ABSTRACT

On the basis of an ethnographic comparison of Taiwan and mainland China, this chapter explores Chinese kinship as an ‘economy of ganqing’ (sentiment) in which kinship value is produced by gendered work: work that produces gender as it produces politico-economic, biological and moral-social values, and the ‘productivity’ of which is linked in significant ways with wider political and economic contexts. Niaoyu, a fishing village on a small island in the Taiwan Strait, was the first of two fieldwork sites where I spent a total of 18 months in order to, originally, compare responses in gender and kinship relations to the different economic and political systems that had developed on Taiwan and the mainland. The other village was Meidao, an island community roughly 200 km north-west of Niaoyu, with very similar geographical, social and historical-cultural conditions, but since 1949 part of the People’s Republic. What struck me, the foreigner, first was the public visibility of women in Niaoyu as the main producers of economic, social and moral values in this small fishing community in industrializing Taiwan. Most

families, in the early and mid-1990s, were dependent on the remittances of children, and especially on daughters working in Taiwan, to survive economically, and it was very visibly women who were spinning the networks of family and friends in the community that often included their husbands and male kin as well. On the mainland side, after the economic reforms, families too had become dependent on the wage labour of children to finance the most important household expenses beyond mere economic reproduction, and in Meidao’s case, young people even went abroad to work, often in ethnic Chinese companies. In comparison, however, women’s social productivity or agency was publicly elided and new agnatic solidarities were highlighted. Here, money made in the new global economy had been transformed into the reconstruction of ancestral halls (citang), and into the formation of patrilineal values that ‘traditionally’ had turned women into kinship outsiders. What was shaping this different value-values nexus in the process of kinship on both sides? In this chapter I argue that ‘work’ is the key element in the process of value

formation in Chinese kinship, structured around a gendered dialectics of inside (nei) and outside (wai), that continues to influence the formation of kinship values in modern Taiwan and the People’s Republic. Work, in my understanding, encompasses all productive social action, not only of economic, but also social and cultural-moral values. Classic anthropological accounts of Chinese kinship, such as Freedman’s (1958, 1966), and even early efforts to view Chinese kinship from women’s perspective, such as Margery Wolf ’s (1972), conceptualized Chinese kinship like male property and as a set of values that informed social agency. Even if Wolf ’s famous account described the emotional ties that Chinese women created with their children (Wolf ’s ‘uterine family’), it was women’s essential propertylessness in kinship for which their emotional work substituted, and their ganqing work, to paraphrase Wolf, was potentially destructive of kinship value. In this account, I revert the relationship between values (‘property’) and effective social action (‘work’) in kinship. I draw on recent studies on Chinese guanxi and gift economies (Kipnis 1997; Yan 1996) that show how people actively produce ‘good feelings’ (hao ganqing) in social relations, and that suggest that such acts should be approached as a source of, rather than as the result of, kinship and gender subjectivities and moral obligations in rural China. My argument also takes forward a proposition made by Silvia Yanagisako and Janet Collier in their pathbreaking book Gender and Kinship (Collier and Yanagisako 1987: xiii, 369), that kinship and gender are locked into a dynamic of ‘mutual constitution’ which eliminates the need to find ultimate reasons for gender and kinship forms, and for their pattern of transformation, beyond the social in economic or political structures. At the same time, gender and kinship dynamics are never separate from, but in particular ways are articulated with, larger social systems of inequality. But as dynamic processes, gender and kinship materially sustain, morally evaluate and socially respond to the dynamics of the larger political economies in historically and culturally particular ways.