Yifei Zhu
Political Sociology
Easter Term, 2024
Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs, 5(1), pp. 278-297

Introduction

This article explores the depoliticising force of gender in contemporary Han Chinese society, defining ‘depoliticisation’ as efforts ‘to conceal, negate or remove contingency and contestation within particular social relations’ (Jenkins 2011). Hence, the depoliticisation of gender is to be defined as the essentialisation and acceptance of certain gender norms which disadvantage certain gender identities in relation to another in society (Bates, Jenkins & Amery 2014). Contemporary China, particularly the experiences of the dominant Han ethnicity, is chosen for this case study because of its uniqueness, in language, culture and reproductive policy.

This article is organised as follows: first, I consider the depoliticisation of gender in the Chinese cultural background through examining widespread myths and folklore as well as the longevity of imperial perceptions of women in modern China. Second, I address the depoliticisation of gender in another aspect of Chinese culture, namely linguistics, by investigating how the Chinese language is gender biased and how this impacts the image and status of contemporary Chinese women. Third, I analyse the role of the 20th century Chinese communist ideology, a unique and important influence on modern Chinese culture, and the extent of its success in eradicating persistent gender norms and promoting gender equality. Finally, I look at the experiences of contemporary Chinese women and examine the unequal opportunities they have faced in education and beyond caused by the depoliticisation of gender, as well as the effects of some recent government policies with respect to gender inequality. Through such analysis, this article concludes that the depoliticisation of gender acts as an indisputable political force.

Myths and values in depoliticising gender

Through essentialist narratives within Chinese cultural norms and values, women are made to see their powerlessness, or perceive themselves as naturally subservient and apolitical (Goot & Reid 2023), which significantly limits their opportunities to explore other paths and options (Beauvoir 2015). One of the ways in which essentialist narratives take hold in China culturally is through the evolution of Chinese myths, specifically about the goddess Nüwa (女娲).

Modifications to the myths surrounding the goddess Nüwa shows how the role of women was increasingly essentialised to being reliant upon men and expectations of their sacrificial nature, both of which are detrimental to the power and agency of women. Initially, when birth-giving remained a myth, women who ‘create life everywhere’ were worshipped and even feared (Beauvoir 2015, 81). The original story of Nüwa was that she alone created humans from mud, according to her own appearances (Li 2014). In this version, her power alone was sufficient. By the Tang dynasty, however, she was said to have married her brother to produce human life—increasingly reliant on male power (Au & Lee 2012). Classic of Mountains and Seas (《山海经》), written in the Qing dynasty, went even further, claiming that her dead body, specifically her intestines, transformed into ten gods who then created the world (The Wonders of Classic of Mountains and Seas, episode 2). Nüwa’s involvement in life creation was portrayed to be only through death and her power became non-existent. A similar story about her sacrifice is the famous Nüwa Mends the Sky (女娲补天) myth where, to save the world, Nüwa sacrificed herself by turning herself into a stone to fill up a hole in the sky. The story was glorified to showcase the ‘motherly’ sacrificial love of Nüwa for mankind. Notwithstanding the praise, the story is an implicit reflection of an essentialised gender role of women, willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. It was also very successful: to this day, children are still taught this story, but few ever question why it was she, instead of a masculine god, that sacrificed herself. Glorification and normalisation of women’s sacrifices then translates to a taken-for-granted attitude towards women’s ‘natural role’ of servitude, further strengthened by influential imperial values. This is the second contributor to the essentialisation of certain gender norms in China, which I shall discuss next.

Imperial values, alongside the widespread mythical tales, is another channel through which gender norms are made essential and hence depoliticised, portraying women as inferior and at the same time moulding women into a servile role. One of the most renowned and influential thinkers of the late Spring and Autumn period (591−453 BC), Confucius was noted to have claimed, in the foundational work of Confucian thought the Analects, that ‘women and small men [here possibly referring to slaves or servants] are difficult to nurture’ (‘唯女子与小人难养也’; Analects, XVI:23; Fuzhou Social Science Network 2016; Song 2019). This shows his firm belief in patriarchal ideology, commonly summarised under the idiom of ‘men are superior, women are lowly’ (男尊女卑; Fuzhou Social Science Network 2016), and his defence and promotion of ‘propriety’ or li (礼), which is a system of differentiation of ranks and statuses including that of men and women (Song 2019). Combined, these frameworks further strengthen the idea of a fundamental difference between how men and women are to be viewed and treated. It must be noted that while the social status of women was already unequal to that of men in the Spring and Autumn Period, women had enjoyed much more freedoms in this period compared to that of later imperial eras (Zhou 2006), following the rise of Confucianism in the Western Han dynasty (Song 2019).

