Notes

1. Zhang is regarded as the meirong nühuang (美容女皇, Queen of Beauty) of the Chinese beauty industry. More details by Zhang about this motion can be found in an interview posted on her blog: http://xiaomeizhang.blog.sohu.com/111441989.html (accessed July 10, 2015). Zhang has been proposing many motions related to women, family, children, and beauty industry over the years, including one in 2011 that encourages “women with suitable condition to return to the family,” see http://xiaomeizhang.blog.sohu.com/168304123.htmlhttp://xiaomeizhang.blog.sohu.com/168304123.html (accessed July 10, 2015) for more details.

2. There is indecision regarding which term can replace funü. In the discussion of the motion, some older people were not comfortable with the term nüren (female person), and some thought nüxing (female sex) put too much emphasis on sexual difference. See the commentaries posted at Zhang’s blog: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_47768d41010008lk.html http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_47768d410100cepz.html (accessed May 11, 2009).

3. There are disagreement on the periodization of the history of People’s Republic of China (PRC), some define the Mao era as from 1949 (with the establishment of the PRC) to 1976 (Mao’s death), some define it as from 1949 to 1978 (when Deng Xiaoping resumed power and the reform officially started). The period after 1976 or 1978 are referred to in different terms depending on one’s focus or agenda, such as the post-Mao era, the reform era, or postsocialist China. Sometimes it is further divided by 1989, or by different regimes, such as the periods under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, or Jiang Zeming. In this book, I use the Mao (1949–1978) and post-Mao era (after 1978) divide, which is more productive in thinking about the changes in gender ideas. Recognizing the arbitrary nature of periodization and danger of homogenization, in my analysis I highlight the continuities between historical periods and the ways individual experiences problematize and rewrite the official history.

5. In December 1949, the new PRC government announced March 8 as Women’s Day. On this day, women have half a day off from their work so they can participate in various celebrations. This regulation was further elaborated in 1954 in the State Council issued Guanyu “Sanba” Guoji Funüjie Fujia Gongzi Ruhe Zhifu Wenti de Tongzhi (关于 “三八” 国际妇女节附加工资如何支付问题的通知, Notice on holiday salary payment for International Women’s Day) and was reiterated in the 1999 Quanguo Nianjie ji jinnianri fangjia banfa (全国年节及纪念日放假办法, Regulations on National Holidays and Memorial Days). See chapter 2 for further discussion on Women’s Day.

6. Stacey (1983) notes that compared with the Yan’an period, the Marriage Law moved away from divorce principles that favored women. It retreated further from the early Jiangxi principle of absolute freedom of divorce by requiring mediation efforts to effect a reconciliation when one party requested a divorce. She argues that the aim is to institute a more democratic form of patriarchal family life rather than wage a feminist revolution.

7. There are a few studies of masculinity in the Mao and post-Mao eras. See for instance, Nancy Chen, William Jankowiak, Elizabeth Perry, and Nara Dillon’s contributions in Brownell and Wasserstrom’s (2002) collection, Zhong (2000), and Song and Hird (2014).

8. For instance, Sidel (1972), Young (1973), Rowbotham (1974), Wolf and Witke (1975, x, 315), Davin (1976), Stacey (1975, 64–112; 1983), Croll (1978), and Andors (1983).

9. For instance, de Beauvoir (1958), Black (1986), Sidel (1972), and Kristeva (1977); see also critiques of their work by Chow (1991), Teng (1996), and Yu (2002).

11. Roberts’s research (2004a, 2004b) on the Geming Yangbanxi (革命样板戏, Revolutionary Model Work) demonstrates that rather than erasing gender and sexuality from public discourse, the Yangbanxi reassigned gender on a class basis, with the revolutionary masses assuming masculinized gender roles and the “counterrevolutionaries” assigned a range of feminized gender roles.

13. There is an interesting parallel between the antistate feminist discourse in China and the Fittstim feminist discourse in Scandinavia counties in the 1990s and 2000s, where the dissatisfaction toward the structural and collective approach of the early feminist movement resulted in a new generation of feminists turning away from the state and created highly individualistic first-person autobiographic narratives that emphasize choice, freedom, sexuality, and empowerment. See Astrid Henry (2014, 659–87, 724–25).

15. For examples, Jung Chang’s Wild Swans (1991), Anchee Min’s Red Azalea (1994), Rae Yang’s The Spider Eater (1998), and Some of Us: Chinese Women Growing Up in the Mao Era, edited by Zhong, Di, and Wang (2001).

