Author Lanyan Chen makes a compelling critique of China's key reform policies for their unintentionally adverse impacts on Chinese women, and then offers a corrective “gender strategy.” According to Chen, imperfect institutional mechanisms and a non-democratic legislative process together muffle grassroots women's voices and unsurprisingly produce policy that fails to adequately address real women's needs and concerns, and often worsens their problems. Chen's gender strategy is thus a precise set of steps to arrive at a more participatory policy-making procedure and gender-equitable policy and outcomes. A feminist political economy framework, emphasizing the urgent need for socially responsible policy that gives equal weight to, and acknowledges the interdependence of, production and social reproduction, informs the analysis. This is especially important for Chinese women, whose double burden is increasing apace with their rising participation in production, exacerbated by insufficient social support. Chen draws upon an extensive array of statistics (including those compiled by the UN and China's State Council), surveys and empirical findings of researchers publishing in Chinese to scrutinize policy effects on women in regard to agriculture, urban industry, reproduction and politics. Included in two of the chapters are case studies, which Chen evaluated as a (former) UNIFEM-NE Asia Gender Advisor, of innovative responses by grassroots women's organizations to particular policies.
In these four arenas, Chen shows how policy infused with a “male-dominated perspective” and implemented by a “male-dominated” government, combines with existing gender differences to result in a gendered outcome disadvantageous to women, and how women have actively engaged the state by adapting to such policy in innovative ways to serve their needs. Chapter one argues the feminization of agriculture indirectly results from agricultural reform policies and a cultural division of labour between the sexes, whereby men exit agriculture to seek higher incomes, leaving women burdened with both domestic and farm work responsibilities. Despite women's growing predominance in the primary sector and role as chief providers of food security to their families, they have not been the primary targets of government efforts to alleviate the “three rural problems,” hence their gender-specific needs have been unmet. The routine designation of men as “household heads” in distribution of land, rent and enterprise profits, and the weak support for home-based agricultural enterprises favoured by women, impede women agricultural producers' access to capital and technological investments, credit, and markets.
These are examples of biased policy and implementation that Chen says must change to boost rural incomes and hence resolve this rural problem. New rural co-operative schemes initiated by local governments and women's federation branches hold great potential for improving women's livelihoods, but require changes outlined in the gender strategy. Chapter two considers the industrial restructuring that has led to the informalization of urban work, and in turn the feminization of the informal sector, using the example of two Shanghai enterprises. Chen advises terminating the national policy of earlier retirement for women, which has a cumulative negative impact, and providing a minimum wage standard and flexible social protection scheme. Chapter three points out the bias inherent in the family planning policy and its implementation, such as: the second-child exception following first-order female births; the disproportionate responsibility placed on women for birth planning at the exclusion of men; and the lack of adequate provision of maternal health care, particularly in rural areas. Chen speculates that privatization of care due to a reduction of public health expenditure increases the likelihood of sex-selective abortions, by forcing pregnant women's reliance on informal care networks, like the powerful patriarchal kin groups who uphold traditional values of son preference. Chapter four gives recommendations for restructuring government in line with the gender strategy: affirmative action policies to increase women's representation at all levels of policy making; the creation of a gender unit for promoting gender equity in policy and legislation within every ministry that reports to the National Working Committee on Women and Children (NWCWC) under the State Council; and the merging of the All-China Women's Federation with the NWCWC.
Chen's veritable manifesto is aimed at China's leaders, central policy makers and top-level women's cadres; one hopes a Chinese version will appear. Chen chastises these policy makers and enforcers for their lack of gender awareness and weak political will, but places ultimate blame for women's declining social status on the political structure itself, and invites the bureaucrats to be part of the solution. As an internationally trained academic and gender practitioner working in a Chinese university, Chen is uniquely suited to the tasks of analysing policy failures and holding the Chinese state accountable to global standards of gender equality and human rights embodied in domestic legislation and the international protocols to which China is a signatory. Chen's gender strategy does not fundamentally challenge the neo-liberal policies adapted by the Chinese state to deal with the pressures of a global competitive economy. Rather, it offers pragmatic steps to ameliorate their deleterious effects that if taken will be transformational. Chen sometimes falls into the essentialist trap, as when associating a “top-down” leadership style with a “male-dominated” bureaucracy, and neglects other powerful social divisions (e.g. socio-economic status and rural − urban residence) shaping inequality even among women, which should be addressed in a feminist gender strategy. Despite these criticisms and some scattered grammatical errors, this is a refreshing and informative read. It should be mandatory for upper-level and graduate courses in development, gender studies and public policy as well as feminist political science/economics, and will be of special interest to scholars focused on contemporary China.
