CHAMPAIGN -- There she is... Miss
ChinaFour years have
passed since the Chinese government endorsed the appearance of Wu
Wei as the nation's first-ever competitor in the Miss World
competition. Since then, governmental support and cultural
preoccupation with such pageants just keeps growing.
"In 2004, China hosted more than
six major international beauty competitions, including Miss World,
Miss Universe, Miss Asia, Miss Tourism World, Miss Tourism
International and Miss Intercontinental," notes University of
Illinois China scholar Gary Xu in a special double issue of the
journal Feminist Economics.
Among the guest editors of the
edition on "Gender, China and the WTO" is Gale Summerfield, the
director of the U. of I.
Women and Gender in Global Perspectives program and a professor
of human and community
development, agricultural and
consumer economics, and of
gender and women's studies. Summerfield also contributed an
article with U. of I. graduate student Junjie Chen that documents a
case study of population control and land rights policies in
Northern Liaoning.
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The popularity of the pageants,
according to Xu, a professor of
East Asian languages and cultures, is symptomatic of a broader
cultural shift taking place in China. As the nation's economy
becomes increasingly market-driven, he said, a curious side effect
of recent economic reforms and an increased trend toward
Westernization has been the widespread linkage of beauty and
economic gain.
The coupling is so pervasive that a
new phrase has been coined to describe the phenomenon: meinü
jingji.
"Broadly defined, meinü jingji
refers to activities like beauty pageants that are typically
commercialized and localized festivities that put beautiful women on
parade, as well as the accompanying range of advertisements for TV
shows and movies, cosmetics, plastic surgery centers, weight-loss
products, fitness programs and the ubiquitous beauty parlors," Xu
and co-author Susan Feiner (University of Southern Maine) write in
the journal article.
The overwhelming message beamed to
women through the media, Xu said, is that beauty – often defined in
Western terms – equals on-the-job success.
But China's new-found obsession
with fashion and beauty is not just skin deep. It is fueled by those
who oil the machines of China's commerce.
"The Chinese bureaucracy is heavily
invested in the promotion of the beauty economy as a source of
employment, growth and glory for China," Xu said.
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Xu and Feiner indicate in the
article that, along with real estate, meinü jingji is among
China's most productive economic sectors. Citing a 2005 report in
the People's Daily, they noted that the beauty industry employed
more than 16 million people. Another newspaper story quoted women
who claimed that half of their monthly paychecks is spent on
skin-care products and cosmetics.
While lucrative, China's beauty
industry isn't necessarily advancing the status of women.
"Misogyny is running rampant," Xu
said. "Women's rights are more violated than men's. Women's value is
more likely determined by appearance than anything else."
In the introduction to Feminist
Economics, Summerfield and co-editors Günseli Berik (University of
Utah) and Xiao-yuan Dong (University of Winnipeg) argue that women's
rights have been eroded in a number of other areas since China's
transition from a socialist to a capitalist economy. While sweeping
changes began to take place in 1978, the journal focuses mainly on
"gendered processes and outcomes" that have occurred since 1992 and
China's affiliation with the World Trade Organization.
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![](../images/ads/current/eagle_one_inv-lda091007.png) Summerfield said that period has
been one of tremendous growth, punctuated by a number of positive
changes for women. But along with what the editors call China's
"imperative for accumulation and efficiency," they maintain that
certain policies – or lack thereof – have led to a weakening of land
rights, income insecurity and declining access to healthcare for
women, along with gender disparities in urban and rural wages and
disproportionate layoffs.
While some of these problems have
surfaced since China joined the WTO and became an active participant
in the global economy, Summerfield noted that "it hasn't really
affected people's day-to-day life much in some of the rural areas."
"But with the growing inequality
that's associated with this lop-sided income growth, you can't just
stay in one place. You're actually getting worse off if everyone
else is getting better off."
One example of this is occurring in
the villages, where women typically lose rights to long-term leases
to farmland when they marry and move to their husbands' villages and
take up residence with the men's families. Even though the
government issued a regulation stating that women should keep rights
to their original plots, issued in their parents' land allocation,
"having that law didn't really change what was happening on the
ground because traditions trumped law in many cases."
In larger towns and cities,
employment practices such as discrimination and wage disparity
exist, but are not always apparent, she said.
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"Discrimination is not just a relic
of the past; it's built into the incentives of the current period,
too," Summerfield said. For instance, "even though you have (had)
two-earner families since the socialist period, there's a sense that
men are the real heads of the family and the ones who have
to earn the income. And if somebody has to go home, it would be
better to be the wife, so she can take care of the children.
"When they lay off people, it's
amazing how common and repetitive it is to see a figure like
two-thirds of the lay-offs are women and a third are men."
With respect to wage disparity,
Summerfield said many in China would maintain there is no such
thing.
"They are more egalitarian than in
many places, and it is generally illegal to pay different wages for
the same work." But, she noted, "where the disparities show up more
frequently are things like bonuses or promotions – especially
bonuses because, obviously, if you're going home to make dinner and
feed kids, the male is working the extra hours." Therefore, when
employers issue bonuses, the men are first in line.
Summerfield is hopeful that by
bringing together and highlighting current scholarship on the gender
impacts of China's reforms in the journal, some of these problems
will receive more attention in the future.
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"Putting light on the problems that
crop up strikes a chord with some people, and they do act," she
said. "And it's much more likely that the government would take some
of these things into account in their official regulations.
Sometimes they just don't realize there are these gender issues
going on in the reform. They think it's just a family issue.
"That's what policies for
intervention are about. There is no reason a market (automatically)
is going to come out on a gender-equitable solution. You have to
have other mechanisms in place to achieve social goals that relate
to forms of equity, whether it's gender or rural or urban issues."
In an effort to better reach those
most able to affect change – Chinese scholars and government
officials, Summerfield said the special issue of the journal will be
translated into Chinese and published as a book within the next
year.
[Text copied from
University
of Illinois news release] |