16. Some representative works are Elisabeth Croll’s Feminism and Socialism in China (1978), Chinese Women Since Mao (1983), and Changing Identities of Chinese Women (1995); Honig and Hershatter’s Personal Voices (1988), a comprehensive study on women’s changing gender roles in the course of the reforms; Mayfair Mei-Hui Yang’s (1999) Space of Their Own; and Lisa Rofel’s (1999) Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in Post-Socialist China.

17. For instance, Moi (1999) points out that the distinction between sex and gender and the focus on the latter ignore lived experiences and embodiment as aspects of womanhood (and manhood).

18. Lois McNay (1999, 175–93) suggests that today’s Western feminist thought on gender and sexuality can be traced along three predominant theoretical trends: post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, theories of intersubjective communication derived from Habermas, and post-Foucauldian theories of discursive construction.

19. This is contrary to the common Western misunderstanding of yang (阳) and yin (阴) as fixed essences, with yin “meaning” female and yang male; the yin and yang are highly fluid.

20. In The Birth of Chinese Feminism, Liu, Karl, and Ko (2013) showed how the Chinese intellectuals at the turn of the twentieth century imaged a romantic gender equal modern West in which a “liberated” modern woman was a constitutive part of the modern male subject they imaged for themselves.

21. There are limitations to this project, too. When the participants are good storytellers and feel more comfortable talking about their lives in front of a stranger, the telling flows smoothly, their stories are told with fewer interruptions, and the structure of their stories are their own product. Some participants were not very good at telling their life stories; they often stopped and needed guiding questions to move on. In these cases, the structure of their narratives is more heavily influenced by my questions and is less an independent product.

22. Atkinson’s sample life story interview questions are not designed in gender-specific ways and are heterosexual-oriented. I revised them to reflect women’s life cycles and concerns and added some questions about gendered appearance and to include same-sex relationships.

23. Some scholars disagree with translating fangyan as “dialect,” as it has very different connotations from the English term “dialect.” See chapter 2 for a detailed discussion. In this book, I use the Chinese term fangyan to avoid the misunderstanding.

24. Except in some minority autonomous regions, where there is bilingual education in Mandarin and other ethnic languages.

1. Since 1958, notions of “absolute egalitarianism” have been abandoned. Even the most radical Chinese leaders have recognized the need for unequal rewards during a prolonged period of socialism. The inequality under socialism was understood as a transitory inequality, which would wither away and transform itself into true equality (see Kraus 1981, 145).

2. The practice of inheriting one’s parents’ class origin reached the extreme during the Cultural Revolution, under the so-called xuetonglun (血统论, bloodline theory) of class. This practice was deployed by Mao and others, such as Liu Shaoqi, during the Red Guard factional struggles. See Wu Yiching (2014) The Cultural Revolution at the Margins (chapter 3).

3. This does not necessarily coincide with the prestige accorded by public opinion, which I discuss later.

5. Doctors in Mao-era China belonged to the cadre category; they were socially respected but earned incomes similar to those cadres in other occupations.

6. Owning an apartment and a car, Lin and her family belonged to the new upper middle class in China.

7. In 2014, when I met Lin again, she still worked at the same company but very much wanted to retire. Her daughter was back in Beijing, had found a job there, had gotten married, and had given birth to a baby girl. In 2015, when I visited Beijing again, I heard from a mutual friend that Lin was retired and busy baby-sitting her grandchild.

8. Although the term jiatingfunü is translated into English as “housewife” and is often associated with the modern nuclear family setting, in the Chinese context and in particular in many extended families, this term refers to the stay-at-home women who do not have a formal job outside of home, which includes not only the wife but also other female family members, such as the grandmother, an aunt or cousin, and so on, who live with the family for various reasons. I use the Chinese term jiatingfunü throughout instead of its English translation, which could be misleading.

9. See also the discussion of Shanghai’s households in Davis (2000) and Unger (1993, 25–49).

10. See Wang Fei-Ling’s research on the hukou system (Wang 2005, 2010, 335–364).

12. Davin (1975, 1976) discussed the party’s policies toward “housewives” (jiantingfunü), referring mostly to the wives of working man, which were regarded as jiashu (家属, attached family members), but did not mention female family members who stayed at home helping out but were not “wives.”

13. Another story about growing up with a grandmother is discussed in chapter 4.

14. For the association of revolution (and revolutionary women) with the youth and future, see also Wang Zheng (2001).

15. In the Mao era, Zhongguo Funü (中国妇女, Women of China (initially called Xin Zhongguo Funü, (新中国妇女, New Women of China) was the official magazine of the All China Women’s Federation (ACWF), the only official national women’s organization sponsored by the CCP.

