Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-28T13:54:56.410Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Women and Self-employment in Post-socialist Rural China: Side Job, Individual Career or Family Venture*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2015

Jing Song
Jing Song*
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, Hong Kong Baptist University; Department of Sociology, Hong Kong Shue Yan University. Email: jing_song@alumni.brown.edu.
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The rise of private sector business in urban China has led to more women engaging in low-end self-employment. This study, however, reveals a more complicated story in the countryside. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in a Chinese village, this study finds that the women took the lead in developing sideline self-employment and were then attracted to rural wage employment in the 1980s. With the privatization of rural industries and the rise of capital-intensive self-employment in the 1990s, some women were forced into low-end self-employment, but others were attracted to high-end self-employment, forging individual careers and family ventures. In more recent times, younger women have been more inclined to work on-and-off, balancing self-employment pursuits with the desire to be a good mother. This pattern marks a shift from the continuous multitasking practised by the older generation.

摘要

随着中国城市的私营经济发展, 女性倾向于集中在低端的自我雇佣行业, 而本研究则指出农村的情况更为复杂。基于在中国一个村庄的深度访谈, 本文发现女性首先在自我雇佣的副业中发挥了领先作用, 随后在二十世纪八十年代广泛被农村工业所雇佣。随着九十年代农村工业的私有化和资本集中的自营行业的出现, 一些妇女被迫进入低端的自我雇佣行业, 而对另一些来说, 她们在自雇行业中找到了更具吸引力的个人职业或者家庭事业。年轻女性倾向于暂时退出工作来取得自雇事业和母职之间的平衡, 这种趋势有别于年长女性中较为普遍的在家庭和工作两头忙的做法。

Keywords

womenself-employmentside jobChinaindividual careerfamily venture女性自我雇佣副业个人职业; 家庭职业
Type
Research Report
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 221 , March 2015 , pp. 229 - 242
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2015 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

The author thanks John Logan, Nancy Luke and Gina Lai for their valuable suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this paper, Professor Yang Shanhua and the research team at Peking University who were involved in the fieldwork, and the respondents for sharing their experiences. This work was supported by the Research Committee of Hong Kong Baptist University (the start-up grant), the National Science Foundation, USA (NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, 2010), and Beatrice and Joseph Feinberg Memorial Fund, Brown University (2009).

References

Bei Village Archive Council. 2007. Bei Village Archive. Beijing: Yanjiu Publisher.Google Scholar
Bossen, Laurel. 2002. Chinese Women and Rural Development. Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Cohen, Myron. 1992. “Family management and family division in contemporary rural China.” The China Quarterly 130, 357–377.Google Scholar
Croll, Elisabeth J. 1983. Chinese Women since Mao. New York: Zed.Google Scholar
Entwisle, Barbara, Henderson, Gail E., Short, Susan E., Bouma, Jill and Zhai, Fengying. 1995. “Gender and family businesses in rural China.” American Sociological Review 60(1), 36–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, Harriet. 2010. “The gender of communication: changing expectations of mothers and daughters in urban China.” The China Quarterly 204, 980–1000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gao, Xiaoxian. 2010. “From the Heyang model to the Shaanxi model: action research on women's participation in village governance.” The China Quarterly 204, 870–898. Google Scholar
Hershatter, Gail. 2011. The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China's Collective Past. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hoffman, Lisa M. 2008. “Post-Mao professionalism: self-enterprise and patriotism.” In Zhang, Li and Ong, Aihwa (eds.), Privatizing China: Socialism from Afar. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Honig, Emily, and Hershatter, Gail. 1988. Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s. Stanford: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Huang, Mengxia (ed.). 2008. Zhongguo minying jingji fazhan baogao (The Development Report of Non-state-owned Economy in China). Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press (China).Google Scholar
Jacka, Tamara. 1990. “Back to the wok: women and employment in Chinese industry in the 1980s.” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 24, 1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacka, Tamara. 1997. Women's Work in Rural China: Change and Continuity in an Era of Reform. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacka, Tamara, and Song, Xianlin (trans.). 2004. “My life as a migrant worker.” In Gaetano, Arianne M. and Tamara, Jacka (eds.), On the Move: Women in Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Judd, Ellen R. 1990. “Alternative development strategies for women in rural China.” Development and Change 21(1), 23–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kim, Sung won, Fong, Vanessa L., Yaoshikawa, Hirokazu, Way, Niobe, Chen, Xinyin, Deng, Huihua and Lu, Zuhong. 2010. “Income, work preferences and gender roles among parents of infants in urban China: a mixed method study from Nanjing.” The China Quarterly 204, 939–959.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Li, Yinhe. 1994. “‘Nüren huijia’ wenti zhi wo jian” (On “women return home”). Shehuixue yanjiu 6, 71–72.Google Scholar
Liu, Jieyu. 2007. Gender and Work in Urban China: Women Workers of the Unlucky Generation. Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mohapatra, Sandeep, Rozelle, Scott and Goodhue, Rachael. 2007. “The rise of self-employment in rural China: development or distress?” World Development 35(1), 163–181.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oi, Jean C. 1992. “Fiscal reform and the economic foundations of local state corporatism in China.” World Politics 45, 99–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rofel, Lisa. 1999. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wang, Danning. 2010. “Intergenerational transmission of family property and family management in urban China.” The China Quarterly 204, 960–979.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yan, Yunxiang. 2006. “Girl power: young women and the waning of patriarchy in rural north China.” Ethnology 45(2), 105–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Yan, Yunxiang. 2011. “The individualization of the family in rural China.” Boundary 2 38(1), 203–229.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhang, Jian, Zhang, Linxiu, Rozelle, Scott and Boucher, Steve. 2006. “Self-employment with Chinese characteristics: the forgotten engine of rural China's growth.” Contemporary Economic Policy 24(3), 446–458.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhang, Linxiu, de Brauw, Alan and Rozelle, Scott. 2004. “China's rural labor market development and its gender implications.” China Economic Review 15, 230–247.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zhang, Qian F., and Pan, Zi. 2012. “Women's entry into self-employment in urban China: the role of family in creating gendered mobility patterns.” World Development 40(6), 1201–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar