The Chinese Women's Movement between State and Market (review)

In The Chinese Women's Movement between State and Market anthropologist Ellen Judd explores the resourcefulness of "the official women's movement" as it works under challenging circumstances to improve the lives of women who have been facing the effects of dramatic social and economic change in rural China since the late 1980s. The starting point for grassroots women leaders is "the proposition that the decisive problem for women is that their 'quality' (suzhi) is too low"— the main premise being "that women have disadvantages in literacy, education, and skills that would enable them to compete successfully and thrive in the marketplace" (p. 2). This has led the official women's movement, defined by Judd as the Women's Federations under the leadership of the Communist Party of China, to the development and implementation of a set of programs and policies to raise the quality of women and lead women to compete more successfully in a market economy.

While the book is concerned with the strategies of the Women's Federations, "it is actually more concerned with what is happening at the margins of the official women's movement, where that movement intersects with the lives of women charting their courses through a society in transition" (p. 18). Drawing on the work of Lila Abu-Lughod, Judd's concern is to conduct an "ethnography of the particular" by exploring the move toward the market "as situated in specific experiences of the reform and in women's various efforts to strategize in the reform context" (pp. 2-3). The author's interest is in how the women's movement is conceptualized and utilized, and in the details and particular strategies for change as seen through an examination of concrete instances of the pursuit of quality. As has been noted by Xiaolan Bao and Wu Xu, the strategy of raising the level of women's quality is criticized by activists and scholars in China, who see it as a "victim-blaming strategy."¹ This thorough study brings new perspectives to the understanding of the quality strategy and points to both the gains and the problems inherent in the ideology and practice of improving women's quality.

The book is based on observations and interviews conducted from 1988 to 1995 in Shandong Province and is solidly grounded in empirical research that includes both systematic data on women derived from household samples and an in-depth longitudinal examination of the effort to organize women as this activity unfolded primarily in and around the rural community of Huaili but also in other localities. Given the extent of this research and Judd's recognized scholarship— she has explored the social and symbolic construction of gender in contemporary China for many years—the extremely high quality of this study is no surprise. The book's title, however, is somewhat misleading. Perhaps Judd is using the term "the women's movement" as a direct translation of the Chinese "women's liberation movement" (funü jiefang yundong), which in the PRC is used synonymously with the Women's Federations and to denote Party and Federation mobilization of women. This top-down style of organizing is reflected in the ironic definition in China of the Women's Federations as a "move women movement." In general, however, social movements arise from spontaneous social protest and typically are not highly institutionalized. Judd distinguishes between an "official" and an "independent" women's movement in China. I would argue that the women's movement in China is distinct from the Women's Federation institution and that while there are many small "movements" such as those of religious women, the overall women's movement includes both activists and organizations outside the Women's Federations and parts of the Women's Federations at their various administrative levels.

The book contains eight chapters. In the Introduction Judd provides the background to her study by describing...