16. See Hershatter’s discussion of the usage of “feudal thinking” in rural women’s narratives (2011, 64).

17. Children’s Pioneer Team (shaoxiandui) was the children’s organization for elementary students in the Mao era, like the Boy and Girl Scouts. It was later replaced with the Little Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution.

18. Little Red Guard (hongxiaobing) was a children’s organization for honor students during the Cultural Revolution, a counterpart of the Red Guard, which was for teenagers.

20. Secondary education was five years during the Cultural Revolution period, divided into two parts: three years of chuzhong (初中, middle school, junior high), and two years of gaozhong (高中, high school, senior high). In this narrative, “grade two” means grade two of middle school.

21. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, children of the elite groups were in the Red Guards, too, but many of them were kicked out for their “black five categories” later. See Wu (2014).

22. The campaign is called shangshan xiaxiang (上山下乡, going up the mountain, and down to the country side). Although the trend for educated urban youth volunteering in the countryside started in the 1950s (see Deng Peng’s Exiled Pilgrims [2015]), the mass movement began after 1968, when Mao instructed that “young people should go the countryside, to be re-educated by poor peasants, is very necessary.” High school students were sent to the countryside, resulting in up to 16 million people moving from urban areas into the countryside. See Gu (2009), Pan (2001, 2009), Rene (2014), Zhong, Di, and Wang (2001, xxxiii, 208).

23. Banye Jijiao (半夜鸡叫, The Rooster Crows at Midnight,) is a story appearing in different versions of children’s books and movies in the Mao era. In the story, the evil landlord goes to the chicken’s den at midnight, imitating the rooster’s crow, so he could have the hired laborers start work early. For a discussion of the fictional construction of this story, see Wu Guo (2013).

24. Speaking at the National Science Conference in 1978, Deng Xiaoping maintained that intellectuals (which included most cadres) “have become a part of the working class itself. The difference between them and the physical workers is only a difference of division of labor in society” (Kraus 1981, 175). It was then believed that for China to achieve the “four modernizations” (modernization of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology), science and knowledge were the keys.

25. Mao reviewed the rallies of the Red Guards (all together 13 million from all over China) in Tiananmen Square eight times between August 18 and November 26, 1966. See MacFarquhar (1997, 181).

26. The first sentence of the lyrics of the team song of the Children’s Pioneer Team is Women shi gongchanzhuyi jiebanren (我们是共产主义接班人, we are the successors of communism).

27. The major cultural product during the Cultural Revolution period was the eight (some say nine) revolutionary model plays, and the stories were adopted in various genres and forms.

28. However, the gender coding did not disappear in these presentations. As Roberts (2004b) argues, gender discourses in the Cultural Revolution period associated the strong revolutionary with masculinity and conflated the weak feminine (symbolic female) with the counterrevolutionary; the latter was to be subordinated to the former. See also Evans (1999).

29. Albania’s movies were among the very few foreign films the Chinese could watch (North Korean and Vietnamese were the only others) during the Cultural Revolution period.

30. Rather Die than Surrender (Horizonte te Hapura) was first screened in China in 1969. The story was set in a city in Albania during World War II. A female student, Mina, helps a female member of the communist guerrillas to escape the enemy’s search. They are later given up by a traitor and arrested by the fascists. They withstand torture and promises of gain and never surrender. At the end, they sing “The Guerillas’ Song” on their way to their execution.

31. The negative image of the nüqiangren of the 1980s and 1990s has evolved into an even more caricatured image of nühangzi (女汉子, manly women) in the 2010s, as represented in a skit at the Chinese New Year Gala in 2015, which mocked the nühangzi for her looks and for remaining single while approaching thirty. This misogynist public discourse in particular targets the educated “leftover” women. See Hong Fincher (2014) and To (2015).

32. Lin has brought the most money into the family since she has been working in business for years. Her husband, as an office manager at a hospital, earns a fixed salary and his income alone cannot support the family’s needs.

33. Taiwanese writer Qiong Yao’s romance novels and the soap operas adapted from them provide an escapist fantasy of passionate indulgence for mainland Chinese audiences.

34. Confucianism is still one of the ruling ideologies in Korean society, where many women choose to become stay-at-home housewives after marriage.

36. The consciousness-raising philosophy and techniques also drew from other sources, such as Students for a Democratic Society, “Guatemala Guerrilla” organizing, Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, Educational and Research Action Projects, personal discussion styles, and experiential learning in the Mississippi freedom schools. See Sara Evans (1979, 214); also noted in Rofel (1999, 295). See also Andrew Ross, “Mao Zedong’s Impact on Cultural Politics in the West” (2005, 5–22).

