In the introduction to this volume, Helen F. Siu and Chan Wing-hoi claim that “The study of Chinese women has contributed significantly to gender theories” (p. 1). They back this with a long bibliographic footnote (p. 273, fn. 1) that gives short shrift to “Chinese anthropology in the tradition of Freedman, Cohen, Wolf, Watson” [which Wolf? which Watson?] to emphasize contributions by analysts working in the interpretivist tradition. For students being introduced to that approach, this is a useful review of intellectual initiatives to build theory that fits Chinese cases. Siu and Chan do not convince me that China analysts have offered new conceptual tools to comparative work in women's/gender studies. Nor is there much interest in theory in most of the individual papers of the volume. Commercialization is a central theme for the book—good idea—but “commercialization” is a very light theoretical whip for driving the political-economic donkey. Imprecision about such a central concept means that the donkey will not go far, and will carry a very light load. Further, this introduction takes an inordinate number of words to signpost that changes in political economy, old regional differences, and various status positions organize the papers.
Most of the papers, however, do add to our knowledge of women in the Chinese world from the early 19th to the early 21st centuries. Most come from thoughtful, effortful work offering information that deepens our understanding of Chinese women in families of merchants and those who worked for them. They are organized historically as Ming/Qing, colonial/Republican, post World War II, and the present neo-liberal era, and carry many messages about the distinctiveness of the Pearl River Delta.
The book begins appropriately with Liu Zhiwei's discussion of a tomb of loyal sisters-in-law that starts the reader off with an illustration of the visibility and significance of women in that region. Counterintuitively from the point of view of northern Chinese or Confucian or state-influenced androcentry, here female ancestors have pride of place. In “Images of Mother: The Place of Women in South China,” David Faure reminds us that mother-son relationships must have varied enormously across the time/space entity called dynastic China. His anecdotes—notably that of a Ming promoter of Confucian orthodoxy, whose young widowed mother breastfed him until he was nine sui (around eight years old)—remind us also that the past is a strange country. May-bo Ching's paper on women and marriage in Cantonese ballads is useful in clarifying the variation in formats of oral, manuscript, and printed texts focusing on women's greatest life transition: marriage. She concludes that the most common, printed documents use language “mixed with a considerable amount of classical Chinese and northern vernacular” (p. 74). This warns us against fundamentalist readings of these as expressing either regional or female voice, as does the discussion in Anne McLaren's Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008).
Wing-hoi Chan takes up a crucial political-economic relationship between women and resources in “Women's Work and Women's Food in Lineage Land.” Most previous research on patrilineality and lineage organization has emphasized rice land as the principal source of lineage power and thus of androcentric practice. With real originality, Chan reveals the significance of the Ipomoean revolution—the shift to sweet potato cultivation in the Pearl River Delta and many other parts of China. After their 16th century arrival, sweet potatoes could feed far more pigs and women, who eat lower on the hog than men, than grain-based ecologies formerly did. Chan excavates information about women's work in producing pigs and potatoes and the power it gave them, breaking ground in one of the great untilled fields of Chinese studies. Speculating wisely, he further explores women's “kin work” beyond the lineage and as a probable influence on other regional characteristics such as delayed transfer marriage.
Where it can be shown that a generality—here, the power of patriliny—has exceptions, scholars are often tempted to treat the generality as no more significant than the exception. Chan avoids this error but commits another. By comparing the Delta with New Guinea, he overlooks patriliny's most important Chinese prop, the imperial state's millennial insistence on kinship/gender hierarchy. China's androcentrism creep has been so well documented—e.g. by Matthew Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)—that it is unwise to ignore the role of the state and its patricorporate agents.
Part II approaches experiences of women whose lives were embroiled in the great Cantonese outmigrations. Chi-cheung Choi, looking at women in Chaoshan emigrant communities over the century prior to 1950, shows how non-indigenous markets and institutional frameworks created new opportunities for women to act with some independence. Huge numbers of young women embroidered, made spirit money, or worked as porters and smugglers for wages or as small entrepreneurs; Chaoshan-based wives of prosperous overseas Chinese managed large households; education for girls began in cities; some rich women owned shares and stock under the names of male kin. Carl T. Smith takes up an inevitable byproduct of colonial encounters: Eurasian women living on the fringe of expatriate society. Boatwomen, who supplied various services to visiting foreigners, were prominent among them; some became rich. Smith holds that the resulting dependence was “less confining and restrictive” than that under Chinese institutions. His evidence argues that this relative freedom was the result of institutions created by colonial management. Josephine Lai-kuen Wong introduces the famous Lady Clara Ho Tong, wife of a Jardine Matheson comprador, who founded a “distinguished Eurasian lineage” through her work in establishing a major Buddhist foundation. As is usual with wealthy Chinese patrons of Buddhism, her efforts seem to have been directed toward replacing folk religion with one that was both more modern and more Confucian. Her life was full of the opportunities and adventures made possible in that world by wealth and position.
Part III deals with China's Hong Kong fringe in the politically dramatic years from the 1949 Revolution to the present. Helen Siu begins it with “Women of Influence: Gendered Charisma,” lauding upper-class Hong Kong women for their power and charm. The “Handbag Party” of upper level female civil servants paralleled their wealthy sisters in rigorous attention to fashion, grooming, and deportment, showing how they were praised for velvet-glove handling of male rivals. While the information about these remarkable women is fascinating, Siu makes no effort to define theoretically the well-turned-out Hong Kong version of feminism. Choi Po-king turns our attention to “Women Workers in Hong Kong, 1960s–1990s.” Less well dressed, perhaps, these women were the very pivot-point of mid-20th century global capitalism. Her methodological section that recognizes the difficulties of tacking between macro-analytic categories and the insights such women share through ethnographic interviewing is of considerable value. Attentive to her sources as persons varyingly situated in a complex world, Choi adds to the slim accumulation of reliable direct information about Chinese working women.
In “Half the Sky: Mobility and Late Socialist Reflections,” Yan Lijun, with Yang Meijian and Taotao Zhang, contrasts the “steel maidens” or “iron girls” of industrialization propaganda with the “niunü” of Guangdong. Their Hong Kong-like “bourgeois fantastic garb” (p. 240) came under sharp attack by left activists, but they often managed to escape much of the scutwork of revolution-building by avoiding rural labor, joining the army (a splendid career choice at the time), finding opportunities for higher education, and smuggling themselves into Hong Kong. This female-centered examination of how young people with class and social capital slipped through the risky years of the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution is a welcome addition to our understanding of that period, and of how Hong Kong authorities actually dealt with those of China. Pheng Cheah's paper on the traffic in women makes use of a film by Fruit Chan, Durian Durian. Cheah sees the film's sex workers as a parody of the southeast China entrepreneurs who established the Chinese commercial presence in Southeast Asia. The heroine shows “many of the traits and characteristics of the savvy and flexible migrant entrepreneur that are celebrated as virtues and ideals both in Hong Kong and in the PRC” (p. 268). How her actions parody the typically small-scale entrepreneurship so salient to Chinese identity in this region is not clear, perhaps because Cheah employs an extremely loose notion of capitalism and pays insufficient attention to long-existing, specifically Chinese forms of entrepreneurship. Consumerism, including the consumption of sexual services, does not equate to capitalism. Cell phones, the availability of CNN on television, and much of the consumerism Cheah sees as evidence of China's being drawn into global capitalism are underpinned by state enterprises and/or “private” ones utterly dependent on state permissions, alliances, resources, and market management. A sharper analysis of this admittedly confusing political economy is needed.
Students will like this book, which is full of variety in topic and tone, and will benefit from having its broad bibliographic resources.
