China’s transformation to a market economy and its impact on gender inequalities – a theoretical perspective

Martyna  Nowak

doi:10.23762/FSO_VOL8_NO4_4

Published : 2020-12-28

Vol. 8 No. 4 (2020)

China’s transformation to a market economy and its impact on gender inequalities – a theoretical perspective

Martyna Nowak

DOI: https://doi.org/10.23762/FSO_VOL8_NO4_4

Abstract

The change that China has undergone in the past decades has ‘mesmerised’ the world, leading to statements claiming that the 21st century will ‘belong’ to that country. China has risen to become a global power, the world’s factory, and a place where the speed of social change has no comparison. This paper offers an overview of the specificity of China’s transformation from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, while maintaining the one-party rule of the Communist Party of China, with particular attention to the situation of women during these challenging times. The primary purpose of this paper is to propose the theoretical framework for further research on gender inequalities in post-reform China, which allows the complex situation of the ‘mix’ between the post-socialist state and the market economy to be taken into consideration. It suggests the need to go beyond the structural approach as the only way of challenging the dominant and changeable discourses and how they are being internalised and reproduced in everyday interactions under the interlocked systems of the state, culture and free market.

Keywords:

China, post-socialism, gender inequality, post-structural feminism

Details

References

Statistics

Authors

Download files

PDF

Citation rules

Nowak, M. . (2020). China’s transformation to a market economy and its impact on gender inequalities – a theoretical perspective. Forum Scientiae Oeconomia, 8(4), 65–85. https://doi.org/10.23762/FSO_VOL8_NO4_4

Altmetric indicators

Cited by / Share

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

References

Appleton, S., Song, L., Xia, Q. (2014), Understanding urban wage inequality in China 1988-2008: Evidence from quantile analysis, World Development 62, 1--13. DOI:10.1016/j.worlddev.2014.04.005.

Attané, I. (2012), Being a woman in China today: A demography of gender, China Perspectives, 4, 5-15. DOI: 10.4000/chinaperspectives.6013.

Barker, C. (2012), Cultural studies: Theory and practice, London: Sage.

Beck, U. (1992), Risk society: Towards a new modernity, London: Sage.

Bian, Y., Logan, J.R. (1996), Market transition and the persistence of power: the changing stratification system in urban China, American Sociological Review, 61(5), 739-758. DOI: 10.2307/2096451.

Bieszk-Stolorz, B. (2017), The impact of gender on routes for registered unemployment exit in Poland, Equilibrium. Quarterly Journal of Economics and Economic Policy, 12(4), 733-749. DOI:10.24136/eq.v12i4.38.

Bobbitt-Zeher, D. (2007), The gender income gap and the role of education, Sociology of Education, 80(1), 1-22. DOI:10.1177/003804070708000101.

Bourdieu, P. (1986), The forms of capital, in: I. Szeman and T. Kaposy, (Eds.), Cultural theory: An anthology (pp. 81-93), Chichester and Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.

Brown, K. (2016), CEO, China: the rise of Xi Jinping, London and New York: IB Tauris.

Bryson, V. (2007), Gender and the politics of time: Feminist theory and contemporary debates, Bristol: Policy Press.

Butler, J. (2004), Undoing gender, New York and London: Routledge.

Chen, M. (2018), Does marrying well count more than career? Personal achievement, marriage, and happiness of married women in urban China, Chinese Sociological Review, 50(3): 240-274. DOI:10.1080/21620555.2018.1435265.

Chow, Y. T., (1966), Social Mobility in China. Status Careers Among the Gentry in a Chinese Community, New York: Atherton Press.

Croll, E. (2011), Feminism and socialism in China, Oxon and New York: Routledge Revivals.

Davis, B., Gannon, S. (2005), Feminism/Poststructuralism, in: B. Somekh and C. Lewin (Eds.), Research methods in the social sciences (pp. 318-325), London: Sage.

Deng, X. (1987), Fundamental issues in present-day China, Oxford: Pergamon Press.

