The Chinese Women's Movement Between State and Market

When China embarked on its rural economic reforms in the early 1980s, changes for women were not a planned part of its program for economic development, in the countryside or in the nation at large.

In the late 1980s the official arm of the Chinese women's movement, the Women's Federations, began experimenting with a series of strategies designed to position women in the mainstream of the reform-era economy. A distinctive feature of this initiative was its focus on "quality" (suzhi), includ...