In the process of helping women to help themselves, female activists have assumed a decisive role in negotiating social and political transformations in Chinese society. This is the first book that describes and analyzes the new phase of women's organizing in China, which started in the 1980s, and remains a vital force to the present day. The political and social changes taking place in contemporary Chinese society have, surprisingly, received scant attention. This volume enriches our understanding of the working of grassroots democracy in China by exploring women's popular organizing activities and their interaction with party-state institutions. By subjecting these activities to both empirical enquiry and theoretical scrutiny, a rigorous analysis of the exchange, dialogue, negotiation and transformation among and within three groups of political actors - popular women's groups, religious groups and the All China Women's Federation - is concisely presented to the reader.This book will be of tremendous interest to students of Chinese Studies, Political Science and Gender Studies alike.

5. Forming a Movement Wave

In the process of helping women to help themselves, female activists have assumed a decisive role in negotiating social and political transformations in Chinese society. This is the first book that describes and analyzes the new phase of women's organizing in China, which started in the 1980s, and remains a vital force to the present day. The political and social changes taking place in contemporary Chinese society have, surprisingly, received scant attention. This volume enriches our understanding of the working of grassroots democracy in China by exploring women's popular organizing activities and their interaction with party-state institutions. By subjecting these activities to both empirical enquiry and theoretical scrutiny, a rigorous analysis of the exchange, dialogue, negotiation and transformation among and within three groups of political actors - popular women's groups, religious groups and the All China Women's Federation - is concisely presented to the reader. This book will be of tremendous interest to students of Chinese Studies, Political Science and Gender Studies alike.

As China has evolved into an industrial powerhouse over the past two decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. Because of state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages, and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family. Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic pains—such as backaches and headaches—that many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Pun suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its agents.

Examining Chinese domestic as well as international circumstances surrounding the emergence of an independent women's movement in Beijing in the 1990s, this book seeks to explain how such a movement could have arisen after the repression of student activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989. It also places this emergence in the context of theories of social movements, civil society and globalization.

‘Scattered with inspiring life-stories of courageous women.’ The Guardian In the early years of the People’s Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations. Yet those gains have been steadily eroded in China’s post-socialist era. Contrary to the image presented by China’s media, women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of rights and gains relative to men. In Leftover Women, Leta Hong Fincher exposes shocking levels of structural discrimination against women, and the broader damage this has caused to China’s economy, politics, and development.

Spanning the century from the Taiping Rebellion through the establishment of the People's Republic of China, this is the first comprehensive history of women in modern China. Its scope is broad, encompassing political, economic, military, and cultural history, and drawing upon Chinese and Japanese sources untapped by Western scholars. The book presents new information on a wide range of topics: the impact of Western ideas on women, especially in education; the importance of women in the labor force; the relative independence enjoyed by some women textile workers; the struggle against footbinding; the influence of anarchism; the participation of a women's brigade in the Revolution of 1911; the role of women in the May Fourth Movement; the differences between the more assertive women of South China and the 'traditional' women of the North in organizing for political action; the involvement of peasant women in insurgency and anti-Japanese struggles in the countryside; and the effects of the Marriage Law of 1950. The author has contributed a new preface to this English edition, and Joshua A. Fogel and Susan Mann have written an introduction that places the book in the context of studies of Chinese women, Japanese sinology, and women's history in general. The book has extensive notes, a bibliography, and, as an appendix, a chronology of the history of women in modern China.