37. See Kathie Sarachild, “Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon” (1975, 144–50). For a short biography of Kathie Sarachild, see Paul D. Buchanan, Radical Feminists: A Guide to an American Subculture (2011), 130–31.

38. Later published as “Consciousness-Raising: A Radical Weapon,” see previous note.

39. See Meng Yue (1993). See also Meng Yue, “Insights from the Evolution of ‘the White Haired Girl’ and the Heterogeneity of Yan’an Art and Literature [Baimaonu Yanbian De Qishi—Jianlun Yan’an Wenyi De Lishi Duozhixing]” (Meng 2006). In her analysis of the evolution of one typical suku story “The White Haired Girl,” Meng shows how its narrative construction replaces gender conflict with class conflict in the plot design, thus interpreting Xi’er’s life story in terms of class exploitation rather than gendered oppression, and reconstructing Xi’er as a member of a oppressed class rather than as a victim of gendered violence.

40. Rebecca Karl (2005) notes that in the 1980s and 1990s, the intellectual discourse of victimization about their experiences in the Mao era has led to a universalized negative definition of politics in general. I think this is particularly true toward the notion of class and class struggle, and it is not a coincidence that gender differences were emphasized in the 1980s.

41. Jacka (2006) notes that this discourse is perceived as less threatening because it places the onus on individual women to learn how to protect their rights, channeled and contained discontent within the legal system, and tended to deflect criticism away from the endemic, institutionalized rights violations and the state’s failure to stem those violations.

1. Chongqing used to be a city in Sichuan Province. It was separated from Sichuan and became a municipality directly under the central government in 1997 (the other such municipalities are Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjing).

2. When I was in Beijing in 2013, I heard from Dong’s boss that her husband was earning enough money to enable her to quit the job and become a housewife in a small city near Beijing. In 2017 when I visited again, Dong was back working in a new branch of the same restaurant as manager.

4. Dong’s monthly salary in her first year working in that restaurant was 700 yuan.

5. There have been disputes regarding this regulation, but most workplaces obey it.

6. In rural areas, women were often assigned less labor-intensive tasks and received less gongfen. Even if women took up the most intensive labor and did the same tasks as men, they were often still given less gongfen.

8. In recent years, the younger generation of Chinese feminist activists have started campaigns against the replacement of funüjie with nüshengjie; see the conclusion for this book.

9. The pinyin (phonetic transcription or romanization) here is of Shichuan fangyan pronunciation, not of Mandarin.

10. The poem was initially inscribed on a photograph of Mao standing with a group of women army combatants, published in 1961. The translation below is from Mao, Barnstone, and Ko (1972, 98–99). The poem is as follows:

飒爽英姿五尺枪,

曙光初照演兵场。

中华儿女多奇志,

不爱红装爱武装

(Early rays of sun illumine the parade grounds:

And these handsome girls heroic in the wind,

With rifles five feet long,

Daughters of China with a marvelous will,

You prefer hardy uniforms [wuzhuang] to colorful silk [hongzhaung]).

11. The Renmin Huabao (人民画报, People’s Pictorial) is the CCP’s official pictorial magazine and is one of the four periodicals that continued to publish during the Cultural Revolution period, providing rare sources for research on official images of that period. Its circulation was 500,000 copies in 1963 and reached 1 million in 1972. Its tenet, “face of the great nation, memory of the people,” indicates its leading position in the CCP’s propaganda system.

12. The movement to send educated youth down to the countryside brought a new wave of army uniform fashion. The youth went to the Production and Construction Army Corps in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Heilongjiang wearing green army-style uniforms (without badges on the hat and shoulder) and army sneakers provided by the corps, as did other “sent-down” youth (Hua 2007). By contrast, rural residents wore civilian clothes, and women often wore the Chinese folk-style side-fastening jacket.

13. A female soldier’s uniform and coat are different from the male’s, but army sneakers are unisex, which meant male style with smaller sizes for women.

14. Many ethnic minority people continue to wear their own ethnic clothes but with the PLA sneakers.

15. New designs started to appear in 1970s, and skirt was put back for the summer uniform of female soldier in 1973. By 1984 when the national day military parade at the thirty-five-year anniversary of the PRC, the new uniforms replaced all the 65 styles.

16. For instance, as Sedgwick notes, “shame on you” has its illocutionary force (the conferral of shame) in an interpellation of witness, and “to shame” means to actively confer or project shame toward another (1993, 4).

