Women, Family and the Chinese Socialist State, 1950-2010

Women, Family and the Chinese Socialist State, 1950-2010
Author: Xiaofei Kang
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-11-11
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9004415939

This volume includes 14 articles translated from the leading academic history journal in China, Historical Studies of Contemporary China (Dangdai Zhongguo shi yanjiu). It offers a rare window for the English speaking world to learn how scholars in China have understood and interpreted central issues pertaining to women and family from the founding of the PRC to the reform era. Chapters cover a wide range of topics, from women’s liberation, women’s movement and women’s education, to the impact of marriage laws and marriage reform, and changing practices of conjugal love, sexuality, family life and family planning. The volume invites further comparative inquiries into the gendered nature of the socialist state and the meanings of socialist feminism in the global context.

The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era

The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era
Author: Xin Huang
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2018-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1438470614

Shows that the feminist interventions of the Mao era (1949–1976) continue to influence contemporary Chinese women. This book traces how the legacy of the Maoist gender project is experienced or contested by particular Chinese women, remembered or forgotten in their lives, and highlighted or buried in their narratives. Xin Huang examines four women’s life stories: an urban woman who lived through the Mao era (1949–1976), a rural migrant worker, a lesbian artist who has close connections with transnational queer networks, and an urban woman who has lived abroad. The individual narratives are paired with analysis of the historical and social contexts in which each woman lives. Huang focuses on the shifting relationship between gender and class, fashion and shame in the Mao and post-Mao eras, queer desire and artwork, and contemporary transnational encounters. By rethinking the historical significance and contemporary relevance of one of the twentieth century’s major feminist interventions—socialist and Marxist women’s liberation during the Mao years—The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era provides insight into current struggles over gender equality in China and around the world.

Once Iron Girls

Once Iron Girls
Author: Hui Wu
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2010
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780739134214

Available in English for the first time, Once Iron Girls: Essays on Gender by Post-Mao Chinese Literary Women brings together twenty-five essays by seven critically acclaimed writers, whose fiction and poetry have become classics in modern Chinese literature. Poetic, metaphoric, and sometimes playful and satiric, the essays discuss the material reality wherein Chinese women live and function. Reflecting on their experiences under Mao and in post-Maoist China, these essays vividly demonstrate that, despite equality of the sexes being the official position and women working equally demanding jobs as men, women are still considered servile to their male counterparts. Taken together, the collection shows Chinese women struggling for identity by discussing the issues that are important in their lives. Unlike Western feminists, they do not want to be seen as different from their male counterparts. Nor do they want to fall into Chinese terminology of being the same as men. Rather, these essays show that women want to be seen first and foremost as human and then as female. By showcasing the politics and poetics of Chinese women's essays to an English audience, Hui Wu's translations uncover the philosophy and purpose behind the literature of a unique generation of Chinese women, whose life experience finds no parallel in China and certainly not in the West.

Women in China's Long Twentieth Century

Women in China's Long Twentieth Century
Author: Gail Hershatter
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2007-03-29
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0520098560

“An important and much-needed introduction to this rich and fast-growing field. Hershatter has handled a daunting task with aplomb.” —Susan L. Glosser, author of Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953

Finding Women in the State

Finding Women in the State
Author: Wang Zheng
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 398
Release: 2016-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520292286

Finding Women in the State is a provocative hidden history of socialist state feminists maneuvering behind the scenes at the core of the Chinese Communist Party. These women worked to advance gender and class equality in the early PeopleÕs Republic and fought to transform sexist norms and practices, all while facing fierce opposition from a male-dominated CCP leadership from the Party Central to the local government. Wang Zheng extends this investigation to the cultural realm, showing how feminists within ChinaÕs film industry were working to actively create new cinematic heroines, and how they continued a New Culture anti-patriarchy heritage in socialist film production. This book illuminates not only the different visions of revolutionary transformation but also the dense entanglements among those in the top echelon of the party. Wang discusses the causes for failure of ChinaÕs socialist revolution and raises fundamental questions about male dominance in social movements that aim to pursue social justice and equality. This is the first book engendering the PRC high politics and has important theoretical and methodological implications for scholars and students working in gender studies as well as China studies.

Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era

Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era
Author: Deborah Davis
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 1993-10-02
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9780520082229

This collection of essays concerns both urban and rural Chinese communities, ranging from professional to working-class families. The contributors attempt to determine whether and to what extent the policy shifts that followed Mao Zedong's death affected Chinese families.

Occidentalism

Occidentalism
Author: Xiaomei Chen
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2002
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780847698752

This revised and expanded edition of the first comprehensive study of Occidentalism in post-Mao China includes a new preface, foreword, and chapter on Chinese diaspora writings in the Chinese language. Xiaomei Chen offers an insightful account of the unremittingly favorable depiction of Western culture and its negative characterization of Chinese culture in post-Mao China since 1978. She examines the cultural and political interrelationship between the East and West from a vantage point more complex than that accommodated by most current theories of Western imperialism and colonialism. Going beyond Edward Said's construction in Orientalism of cross-cultural appropriations as a defining facet of Western imperialism, Chen argues that the appropriation of Western discourse--what she calls "Occidentalism"--can actually have a politically and ideologically liberating effect on contemporary non-Western culture. She maintains that simplistic allegations of Orientalism frequently found in current critical discourses seriously underestimate the complexities of intercultural and multicultural relationships. Using China as the focus of her analysis, Chen examines a variety of cultural media, from Shakespearean drama, to modernist poetry, to contemporary Chinese television and popular fiction. She thus places sinology in the general context of Western theoretical discourses, such as Eurocentrism, postcolonialism, nationalism, modernism, feminism, and literary hermeneutics, showing that it has a vital role to play in the study of Orient and Occident and their now unavoidable symbiotic relationship. Occidentalism presents a new model of comparative literary and cultural studies that reenvisions cross-cultural appropriation. It will be indispensable to future discussions of Orientalism, Occidentalism, and postcolonialism, as well as subaltern studies, Asian studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and non-Western drama.

A Social History of Maoist China

A Social History of Maoist China
Author: Felix Wemheuer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2019-03-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107123704

This new social history of Maoist China provides an accessible view of the complex and tumultuous period when China came under Communist rule.

Higher Education in Post-Mao China

Higher Education in Post-Mao China
Author: Michael Agelasto
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 516
Release: 1998-06-01
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9622094503

Since the death of Chairman Mao in 1976, China has embarked upon the Four Modernizations reform programme that has transformed the social, economic and political landscape of the world's most populous nation. Higher education has been ascribed a key supporting role and has itself undergone major reforms. This book looks beyond the articulated goals and accomplishments of the modernization of higher education in China. It delves into the grass roots reality and identifies the true achievements, the unintended outcomes and the major obstacles that still have to be overcome. Incorporating twenty chapters from the new generation of scholars from inside and outside China, Higher Education in Post-Mao China presents in-depth analyses of the impact of educational reforms on tertiary educators, the curriculum, the economic structure, women, and students' values and aspirations. In conveying the Chinese experience of higher education reform over the past two decades, this book makes a major contribution to contemporary sinology and comparative education.

Mao's China and After

Mao's China and After
Author: Maurice Meisner
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 614
Release: 1999-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0684856352

Presents a revised account of the revolution of 1966-1969 - Examines the social and political consequences of the upheaval - Deng Xiaoping - Democracy movement - Tienamnen Incident - Mao Zedong - The hundred flowers - Great Leap Forward.