ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how young women’s aspirations for, and efforts to acquire new housing are contributing to important changes in the economic and cultural conditions of village life. Specifically, it argues that young women have given impetus to the following interrelated trends. In the wealthier regions of China, including the Zhejiang villages that are the focus of this study, young women often stipulate that they will only marry a man who owns a new mansion. Most mansions are occupied by nuclear households. Their construction has necessitated the rescheduling of intergenerational property transmission and the migration of labour, and spurred the marketisation of China’s countryside. The eclectic architectural designs of the new mansions intentionally signify the suburbanisation of village communities, spatially reconfigure family relations and re-engender the domestic sphere. My representation of women as agents of these changes is a preliminary attempt to respond to the recent challenge put forward by Arif Dirlik. Dirlik exhorted researchers to attend to the ways that individuals-‘circumscribed by the very conditions they would transform’—create distinctive cultures of consumption within and outside the realm of global capitalism (2001:23). The proposition that people intent on their individual goals collectively create the cultural practices that sustain capitalism is not novel (Creed 2000; Douglas and Isherwood 1979). What makes Dirlik’s formulation particularly relevant to scholars concerned with the lives of women in contemporary China is his argument that while consumption might offer individuals a means of temporary liberation and selfexpression, it simultaneously enmeshes them in complex capital, labour and product
markets. I illustrate Dirlik’s argument by showing how young women’s pursuit of housing and family ideals is helping to embed Zhejiang villages in global markets. At the same time, of course, the lives of rural women are being transformed by the very processes of property accumulation and consumption that they are facilitating.
