Harriet T. Zurndorfer

Chinese women in the imperial past : new perspectives

The present volume is the result of a Leiden University workshop on women in imperial China by a group of international scholars. In recent years Chinese women and gender studies have attracted more and more attention, and this book is one of the first efforts to focus on major aspects of this subject. It covers a wide range of topics and disciplines, including bibliography, demography, history, legal studies, literature, history of medicine, and philosophy. Chinese Women in the Imperial Past can rightly be seen as connected with the new Brill journal NAN NU, Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China, which was founded to provide the scholarly community with a lasting forum in which the subject of Chinese women and gender can be dealt with in its own right.

Men, Women, Money, and Morality: The Development of China's Sexual Economy

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on men and women engaged in Chinas sexual economy, which is dominated by the exchange between wealthy and politically influential men and unmarried young women who trade their femininity and sexuality for material wealth and financial security from these men. Drawing on analyses of the popular 2009 television serial, Woju (Dwelling Narrowness), coupled with recent ethnographic studies, the paper shows how this sexual economy thrives in the increasingly competitive and commercial urban landscape of present-day China. The study then examines the impact of commodification and materialism on men and women. The paper places these gender dynamics within the context of socioeconomic changes during the last thirty years and investigates how gender inequality became assimilated into both official and popular discourses of Chinese life, thereby facilitating the ascendancy and power of the sexual economy.

The Hsin-an Ta-Tsu Chih and the Development of Chinese Gentry Society 800-1600

One characteristic that distinguished one Chinese region from another from the Sung period onward was the prevalence or otherwise of large extended families or lineages. In some areas such as Kwangtung and Fukien the development of large extended families became common while in most parts of North China it did not 1). Perhaps the area where the development of lineages is best documented as shown by its high number of genealogies, is the prefecture of Hui-chou * hij (also known as Hsin-an V ), located in the southeast corner of present-day Anhui province 2). Not only does

Cotton Textile Manufacture and Marketing in Late Imperial China and the ‘Great Divergence’

Abstract By 1800 cotton cloth was China’s most important domestic trade commodity after grain. This paper reviews the history of cotton textile production in the Jiangnan region (or Lower Yangzi River area) where it thrived from 1300 to 1830, and discusses the factors contributing to its commercialization. It reveals the impact of the Ming and Qing governments in its institutionalization, and how the social organization of the industry was framed around the household economy and women’s labor. This essay also documents the problems that cotton production and marketing encountered by the end of the eighteenth century, and demonstrates how the recent debates about the ‘great divergence’ and the nature of the Chinese political economy resonate in the history of China’s cotton textile enter-prise. Finally, it shows how in the first decades of the nineteenth century, empire-wide demographic and environmental constraints brought economic stasis to Jiangnan’s cotton industry.

Violence and Political Protest in Ming and Qing China: Review and Commentary on Recent Research

Thomas T. Meadows, an experienced British diplomat in China during the nineteenth century and author of The Chinese and Their Rebellions , wrote: “Of all nations that have attained a certain degree of civilization, the Chinese are the least revolutionary and the most rebellious.” Meadows had ample opportunity to make such a remark since he was witness to some of Chinas fiercest rebellions, those committed by the Taipings, the Nien and Moslem groups during the time of his tour. These revolts, although mass-based and widespread, were put down with particular ferocity by the Qing monarchy. Meadowss remark directs attention to the delicate question of when does a rebellion become a revolution? In the case of these movements, they did not become revolutions because there was no transformation either in the structure of Chinese society or in the system of political power. These incidents may have been “revolutionary situations”, but they did not have “revolutionary outcomes”.

Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Confucian Moral Universe of Late Ming China (1550–1644) *

This study pursues three goals: to unravel the socio-economic conditions which pushed women into prostitution and courtesanship, to analyse their position in Chinese society, and to relate what changes occurred at the end of the Ming dynasty that affected their status. According to contemporary judicial regulations, both prostitutes and courtesans were classified as “entertainers”, and therefore had the status of jianmin [mean people], which made them “outcasts” and pariahs. But there were great differences, beyond the bestowal of sexual favours, in the kind of work these women performed. That courtesans operated at the elite level of society, and that they were often indistinguishable from women born into the upper or gentry class, is indicative of this eras blurry social strata, which has prompted scholars and writers to elevate the place of the educated courtesan in Ming society.

Escape from the country: the gender politics of Chinese women in pursuit of transnational romance

Abstract This study focuses on two marginalized groups in Chinese society: 27-years old (or older) ‘left-over’ (never-married) women and divorced women. Both these kinds of women are subject to discrimination and ridicule by the mass media and even their own families. This essay argues that despite the economic prosperity China has enjoyed over the last thirty years, gender relations in the country are rooted in a patriarchal discourse that reveals a hybridity of old and new ideals – family responsibility and individual self-fulfillment – in which the pursuit of love and marital commitment cannot be divorced from larger social-cultural-economic structures that endorse intergenerational responsibility and obligation, as well as promote gender inequality in the home and workplace. For these two groups of ostracized women, romance with foreign men may seem an alternative to the constraints of this structural framework. Drawing from a pool of evidence, published interviews, media reports, and printed ethnographic studies, this study analyzes the predicaments of leftover and divorced women, the interactions between these women and foreign men, and what their experiences with these men say about gender and racial differences in relation to gender inequality.