With the spread of Confucian ideology, the superiority of men and inferiority of women became normalised and etched into the minds of the imperial-era Chinese. Several works of literature on how women are supposed to ‘behave’ were then written, the most famous being the Four Books for Women (女四书) written in the imperial dynasties of Eastern Han, Tang, Ming and Qing, all promoting the idea of ‘Three Obediences and Four Virtues’ (三从四德) for women. The ‘Three Obediences’ were obedience towards the father before marriage, towards the husband after marriage, towards the son after the death of the husband (Yang 2001). It is not difficult to see that these ideals and values were largely based on the acceptance of the patriarchy and aimed to greatly restrict women’s development (Ke 2016). It is also noteworthy that all these books were written in dynasties heavily influenced by Confucianism, again demonstrating the long-lasting impacts of the essentialist Confucian values of women.

While these gender-specific imperial ideals became essentialised across the patriarchal society, the obvious internalisation of these ideals by women was more concerning. Lessons for Women (《女诫》), often referred to as the ‘first of the Four Books for Women’ (《女四书》之首), was written by a high-achieving woman politician of the Eastern Han dynasty— Ban Zhao (班昭), whose most notable achievement was completing the Book of Han (《汉书》), in a society where most women were barely literate (Rošker 2020; Swann 1901, 61−73). However, as high achieving as she was, she still wrote Lessons for Women in her fifties, promoting marriage norms such as the following:

If a husband does not control his wife, then the rules of conduct manifesting his authority are abandoned and broken. If a wife does not serve her husband, then the proper relationship (between men and women) and the natural order of things are neglected and destroyed. [夫不御妇，则威仪废缺；妇不事夫，则义理堕阙] (Lessons for Women, II)

Her case is a perfect example of the power of gender to internalise the traditional subservient role of women in patriarchal society. When such gender-specific inequality is essentialised, depoliticised and internalised, even at the highest levels of societal achievement, oppression ensues.

Interestingly, the situation of the imperial-era Chinese woman seems to mirror that of Simone de Beauvoir’s (2015, 93) analysis of the woman being ‘a part of man’s patrimony, first her father’s and then her husband’s’, despite the difference between Chinese and Western culture. When making the famous point that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, woman’ (Beauvoir 2015, 293), emphasising the role of gender socialisation, Beauvoir (2015, 293) argued that masculinity and femininity resulted from constructed social forces, with men and women acquiring masculine and feminine traits and behaviours in the process of being brought up. Specifically, she pointed to the example of a little girl being given a passive doll to play with, in contrast with boys who were able to grasp their bodies and move freely in the world, and how this leads to the girl being taught that she ‘must try to please’ and ‘must make herself object’ (Beauvoir, 305). Again, despite the differences between Western and Chinese culture, the situation of Chinese girls mirrors this passivity and lack of freedom. Unmarried imperial-era Chinese teenage girls are referred to as guixiu (闺秀), who are largely constrained to their bedrooms and not allowed to interact with the outside world before their marriages (Li 2023). The parallels in the situation of women arising from similar gender norms is suggestive of the universal political power of the depoliticisation in gender ideology.

It is important to note that the impact of imperial women ideals did not die with the imperial dynasties: internalised gender norms and values were passed on to later generations and further normalised. The long-lasting influences of these imperial values can still be seen in current-day Chinese society. The rise of ‘female virtue’ (女德) classes in the 2010s is a perfect example:

In 2014, female virtue classes taught modern women not to fight back when beaten and not retaliate when scolded; in 2017, female virtue classes proclaimed that women who order takeaway and do not do the dishes are not following moral codes for women. (China Central Television 2020)

Despite repeated governmental efforts to shut down female virtue classes, they continued to open under different disguises with no shortage of students (China Central Television 2020). The Fushun cultural centre’s programs had over ‘10,000 students’, and its headmaster claimed ‘the enterprise was funded entirely by donations from students’, showing the deep-rooted internalisation of, and societal inertia exerted by, such ‘ancient doctrines’ and moral codes for women (BBC News Beijing Bureau 2017). The acceptance of women’s moral codes as a norm for how women should act falls in line with Judith Butler’s arguments of the role of gender as a production and normalisation of masculine and feminine. Emphasising the roles played by social expectations and gender norms in sustaining the patriarchal societal structure, Butler saw gender as a performative, namely that gender identity is ‘performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results’ (Butler 2015, 33). The example of female virtue classes and their popularity showcases the effects of the normalisation of gender as a norm and the persistence of these teachings may prolong the longevity of patriarchal ideology in Chinese society, enhancing the process of essentialisation of the powerless position of women. Indeed, another important aspect of depoliticisation through essentialist narratives stems from another fundamental and arguably unique aspect of Chinese culture—its language.

