Abstract
Despite long hours of often monotonous labor in difficult conditions, women working in the Dalian Economic Zone in Northeast China refer to the zone and their lives there as “paradise.” Whether or not the DEZ is truly a “paradise” is less important than how such a statement reveals how positively some women feel about where they are living. They speak glowingly of their lives in Dalian, ready to point out how they lucky they are.
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Notes
- 1.
Guldin (2001), however, also sees this increased contact and easier travel as potentially leading to fewer permanent moves as rural residents have increased access to elements of urban life.
- 2.
But this same reluctant connection to the west is true of other places as well, as the example of India, and its efforts to create an “alternative modernity” (Prakash 1999) suggests.
- 3.
There is an interesting irony here: As was true for some women in early industrializing United States (Ewen 1985), women in Dalian were often producing what they themselves could not afford to consume.
- 4.
Yan Hairong cites a photograph and “poem” originally published in Anhui Ribao titled “The transformation of dagongmei” which similarly reflects the ways migrant women are sometimes seen by rural women. The photo shows two women at a bus station; given the caption, they are rural migrants who have been in the city and clearly on their way back to their village. The poem suggests the kinds of changed images such women represent:
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When they left they carried ‘snakeskin’ bags
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When they returned they had leather bags and shoes
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Instead of zaijian they said ‘bai-bai’
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Village neighbors mistake them for ‘little foreigners.’ (cited in Yan 2008: 145)
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- 5.
In her study of silk factory workers, Rofel found that the youngest cohorts saw marriage as a way to express themselves as feminine, a place where they could find freedom from state influence and a place to be modern (Rofel 1999).
- 6.
For an interesting discussion of how similar contradictions are part of the ways that infant feeding is constructed to make “modern consuming mothers,” see Gottschang (2001).
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Riley, N.E. (2013). Performing Gender in a Modern Economic Zone. In: Gender, Work, and Family in a Chinese Economic Zone. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5524-6_6
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