as Men
• 6 A New Generation of Sino-Nordic Gender Matters
• 7 Book Review: Transforming Chinese Patriarchy: Chinese Families in the Twenty-first Century
• Index