ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a discussion of peasants and their economic choices, and then moves on to the gender question in contemporary rural China. P. C. Huang suggests that traditional Chinese peasants followed a safety-first logic and kept investing cheap family labor into labor-intensive agriculture and handicrafts despite declining labor returns. China's market reform has given rise to a celebration of the triumph of human capital over redistributive power. Post-Mao development policies and open-up strategies have favored the eastern region, which benefited from its favorable geographic and economic conditions. Due to the withering away of interventionist government policies, local politics play a more important role in shaping developmental pathways. Local leaders may pass on autonomy to villagers, but some maintain and reorganize their regulative power. Under the collective coordination of the rural economy, the local office may have different takes on gender equality that contribute to the local employment patterns for men and women.