Djilas, M. (1982), The new class: An analysis of the communist system, San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Dmytrów, K., Bieszk-Stolorz, B. (2019), Mutual relationships between the unemployment rate and the unemployment duration in the Visegrad Group countries in years 2001-2017, Equilibrium. Quarterly Journal of Economics and Economic Policy, 14(1), 129-148. DOI: 10.24136/eq.2019.006.

Drakulic, S. (2016), How we survived communism and even laughed, New York: Harper Perennial.

Dunn, J. (1984), The politics of socialism: An essay in political theory, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Elman, B. A. (2000), A cultural history of civil examinations in late imperial China, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Eyal, G., Szelényi, I., Townsley, E. R. (1998), Making capitalism without capitalists: Class formation and elite struggles in post-communist Central Europe, London and New York: Verso.

Fincher, L.H. (2014), Leftover women. The resurgence of gender inequality in China, London: Zed Books.

Flaherty, J.H., Liu, M.L., Ding, L., Dong, B., Ding, Q., Li, X., Xiao, S. (2007), China: The aging giant, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 55(8), 1295-1300. DOI: 10.1111/j.15325415.2007.01273.x.

FlorCruz, J. (2008), Looking back over China’s last 30 years. CNN, 19 December 2008, retrieved from: http://edition.cnn. com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/12/18/china.reform.florcruz/index.html?iref=24hours, (accessed 22 March 2015).

Fong, V.L. (2002), China’s one-child policy and the empowerment of urban daughters, American Anthropologist, 104(4), 1098-1109. DOI: 10.1525/aa.2002.104.4.1098.

Foucault, M. (1980), Power/knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings 1972-1977, New York: Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (1982), The subject and power, Critical Inquiry, 8(4), 777-795. DOI:10.1086/448181.

Fraser, N., Nicholson, L. (1994), Social criticism without philosophy: An encounter between feminism and postmodernism, in: S. Seidman (Ed.), The Postmodern turn: New perspectives on social theory (pp. 242-261), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fuszara, M. (2000), New gender relations in Poland in the 1990s, in: S. Gal and G. Kligman (Eds.), Reproducing gender: Politics, publics and everyday life after socialism (pp. 259-285), Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Glass, A.P., Gao, Y., Luo, J. (2013), China: Facing a long-term care challenge on an unprecedented scale, Global Public Health, 8(6), 725-738. DOI: 10.1080/17441692.2013.782060.

Golley, J., Zhou, Y., Wang, M. (2019), Inequality of opportunity in China’s labor earnings: The gender dimension, China & World Economy, 27(1), 28-50. DOI:10.1111/cwe.12266.

Greenhalgh, S. (2010), Cultivating global citizens: Population in the rise of China, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press.

Hanser, A. (2005), The gendered rice bowl: The sexual politics of service work in urban China, Gender & Society, 19(5), 581-600. DOI: 10.1177/0891243205276794.

Hershatter, G. (2007), Women in China’s long twentieth century, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Hershatter, G. (2014), The gender of memory: Rural women and China’s collective past, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Holding Up Half the Sky (2012), The New York Times, 6 March 2012, retrieved from:http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/07/world/asia/holding-up-half-the-sk y.html?_r=1&, (accessed 12 April 2015).

Holton, R. J. (2014), Global inequalities, London: Palgrave.

Huang, Y. (2008), Capitalism with Chinese characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the state, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Human Rights Watch (2018), Only men need apply. Gender discrimination in job advertisements in China, retrieved from: https://www.hrw.org/report/2018/04/23/only-men-need-apply/gender-discrimination-job-advertisements-china, (accessed 14 August 2020).

Hunter, S. (2012), Feminist Perspectives, in: P. Alcock, P., M. May and S. Wright (Eds.), The student’s companion to social policy (pp. 83-89), Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Jayachandran, S. (2015), The roots of gender inequality in developing countries, Annual Review of Economics, 7(1), 63-88. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-economics-080614-115404.

