Introduction -- Conceptual background: resilience and urban -- Empirical background: the causes, threats of, and responses to urban flooding in China and the world -- Research methodology -- Individual resilience to urban flooding of Gongming -- Factors influencing individual resilience to urban flooding: people-disaster-place-society -- Nurturing individual resilience through urban management -- Conclusion.
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Acknowledgements -- Preface -- Introduction -- The peasant question and gender question -- Bei village : rural industries and private businesses -- Su village : collective legacy and the "new socialist countryside" -- Han village: urban dream, tied migration and male bonding -- Ning village: integrated or marginalized in urbanization -- Conclusion -- Index
Purpose This study aims to examine why women transition from wage work to self-employed entrepreneurship, the seemingly insecure and unruly economic sector compared with the stable iron rice bowl and the fancy spring rice jobs.
Design/methodology/approach Based on in-depth interviews in Zhejiang, the entrepreneurial hotbed in coastal China, this study examines the experiences of self-employed female entrepreneurs who used to work in the iron rice bowl and the spring rice jobs and explores their nonconventional career transition and its gendered implications.
Findings This study finds that these women quit their previous jobs to escape from gendered suppression in wage work where their femininity was stereotyped, devalued or disciplined. By working for themselves, these women embrace a rubber rice bowl that allows them to improvise different forms of femininity that are better rewarded and recognized.
Originality/value The study contributes to studies on gender and work by framing femininity as a fluid rather than a fixed set of qualities and fills the research gap by illustrating women's agency in reacting to gender expectations in certain workplaces. The study develops a new concept of rubber rice bowl to describe how entrepreneurship, a seemingly women-unfriendly sphere, attracts women by allowing them to comply with, resist, or improvise normative gender expectations.
The rise of private sector business in urban China has led to more women engaging in low-end self-employment. This study, however, reveals a more complicated story in the countryside. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in a Chinese village, this study finds that the women took the lead in developing sideline self-employment and were then attracted to rural wage employment in the 1980s. With the privatization of rural industries and the rise of capital-intensive self-employment in the 1990s, some women were forced into low-end self-employment, but others were attracted to high-end self-employment, forging individual careers and family ventures. In more recent times, younger women have been more inclined to work on-and-off, balancing self-employment pursuits with the desire to be a good mother. This pattern marks a shift from the continuous multitasking practised by the older generation. (China Q/GIGA)
AbstractThe rise of private sector business in urban China has led to more women engaging in low-end self-employment. This study, however, reveals a more complicated story in the countryside. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted in a Chinese village, this study finds that the women took the lead in developing sideline self-employment and were then attracted to rural wage employment in the 1980s. With the privatization of rural industries and the rise of capital-intensive self-employment in the 1990s, some women were forced into low-end self-employment, but others were attracted to high-end self-employment, forging individual careers and family ventures. In more recent times, younger women have been more inclined to work on-and-off, balancing self-employment pursuits with the desire to be a good mother. This pattern marks a shift from the continuous multitasking practised by the older generation.
East Asia has witnessed an acceleration of geographical movements and varied patterns of social mobility across the region as economies matured and growth slowed. This special issue builds on the widely recognized gender dimensions of geographical mobility and investigates its relationship with social mobility from a gender perspective, while also recognizing that social mobility, with or without geographical mobility, is gendered. Focusing specifically on women and exploring the interrelationship between social and geographical mobility, we identify three key issues: (1) gendered employment opportunities and obstacles to moving up and around; (2) the interaction between women's migration/mobility and marriage, motherhood, family roles, and domestic responsibilities; and (3) emerging trends in women's migration and return migration in relation to social mobility. These issues cast light on the ways in which different forms of geographical and social mobility can either empower women or reinforce gender inequality in East Asian societies.
Migration studies often assume a hierarchy of places that drives a periphery-to-core movement and regard reverse migration as being related to downward social mobility. This study draws on in-depth interviews with 16 highly educated women migrants who returned to small cities and counties in less developed areas after years spent studying and working in China's metropolises and/or abroad. Contrary to the stereotypes of unambitious and family-oriented women returnees, the study finds that women's return migration can be motivated by complex goals and expectations, ranging from perceived economic opportunities to noneconomic needs of returning to a familiar place and to be near their families. These women were empowered by their skills accumulated in a "brain circulation" process, but their consequent social mobility also depended on their positionalities in local power structures and access to family resources. Based on their goals and positionalities, these highly educated women returnees illustrated different forms of agency: (1) the adventuring women returned to embrace market opportunities in small cities despite the lack of local resources; (2) the settling women returned mainly for family reasons and fell into self-employment serendipitously, without readily available local resources; (3) the integrating women connected their entrepreneurial goals with their access to local resources; and (4) the compensated women returned mainly for family reasons, but their access to local resources allowed them to try out working for themselves as a compensation for giving up metropolitan life. The study challenges the core-to-periphery stereotypical narrative and finds that women's return migration may lead to upward social mobility and/or self-realization, although still constrained by women's goals and positionalities underlying their return migration.
AbstractThis study uses the 2006 and 2016 East Asian Social Surveys to map value changes related to the second demographic transition in mainland China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The study examines trends in attitudes towards cohabitation, childrearing, and divorce over a 10-year period in the four East Asian societies. The findings suggest that the second demographic transition, if any in East Asia, is an uneven process between societies, and mainland China stands out as the only society in which attitudes had become more conservative, even after controlling for compositional differences in population. In the other three societies, attitudes had shifted to be more liberal. Moreover, the study finds little evidence on the diffusion within societies, given their similar trends across different sociodemographic groups. From an ideational perspective, mainland China and the other three East Asian societies illustrated different patterns of attitude changes regarding marriage and family. From a behavioral perspective, trends in attitudes do not always align with demographic patterns at the macro level, especially in mainland China. More studies are needed to understand the nuanced differences in ideational shifts between societies and the relationship between ideational and behavioral changes in East Asia.
In this study, 269 Beijing born respondents were interviewed and asked questions about their language attitude and language behavior. Research categories, apart from 'attitude', were 'accent maintenance', 'accent selection', and 'code-switching', whereas the variables employed were 'gender', 'age group', 'origin' of parents, 'district' grown-up, 'spouse' background, 'education' level, 'job profile', and 'network density'. We found that Beijing dialect in Beijing's central city districts, coexists with the national language Putonghua, or, Standard Chinese, has high language status among native young people in Beijing and a wide range of uses. The main factors which effect respondents' language behavior are 'network density', 'place-of-origin', and 'occupation'. We also determined a high level of confusion between Beijing dialect accent and Putonghua accent, which we related to the mode of Putonghua teaching and Putonghua promotion. We conclude that Beijing dialect and Putonghua will form two functional varieties, playing different roles in different language environments.
We investigated how men and women in rural China actively responded to macro-level government interventions with their marriage choices across three historical periods: nascent socialism, the Cultural Revolution, and the era of market reform. We outlined major shifts in ideological foci and redistributive policies and linked these macro-level "shocks" to detailed life history narratives (N = 42 spouses from 38 marriages) to explore changing meanings of gender preferences and the availability of preferred partners in the marriage market. The qualitative analysis revealed that the preferences of women and men for spouses with particular characteristics remained relatively stable over time: women used marriage as a vehicle for economic security and men sought brides who would be good homemakers and mothers. However, the shifting economic and political climate influenced the types of individuals endowed with essential resources and thus changed the characteristics most coveted in the marriage market across periods.
