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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: [email protected].
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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
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Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 2015 

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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).

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