The role of the Chinese language

I will now turn to an examination of the Chinese language, analysing how the language is itself a product of gender depoliticisation, and contributes to that, by enshrining biases within fundamental aspects of the language.

It is important to clarify why language is an important aspect of Chinese culture to consider. The first reason is that language is a fundamental and inseparable part of culture and

‘regimes of truths’—famously coined by Michel Foucault—in each society. Foucault (1977, 13) argued that regimes of truths include ‘the types of discourse it harbours and causes to function as true; the mechanisms and instances which enable one to distinguish true from false statements, the way in which each is sanctioned’, in which language plays a crucial part. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, as summarised by Roger Brown (1976, 128), presents a similar yet more explicit argument, that ‘the structure of anyone’s native language strongly influences or fully determines the worldview he will acquire as he learns the language’.

It must also be noted that gender-related linguistics biases are not unique to the Chinese language alone. In French, to differentiate between adjectives by gender, the feminine adjective often involves an added ‘e’ to the end of a masculine adjective, for example, chinois and chinoise (Chinese), marié and mariée (married), etc. This approach arguably makes the masculine the norm, and the feminine the ‘Other’, as Beauvoir (2015) argued. However, the linguistic biases in Chinese take a unique form. Being a character-based language, gender biases in Chinese exist in both the formation of characters and the formation of words and can therefore be found literally anywhere and everywhere in the Chinese language. The Chinese language hence contributes to the essentialisation of certain stereotypes of women and the men-women power dynamic—specifically, the inferior position of women—through three ways: the role of radicals in forming Chinese characters, the ordering of characters in forming Chinese words, and how men and women are addressed. I will now examine the aspects of Chinese language that contribute to the depoliticisation of gender.

The role of radicals in Chinese characters is to classify characters into groups, and implicit stereotyping occurs through such classification. Taking the 女 (female) radical, for example, many Han characters perceived to be descriptive of women contain the female radical, including 嫩 (delicate), 婉 (congenial) and 妆 (to dress up), even though the use of these words are not limited to the feminine gender alone (Tso 2014, 2). This radical classification thus not only evokes a stereotypical view of what women are like, but also serves to inflict upon women a specific image of what they are supposed to be—delicate, restrained and dressed up. Women’s characters are then increasingly moulded to men’s stereotypes and subject to male manipulation. At the same time, among the many characters with the female radical, there are many that describe negative traits not unique to the feminine gender. These characters include 嫉 (jealous), 妒 (envy), 婪 (greedy), 妄 (presumptuous), 嫌 (dislike or scornful), 奸 (wicked or rape), 妖 (demon) and 奴 (slave). None of the above characters’ meanings are uniquely related to the feminine gender, but through using the female radical, these traits are indirectly associated with women (Tso 2014, 2). A derogatory effect is achieved, and the stereotypical character and portrayal of women becomes increasingly negative. As men and women alike are taught the Chinese language and these characters from a young age, the implicit power of gender through the association of the feminine to these traits serve to essentialise the derogation of the feminine gender.

Apart from the use of radicals, because of the Chinese language’s character-based nature, the ordering of characters in words is also important. Unsurprisingly, this aspect of Chinese linguistics also shows preference of the masculine over the feminine. In accordance with the ‘classical injunction’ of ‘women are those who come afterward’ (妇者, 后人也; Farris 1988, 297), masculine terms almost always show a tendency of coming before feminine terms. Examples include 男女 (‘male-female’, ‘man-woman’; men and women), 父母 / 爸妈 (‘father-mother’; ‘parents’), 夫妇 / 夫妻 (‘husband-wife’; married couple), and子女 / 儿女 (‘son-daughter’; children; Tso 2014, 6). This ‘natural order’ also corresponds to the Chinese tendency of putting more positive or primary characters at the start of words, and more negative characters after them. Almost all oppositional pairs consisting of two characters follow this logic: 是非 (‘right-wrong’), 对错 (‘correct-incorrect’), 荣辱 (‘glory-shame’), 爱恨 (‘love-hate’), 上下 (‘up-down’) and高低 (‘high-low’; Tso 2014, 6). The masculine therefore is essentialised to correspond to the ‘positive’ and the feminine to the ‘negative’ (Tso 2014), again creating an ‘invisible’ form of discrimination against the feminine gender that is internalised by men and women alike through the Chinese language.

