Hill Gates

Dependency and the Part-time Proletariat in Taiwan

A substantial number of Western intellectuals has been convinced at least since Marxs time that imperialism is more advantageous to the imperialist than to the imperialized; dependency theorists have repeatedly proven that the poverty of poor nations is exacerbated and often caused by their economic relations with more powerful countries. A corollary of this argument is that dependent nations must be economic failures, sinking further into financial servitude, political oppression, and cultural collapse as their dependency grows. Examples of such tendencies are abundant and well known from imperialized countries. Among these, Taiwan is a paradox. Clearly dependent and heavily so, on U.S. trade, military, and financial inputs (and on Japan as well), Taiwan has industrialized reasonably rapidly, producing the second highest living standard in Asia. Taiwans per capita GNP compares with that of Brazil or Iran; it does not

Feet and fabrication: footbinding and early twentieth-century rural women's labor in Shaanxi.

The early twentieth-century transformations of rural Chinese women’s work have received relatively little direct attention. By contrast, the former custom of footbinding continues to fascinate and is often used to illustrate or contest theories about Chinese women’s status. Arguing that for rural women at least, footbinding needs to be understood in relation to rural economic conditions, the authors focus on changes in textile production and in footbinding in two counties in Shaanxi province. Drawing on historical sources and their own interview data from rural women who grew up in this period, the authors find evidence that transformations in textile production undercut the custom of footbinding and contributed to its rapid demise.

Hegemony and Chinese Folk Ideologies: An Introduction

The scale and duration of late imperial China (conventionally dating from 1368 A.D. to the 1911 dynastic collapse) created conditions under which the secular effect of relatively consistent state structures and policies, and of an economy increasingly penetrated by capitalism, evoked well-integrated patterns of both cultural compliance and resistance from the population. Sometimes actively dependent on elite categories, sometimes creatively evasive of them, people’s perceptions of these processes constitute a vast mosaic of folk ideologies that owe their sophistication and brcad geographic spread to their position in this enduring civilization. In this collection of articles, we hope to attain two intellectual goals: to examine the operation of folk ideologies in the continuous creation and recreation of Chinese culture; and to expand the theoretical reach of the concepts of hegemony and ideology, which have thus far not been much tested in the literature on China.

Book Reviews : Chou Bih-er, Cal Clark, and Janet Clark, Women in Taiwan Politics. Overcoming Bar riers to Women's Participation in a Modernizing Society. Boulder & London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1990, xiii-207, tables, bibliography, index,

Chou Bih-er, Cal Clark, and Janet Clark have written a beautifully clear study of women who have succeeded in the rough competition of Taiwan politics, a book carefully framed as a test of modernization versus feminist theories of political change. While Taiwan’s assemblywomen continue to face real discrimination at the hands of male party leaders, they have the advantage of a reserved-seats system which assures at least some female representation. At the time of the study, they were no longer tokens, but &dquo;surprisingly well accepted&dquo; in Taiwan’s politics, with political resources almost equal to those of their male counterparts. By the end of the 1980s,