GLOBAL CONCEPTS, LOCAL PRACTICES:

CHINESE FEMINISM SINCE THE FOURTH UN CONFERENCE ON WOMEN

The Fourth United Nations Conference on Women held in Beijing in 1995 marked a watershed in the history of Chinese feminism. But so far, little has been written, either in Chinese or in English, significant changes in contemporary Chinese feminism. In this article examine how, since the early 1990s, Chinese feminists have enthusiastically embraced the global feminist concept of gender and used it innovatively to create local practices of "gender training." Crucial to this has been the dynamic relationship between the rise of feminist nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in China and the transformation of Chinese state feminism as embodied in the Communist Party-China Women's Federation, a state-sponsored hierarchical organization with national headquarters in Beijing. Drawing on interviews of feminists produced by the Global Feminisms Project (GFP), we illuminate feminist conceptual, organizational, and social transformations in These have unfolded in conjunction with transnational feminist movements during a period when China has become a global capitalist Locating Chinese feminism at the intersection of local and processes, we contribute to understanding the dynamics between grounded feminist strategies and the global circulation of feminist concepts and practices.

Although a new cohort Chinese feminists had been in communication with feminists outside China since the 1980s, it was the 1995 UN conference that provided crucial "transnational opportunity structures" enabling Chinese feminists to generate dramatic changes. First, the conference provided an opportunity for Chinese feminists to legitimate NGOs in China. Second, it provided conceptual frameworks for Chinese feminist activists eager to break away from or transform a Marxist theory of "equality between men and women" that had dominated Chinese state socialism.

In the early 1990s, in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, the Chinese government curtailed spontaneously organized activism outside of government-sponsored organizations. Feminists used the opportunity of the UN conference and the accompanying NGO Forum to popularize the concept of the NGO in China for the first time. Chinese feminists published numerous articles in the mainstream media, especially in the Women's Federation's newspaper Chinese Women's Daily, introducing women's NGOs from around the world and carefully putting forth the argument that NGOs are not antigovernment organizations. Presented by Chinese feminists as a common practice in both the international arena and developed countries, the concept of the NGO served as a lever for Chinese feminists to pry open social spaces for Chinese citizens' spontaneous activism. Taking advantage of the government's eagerness to find ways for China to "re-enter" the world and to join capitalist globalization, Chinese feminists, including many of the GFP interviewees, successfully pitched the formation of Chinese women's NGOs as one of the mechanisms to "connect [China's] tracks with the world.

Since the mid-1980s, Chinese feminists had been eagerly looking for new analytical tools that would enable them to break away from the constraints of a Marxist understanding of "women's problems." During the socialist period, a Marxist theory of women's liberation had provided the grounding for a "state feminism" that held a monopoly on defining "equality between men and women" (nannii pingdeng). The latter term is an early-twentieth-century translation of the English term "sexual equality" endorsed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since its founding in 1921. Socialist state feminists embraced its key tenets: sexual inequality between women and men is an expression of class inequality; private ownership is at the root of women's oppression; "remnants of feudalism" inequality where it persists under state socialism; state rates women's "low quality" (an ambiguous notion that preted in two ways: emphasizing women's lack of resources women and blaming women for their own lowly social between men and women in state socialist feminist discourse, w;as to be achieved mainly through women's equal production under public ownership, a theoretical position into policies with mixed impact on different groups of within the CCP made tremendous efforts to institutionalize between men and women" in the Mao era. However, by apparent that thirty-five years of public ownership and tion in production had not resulted in the elimination of As the state began to privatize the economy, discontent theory of women's liberation and a narrowly defined men and women" in socialist state feminism was on the Chinese academics and officials of the Women's Federation.

The UN's Fourth World Conference on Women enabled Chinese feminists to discover the transnational feminist concept of gender as well as other important concepts, such as "women-centered sustainable development," "women's empowerment," and "mainstreaming gender." Powerfully exposing gender blindness in a class-centered Marxist theory of women, the concept of gender was enthusiastically embraced by contemporary Chinese feminists in their efforts to review the socialist state practices of "equality between men and women" and to envision gender equality in new ways.

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