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In the research on the rural women's political participation, it concerns why they participate in community governance and how we can ensure their real participation. With a case study of Zhoushan Village's experience in successfully promoting the empowerment of rural women so that they may truly participate in community governance and then proceed to promote structural reform in the community, this paper examines the effective approaches taken over the past decade for rural women's participation in community governance, and the far-reaching effects that their participation has had on individual and family status, the economy, society and culture. The experience of Zhoushan Village, which has been the result of interaction, is global and local, original and contextual, co-created and accepted by local women and villagers together. It will make a special contribution to good governance of rural communities in the transitional period of social governance in rural China.

Representing an unprecedented collaboration among international scholars from Asia, Europe, and the United States, this volume rewrites the history of East Asia by rethinking the contentious relationship between Confucianism and women. The authors discuss the absence of women in the Confucian canonical tradition and examine the presence of women in politics, family, education, and art in premodern China, Korea, and Japan. What emerges is a concept of Confucianism that is dynamic instead of monolithic in shaping the cultures of East Asian societies. As teachers, mothers, writers, and rulers, women were active agents in this process. Neither rebels nor victims, these women embraced aspects of official norms while resisting others. The essays present a powerful image of what it meant to be female and to live a woman's life in a variety of social settings and historical circumstances. Challenging the conventional notion of Confucianism as an oppressive tradition that victimized women, this provocative book reveals it as a modern construct that does not reflect the social and cultural histories of East Asia before the nineteenth century