Particular Article About Women In Contemporary China - Manuscript

Article Review
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Article Review
This paper reviews one particular article about women in contemporary China. In this review, the paper discusses the article’s central theme. In addition, the main arguments made by the author, the article’s contribution to Chinese women’s studies, and the weakness of the article are discussed.
The central theme of the article is the identity negotiation and belonging process of Chinese women in the countryside as they move from the villages to the cities for jobs in contemporary China. Migration from rural to urban provinces provides women in rural China not just challenges, but also new spaces to create their sense of belonging and identity. The migration could be thought of as a gendered process, a continuing project by which the identities of women from rural China are transformed, remade, maintained and at times rejected. The author follows the migration of these women by collecting data from the provinces that send and receive the women. She captures the fluid, situated and dynamic nature of the identity deconstruction and reconstruction of rural migrant women. The author illustrates the fluidity of the identity of rural Chinese migrant women as well as the intricacy of their construction processes.
The major arguments the author has made in the article are that women migrants from rural China, as people who encounter global capital, produce and perform their identities actively just like women in Latin America and other countries in Asia. Nonetheless, their production of identity has some restraints. Their identity production is shaped by the already configured local culture/power realms, the local workings of capital, as well as the intersection of state agencies. Identity negotiation of rural migrant women is influenced directly by discourse on suzhi or quality that serves to devalue their labour, and hukou that distinguishes and labels city/gao suzhi as high quality, and pastoral or countryside/di suzhi as poor quality, and serves to legitimize the devaluation.
In distancing themselves from the poor quality and thus the pitiable value associated with the peasant identity, these women make every effort to leave their peasant identity. Before they migrate to the urban areas, a large number of women in rural China, particularly those who are relatively young, disconnect themselves from agricultural work. When they arrive to the cities, they identify themselves as women who are different from rural women in the villages. Even so, their longing of leaving their peasant identity behind does not necessarily give these women membership of the city space. According to the author, the lesser status of these women in the cities, in addition to different institutional impediments, force them to depend upon their kinship networks and family members in the urb...