Kamerman, S., Moss, P. (2009), The politics of parental leave policies: Children, parenting, gender and the labour market, Bristol: Policy Press.

Kocka, J. (2016), Capitalism: A short history, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Kuhn, P. A. (1984), Chinese views of social classification, in: J.L. Watson (Ed.), Class and social stratification in post-revolution China (pp. 16-28), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

LaFont, S. (2001), One step forward, two steps back: Women in the post-communist states, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, 34(2), 203-220. DOI: 10.1016/S0967-067X(01)00006-X.

Lane, D. S. (1996), The rise and fall of state socialism: industrial society and the socialist state, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Lavigne, M. (1999), The economics of transition: from socialist economy to market economy, London: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-27313-3.

Lewandowska-Gwarda, K. (2018), Female unemployment and its determinants in Poland in 2016 from the spatial perspective, Oeconomia Copernicana, 9(2), 183-204. DOI: 10.24136/oc.2018.010.

Liu, S. (2013), A few good women at the top: The China case, Business Horizons, 56(4), 483-490. DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2013.04.002.

Liu, Z. (2005), Institution and inequality: the hukou system in China, Journal of Comparative Economics, 33(1), 133-157. DOI: 10.1016/j.jce.2004.11.001.

Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China (2011), retrieved from:http:// www.china.org.cn/china/Legislations- Form2001-2010/2011-02/11/content_21897930.htm, (accessed 15 September 2020).

Marx, K. (2010), A contribution to the critique of political economy, in: J.F. Sitton (Ed.), Marx today: Selected works and recent debates (pp. 91-94), New York: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI:10.1057/9780230117457.

Millett, K. (2016), Sexual politics, New York: Columbia University Press.

Mitchell, J. (1974), Psychoanalysis and feminism, New York: Vintage Books.

Murawska, A. (2016), Differences in unemployment among persons in a special situation on the labour market on the example of Polish provinces, Oeconomia Copernicana, 7(3), 375-388. DOI:10.12775/OeC.2016.022.

Nathan, A.J. (2017), China’s changing of the guard: Authoritarian resilience, in: K.E. Brodsgaard (Ed.), Critical Readings on the Communist Party of China (pp. 86-99), Leiden and Boston: Brill. National Bureau of Statistics of China (2000), retrieved from http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/statisticaldata/yearlydata/YB2000e/index1.htm, (accessed 7 April 2017).

Naughton, B. J. (2018), The Chinese economy: Adaptation and growth, Cambridge and London: MIT Press.

Nowak, M. K. (2017), Gender analysis of the one-child policy: the impact on gender inequalities in China, PhD thesis, (unpublished), Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, retrieved from:ht tps://theses.lib.polyu.edu.hk /handle/200/9087, (accessed 12 August2019).

Park, J.D. (1997), The special economic zones of China and their impact on its economic development, Westport: Praeger Publishers.

Pilc, M. (2017), Cultural, political and economic roots of the labor market institutional framework in the OECD and postsocialist countries, Equilibrium. Quarterly Journal of Economics and Economic Policy, 12(4), 713-731. DOI: 10.24136/eq.v12i4.37.

Population Census of China (1982), Population Census Office under the State Council and Department of Population Statistics, Beijing: State Statistical Bureau.

Preston, S. H. (1978), Mortality, morbidity, and development, Population Bulletin of the United Nations Economic Commission for Western Asia, 15, 63-75.

Qin, A. (2019), A prosperous China says ‘men preferred,’ and women lose, New York Times, 17 July 2019, retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/16/world/asia/china-women-discrimination.html, (accessed 20 May 2020).

Report on major results of the third wave survey on the social status of women in China (2011), All-China women’s Federation and National Bureau of Statistics of China, retrieved from: http://www.china. com.cn/zhibo/zhuanti/ch-xinwen/2011-10/21/content_23687810.htm, (accessed 14 May 2016).

Riley, N. E. (1999), Challenging demography: Contributions from feminist theory, Sociological Forum, 14(3), 369-397.

