Gender and Work in Urban China – Women Workers in Urban China

Citation

Egan, C. (2013), "Gender and Work in Urban China – Women Workers in Urban China", Gender in Management, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 63-66. https://doi.org/10.1108/17542411311301574

Introduction

Sociologist Liu Jieyu's book offers an intimate, insightful retelling of gender evolution in China over the last 50 years of the twentieth century. Jieyu's approach to Chinese women's history uses a focused personal lens to project a wider cultural picture. She constructs this view by layering three insightful approaches. First, Jieyu uses qualitative personal interviews to draw out reflective narratives from “ordinary” Chinese women who modestly assume that they have nothing worthwhile to share. Next, she places women of the “unlucky generation” at the centre of the story to compare and contrast the gender expectations placed on these women versus their mothers and their daughters. Finally, Jieyu challenges the reader, particularly academics and feminists, to reconsider everything we think we know about gender parity in socialist China at the end of the century.

One of Jieyu's initial challenges was being both an insider (of Chinese descent) and outsider (University of New York graduate student) attempting to collect the narratives of Chinese women of the unlucky generation, defined roughly as women born in the early 1950s to poor and working‐class families who experienced famine, lack of education, one‐child policy, forced labor, and redundancy, all during the first 40 years of their lives. Many of the women she contacted did not consider their stories important and many more were understandably concerned about repercussions for speaking critically of the Chinese Government. Women who were motivated to participate tended to misconstrue the research as a journalism interview, felt their participation would help their daughters' educational pursuits, were doing a favor for the intermediary who connected them to the interviewer, or wanted to play matchmaker for Jieyu. In addition to these challenges, Jieyu also found some of the participants' daughters reluctant to participate. These sampling issues may affect her interviewees' representativeness of other Chinese women and their daughters who were not motivated to participate. To compound her struggles even more, she launched her field research in March of 2003 to be interrupted by the Chinese SARS epidemic. Despite these hurdles, Jieyu conducted interviews with 33 unlucky generation Chinese women, plus 22 daughters. Jieyu strategically selected Nanjing as the field location since it is “the capital of the south” with 6 million people, including these 33 women who had worked in the city for years only to be forced out at middle age (p. 13).

What marks the unlucky generation as unique in their struggle is that they seemed to always be at the wrong age at the wrong place at the wrong time. During their childhood development, they suffered through a three‐year famine; when they were school‐age, they were forced to leave school to live and work in the countryside with the peasants; as they began to start their families, their reproduction was dictated by the government's one‐child policy; when they joined the workforce because they were told the country needed them, they were made redundant when they most wanted to work. Jieyu adeptly sums up their experience in the words of one interviewee Jing Xia:

Our generation has run into everything in our life. When we should receive education, we didn't have the chance, only graduated from primary school. When we started work only at 15 or 16, we worked three‐shift rotations, destroying our health. When you tried to study something, the three‐shift rotation prevented you from it. Later, when you could devote yourself at 40, the factory went down and you were laid off […]. I feel our whole life is miserable enough (p. 2).

Collectivist personal narratives: the danwei

Of note in Jing Xia's description of her personal experience, is that she expresses it as a collective experience, in keeping with both pluralistic Chinese culture and characteristically feminine speech styles (Ting‐Toomy and Chung, 2011; Wood, 2012). Jieyu astutely observes that the concept of danwei, the work group that influences professional and personal choices of workers, shaped the life events of these women and how they came to perceive these events. According to Bian, as cited by Jieyu, the danwei represented the individual worker, not only in professional life, but in personal, political, and social welfare life as well (Bian, 1994).

The danwei also illustrates the disconnect between rhetoric and reality in the lives of these interviewees. The rhetorical danwei was a successful socialist model of community support where workers relied on and cared for each other. Rhetorically, it was also a surrogate family, potentially a more liberating one where women would be freer of the sexism of the traditional Chinese patriarchal structure. In reality, the danwei possessed all of the obvious conflicts of any group of people living and working in close proximity whose choices significantly impacted one another. And while it did extend the notion of family beyond biology to a functional family unit, the women interviewed reveal that sex discrimination, inequality, and family status were ever‐present in the most routine aspects of their lives.

