Chinese Women in the Official Chinese Press: Discursive Constructions of Gender in Service to the State Cara Wallis Annenberg School of Communication University of Southern California Los Angeles, US Keywords: China, women, gender, media representations, nationalism Abstract Theories of gender and the nation posit that women are prescribed certain roles according to the needs of the state at a particular historical moment and that such roles are frequently articulated in media discourses. In China, the government has a long-standing tradition of using the state-run media to convey a national vision and mould its citizens. Hence, the mediated representation of Chinese women has ebbed and flowed according to radical shifts in government policy and ideology. In recent decades, massive economic and social changes have necessitated a quest for legitimacy on the part of the government through a vast reorganization of the country’s ideological environment, including the official construction of gender. This paper discusses three discursive representations of women currently articulated in state-run Chinese newspapers –worker, housewife, and consumer – and examines how the government press emphasizes the equality of Chinese women while simultaneously positioning them as inferior to men. In December 2000, the All China Women’s Federation (ACWF, the largest mass organization for women in China) along with the National Bureau of Statistics undertook a survey on Chinese women’s social status, ten years after the first such survey had been conducted in 1990.1 Nearly 50,000 participants were interviewed from various geographic regions and social strata within China, with questions designed to examine the impact of China’s market reforms on women’s status. While the results revealed that Chinese women have made progress in education, health, and family life, they also showed that women’s unemployment had increased and the income gap between males and females, particularly in rural areas, had widened. One third of female respondents agreed that ‘Men are more able than women by nature’ and about 54 percent of men and 50 percent of women believed that ‘Men take society as their dominant factor while women the family. _______________ Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture © 2006 (University of Westminster, London), Vol. 3(1): 94-108. ISSN 1744-6708 (Print); 1744-6716 (Online) 94 Wallis, Chinese Women in the Official Chinese Press… In response to such findings, Peng Peiyun, then-president of the ACWF, expressed hope that the government would increase its efforts towards women’s equality (Women of China 2001). As this survey and numerous studies have indicated, since China embarked on a path of economic reform in the late seventies, the changing status of Chinese women has been marked by both progress and reversals. Certainly many women have benefited from the reforms and enjoy greater autonomy and a higher standard of living. However, such improvements have been coupled with the return of a traditional, subordinate image of women that has paradoxically grown in tangent with women’s expanding rights and opportunities. In much media and public discourse, a notion of essentialized gender differences encourages females to seek the approval, protection, and material support of men in much the same way they formerly sought these from the party. When such traditional gender ideology first resurfaced, many were alarmed that these ideas could so quickly take hold in a country that only a few years earlier had ardently proclaimed gender equality (even if the ideal surpassed reality). At that time, debates published in the official press paid particular attention to the images of Chinese women found in the advertisements that suddenly proliferated in the post-Mao era (Croll 1983; Hooper 1998). Although it has been more than two decades since the original debate began to take shape, in this article I revisit the topic of the mediated depiction of women in China. I examine the discursive representation of women in the official (as opposed to commercial) press, drawing primarily from the People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao), the ACWF’s China Women’s News (Zhongguo Funu Bao), and the English- language China Daily, though I also include some examples from other regional newspapers. My assumption is that these sources operate as a mouthpiece for the government and thus are most representative of the state’s view of women’s proper role at this particular historical moment. Still, it should be pointed out that even within official publications, there are diverse and often contradictory discourses. China is currently caught up in a whirlwind of market-driven reforms that perhaps have gone far beyond anything imaginable when these policies were first set in motion. The tensions and ambiguities inherent in the country’s development course are thus often manifested in the Chinese media. Many believe that the mediated representation of Chinese women has often served as a stand-in for the condition of the nation and has dramatically shifted in accordance with changing government policy and ideology. Indeed, the mutually constitutive construction of gender and nation is found in both the official and commercial Chinese press. In China, as in many nations, women’s citizenship is often constructed differently than men’s not only through particular laws pertaining to their civil or political rights, but also in how they are positioned 95 Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 3(1) within and through certain discourses. Here I identify three representations – worker, housewife, and consumer – and argue that these align with the government’s current political and economic goals, and that a discourse of gendered labour and consumption practices serves to contain women for the sake of the nation. The issue of Chinese women’s representation in the media was debated with varying degrees of intensity throughout the eighties and nineties, yet there are compelling reasons for a re-examination. First, most previous analyses of changing depictions of Chinese women looked not at rhetorical discourses in the state press but at advertisements or entertainment (Croll 1983; Riley 1997; Robinson 1985). A notable exception is Evans’ (2002) discussion of changing images of the ideal housewife as found in the popular and academic press. Second, since the mid- nineties, in the wake of Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 ‘Southern tour’ in which he wholeheartedly endorsed market reforms as a way to improve people’s standard of living, the changes in China’s economic and ideological environment as well as in the lifestyle of ordinary people are unprecedented, and these have had a profound impact on notions of gender and sexuality. With the loosening of socialist asceticism, women have become increasingly sexualized in the media, yet there has been a parallel movement of gender consciousness, largely as a result of the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995. My analysis is undertaken with knowledge of the work of the Women’s Media Watch Network and other groups which have in the years since the women’s conference arduously sought to monitor the media from a gender perspective (Bu 2005; Cai et al. 2001). To place these current representations of women in the official press within a historical context, I will begin with a brief discussion of mediated discourses about women during the Mao era followed by a short overview of the significant economic and social changes affecting Chinese women today. Chinese Women in the Revolutionary Press Many have noted the reliance of the modern nation-state on media technologies for implanting national consciousness and values, and articulating national identity as a ubiquitous and often banal part of everyday experience that influences other identities, including gender and sexuality (Anderson 1983/1991; Billig 1995). Perhaps few countries have been as purposeful in their use of media in shaping the nation as the People’s Republic of China, where upon its inception, the strong political and ideological nature of the new regime was thoroughly integrated into everyday life through mass mediated campaigns and the distribution of pamphlets containing Mao’s sayings. Though widely criticized as ‘thought control’ by westerners, the early years of the Mao era offer a striking example, albeit with a socialist twist, of Anderson’s theory of the nation. Mao’s endless campaigns were intended to transform ordinary citizens into zealous ‘new Socialist men.’ 96 Wallis, Chinese Women in the Official Chinese Press… Yet it was not just men who were transformed in China’s revolutionary society. Mao’s oft-repeated adage that ‘women hold up half the sky’ is still in use today by some government officials, and since the earliest days of China’s communist party, Chinese women have been expected to play an active role in building the nation, even as that role has shifted to meet changing social and economic needs. As Gail Hershatter (2004, 1028) notes, ‘In twentieth-century China, women were the site at which national modernity was imagined.’ From the outset, the communist party did its utmost to discard the old ways embodied in Confucianism and feudalism, which were blamed for China’s backwardness, in particular with regards to women. Mao immediately banned foot binding, granted women individual citizenship, and gave them equal rights under the law. While some have argued that the enforcement of such laws was often ignored for the sake of male peasant support for the revolution; nevertheless, many Chinese women’s lives did improve (Stacey 1983; Wolf 1985). Women were also actively inducted into the public labour force, and the highly politicized nature of life in Maoist China meant that to the greatest extent possible, the former division between public and domestic spheres was removed. The press was used to construct the new socialist woman, and stories of liberated women enjoying life as equals to men were prominent in newspapers, books, film, and television.