Harriet Evans

The Gender of Communication: Changing Expectations of Mothers and Daughters in Urban China

In the flow of the material, cultural and moral influences shaping contemporary Chinese society, individual desires for emotional communication are reconstituting the meaning of the subject, self and responsibility. This article draws on fieldwork conducted in Beijing between 2000 and 2004 to discuss the gendered dimensions of this process through an analysis of the implications of the “communicative intimacy” sought by mothers and daughters in their mutual relationship. What could be termed a “feminization of intimacy” is the effect of two distinct but linked processes: on the one hand, a market-supported naturalization of womens roles, and on the other, the changing subjective articulation of womens needs, desires and expectations of family and personal relationships. I argue that across these two processes, the celebration of a communicative intimacy does not signify the emergence of more equal family or gender relationships, as recent theories about the individualization and cultural democratization of daily life in Western societies have argued. As families and kin groups, communities and neighbourhoods are physically, spatially and socially broken up, and as gender differences in employment and income increase, media and “expert” encouragement to mothers to become the all-round confidantes, educators and moral guides of their children affirms womens responsibilities in the domestic sphere. Expectations of mother–daughter communication reshape the meaning – and experience – of the individual subject in the changing character of the urban family at the same time as they reinforce ideas about womens gendered attributes and the responsibilities associated with them.

Sexed Bodies, Sexualized Identities, and the Limits of Gender:

Sex is one of the dominant metaphors of Chinas postmillennial consumerist modernity. Public media and private discussions map endless pleasures and possibilities onto sexed bodies, foregrounding sexuality as an increasingly significant component of individual identity. Yet, as argued in this article, the diversity of sexual representations masks the discursive operation of the sexed body in consolidating individual accommodation with the consumer market and in “neutralizing” the exploratory and pluralist meanings of contemporary sexual culture. Inheriting a recent ideological history in which sexuality was not a significant component of public discussions about gender relationships, and in an ideological context bridging local and global interests that limit the interrogation of gender as a critical category of enquiry and organization, sex and the sexed body emerge in mainstream discourse as a collection of acts, responsibilities, and choices dissociated from the broad social issues of gender hierarchy and injustice.

The Intimate Individual: Perspectives from the Mother-Daughter Relationship in Urban China

The individual “self” (ziwo) occupies a privileged place in p opular media and academic discussions about China’s post-Mao social and cultural transformation. 1 Alongside marketization and urbanization, a family oriented and collectivist ethics of personal responsibilities molded by Confucian as well as socialist principles of personhood, has been increasingly replaced by an emphasis on self-fulfillment and individual rights. What Yunxiang Yan (2009) calls the “individualization” of Chinese society, seems to be manifest in all areas of social and cultural life, from an education system that nurtures highly competitive individual ambition from the first years of school life, commercial advertising that equates self-worth with entrepreneurial success, consumer capacity, and good looks, to young people’s challenges to their parents’ authority. Its manifestation in everyday life unevenly draws on embedded cultural practices as well as new global influences. It also unevenly corresponds with the party–state’s interests in regulating the parameters of social and political activity and expression to sustain the authority of the political system, and to encourage entrepreneurial interests in the service of national prosperity. Zhang and Ong see China’s new individual as the product of the pull between the deregulated neoliberal market and the controlling impulse of the socialist state (Zhang and Ong 2008). Yan’s longer-term focus on the processes since the 1950s that have “untied” the individual person from the collective and state attributes to the state an important role in “manag[ing] the process of individualization by drawing boundaries and regulating directions” (Yan 2009: xxvii).

Neglect of a neighbourhood: oral accounts of life in ‘old Beijing’ since the eve of the People's Republic

Oral accounts of life over seven decades in Dashalanr, a popular neighbourhood in central Beijing, reveal a social world that despite being shaped by the states policies of social and political classification, housing and employment, has been resistant to complete appropriation by them. Based on research in the neighbourhood since 2005, and drawing on Xuanwu District archives, this article examines local residents’ accounts of long decades of hardship and neglect. With an analytical framework that links gender with temporality, place and space, it suggests ways in which their singular experiences can be read as historical narrative.

