Sally Sargeson

Land Expropriation and the Gender Politics of Citizenship in the Urban Frontier

The co-constitution of citizenship status, practice and rights are conceptualized for understanding the contribution of gender politics to regional variation in the citizenship of people at the margins of Chinas expanding cities. Conflicts over compensation entitlement in communities where land has been expropriated for urban expansion are examined.

Introduction to special colloquium on women and institutional change in rural China

This is an introduction to the special section of articles that analyze the gendered modalities of policy and institutional change in rural China and examine how women are engaging with, and affected by, those changes. In two consecutive issues, eight articles examine changes in policies and institutions relating to rural development, village-level politics and property rights, marriage migration and urbanization. Through their individual case studies, the contributors elucidate how gender is integral to the conceptualization and implementation of policy and institutional changes in rural China; how those changes are altering the status, rights, resources, goals and arenas of action of different categories of rural women, thereby reinforcing or altering gendered constructs; and, finally, how womens actions are triggering further policy and institutional changes.

Grounds for self-government? Changes in land ownership and democratic participation in Chinese communities

Do variations in land ownership affect people’s democratic participation? Quantitative, cross-country research on this topic suffers from the non-comparability of regulatory systems and cultures, and the use of crude indicators to identify participation. This study attempts to overcome these methodological problems, by employing indicators of procedural and substantive participation in a structured, diachronic comparison of qualitative data from five sites in China – an authoritarian state, which, however, requires residents of urban communities and villages to participate in ‘self-government’. It examines whether and why changing land from collective ownership to state ownership, and residents’ compensated acquisition of cash and secure, fungible assets, strengthens or weakens participation in self-government. In the research sites, collective land ownership is found to stimulate participation in self-government. Transformation of the land to state ownership and people’s acquisition of private property weakens participation. The robust results of the study support the direction of a causal argument that collective land ownership is conducive to democratic participation. These findings imply that scholars and policymakers should consider the potentially adverse political consequences of changing land ownership. A further implication is that, absent substantial political reform, an urbanized China might be less rather than more democratic at the community level.

Representing Women in Chinese Village Self-Government: A New Perspective on Gender

ABSTRACT Recent feminist debate about how to achieve the substantive representation of women in government has been conducted largely in relation to national parliaments in democratic states. This article brings a new perspective by examining grassroots rural government in contemporary China – an authoritarian state, which, however, began implementing village “self-government,” including elections, in 1987. The article draws on qualitative fieldwork in the Chinese provinces of Zhejiang and Yunnan. The authors went into this fieldwork with an understanding that womens substantive representation, democracy, and gender equality are mutually constituted and with an expectation that village self-government might make a much-needed contribution to the achievement of all three. However, we ran into trouble with this analytical framework. First, there were marked variations in villagers’ practices and understandings of “representation.” Second, we found that democracy was not a prerequisite for substantive representation. Third, most villagers we talked with claimed that “men and women are equal” and there was little conception of villagers’ interests diverging by gender. This article explores our analytical “trouble,” with a view to advancing scholarship on constraints to democracy in authoritarian states and suggesting fruitful directions for feminist theorists interested in the relationship between gender, representation and democracy.

Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China

In Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China, Leta Hong Fincher argues that the ‘state-sponsored media campaign’ denigrating ‘leftover women’ – that is, urban professional women aged over 27 who are unmarried – is indicative of a broad resurgence of gender inequality in contemporary China. The campaign is intended to serve several functions; in the near term, it will help reduce unrest among a male population facing a shortage of brides because of the imbalanced sex ratio and, by encouraging women to become full-time homemakers, reduce competition in the labour market. In the longer term, by ensuring that better-educated wombs are made available for fertilisation, it is expected to help improve the ‘quality’ of the next generation of children. To this end, Leta Hong Fincher asserts, China’s media and the All-China Women’s Federation – both of which follow state dictates – are urging educated urban women to marry in their mid-twenties to avoid missing their ‘best’ child-bearing age or, worse, getting left on the shelf altogether. The stigma constructed around the term ‘leftover women’ is pushing women into hasty, ill-considered marriages. Moreover, in the rush to marry, women are foregoing independent economic security and failing to insist on joint ownership when marital property is purchased and registered. Consequently, many newly wed women, according to the author, ‘have been shut out of arguably the biggest accumulation of residential realestate wealth in history’ (p. 45). The argument is elaborated in six chapters. These chapters provide a definition and description of ‘leftover women’, explanations of how a gender wealth gap is created within marriages and by parental discrimination, a review of how Chinese women’s legislated and customary property rights have changed since the Song dynasty Book reviews