To illustrate the reality of danwei work and life pressures on these women, three narratives speak to male favoritism, endangering pregnancy, and work‐family pressures. Jing Xia recalls this common, pervasive gender inequality in a spinning factory:

There were very few men there, all women. So these men, if possessing a few more skills, would be transferred to work in the office […] If one out of ten [female spinners] could become a leader, that would be terrific. All those promoted were men (p. 45).

Another concern for women workers was handling dangerous chemicals during pregnancy, yet feeling as if they had no choice or voice. Song Yuming confides:

Even when I was pregnant with my daughter, I still dealt with potassium hydroxide and other chemical acid. If I hadn't been working with such stuff, my daughter would've been cleverer. At that time, with a big belly, I was carrying all kinds of acid around (p. 47).

As a final example, Guan Guohua addresses how her desire for professional success was incongruent with family obligations and expectations:

I could bear hardships and stand hard work. I took so much overtime work. At one time, my father‐in‐law was in hospital, I was too busy to visit him before he passed away. My mother‐in‐law couldn't understand and got cross with me (p. 49).

These recollections and many others included in the book demonstrate that danwei was not a gender‐neutral utopia as the government rhetoric propagandized, but a complex interpersonal, cultural drama with women making the best choices they could for themselves and each other under the circumstances.

The unlucky generation and their daughters

The themes shared above of women's struggles in the workplace and in family life are not unique to China or the unlucky generation, but are universal, without borders or time. What makes these experiences distinct is the extent to which these women's place and time continuously disadvantaged them through malnutrition, lack of education, family control, factory work conditions, and forced redundancy. Rather than be content to simply capture these fascinating life stories, Jieyu searches for lessons learned by these women which they in‐turn pass down to their own daughters. The daughters' generation begins with those born after the 1979 mandated one‐child policy whose families and opportunities were considerably different from those of their mothers. The first distinction is that the mothers as children were responsible for looking after their siblings, taking on adult responsibilities while still children themselves. By contrast, being only children allowed the daughters the benefits of being the center of attention and prolonging the freedom of childhood. Second, the mothers' lack of formal educational opportunity spurred them to prioritize schooling for their daughters. Wei Xinhua gives this heart‐rendering proclamation:

Our hope now is for her to be successful […] [W]e will try our best, whatever she wants to learn, I will provide. This is because at the time when I wanted to continue studying, I couldn't do it. Now if she wants to, I will spare no effort (p. 126).

While the mothers' sacrifice for their daughters' success is admirable, this ceaseless service comes with a hidden price for the daughters: lack of independence, toughness, and skills. As daughter Qian, age 21, admits:

I can't do the housework very well. I don't touch any domestic work at all. My parents don't allow me to either. They are very protective of me. For example, if I boil water, my parents are afraid that I might be poisoned by a gas leak. Even now whenever I am alone at home, they unplug every electrical appliance before they leave the house (p. 127).

Beyond the lack of domestic skills, the daughters feel tremendous responsibility for carrying the hope of happiness their mothers have placed upon them. They speak of freedom and opportunity, yet anxiety and pressure. Daughter Song summarizes:

Most of us still inherited our parents' viewpoints, but in our heart, we are very confused. We want a breakthrough but we also question if it will bring about the total acceptance of Western ideas […] We think a lot but are not courageous in action (pp. 136‐7).

Through interviews with the daughters of the unlucky generation, Jieyu believes this current generation of Chinese women is both empowered and confused as they rectify their mothers' pasts with their own futures.

Reconsidering gender in China

Jieyu's research not only aims to enlighten the mothers and daughters she interviewed about the personal and cultural significance of their life experiences, but to educate or re‐educate Western readers as well. She notes that most Western readers familiar with autobiographical accounts of the unlucky generation gained this insight from Chang's (1993) Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, Mu's (2002) Vermillion Gate, and Yang's (1997) Spider Eaters. While these texts are powerful, important works, Jieyu cautions that the writers are not representative of everyday Chinese women during this period. These authors had elite status that allowed them educational and emigration opportunities not afforded by Jieyu's interviewees who spent their lives living, working, and raising families in the Nanjing area. Jieyu has given a voice to those women who previously could not speak for themselves. She also allows us a different perspective to view with anticipation as the daughters of the unlucky generation find their own voices to add to the cultural conversation on gender, work, and life.