• DOI:10.1353/JOWH.2010.0239
• Corpus ID: 143667861

Maoism, Feminism, and the UN Conference on Women: Women's Studies Research in Contemporary China

@article{Zheng1997MaoismFA,
  title={Maoism, Feminism, and the UN Conference on Women: Women's Studies Research in Contemporary China},
  author={Wang Zheng},
  journal={Journal of Women's History},
  year={1997},
  volume={8},
  pages={126 - 152}
}

• Wang Zheng
• Published 25 March 2010
• Sociology
• Journal of Women's History

On a September morning at Huairou, the site of the 1995 Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Forum, over three hundred women from all over the world gathered in an auditorium to listen to the presentations of a group of Chinese women scholars on the topic "Women's Studies in China." This was one of forty-seven panels presented by Chinese women at the NGO Forum. Many participants in the Forum from outside of China, observing Chinese women's activities for the first time, were impressed by what seemed to be an extraordinary amount of women's studies scholarship and activism. Although one of the most significant social phenomena in contemporary China is the development of research on women, the history of women's studies is in fact relatively short and began only with the economic reforms of the early 1980s. Moreover, while the term "women's studies" might have conveyed to participants at the NGO Forum a sense of a common academic enterprise, in fact, women's studies in China has a very different history and content than it does in the United States. Rather than emerging from a feminist movement, women's studies, or research on women (funA¼ yanjiu) in China, has constituted a nation-wide women's movement that is creating new discourses on Chinese women. This essay examines the social and poUtical context of the rise of research on women in contemporary China, attempts to delineate the contours of this movement, and discusses the relationship between the Chinese women's movement and Western feminism. Having played the dual role of participant/observer in the development of research on women in China in the past several years, I wiU present my observations based on interviews with women scholars and activists in China and participation in some projects carried out in China, in addition to my survey of related literature about and documents of the movement. However, I do not claim that this paper represents an "inside view." Although I was born and educated in the People's Republic (PRC), I have spent the last decade engaged in studying U.S. women's history and Western feminism. I therefore view the current women's movement in China from multiple perspectives.