Another linguistic channel through which the societal preference of men over women in China is shown is the way in which men and women are addressed respectively. The most common way to address a man in Mandarin, xiansheng (先生), means both ‘gentleman’ and ‘teacher’. The double meaning of this word means that while any men can be called xiansheng in China, regardless of achievement, a woman would need to be outstanding to deserve this ordinary address (Tatlow 2013). Once again, there is a disparity between the genders; only top-achieving women are deserving to be addressed equally as the humblest of men. This is an obvious but accepted and essentialised sign of men’s privilege in Chinese society through the depoliticising effects of gender, integrated within Chinese society through linguistics. I will now examine the third significant component of modern Chinese culture—the role of political ideology under communist rule as well as its reforms and their roles in sustaining the patriarchal structure in China.

The role of ideology in 20th century China

I will now examine the role of ideology, specifically during the 20th century, where the Chinese government sought to abolish persistent gender norms and promote gender equality.

Taking rapid and decisive steps including the New Marriage Law (《新婚姻法》) and the Land Reform Movement in the 1950s, the Chinese government outlawed the most extreme forms of abuse and restrained the powers of men in controlling the movement of women in marriage and divorce in the early revolutionary era (Croll 1983, 1). It is obvious that these policies created benefits for women and helped bring about their emancipation to a certain extent. By the 1970s, most women in China perceived their situation to be much improved by the Communist government (Croll 1983, 5). The premises of Confucian ideology were frequently contrasted, and the political presence of the All-China Women’s Federation (中华全国妇女联合会) was also notable. Slogans appeared, encouraging women to enter the labour force instead of being restrained to domestic tasks, the most famous one being Mao’s slogan of ‘women can hold up half the sky’ (妇女能顶半边天; Zi 2021).

However, the successes of these reforms were often limited. One of the main reasons was that the long-normalised economic and social structures and functions that bound women to their essentialised roles were not properly abolished before the attempt of emancipating women. Instead, the complex issue of women’s situation was reduced, and only largely addressed at ideological levels, using slogans, criticisms of Confucian ideology, and encouragements for women to gain an education and full-time job (Croll 1983, 10). A failure to address the allocation of domestic and reproductive tasks meant that women were still not able to be freed from their normalised roles. They were still expected to take care of the children and the elderly alongside their work, and the government’s efforts to promote gender equality served only to largely make life more difficult for women (Croll 1983).

Marxist feminist theories, including that of Catharine MacKinnon, had addressed this kind of failure to end women’s confinement to traditional roles, arguing that efforts to introduce women to the economic labour force lead only to the effect that ‘women become as free as men to work outside the home while men remain free from work within it’ (MacKinnon 1989, 10). Exploring the ‘wages for housework’ theory and its attempts to explain how women’s contribution and women themselves are invisible yet essential, MacKinnon (1989, 80) further argues that even in Marxist theory, ‘even when women work, women do not count’ as their unpaid domestic and reproductive work is minimised both in the sense of ‘being prevented from being realised’ and the sense that ‘its importance has been precluded from realisation’.

The situation of Chinese women did not become much better following China’s economic reforms and re-introduction of marketisation in the 1980s. In the 1980s and 1990s, the post-reform Chinese government engaged in yet more efforts to promote gender equality, introducing major legislative developments including the Law on the Protection of Rights and Interests of Women (《中华人民共和国妇女权益保障法》), first adopted in 1992 (Angeloff & Lieber 2012, 18−19). The affirmation of the ‘four selfs’—the right to self-respect, self-confidence, self-reliance, and self-understanding—represented a shift in ideology from the view of women as members of a collective identity during the pre-reform era to the view of women as individuals emancipated from their yokes (Angela & Lieber 2012). Following the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in September 1995, China launched its first action programme for women’s development with eleven objectives, including combating violence against women (Angela & Lieber 2012, 19). However, in May 2000, a symposium organised by the Chinese Women’s Research Society with UN Women’s backing revealed that the first action programme’s reforms had ‘contributed significantly towards accentuating discrimination against women—especially girls—and in terms of women’s joblessness and rising domestic violence’ (Angeloff & Lieber 2012 20).