Rofel, L. (2007), Desiring China: Experiments in neoliberalism, sexuality, and public culture, Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Shirk, S.L. (2018), China in Xi’s ‘New Era’: The return to personalistic rule, Journal of Democracy 29(2), 22-36. DOI 10.1353/ jod.2018.0022.

Sicular, T., Ximing, Y., Gustafsson, B., Shi, L. (2007), The urban–rural income gap and inequality in China, Review of Income and Wealth, 53(1), 93-126. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4991.2007.00219.x.

State Council (2020), retrieved from: http://english.www.gov.cn/statecouncil, (accessed 10 September 2020).

Tabulation on the 2010 population census of the Peoples Republic of China (2010), Beijing: China Statistics Press.

Tilly, C. (1999), Durable inequality, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Tong, R. (2013), Feminist thought: A comprehensive introduction, Abingdon: Routledge.

Tsai, K. S. (2007), Capitalism without democracy: The private sector in contemporary China, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

UNESCO Institute for Statistics (2014), Higher education in Asia: expanding out, expanding up: the rise of graduate education and university research, retrieved from: http://uis.unesco.org/sites /default/files/documents/higher-education-inasia-expanding-out-expanding-up-2014-en.pdf, (accessed 14 June 2017).

Unger, J. (2002), Transformation of rural China, New York: M.E. Sharpe.

Wang, F. (2008), Boundaries and categories: Rising inequality in post-socialist urban China, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Weber, M. (2009), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, Abingdon: Routledge.

Whyte, M. (1984), Sexual inequality under socialism: The Chinese case in perspective, in J.L. Watson (Ed.), Class and social stratification in post-revolution China (pp. 198-238), New York: Cambridge University Press.

Whyte, M. (2010), Myth of the social volcano: Perceptions of inequality and distributive injustice in contemporary China, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Whyte, M. (2012), China’s post-socialist inequality, Current History, 111(746), 229-234.

World Bank (2020), Labour force participation rate, female (% of female population ages 15+) (modelled ILO estimate), retrieved from: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sl.tlf.cact.fe.zs?locations=CN0-CN, (accessed 22 July 2020).

Xi J. (2013), “Jianchi nannü pingdeng jibenguoce, fahui woguo funü weida zuoyong”[Upholding the fundamental statepolicy of equality between men andwomen, asserting women’s great role in our country], Xinhua Net, retrieved from: http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/201310/31/c_117956150.htm, (accessed 17 August 2020).

Xu, X. Q., Li, X. (2009), Review and preview of the urbanization in Pearl River Delta in the past 30 years of reform and opening up, Economic Geography, 29(1), 13-18.

Yang, D. L. (1996), Calamity and reform in China: State, rural society, and institutional change since the Great Leap Famine, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Yi, Z., Wang, Z. (2003), Dynamics of family and elderly living arrangements in China: New lessons learned from the 2000 census, China Review, 3(2), 95-119.

Zhang, Z. (2000), Mediating time: The” rice bowl of youth” in fin de sičcle urban China, Public Culture, 12(1), 93-113.

Zheng, J. (2016), New feminism in China: Young middle-class Chinese women in Shanghai, Singapore: Springer. DOI:10.1007/978-981-10-0777-4.

Zheng, W. (2003), Gender, employment and women’s resistance, in: E.J. Perry and M. Selden (Ed.), Chinese society: Change, conflict and resistance (pp. 162-186), London and New York: Routledge Curzon.

Martyna Nowak

martyna.nowak85@gmail.com

Affiliation:

Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Martyna Nowak, PhD, obtained her doctoral degree from Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research focuses on gender issues, social policy analysis and social change, with a special focus on the issues in contemporary China and its transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy. She has taught various courses for both undergraduate and graduate students. She holds a master’s degree in Far East studies from Jagiellonian University, and was granted scholarships by the Polish, Chinese and Taiwanese Ministries of Education. Beside her academic achievements, she also has over 10 years of experience in the areas of consultancy, project management and diplomacy.