ABSTRACT
In the modernising China of the 1980s and 1990s, images of Chinese women parading down the catwalk in the latest Pierre Cardin fashion have overtaken images of the revolutionary Chinese woman digging ditches in a blue ‘Mao suit’. It has become customary to discuss the affluent, post-socialist Chinese woman as the target of global economic forces and Western consumerism (Hooper 1994; Ling 1994) or to decry what are seen as reversals in the socio-economic status of Chinese women working outside the home (Rai and Zhang 1994; Gao 1994; Bell 1994). Western and Chinese observers have noted the return of pre-revolutionary ‘feudal’ practices in kinship and marriage arrangements (Davis and Harrell 1993). Some Chinese feminists have welcomed the new space offered by economic reforms to allow women to free up a specifically female subjectivity (Li 1994), while others condemn notions of ‘essential’ Chinese woman as a return to discriminatory policies based on biological determinism (Woo 1994; Hom 1994; Gao 1994).
