Heather Xiaoquan Zhang

Female Migration and Urban Labour Markets in Tianjin

This study examined the migratory process among female migrants to Tianjin City in North China. Data were obtained from participant observations and in-depth interviews with female migrant workers businesswomen and employees in the labor service company affiliated with City Womens Federation (CWF). Female migrants either worked in domestic or catering services or as contract labor in enterprises with sole overseas investments in Tanggu Economic Development Zone in the east of the city. Migrants were all in their late teens or early 20s and single. Migrants originated from diverse locations and stayed a few months or years. Tertiary industry in Tianjin City increased rapidly during the 1980s. This study examined reasons for migration push factors information channels for womens rural out-migration the role of CWF urban income and labor market experiences gender expectations and remittances. It is concluded that rural females have greater mobility in the spatial and social sense. Rural migration was shaped by the centrally planned economy (prior to post-Mao reforms) and its later erosion. Female migrant workers have become an essential part of spontaneous worker flows and floating population despite constraints. Out-migration for migrant women is a challenge to traditional expectations. Female migrants were not impoverished or from poverty areas. All desired to break free of the narrow circle of native villages. In urban areas migrant women were adaptable and resilient despite exploitation and discrimination. Females were a source of cheap labor in the city.

Contextualising Reproductive Rights Challenges: The Vietnam Situation

Abstract Since the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development, the language of reproductive rights has gained prominence in international social policy forums. The overarching international human rights framework defends universal rights but recognises that the means for realising those rights need to be locally specified. In practice, though, rights-based approaches to reproduction have generally offered a fairly uniform, expanded and improved constellation of reproductive health services that take little account of the embedded nature of reproductive rights issues. For Vietnam, we link an understanding of rights with an assessment of the shifting identities and diverse reproductive health needs of women. Through identifying a number of contextualised challenges for a rights-based approach to reproduction in the country, we demonstrate that engagement with the wider realities of womens lives and incorporation of notions of social differences is necessary to effectively broaden the scope of reproductive freedoms and entitlements.

Gender Difference in Inheritance Rights: Observations from a Chinese Village

This article analyses inheritance in Chinese village society within a broad notion of welfare and social policy research. Its central concern is with the gendered dimension of inheritance. Based on fieldwork, the study reveals a significant gap between legislation and reality with daughters losing their statutory rights to their brothers in rural households and the village community despite the legal recognition of equal rights between women and men in property and inheritance. The article argues that while pluralist welfare provision is emphasized in promoting well-being in rural China, the problem of unequal entitlements and rights of men and women calls for more effective government actions in the form of social policy-making to combat gender discrimination and gendered exclusion, and to ensure more gender-equitable welfare outcomes.

Protecting Mobile Livelihoods Actors’ Responses to the Emerging Health Challenges in Beijing and Tianjin

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Beijing and Tianjin, and applying a livelihood framework combined with a well-being perspective, this article examines an important aspect of rural–urban migrants’ social protection in China, namely migrants’ health, in particular work safety and occupational health. It argues that migrant workers’ social rights to health and livelihoods are a fiercely contested domain of citizenship entailing aspects of exclusion, inclusion, and control and allocation of economic, social, and political resources. The article shows that in spite of the accelerated pace of legislation and consolidated efforts to reconstruct the welfare system in China in recent years, the new social security schemes have thus far, by and large, failed to protect migrant workers in a systematic manner. The issues raised in the article therefore call for greater academic attention and more effective public policy responses.

Working with the homeless: The case of a non-profit organisation in Shanghai

This article addresses a two-pronged objective, namely to bring to the fore a much neglected social issue of homelessness, and to explore the dynamics of state-society relations in contemporary China, through a case study of a non-profit organisation (NPO) working with the homeless in Shanghai. It shows that the largely invisible homelessness in Chinese cities was substantially due to exclusionary institutions, such as the combined household registration and ‘detention and deportation’ systems. Official policy has become much more supportive since 2003 when the latter was replaced with government-run shelters, but we argue that the NPO case demonstrates the potential for enhanced longer-term support and enabling active citizenship for homeless people. By analysing the ways in which the NPO offers services through collaboration and partnership with the public (and private) actors, we also argue that the transformations in post-reform China and the changes within the state and civil society have significantly blurred their boundaries, rendering state-society relations much more complex, dynamic, fluid and mutually embedded.