An analysis of the survey data for employed mothers of young children in urban areas in the three countries demonstrates that they undertake disproportionate shares of domestic labour, compared to their spouses. China is most distinctive, however, in that women there combine full-time paid work with domestic roles and in that their spouses play a greater domestic role than in the other two cases. Gender role segregation in these spheres is greatest in Japan. The `housewife' role is endorsed in Japan but rejected in China. The British situation is closer to the Japanese than the Chinese one and is characterised by the resort to part-time work, which is itself more associated with gender role segregation than is full-time work. Chinese women are most integrated into the employment sphere and display most discontent with gender injustice at work, while the Japanese and British women express relative levels of satisfaction with their more limited employment involvement. The analysis concludes with a discussio...

The dual burden: east and west (women's working lives in china, japan and great britain)

Chinese labour heroes represent an idiosyncratic expression of a broader twentieth-century phenomenon of promoting worker emulation through the hailing of model labourers. Taken from a comparative perspective, the Chinese practice can be seen not only as modelled on an earlier Soviet development, but also a broader need felt in totalitarian regimes in the 1930s and 1940s that workers needed to be ‘remoralised’ through the establishment of cults of workers and work. Recently revived in the People's Republic of China in the form of patriotic movies and television shows, the main historical development of the Chinese articulation of this broader historical labour phenomenon is assessed in light of recent studies of Soviet and National Socialist attempts to heroise labour.

Socialist emulation in China: worker heroes yesterday and today

This article addresses the question of why despite the enormous success achieved by China in economic growth there are significant indicators showing relatively adverse life situations for women in many respects. A falling proportion of women in the population, unfavourable employment situation, disparity in wages, inadequate representation of women in political leadership are some of the indicators of the negative fallout of the Chinese growth story even as women too have benefited from the substantial improvement of Chinese people’s livelihood conditions during the recent decades. Based on field visits to Wuxi over a thirty-year period and using macro data we argue that the Chinese experience raises serious questions about the pattern of economic growth that has been adopted by the Chinese leadership and advanced globally in recent years.

Clouds Over Half the Sky Women’s Prospects under Reforms


Many Chinese students dislike hyper-competitive public school exams but find competing in e-sports games enjoyable. Some students are perceived to game ‘too much’ by their parents, who, anxious about gaming's impact on their grades, send their children to treatment camps for ‘Internet addiction’. This article documents parents’ and student-gamers’ experiences of competition in China's formal education system, online gaming, and professional e-sports. As student-gamers move between these competitive arenas, they develop counter-hegemonic understandings of what competition does and reconfigure their sense of self. Their movements reveal that, far from a symptom of neoliberal ideology, the prevalence of competition in China marks dialectical interactions between various ideologies and the lived experience of competitive practices. This finding contradicts simplistic conflations of competition and neoliberal economic models.

E-sports vs. Exams

construction of a socialist society. They were supposed to promote the political socialization of Chinese peasants and to transform their world outlook. They not only cooperated with the regime but were unusually enthusiastic in implementing the party and government programmes. As perfect examplers of the values and attitudes set forth by the Communist regime, labour heroes became the emulation models for the Chinese masses. The

The Role of Labour Heroes in the Yenan Period

The mak contrsst between these two statements is not to be found in the differing social backgrounds of women themselves, but in the policies and practices adopted for the elimination of women’s inequality and their liberation from familial and extrafamilial oppression during the last forty years. Land reform, carried out in much of the liberated areas of China prior to 1949, swept over most of the countryside in 1950-52. It involved redistribution of land from landlords and, to a lesser extent, from rich peasants, to small and landless peasants. Thus 700 million mu* of land covering approximately 44 per cent of

The PRC at Forty: Women and the Land Question in China

Ir Is A matter of historical record that Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (KMT) signally failed in the early years of their regime to bring China under the firm control of a centralized authority and to mobilize popular following. The main purpose of this paper is to examine the role of the KMT as a national unifier and Chiang Kai-shek’s efforts to unify China following the Northern Expedition in 1928. What constituted Chiang’s authority in this period? To what extent was it circumscribed ? What hampered his efforts, military and otherwise to achieve political unification ? Chiang Kai-shek was obsessed with the problem of unification. He often said in pathetic despair &dquo;We are not united and do not work hard to make our country strong and unified&dquo;.’ This was his way of answering the many puzzling problems he was confronted with during the period under discussion. As head of the Central Government, Chiang considered himself the symbol of national unity and insisted that defiance of the Central Government would destroy the unity of the country. Once unity was restored, he thought, China would overcome her domestic difficulties, however serious. He asked his comrades to be desciplined and ready to make &dquo;whatever sacrifices may , be necessary&dquo;.2 2 The first requisite of any scheme of national reconstruction was unification of the country and establishment of the authority of the National Government over the provinces. China had no sub-culture strong enough to be a serious obstacle to political unity. The National Government relied for its authority on the support of the masses. Co-operation between the Party government and the masses was taken for granted. Why did the KMT then fail to unify the country? The KMT certainly had the potential to unify the country. Its leader, Chiang, by any standard, was a genuine nationalist and sincere in his efforts. But his power, both in the party and the country, was circumscribed by organizational ineptitude. His government faced problems few governments had faced in modern times. To modernize China he had to establish a unified administration where warlordism had existed for

Govind S. Kelkar

Papers

The Role of Labour Heroes in the Yenan Period

The PRC at Forty: Women and the Land Question in China

The Kuomintang: An Inquiry into the Political Unification of China: I928-I930