Unequal opportunities from gender

To gain a better idea of the Communist government’s failures at the emancipation of women, I will now address the persisting inequality in opportunities for Chinese women, compared to Chinese men, both in education and beyond.

Firstly, I will examine the difference in education experiences resulting from gender. As education functions as a gateway to different career and pay opportunities, inequality in education is a political force granting individuals with different levels of power. The role that gender plays in Chinese education is one that exacerbates such inequality between genders, through unequal access to education as well as different outcomes from education.

Unequal access to education in China arises from Chinese families’ preference for sons (重男轻女). Although this attitude is not unique to Chinese society, another unique Chinese idea of ‘to raise children (often implicitly, sons) for elderly care’ (养儿防老) is at play exacerbating the unequalness of educational opportunities (Zhu & Gao 2016). China’s traditional patrilineal family structure also means that traditional parents rely on their sons for old age support and are hence more likely to send their sons over daughters to school, especially when it comes to non-compulsory senior secondary school which often involves privatised tuition and living expenses that exceed the average family income several fold (Seeberg 2014, 688). Case study results confirm this: from a sample of 1,687 cases in rural Gansu, it was found that the risk of being out of school is 39 percent higher for girls than boys (Seeberg 2014, 688). However, education is a significant factor in empowering women, especially in rural villages. Village girls who continued education were found to acquire more political and economic status in their families, and schooling also acted as a gateway to improved work options and opportunities (Seeberg 2014, 691). Therefore, unequal access to education further limits Chinese women’s future opportunities and makes them increasingly powerless in modern society.

Even for girls who succeeded in getting an education, they still face unequal outcomes, mainly through underrepresentation and unequal opportunities in work. Women are often socially discouraged from choosing high-paying STEM degrees (Jin 2023). Such societal pressure could work as an additional cost and make women rationally choose to not pursue their passions even though they are equally as capable as men to pursue a STEM degree. A study of first-year students enrolled at Peking University in 2000 shows that female students dominate humanities subjects while men dominate STEM subjects (Liu, Shen & Li 2023, 35). The number of women studying for a doctoral degree in STEM is also much lower than that of men, possibly due to greater pressure to start a family (Liu, Shen & Li 2023, 39). It is likely that fear of judgement or societal pressure made women’s costs of pursuing a doctoral degree outweigh the benefits, limiting their options and resulting in an underrepresentation of women in STEM-related research. This contributes to increasingly diminishing opportunities and representation of the feminine gender in STEM and other male-dominated fields.

Having explored the unequal opportunities for Chinese men and women in education, I shall now turn to the inequalities post-education, caused by gender differences. With the exact same education as men, women are discriminated against in employment. Even after removing the influence of most career-related variables, most of the gender income gap still cannot be explained (Liu, Shen & Li 2023, 39). The competitiveness of women college students is far lower than men ‘in some jobs with good social reputations and high incomes’ (Liu, Shen & Li 2023, 39). This means that it is much more difficult for women to improve their socioeconomic status in Chinese society, making them more likely to rely on men as the breadwinner of the family, further justifying and reinforcing the patriarchal societal structure. Even for women who do succeed in their careers, a derogatory term, ‘leftover women’ (剩女), is used against them if they did not marry (To 2013, 2). This slander of deviations from the traditional ideal of the ‘good wife, wise mother’ (贤妻良母) shows again the extent of essentialisation of the traditional gender roles, and therefore the political power of gender in Chinese society.

For the women who do choose to marry, the situation is also bleak, resulting from long-lasting imperial-era values as well as government policies. The Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan (《醒世姻缘传》) written in the Qing dynasty used the phrase ‘a daughter married off is water poured onto the ground’ (嫁出的女, 泼在地里的水) to describe the status of married women in respect to their parents (Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan, XCII). In essence, they are no longer a part of their parents’ household once married, because they now belong to her husband’s household. This idea is still firmly held today, with the phrase evolving to ‘a daughter married off is water spilt’ (嫁出去的女儿，泼出去的水; Qu & Yu 2019).