19. Furthermore, gendered shame works in conjunction with heterosexuality and serves as a regulatory tool that disciplines and punishes queer transgression. See Munt (1998, 2012).

20. Geaney (2004) argues that, in contrast to the present general Western understanding of shame as often either visual or sexual in nature (an aspect that will be discussed later), early Confucian texts reveal a concept of shame as a response to disconcertingly blurred boundaries.

21. This association of shame with women being outside the home has changed since the Mao era, when the “women of the family” came to be associated with backward, illiterate, and noncontributing members of the socialist state. See chapter 2.

22. As Finnane (2008, 202) points out, gender and class hierarchies were present within the worker-peasant-soldier triad. Workers and soldiers were often portrayed as male, with workers as the leading class with an international outlook, whereas the peasant was often a woman and her Chinese folk-style clothes link her to tradition.

23. Differences between the rural and the urban, physical and intellectual labor, and between classes.

24. Wei was a teenage girl living in Beijing when the Cultural Revolution started.

25. Although austere sartorial style has been the ideal for women since the Yan’an period in the early 1940s to the late 1970s, the government’s position has fluctuated over time. For instance, in the mid-1960s, official representations encouraged gender distinctions in dress, coincided to the government’s attempt to persuade women to withdraw from the labor force to relieve levels of urban unemployment (Evens 1997, 134–37).

26. Various Chinese terms express the combination of shame and other emotions, such as xiufeng (羞愤, anger-shame), chi (耻, humiliation-shame), kuijiu or chankui (愧疚 or 惭愧, guilt-shame), and buhaoyisi (不好意思, a combination of gratitude, apology, avoidance, shame, and embarrassment).

28. Young takes on Irigaray’s (1985) idea that masculine desire is expressed through visual metaphors, whereas feminine desire moves through the medium of touch and sees clothes giving women pleasure by touch, with the sense of skin on matter, fingers on texture, and an orientation to sensuality. She thinks that clothes often serve for women as threads in the bonds of sisterhood, and that women take pleasure in clothes because looking at them and looking at images of women in clothes encourage fantasies of transport and transformation.

29. Sinitic languages belong to the Sino-Tibetan language family, which is part of the Tibeto-Burman family, which includes almost 400 languages spoken across China, Tibet, South Asia, and parts of Southeast Asia (Shi, Tsai, and Bernards 2013).

30. For instance, the phonetic script reform and the national language movement since the late Qing period; the baihua (白话, vernacular) movement in the May Fourth era; the Latinized New Writing movement in the 1930s; and the debate on “national forms” during the period of the Sino-Japanese war (1937–45).

31. Lo, Kwai-Cheung (2000, 184) argues that by unifying the tools of exchange and communication and hierarchizing one dialect over the others, writing serves as the ideological apparatus that helps create the concept of cultural nationalism and inscribes the mastering subject in its space of articulation.

32. In Chinese, different words may have the same pronunciation but have different meanings.

33. Dong learned Mandarin at school, which is the standard language in education system in mainland China. As a shy student, she might have hardly spoken in class, and even when she had to, she would have spoken to the fellow students, and chances are none of them were native Mandarin speakers.

34. Liu Jin (2014) also made this point, citing Stuart Hall’s discussion on the relation between the global and the local, and argues that the “distinct” local identities promoted and celebrated in Chinese local language rap songs may turn out to be examples of diversity within conformity, pluralism within unity, heterogeneity within homogeneity, and localization within globalization.

35. For instance, standard Mandarin (Putonghua) borrowed much of its vocabulary from Taiwan Guoyu (国语, Mandarin), see Shao (2015, 19–38).

1. Shitou kindly provided copies of her work and granted permission to reproduce them for this book. Since she is a public figure, I consulted Chinese and English news reports and television interviews with her. They provided background information for my interpretation of her life story. Such sources are indicated wherever points do not come directly from my interview with her.

2. For instance, illustrations in van Gulik and Goldin (2003) and Tanba, Ishihara, and Levy (1968) show lesbian activities.

4. Various terms have used to refer to the Chinese queer community, such as gay and lesbian, ku’er (酷儿, translation of the English term queer), LGBT, tongzhi (同志, comrade) each with its own range of acceptance, specific usage, and audience. In particular, the terms tongzhi and queer are often used interchangeably in everyday uses, and there are no strict or formalized distinctions between them (for a discussion of the genealogy, usage, and relationships between these two terms, see Engebretsen, Schroeder, and Bao 2015). I use the term tongzhi to refer to the queer community and culture in contemporary China, for it is an accepted way of identifying oneself in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and for its geopolitical connotations. I use the English term “queer” for its nonnormativity connotations and subversive orientation and in theoretical related discussions.