Introduction: conceptualizing women, gender and rural development in China

Between the 1980s and the fi rst decade of the 21st century, China’s rapid, sustained economic growth brought great benefi ts to rural citizens. According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), for example, between 1978 and 2007 the real annual growth rate of rural per capita net income reached 7.1 per cent, and the number of rural people in absolute poverty declined from 250 million to 14.8 million (UNDP 2008: 10–11, 13). Rural life expectancy and literacy rates also improved dramatically. To many observers, these changes constituted nothing less than a ‘developmental miracle’ (So 2003). It was also noted, however, that China’s rapid economic growth had coincided with an increase in the types of rural–urban, regional and social disparities, environmental degradation and unrest that characterized other developing countries. Of particular concern to women’s advocates, some achievements that had been made in previous decades in reducing gender inequalities in rural political representation, income and education were being reversed (Tan Lin 2006; Tan Lin and Bohong Liu 2005). Growing concern about the scale and severity of these issues prompted what has been represented widely as a major reorientation of approaches to rural development by China’s leadership. In 2003, the incoming Chinese Communist Party regime led by Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao committed itself to shifting from a focus on promoting aggregate economic growth, to placing ‘integrated urban–rural development’ at the forefront of state eff orts to create an harmonious, ‘peoplecentred’, ‘welloff ’ society. For development scholars and women’s advocates alike, one of the key questions to emerge from this reorientation is whether or not we are witnessing a shift from a model in which gender equality in rural areas is viewed largely as a concomitant of economic growth, to an approach that enables rural women to pursue their own development goals. This is the overarching question that we seek to address in this book. More specifi cally, we ask, how are women and gender conceptualized in, and mobilized by the rural development policies and projects issuing from

Contemporary China: The “Woman Question” and Gender Inequalities

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, debates over what was often referred to as the “woman question” preoccupied the educated social elite in China, just as it did in Europe, Britain and the United States. Leading Chinese intellectuals and political activists viewed patriarchal norms that subordinated women as the epitome of the “backwardness” and degeneration of Confucian social institutions. These (mainly male) reformers and revolutionaries saw women – uneducated, hobbled by foot-binding and subordinated by the “three obediences” (to their father, husband and sons) – both as a metaphor for the weakness of China and the Chinese state, and as literally holding the country back from becoming modern and strong on the world stage. Women were supposedly unproductive, unable to participate in public affairs and poorly equipped to raise their children into modern citizens. Like modernizing elites elsewhere across the world, the reformers viewed the liberation of women and the achievement of gender equality as necessary for national strength and self-determination, modernity and social progress. In the first half of this chapter, we discuss the lasting impact that the woman question has had in the 20th and 21st centuries on Chinese state policies regarding gender inequalities, and we assess the social consequences of those policies. We also look at the ways in which scholars have approached the topic of gender inequality in China. In the second half, we examine some of the main institutions through which gender inequalities continue to be reproduced today, despite decades of state policies and legislation aimed at overcoming them.

Contemporary China: Religion, Ritual and Religiosity

In contemporary China, there are a huge variety of ideals, activities, people, practices, networks and buildings that could be depicted as either religious or quasi-religious. These include Christian churches, Islamic mosques, Buddhist, Daoist and local temples, ancestral shrines, fortune tellers, geomancers, qigong practitioners (those who manipulate qi , the vital energy of life), Confucian ritualists, teachers of Confucian, Daoist or Buddhist philosophy, and even the purveyors of state ideologies and rituals, who often draw on broadly religious sensibilities. To grasp this huge array of discourses, activities, people and things, we must begin by examining why some are classified as “religious” while others are not, and how Chinese historical experience has affected this classificatory logic. Defining and regulating religious activity in China In western countries, over the latter half of the second millennium, the category of religion took shape through the gradual emergence of secular modes of governing and scientific reasoning in societies that were formerly ruled in the name of Christianity. Because Christianity emphasized inner belief, and because the power of religious leaders was diminished by the separation of the church from both state rule and the scientific depiction of nature, the category of religion came to refer to relatively powerless institutions of belief, clearly separate from both government and science. Freedom of religion became a freedom of “belief” that was not to impinge on either state rule or scientific reason. Individuals or groups who wished to impose their religion on the state, or who ignored scientific findings because of their religious beliefs, were dismissed respectively as zealots or cults.

Introduction to Colloquium on Women and Policy and Institutional Change in Rural China: Part II

Articles in the first part of this colloquium surveyed articulations between rural development policies, village politics and land reforms and womens capabilities in Chinas countryside. The second part of this colloquium focuses on policies and institutions affecting geographies of gendered power in China. Four articles detail the consequences for women, families and society of marriage migration and urbanization.

Transforming Rural China: How Local Institutions Shape Property Rights in China. Chih-Jou Jay Chen

Publishers details for: Transforming Rural China: How Local Institutions Shape Property Rights in China, by Chih-Jou Jay Chen, London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004. xvi + 213 pp. 60.00 (hardcover).