ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the 1970s, young women in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) were presented with a simple picture of their status in relation to their grandmothers. After 1949, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), women have been liberated from the shackles of tradition. In the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s non-CCP voices were few and far between and the emancipation rhetoric was unremitting—‘Gender equality had been achieved in the PRC.' In thirty years the CCP’s monotone that gender equality has been achieved in Communist China has been replaced by a multiplicity of voices about the diversity of the modernities Chinese women experience. This chapter explores these transformations in a survey of the political, economic and social indicators of women’s status in the PRC. Gender equality is conceived as a luxury of wealthy and ‘modern’ nations that have discarded tradition.
