This article is a study of socialist feminist cultural practices in the early PRC. It investigates stories behind the scenes and treats the All-China Women's Federation's official journal Women of China as a site of feminist contention to reveal gender conflicts within the Party, diverse visions of socialist transformation, and state feminist strategies in the pursuit of women's liberation. A close examination of discrepancies between the covers and contents of the magazine explicates multiple meanings in establishing a socialist feminist visual culture that attempted to disrupt gender and class hierarchies. Special attention to state feminists' identification with and divergence from the Party's agenda illuminates a unique historical process in which a gendered democracy was enacted in the creation of a feminist cultural front when the Party was consolidating its centralizing power. The article demonstrates a prominent “gender line” in the socialist state that has been neglected in much of the scholarship on the Mao era.

In this article I re-think the complex legacies of the Maoist era and their relationship to the contemporary decline in rural women's leadership. By focusing on some of the gendered dimensions of rural development policy, it becomes evident that many “traditional” beliefs about the leadership abilities of rural women were given new life during the Maoist era. Prior to the Cultural Revolution rural women had two dominant paths of “liberation” or jiefang available to them: one that involved a liberation through the female body and household, the path of dangjia, and one that involved a liberation from the constraints of the female body and household, the path of fanshen. In this article I show how the simultaneous implementation of these two paths of liberation on a unique women-led Mu Guiying Brigade during the Great Leap Forward reproduced the problem of the political unacceptability of rural women.

In the fifth village elections in 2003 in Shaanxi province only 184 women were elected as village heads, a mere 0.6 per cent of the total. By the sixth elections in 2006 the number had almost doubled, and by the seventh elections in 2009 it had increased to 544. Together with the women on village Party committees, there were now 1,193 women village officials throughout the province, 4.5 per cent of the total. In contrast to leading women cadres within the formal structures of the political system, these village heads owed their positions not to nomination by upper levels of Party and government leadership but to success in fiercely competitive elections. Their success was the result of a grass-roots movement launched by a civil organization, the Shaanxi Research Association for Women and Family, to mobilize women's political participation. Their activities and trajectories had an impact on the local gender division of labour and entrenched gender attitudes that far surpassed the numbers alone. This article examines the collaboration between the Shaanxi Research Association for Women and Family and the All-China Women's Federation to mobilize women's political participation in Heyang county, Shaanxi province. It particularly focuses on the role of the Research Association in drawing on international feminist practices of women's empowerment to provide participatory based gender training courses as the key to persuading women to confront local and institutional resistance. Collaboration between the Research Association and the Women's Federation opened up access to significant resources both within and outside the system, creating new spaces for the articulation and protection of women's rights. Originating in a grass-roots movement, this collaboration can be seen as an instance of China's contemporary movement for gender equality.

This article highlights the case of a rural north-east Chinese village where youth labour mobility is a marriage strategy deployed by parents and engaged in by young people given constraints on education and income in the countryside. While some rural mothers and their daughters do make the fairytale of “marrying-up” into an urban household come true, for most rural young women migrants the self-oriented consumption that they are encouraged to pursue free of rural domestic responsibilities sets them up for heartbreak when they are brought back for a rural marriage. As long as rural households are left to rely on the “insurance” of land and a younger generation to work it and provide labour of domestic subsistence, they will pull sons (and wives for them) back to the countryside, and try to marry daughters to urban households to expand their network of security. This new twist on an old managerial strategy sets up a tragic conflict: young men are encouraged to return to the countryside, while young women are pushed to provide a “uniting bridge” into the city and, when they fail, are brought back to the countryside for marriage. If the experiences of families in Huangbaiyu village are not an anomaly but signal a broader trend, a generation of returnee young women who are frustrated and angry in rural marriages and abandon their husbands and parents-in-law will dramatically influence the future of China's development.

This article queries the current mobility of China's rural population by inverting the usual urban perspective and looking at this mobility through exploring the lives of those who do not move. It departs from a micro-analysis of who remains in the countryside in three west China agricultural communities between 2003 and 2005 and links this with an exploration of emergent structural features of rural communities as they are remade in the early 21st century in the wake of the abolition of agricultural taxes and levies. The ethnographic approach adopted highlights the agency, choices and practices of local people in charting their courses in a rural social world being drained of people. It proposes the utility for analysis of family strategies, identifying a repertoire of resourceful and diverse practices through which people strive to recreate and repopulate their social worlds. The argument links the study of historical directions in polity and economy with local and gendered practices in everyday life.

This article explores the relationship between gender and income inequality within and across households in an urban Chinese sample by looking at survey data from 381 married couples with infants born in a Nanjing hospital between 2006 and 2007 and in-depth interviews with a subsample of 80 of these couples. We explore the relationship between family income and differences between husbands’ and wives’ work preferences. A couple-level quantitative analysis shows that in lower-income families, husbands were more likely than their wives to prefer career advancement and low stress at work, and wives were more likely than their husbands to prefer state jobs. Our analyses of the qualitative subsample show that, even though high-income husbands and wives are more likely to share similar work preferences, the household division of roles within their marriages is still gendered along traditional lines, as it is in the marriages of low-income couples.

This article applies Myron Cohen's studies of family division and family management in rural China to an examination of how working class families in urban China cope with the hardships created by industrial transition and housing reform. Senior parents work with their adult children; parental authority retains a critical role. By flexibly shifting powerful domestic roles, senior women, in particular, work with their adult sons in order to transmit the domestic resources necessary to secure the filial services to which they feel entitled. In China's fast-changing economic environment, fuelled by the modernization process, the dynamics of family culture still present effective tools and strategies for individual citizens seeking to protect and advance their own interests.

In the flow of the material, cultural and moral influences shaping contemporary Chinese society, individual desires for emotional communication are reconstituting the meaning of the subject, self and responsibility. This article draws on fieldwork conducted in Beijing between 2000 and 2004 to discuss the gendered dimensions of this process through an analysis of the implications of the “communicative intimacy” sought by mothers and daughters in their mutual relationship. What could be termed a “feminization of intimacy” is the effect of two distinct but linked processes: on the one hand, a market-supported naturalization of women's roles, and on the other, the changing subjective articulation of women's needs, desires and expectations of family and personal relationships. I argue that across these two processes, the celebration of a communicative intimacy does not signify the emergence of more equal family or gender relationships, as recent theories about the individualization and cultural democratization of daily life in Western societies have argued. As families and kin groups, communities and neighbourhoods are physically, spatially and socially broken up, and as gender differences in employment and income increase, media and “expert” encouragement to mothers to become the all-round confidantes, educators and moral guides of their children affirms women's responsibilities in the domestic sphere. Expectations of mother–daughter communication reshape the meaning – and experience – of the individual subject in the changing character of the urban family at the same time as they reinforce ideas about women's gendered attributes and the responsibilities associated with them.