UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Chinese feminism has undergone a complex and intriguing development. Chinese women were first acculturated with Marxist women’s liberation ideology during the Mao era, and during the 1995 United Nations Fourth Conference on Women in Beijing, Chinese female activists were open to new possibilities of gender consciousness. The shift in Chinese gender ideologies denotes a change in the emphasis on gender sameness to difference. Given this background, this paper examines the gender consciousness adopted by the Chinese female activists in Beijing and argues that “gender”(xinbei) is still a floating concept in China. The cultural frame of gender consciousness adopted by the female activists depends on their social and cultural location, and the activists personal repertoires of gender consciousness serve as a tool kit to draw from during times of organizing. The patchworks of gender consciousness allow activists to maneuver with the authoritarian government and also work with international funding agencies. The paper first explores the different usages adopted by female activists to convey the idea of “gender” and is analyzed according to activists’ social and cultural upbringings. “Gender” is an umbrella concept in China, which is sometimes equated with “women/female,” sometimes alluding to socialist ideals of female emancipation, or connoting the social construction aspect of “gender” in a Western context. The paper then discusses the prevailing gender repertoires that existed in China and how the concept of “gender”(xinbei) and “social gender”(shehui xinbei) is conceptualized and allowed spaces for practical action.