5. The term lala (拉拉) for lesbian was imported from Taiwan in the 1990s and originated from a lesbian character named Lazi (拉子) in Eyu Shouji (鱷魚手記, The Crocodile’s Journal), a novel by Qiu Miaojin (邱妙津) (Sang 2003).

6. See Anagnost’s (2004, 189–208) discussion on the discourse of suzhi (素质, quality).

8. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, artists came from all over China and formed an artist community, a Chinese Soho, in a village in the northwest part of Beijing near Yuanmingyuan (圆明园) Park. They rented peasant houses as studios and aimed to sell their works to the mushrooming art galleries in Beijing; there was also an emerging interest in collecting contemporary Chinese art overseas. Many internationally acclaimed Chinese artists, such as Fang Lijun and Wang Guangyi, have lived in Yuanmingyuan.

9. For instance, Mao Zedong’s (毛泽东) ming (名, formal given name) is Zedong (泽东), while his zi (字) is Runzhi (润之); he also had the nicknames Shitou and Shisanyazi (石头, 石三伢子), and he used more than ten pen names, such as Mao Sanshi (毛三石), Zedong (泽东), Runzhi (润之), and Yan Ziren (杨子任).

10. There was one news report in the late 1950s, where the Changsha Meat and Fishery Products Company encouraged female employees to learn to butcher pigs. This became a national “news story of the year.” See Roushi shuican gongsi nütufu (肉食水产公司 “女屠夫,” Women Butchers in the Meat and Fishery Product Company), available at http://bbs.baixing.com/thread-27650-1-1.html (accessed November 20, 2008). Note that this discussion is about butchery as a profession. Many women have been responsible for killing poultry, pigs, sheep, and so on as part of the food preparation for their families. Butchery as a male profession used to be a tradition of the Han people, but not of some minority groups in China. For instance, among the Naxi (纳西), a matrilocal society living mainly in the southwest part of China, women have always been butchers and were considered better at it than their male counterparts.

11. Another painting of a woman with a knife as her arm may reflect Shitou’s childhood memory of seeing her mother wield a butcher’s knife.

12. Such images often appear in posters from the Cultural Revolution era, which can be found at Chinese Posters Collection at University of Westminster, London. Available at http://chinaposters.westminster.ac.uk/zenphoto/ (accessed December 2017).

13. For a study of the mandarin duck and butterfly literature, see Chow (1986, 69–93) and Link (1981).

14. Zhu Yingtai, a young girl from a higher-class family, dressed as a mam to attend school (where only men were allowed) and fell in love with a classmate. Their love ended up as a tragedy because of her family intervention. Liang died of desperation, and Zhu joined him in his tomb on her wedding day, avoiding a marriage arranged by her family with another man. After their death, the lovers became two butterflies, happily together, never separated again. For a study of Liang and Zhu’s story, see Altenburger (2005, 165–205).

15. For example, Sang reproduced some of these posters in The Emerging Lesbian (2003, 2, 18–19, 57). For a catalog, see Zhang (1994).

16. While that might be true in the early period of lesbian activism in China, a more complex construction of Chinese lesbian identities is now taking place, as Shitou’s works suggest.

17. Shitou is not alone in seeking ways to articulate distinctive Chinese lesbian identities. For instance, the organizers of the Beijing lala club consciously incorporated Chinese cultural traditions into their signifying practices, such as combining the rainbow sign with kite flying at the Great Wall in the documentary Queer China (Z. Cui 2009). See also Engebretsen (2015).

18. For instance, an interview conducted by internet programs about queers in China, Tongzhi yi fanren zhi Shitou Ji (同志亦凡人之石头记, Queer as Folk Beijing—The Pink Artistic License), season 2, no. 2, March 21, 2008, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEzo6UM9Hr4 (accessed December 2017, 2008).

19. Some scholars translate nüquan zhuyi (女权主义) as feminism and nüxing zhuyi (女性主义) as womanism, for example, Lin (2006, 115) and Barlow (2004, 49–63). The term “womanism” is understood as a form of feminism that acknowledges women’s natural contribution to society and has been used in distinction to the term “feminism” and its association with white women. This term originated in the United States among African American women and has very different connotations compared to nuxing zhuyi in contemporary China. For a discussion on the translation of the term “feminism” in China, see Ko and Wang (2007) and Min (2007, 174–93).