Government policies are also influenced by gender, with the implicit role of gender acting to diminish women’s rights and freedoms in non-gender-related government action. One example of this is the ‘divorce cooling-off period’ (离婚冷静期). Adopted in May 2020, the new law consists of a 30-day wait between couples filing for divorce and divorcing (The Economist 2020), and any party who decides not to divorce could recall the divorce application during this wait (First Intermediate People’s Court of Beijing Municipality 2021). Although the law itself is gender-neutral, it is still women that are mainly affected as they initiate three-quarters of divorces, and now have their freedoms to escape from an unhealthy marriage limited (The Economist 2020). Another area of concern was the case of abuse. The legislation claims that litigations for divorce are exempt from the cooling-off period, protecting the interest of the abused. However, accusations of abuse are often ignored, ‘especially if raised by female plaintiffs’ (The Economist 2020). The implicit influence of gender over this government policy thus restricts women’s freedoms and rights through limiting their abilities to escape from an unhealthy marriage.

Furthermore, it is normalised among women to take on the responsibility of reproduction. As Annandale and Clark (1996, 29) argued, women experience a ‘reverse privilege’, where reproduction is still centred for women ‘as if it were central to all women’s lives’, with men being almost invisible in the process. Chinese policies surrounding birth control in the 20th century, specifically the one-child policy introduced in 1979 (Li 1995, 563), also reflect this gender-specific reproductive burden; women were the ones who lost sovereignty over their bodies (Ma 2013), and were the ones forced to undergo abortions and sterilisations (Taylor 2015). To essentialise women’s acceptance of a fate of childbirth and childcare, traditional Confucian ideology promoted the idea that ‘of the three unfilial things, failure to produce a (male) descendant is the greatest’ (不孝有三, 无后为大; Jiang, Zhang & Sánchez-Barricarte 2015, 226), associated with the ideal of ‘continuing the bloodline’ (传宗接代). The importance attached to ‘continuing the bloodline’ disempowers women, as only male offspring are regarded as carrying on the family line, leading to a preference of sons over daughters in Chinese families (Jiang, Zhang & Sánchez-Barricarte 2015). This preference also led to disastrous unintended consequences of the one-child policy. Infanticide and abandonment of female babies becoming widespread practice, causing China’s sex ratio to reach a unique and concerning 120 male to 100 female births in 2000 (Stanford King Center for Global Development 2020).

Some Chinese cities have more liberal norms where many informants say they ‘have no preference for sons and some explicitly showing a preference for girls’ (Ji et al. 2020, 132), and there is a recent surge of the liangtouxing or ‘two-side surnames’ (两头姓) practice—having two children with each taking one parent’s surname, so that the mother also gets her surname passed down. Whilst such acts, previously unheard of in traditional ideology, promote equality in principle, their actual practice shows that China’s gender preference is already invisible and normalised. When a family has two children, it is still usual practice for the son to take the father’s surname and the daughter to take her mother’s (Ji et al. 2020, 132). When there is only one child, ‘almost exclusively the surname follows the father’s name’ (Ji et al. 2020, 132). Practices such as two-side surnames and the subsequent essentialisation of implicit preferences provide women with superficial gender equality and take away legitimacy of calls for more rights, therefore rendering women even more powerless to push for greater gender equality. Through this process gender again hinders the level of power of women in Chinese society.

The persistence of the idea of ‘continuing the bloodline’ becomes yet another cause for the unequal treatment of women in the workplace. As Kristin Luker (1985, 118) argued, women ‘[pay] a very high price for being women’, and more specifically for being ‘mothers or potential mothers’. Importantly, she pointed out that women could not even get equal work, compared to men, unless ‘they could challenge the assumption that their work activities were, or ought to be, or might be subordinated to family plans’. Although Luker writes about the price of reproduction for women in an American context, the theory applies to the Chinese case as well, with women being continuously asked about their marriage and childbearing status – despite it being illegal – in the Chinese labour market (Zhao 2023). The political force of depoliticised gender norms and ideals again exacerbates the already imbalanced power dynamic between the genders in Chinese society.

Conclusion

Through engaging in a case study of the situation of the feminine gender in China, this article establishes gender, with its power in depoliticisation via essentialist narratives, as an undeniable political force, and provides a novel interpretation of patriarchal sustenance. This is achieved through analysing unique aspects of the experiences of contemporary Chinese women in the Chinese context, including an examination of the Chinese cultural background, linguistics, ideology and persisting inequalities in education and beyond. Further research on this topic could seek to explore the situation of women of different ethnicities in China as well as how their experiences differ from those of the Han ethnicity.