Tamara Jacka

Migration, householding and the well-being of left-behind women in rural Ningxia

In recent years, large-scale labor migration has had a significant impact on the social landscape of rural China. Large numbers of rural Chinese men work away from home for long periods until they reach late middle age, while rural women also often migrate when young, but generally return to the countryside to get married. After marriage and childbirth, most women remain in the village, but repeated episodes of migration are increasingly common among married women in their 20s and 30s. Consequently, much of the Chinese countryside is dominated by split households and a depleted, shifting population of middle-aged women, children and the elderly.

Approaches to Women and Development in Rural China

In this paper I analyze the language and concepts framing approaches taken by the Chinese womens movement to women and rural development. Until the late 1990s the language adopted by Chinese womens organizations concerned with rural development was quite different from that of development agencies elsewhere, but since that time it has become increasingly similar. In this paper I ask: to what extent did the earlier language of Chinese womens development activists point to understandings and practices that were different from those of the global development movement? And what might be the significance of the growing convergence between the two?

Left-behind and Vulnerable? Conceptualising Development and Older Women’s Agency in Rural China

Abstract: Concern has been growing recently in China about the well-being of children, women and the elderly “left behind” on the farm when family members leave the village in search of waged work. Increasingly, the left-behind are portrayed in academic and policy discourse as a “vulnerable group” of passive dependants, sidelined by modernisation and abandoned by their families. This paper challenges this discourse, arguing that while attention to the well-being of the left-behind is vital, there is an urgent need for a shift in focus from their vulnerability to their agency. The paper focuses on the agency of left-behind women between the ages of 50 and 80. It aims, first of all, to point the way toward an empirically richer understanding of the social construction of older women’s agency and well-being. The second aim of the paper is to suggest how different conceptualisations of “agency” and “older women” might contribute to more ethical and politically effective strategies for development and the improvement of women’s well-being. To further these two aims, the paper draws on fieldwork conducted in rural Ningxia, north-western China, and on critiques of the “capability approach” to development expounded by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.

Chinese discourses on rurality, gender and development: a feminist critique

During the 1980s and 1990s, peasants, especially peasant women, were mostly ignored in elite Chinese discourse on development, or portrayed as a ‘backward’, ‘low quality’ group, who put a drag on modernization. But since then, a number of elite discourses have emerged, which try to address the disadvantages suffered by the peasantry. In this paper I critique two of these recent discourses, relating to ‘participatory development’ and ‘new rural reconstruction’. Drawing on Nancy Frasers conceptualisation of ‘injustice’ and her analysis of ‘affirmative’ and ‘transformative’ strategies for overcoming it, I argue that these discourses make important, but limited, contributions to efforts to overcome injustice. The main focus of the paper is on new rural reconstruction discourse, because it promises a more radically transformative approach to injustice. However, advocates of new rural reconstruction elide gender inequalities in rural society. Far from being incidental, I argue, this elision is an integral component of an essentially affirmative approach, which reproduces injustice rather than providing the theoretical tools and language with which to address it. Comparing new rural reconstruction discourse with that of participatory development helps illuminate the limitations and strengths of each.

Population Governance in the PRC: Political, Historical and Anthropological Perspectives

Population control is the most important issue in China recently. Population governance is very important from all points of views. This issue of population control and governance with the help of historical and anthropological perspectives is explained in this article.

Village Self-Government and Representation in Southwest China

Abstract Villages in China are, according to recent law, “self-governed” by villager committees, whose members are elected by villagers and held accountable to villagers and villager representative assemblies. Previous studies have focused on the institutions of self-government, assuming that, if unimpeded, they will enhance both direct villager participation in governance and the representation of villager interests. In contrast, this article focuses on local understandings and ideals about political roles and relationships, as constructed through everyday political claims and practices. The article draws on qualitative research in four villages in Yunnan, southwest China. In these villages, neither cadres nor villagers used the word “represent” to characterise the role of members of village government. Furthermore, villagers could not explain what villager representatives do or what “representative” in the title “villager representative” means. This leads us to ask: How do village residents conceive the responsibilities of villager representatives and cadres? Is the lack of reference to “representation” merely a linguistic issue, or do they have a different conception of villager-cadre and villager-representative relationships? In addressing these questions, this article aims to enrich our understanding of village self-government in China and contribute to theorising about political representation.

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.

Translocal family reproduction and agrarian change in China: a new analytical framework

ABSTRACT This paper advances a new framework for analysing agrarian change in rural China and elsewhere in developing Asia, which centres on translocal family reproduction. The framework highlights the crucial connections between rural families’ translocal strategies for meeting reproductive (especially care) needs, their changing aspirations for reproduction, and other aspects of agrarian change, including de-peasantisation, de-agrarianisation and social differentiation. In developing this framework, the paper refers to a village case study in central China and draws on a critique of the ‘livelihoods perspective’ on agrarian change, approaches focusing on ‘global householding’, and the cultural reproduction of class and gender.

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.