20. I use this term in a different way from most scholarly discussions of gay kinship, which relate to gay men’s relationships with each other, their family, and patriarchal culture. On Chinese gay and lesbian and kinship, see for instance Rofel (2007) and Engebretsen (2009, 3–22).

21. For instance, in a recent book the editors decided to juxtapose “queer” and tongzhi in its title as Queer/Tongzhi China (Engebretsen and Schroeder 2015). Although tongzhi is also sometimes used as the Chinese translation for the English term “queer,” it is often perceived as the appropriation of the communist term “comrade” (though also a translated term).

22. There are other, less circulated Chinese translations of the English term “queer,” such as Guaitai in Taiwan, meaning weirdo, or freak. See Fran Martin (2003, 4) and Chan Hsiao-hung’s (1996, 6–25, 2000) discussion of this term.

23. Zhou and Lu’s writings constitute part of the debate in the study of history of sexuality in China between the anti-universalist and the anti-essentialist arguments. The anti-universalist or Chinese exceptionalism regards China as having a distinctive, different history and culture of homosexuality. The anti-essentialist position questions the romanticization of a homosexual tradition in China. In her study of Ming literature culture, Sophie Volpp (2001) argues that same-sex culture remained marginalized and illegitimate. Kam (2013, 92–93) further emphasizes that “silence can be a violent form of symbolic erasure,” and that tolerance as a “discourse of depoliticization and personalization of political issues” and self-shaming as being the only emotion permitted to nonnormative sexual subjects within Chinese families.

24. For the adaptation of the term tongzhi by Chinese gays and lesbians in Hong Kong, see W. Chou (1997, 2000) and Wong (2005). For the adaptation of the term tongzhi in Taiwan, see Wong and Zhang (2001) and Lim (2008).

25. The term liumang (流氓, hooligan) began to enter the political and legal documents in China in the 1950s under the Chinese communist regime. It comes from a translation of the German term lumpenproletariat in Marx’s Communist Manifesto, into liumang wuchanzhe (流氓无产者, hooligan proletariat). Liumang wuchanzhe was used by the communist regime to refer to the remnants of the old society, who were subjected to socialist education and reform; if they refused to change, they would be punished by the state. See Zhou (2009).

26. They discussed four primary ways the interface could mobilize visual and textual regimes: (1) relationally, in which the word and image are parallel or interrogatory juxtaposed; (2) contextually, through documentary or ethnographic juxtaposition; (3) spatially, through palimpsestic or paratextual juxtaposition; and (4) temporally, through telescoped or serial juxtaposition. The four modes of the interface producing meaning at a visual/textual matrix, and these modes must be read against/through each other. They may be in irreducible tension, interrogatory, and tell different, even contradictory, stories (Smith and Watson 2002, 21–23).

1. For discussions of River Elegy (or Deathsong of the River), see Richard Madson (1995, chapter 8) and Fewsmith (2001, chapter 4).

2. As illustrated to some extent in the works discussed in chapter 3; see Dirlik and Zhang (2000).

3. For a discussion of the different usage of “transnational,” see Grewal and Kaplan (2001).

4. Ong and Nonini (1997) define modern Chinese transnationalism as a distinctive postcolonial social formation rooted in the history of European colonialism and developed within the strategies of accumulation of the new capitalism throughout the Asia Pacific.

6. It has been common for Chinese couples to be separated for long periods of time for the advancement of career, education, and the well-being of family members, especially for the children. During the Mao era, couples were often separated for gongzuoxuyao (工作需要, the demands of their work), and personal and family needs were considered subordinate to the needs of the work, the party, the revolution, and the nation, often perceived as interchangeable.

7. During the latter part of the Cultural Revolution, it became a national fashion for women to knit sweaters and sew their own clothes. This fashion gradually found its way to urban families. When participating in political study sessions; women would bring their craft items to meetings and as a pastime. The military was also affected by the Cultural Revolution; professional development and production were rendered secondary to political struggle.

8. This is not to say that the military base was power-free and without hierarchy; for instance, Anne’s parents were gaoji zhishifenzi (高级知识分子, meaning highly educated ranked intellectuals), and lived in the gaoganlou (高干楼, building for high-ranking officials).

9. In 1989, the government started to charge for university education; the tuition was 200 renminbi per year, while the average annual income for rural residents was 1,376 renminbi. In 1997, all public universities in China charged tuition fees, and the average was 3,000 renminbi a year. Currently, public university tuition fees range from 4,000 to 6,000 renminbi with the highest reaching 10,000 renminbi a year.

