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Urbanizing Woman and Her Sisters: The Ethics of Gender in Chinese Television Dramas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2009

Haiping Yan
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In the autumn of 1997 the World Bank issued ‘China 2020’, a seven-volume report on the key issues and challenges that ‘China must face over the next two decades’. The opening passage reads:

China is in the throes of two transitions: from a command economy to a market-based one and from a rural, agricultural society to an urban, industrial one. So far, both transitions have been spectacultarly successful. China is the fastest growing economy in the world, with per capita incomes more than quadrupling sine 1978, achieving in two generations what took other countries centuries.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1999 , pp. 268 - 275
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 1999

References

Notes

1. The World Bank, China 2020 (Washington: World Bank Publications, 1997).Google Scholar

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Xian, Zhang & Xin, Fu, Chuang ShanghaiGoogle Scholar (Braving Shanghai), produced by Shanghai Television and Film Corporation, broadcast in November 1998.

5. ‘Shanghairen, nuli!’ (‘Shanghainese, Make Efforts!’), Jiefang ribao (The Liberation Daily), Shanghai, , 29 11 1998.Google Scholar

6. The scholarly discussion of neo-Confucianism has been one of the major cultural features of contemporary China particularly since the late 1980s. Li Zehou, the leading philosopher during the reform era, has recently published New Interpretations of Confucius (Hong Kong: Tiandi Tushu Publishing House, 1998), indicating the important degree of the differential efforts made in such a rediscovery of Confucius and his moral philosophy in China.

7. In the city of Chendu of Sichuan Province, for instance, within the first ten days after the Chinese spring festival of 1994, there were seven incidents of workers' unrest caused by a management decision to prolong working hours and intensify their workload. See ‘The Voice of Women Workers’, Chinese Women's Movement (Beijing: All China Women's Federation), April 1997, p. 31.

8. In the established discourses of ‘three-world’ theories, China has often been defined as a member of the ‘Second World’. I, however, respect the many scholars who place China among ‘Third-World’ nations in that it has shared much of the historical struggles of the ‘Third-World’ nations in modern world history.

9. See, for instance, Barlow, Tani, ‘Theorizing Woman: Funu, Guojia, Jiating’, in Zito, Angela & Barlow, Tani, eds., Body, Subject, & Power in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 253–89.Google Scholar

10. See Crol, Elizabeth, Feminism and Socialism in China (New York: Schocken Books, 1978)Google Scholar, Sui, Bobby, Women of China: Imperialism and Women's Resistance 1900–1949 (London: Zed Press, 1982)Google Scholar, and Gilmartin, Chritina, Engendering the Chinese Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).Google Scholar

11. The highest rated drama broadcast by the Chinese Central Television Station in the first three months of 1998 for instance, was an eight-episode series entitled Women Bankers. See ‘Listing of Ratings on CCTV programs’, Tele vision Studies (Beijing: the Chinese Central Television Station), April 1998, p. 64.

12. For some empirically informative and analytically sustained discussions on this topic, see, for instance, Meisner, Maur ice, Deng Xiaoping Era (New York: Hall & Wang Publishers, 1997).Google Scholar

13. Yida, Liu, ‘Looking into the “Lay-off” Situation’ Beijing Evening News, 21 02 1998, p. 4.Google Scholar

14. Zhi, Bai, SistersGoogle Scholar, produced by Shanghai Yongle Television and Film Cooperation, broadcast in 1996.

15. From an interview with Zhi, Bai, Shanghai, , 12 12, 1997.Google Scholar

16. Qinli, Liu, ‘Why Must They Help You?’, Jingji cankac wenzhai (China Economic Reference), 26 04 1998.Google Scholar

17. Honig's, EmilySisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar offers valuable information and insights or this subject. Also see Sui, Bobby, Women of China (London: Zed Press, 1982), particularly pp. 151–171.Google Scholar

18. There are numerous women's magazines presently circulating in China with substantial readerships. Nüziyuekan (Women's Monthly) by Beijing Women's Federation, Nüzi (Ms.) by Tianjing Women's Federation, Xiandai jiating (Modern Family) by Shanghai Women's Federation, Nübac (Women's Report) by Shenzhen Women's Federation, Nüzishijie (Women's World) and Fünü shenhuo (Women's Lives) by the Provincial Women's Federations in Hebei and Henan, Nüyou (Women Friends) by Harebin Publishing House, Zhongwai fünü wenzhai (Chinese and Foreign Women's Digest) by the Women and Children Publishing House in Neimengu, Nüxing wenxue (Women's Literature) by Gaikan Publishing in Hebei, and Fünü yanjiu (Women's Studies) by Beijing Women's Centre for Critical Theories, are among the most noted. Zhongguo fuyun (Chinese Women's Movement) by All China Women's Federation, while consciously remaining in lines with the changing rhetorics of the changing policy-makers during the reform era, communicates significant information on women's individual and collective activities, struggles, and movements that are much more complex than the official rhetoric of the reform—contested and full of contradictions in itself—could contain.

19. See, for instance, Wenhui bao (Wenhui Daily), Shanghai, , 01–06, 1998Google Scholar; Beijing ribao (Beijing Daily), January-June, 1998; Zhejiang ribao (Zhejiang Daily), January-June 1998.

20. For instance, the concerted actions taken in May 1997 by all provincial governors and other leading officials to publish their positional papers on the ‘Woman Question’, asserting that they all take the principle of gender equality as one of their guiding policies in administration, and they all believe that women's social, economic, and cultural emancipation is an intrinsic part of China's modernization. See The Special Issue on Enforcing the State Policy on the Equality Between Men and Women, Chinese Women's Movement (Beijing, May 1997), pp. 2–25.

21. Zhi, Bai, Sisters, typed manuscript, Book Two, p. 12.Google Scholar

22. The ground for such a belief can be partially seen in the current debates about the crisis in global finance among the World Bank (led by its chief economist, Joseph Stiglitz), the International Monetary Fund (led by its Managing Director, Michel Camdessus and the Asia-Pacific Director, Hubert Neiss), and the US Treasury (see, for instance, reports in the New York Times and The Financial Times on 3 December 1998). Triggered by the Asian economic crisis, such debates indicate a growing awareness across the world about the structural problematics of what Fredric Jameson calls ‘late capitalism’ of which the Woman Question has been a vital indicator.