Gender, Agency and Social Change

The pace and extent of changes in China’s economy, society, politics and cultural life in the past 20 years have fostered a spectacular expansion of scholarly interest in gender and gender difference in modern and contemporary China.1 Across the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, students now have easy access to research publications on gender differences in practices and expectations of marriage, parenting and family life, education, labour and employment, migration and politics. Indeed, it is through the critical study of gender in social and cultural organization and practice that a good deal of conventional wisdom about the Chinese state, society and economy is coming under review. For example, in this volume, both Shannon May and Ellen Judd suggest that the familiar phenomenon of China’s “empty villages,” devoid of able-bodied young men and women, is empirically contentious. This volume is the result of a fortuitous convergence between an editorial suggestion to The China Quarterly to run a special issue on gender and an international conference on gender studies in Shanghai in 2009, jointly sponsored by Michigan and Fudan 复旦Universities. Initially structured around papers presented at the conference, it also brings together work from other scholars to reveal some of the ways in which gender operates across diverse fields of inquiry as one of the main axes of social organization and cultural practice. In its themes and analytical interpretations, it offers examples of some of the new directions recent scholarship on gender in China has taken in recent years. This is no longer principally inspired by the purpose of making women visible or filling in the gaps of a history that is still far from complete, though these aims continue to inflect

Book review: Zheng Tiantian, Red Lights: The Lives of Sex Workers in Postsocialist China. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. 304 pp., with index and notes. US

and frequently market based forms of censorship and self-censorship help to maintain Party domination of the marketized media. Expanding the emphasis in her prior works on the importance of international capital in China’s communication system, she demonstrates not only the intricacies of those linkages but also the complex division of labor within China’s media structure in which party-state media dominates the news, transnational media provides international and business news and lifestyle coverage to the elite, and domestic media focuses on amusing the masses. In so doing, she argues that the media, though marketized, is not a free media. It is not based on the right of the people to produce their own media, which occurred briefly in the Democracy Wall period when small-scale independent bottom up publications flourished. Nor is it based on the right to be informed which, to a lesser extent, was approached in 1989 when editorial freedom within the party-state media increased. Rather, restrictions on the ownership of private media, exemplified by the closing of two leftist websites because they did not have the minimal capitalization of 10 million RMB (US

22.50. ISBN: 978-0-816-65903-6 (pbk):

1.2 million) (p. 58), reinforce the point that what is presented in the media is dominated by the party-state and related class interests. Unifying this analysis is the argument that all is not simple or unidirectional. Rather, while the media plays a key role in distributing political power and values and contributing to class construction, the transformation of the media itself is contested. Worker and rural populations as well as leftists struggle on unequal terms to construct this communication structure with the party-state and with market-oriented media outlets and their middle class allies who hope to use limited citizen rights to defuse social conflicts, create a (classical) liberal constitutional state and avoid radical social revolution (p. 278). Zhao’s detailed case studies reinforce her argument. Using examples ranging from theoretical controversies over the right to debate neoliberalism to controversies arising in everyday situations, such as that surrounding Sun Zhigang (the first university graduate from his village since 1949 who, because he had left his ID at home, was picked up as an undocumented migrant worker and beaten to death while in police custody in Guangzhou), she demonstrates how such debates are increasingly framed in ways which exclude the viewpoints and voices of vast if not majority elements of the population. The framing of such debates thus contributes to how the party-state continues to use the marketized media to maintain control of the commanding heights in this critical area of society. In short, Zhao skillfully argues that despite the recent advocacy of social harmony by and the perceived populism of the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao leadership, China is both an increasingly class divided and a globalized society in a period of ongoing struggle and transition which can be seen through the evolution of its communication structure.

Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History . Edited by S usan M ann and Y u -Y in C heng . [Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2001. 310 pp.

Recent Western research on women and gender in Chinese history has raised critical questions about many of the familiar narratives of Chinas Confucian tradition. This research – much of it the work of contributors to this volume – has produced perspectives on gender relations that are at once more complex, fluid and historically plausible than the standard assumptions of Confucian discourse would suggest.