10. In the 1980s and 1990s, presuming that women did not have sex before marriage, knowledge about contraception was given to young women when they registered for marriage in a training session for newlywed couples. Even though condoms were available in drug stores, it was perceived as embarrassing for women to go to the counter. For the purpose of population control, free tools for contraception were mainly distributed by the personnel in charge of birth control in one’s work unit in the cities; they were responsible for preventing unplanned births or births outside of quota.

12. Like the English-speaking teachers in Edwards’s (2006) study, many foreign business people in China are incapable of remembering and using their Chinese colleagues’ (mostly subordinates) and business partners’ names (or are unwilling to).

13. Edwards (2006) shows that even using an English name can be a strategy of resistance—by having the teacher address her with an English name, which appears to be her personal name but actually is not, the student resists the request for symmetrical solidarity and intimacy.

14. It is also the case for Jacky, F, and many others working for foreign invested companies. As a former colleague, I never got the chance to know their Chinese names—intentionally or unintentionally, their Chinese names were never mentioned.

15. In the People’s Republic of China, women usually keep their last name on marriage.

16. For instance, in Zhang Xianliang and Su Tong’s novels and Zhang Yimou’s film.

17. For instance, by female writers such as Chen Ran, Lin Bai, Wang Anyi, Wei Hui, and Mianmian.

18. I have not seen Anne since the interview, but in 2014, I overheard from mutual friends that she now has a baby.

19. In Beijing Mandarin and other northern Mandarin varieties, every stressed syllable has a full tone with a fixed pitch value of one of the four Mandarin tones. When a syllable is weakly stressed, it has neutral tone. As Zhang Qing explained, in the “cosmopolitan” Chinese, the neutral tone, a common feature in Beijing and Mainland Mandarins (see in the Pinyin transcriptions) but rarely used in Southern regional speeches, is often replaced with a full tone variant. For instance, míngbai (明白, understand) is pronounced as míngbái, and xuésheng (学生, student) is pronounced as xuéshe¯ng. See Q. Zhang (2005, 444–45).

20. Q. Zhang (2005) also found that female yuppies overwhelmingly favored the nonlocal variants and uses more cosmopolitan Mandarin in their speeches.

21. This term was taken up by former CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin in early 2000, in what he called the Sange Daibiao (三个代表, Three Representations). This slogan claimed that the party’s legitimacy in leading China to modernization derived from its ability to adapt to an ever-changing environment and reform itself from within, so that it still “represents the demands for the development of advanced social productive forces, the direction of advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the greatest majority of the people.” A strategy for implementing these Three Representations was “baochi gongchandangyuan xianjinxing jiaoyu” (保持共产党员先进性教育, education of CCP members so they can maintain their progressiveness).

22. Many speech communities (for instance, in Hong Kong) are strongly against the use of language mixture in formal contexts and code switching only occurs during in-group communication in informal contexts. However, hybrid Chinese is often used in formal business meetings in FIEs.

23. The Chinese state now tries to popularize the idea of a “Chinese dream” that would provide an alternate source of aspiration for the nation’s youth, and authorities have recently started to curb the use of English. Renmin Ribao (人民日报, People’s Daily), the official party newspaper, published two editorials in April 2014 condemning the use of English loan words when speaking Chinese. In fall 2013, plans were announced to reduce the importance of English-language instruction and expand courses on traditional culture in grade school. See Dexter Roberts, “China’s War on English,” Bloomberg Businessweek (May 22, 2014), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-22/china-moves-to-protect-its-language-from-english.

24. Some scholars distinguish between “code mixing,” which refers to the alternate use of two or more languages below clause level, with “code switching,” which refers to the alternate use of two or more languages at or above clause level. Others prefer to use “code switching,” code mixing” or “code alternation” to cover both types of code alternation. In this study, I use “code switching” to cover both practices.

25. Currently urban children begin studying English in the third grade. Regardless of what field one chooses, passing a foreign language, predominantly English proficiency test is required to enter university in China. Scholars who want to be promoted to a full professorship also have to pass foreign language, predominantly English examinations.

26. J. Lee (2012) didn’t mention the gender of the speaker in the code switching, but given the topic, it is likely a woman.

27. This phrase itself is also already an example of code switching, as “rapport” is borrowed from French. I thank Richard Stack for pointing out this connection to me.

CONCLUSION: THE GENDER LEGACY OF THE MAO ERA AND CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST STRUGGLES

1. They were detained for thirty-five days and charged by the police for xunxie zishi (寻衅滋事, picking quarrels and provoking troubles). Although subsequently released, they remain criminal suspects.