Women’s land activism and gendered citizenship in the urbanising Pearl River Delta

Introduction: The waijianü phenomenon in urbanising rural Guangdong

Beginning in the mid-1990s, many rural ‘out-married women’ (waijianü) have persistently submitted petitions and staged protests in villages, towns and cities across Guangdong Province. Their small-scale, dispersed and peaceful activism has been so frequent that it has made its presence felt at every administrative level of government. Their grievance is simple: as women, they have been deprived of their right to village collective property in the process of land conversion. Owing to Chinese virilocal marriage customs, women who marry non-local men are labelled ‘out-married women’ (waijianü), reclassified as outsiders and dispossessed from the village in which they grew up. Gender discrimination in resource allocation is nothing new in rural China. But the out-married women’s land disputes emerged in a new context of socio-economic dislocations. As rural land was converted to build the facilities that have made the Pearl River Delta the factory of the world, the ownership and redistribution of collective assets became contested issues, precisely because collective land began to generate significant rental income. The deprivation of rural out-married women’s village citizenship came at the very moment that property reforms strove to mitigate rural conflicts in the process of industrial urbanisation. The shareholding reform in Nanhai demonstrates best how the formalisation of property rights has intensified old, informal types of discrimination in villages. Between 1992 and 1994, villages in Nanhai started to re-collectivise formerly contracted-out farmland to build warehouses and factories. The villages were restructured into a new form of shareholding cooperatives; and villagers became shareholders and lived on dividends from the rental income of collective land. However, this also initiated a process whereby out-married women were excluded from the redistribution of shares. By 1998, 23,600 out-married women in Nanhai had been denied shares; 4165 of their children were also implicated (Women and Gender Studies Center (WGSC), 2008). The scale of such exclusionary practices forced waijianü to embark on a kind of Long March to defend their rights.

In light of the unequal access to urban citizenship resulting from the household registration (hukou) that classifies each person as a rural or urban resident with differentiated entitlement to urban resources (Chan, 1994; Solinger, 1999), an increasing number of scholarly works have pointed out how a system of citizenship stratification has emerged in urbanising China (Li et al., 2010; Wu, 2010). However, this stratification has seldom been analysed in terms of gender. Rural women, situated at the bottom of the hierarchy of differentiated citizenship, often suffer gender-based discrimination and fall still further down the hierarchy. Specifically, women are more vulnerable than men to economic and social dispossession in the process of displacement and renegotiation of land rights. Women are also marginalised in property rights reforms that are reshaping China’s rural land system and collective ownership. But it would be incorrect to conclude that dispossessed women lack agency (Sargeson, 2008). Sargeson and Song (2010), for example, have documented how women’s actions have forced some municipal governments to overturn local rules to exclude women from the compensation entitlement related to land expropriation. Following this emphasis on women’s active participation in the political life of the community, this paper takes a step further to argue that out-married women’s land activism, in fighting against exclusion and non-recognition, is a citizenship movement, defending rights and demanding social recognition. As Taylor puts it: ‘nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being’ (Taylor, 1994: 25). Rural women’s land activism, in seeking recognition, redefines citizenship as more than a static bundle of rights and entitlements, while asserting specific forms of political agency in a context in which their already precarious economic and social position has been eroded by property rights reforms. In asserting these claims, Chinese women have actively participated in processes of citizenship-making.

According to Guangzhou Intermediate People’s Court, the most intense waijianü conflicts have been concentrated in urban fringes undergoing rapid expansion, such as the Baiyun and Huadu districts of Guangzhou Municipality, Nanhai district of Foshan Municipality and Zhangmutou town in Dongguan Municipality (Sun et al., 2004). It is important to emphasise from the outset the regional characteristics of the peri-urban areas in Guangdong. In order to supply land for industrialisation, the role of the rural collective in the Pearl River Delta has long since shifted from a land contractor to an aggressive land manager, one which represents the shareholding organisation in overseeing and operating land transfers. Over the course of more than three decades of rural industrialisation, these rural collectives at the village level have gained strong autonomy, shaping a process of spontaneous and bottom up ‘peri-urbanisation’ in their own specific ways (Lin, 2006; Shen, et al., 2002; Zhu and Guo, 2015). These urbanised villages, being ‘not rural but not urban’, have maintained their collective economies even after they have been transferred to urban administration (Tang, 2015). Moreover, village collective shareholding companies continue to play a leading role in community governance (Tang, 2015, 2019). Exactly because of this village autonomy, shareholding reforms were never carried out from the top down in a consistent manner. The waijianü conflicts that stemmed from their shareholder status were dotted across the peri-urban areas and the local states’ responses were far from uniform. The disputes over village membership and entitlements do not merely tell a typical story of displacement and compensation for expropriated village land. In fact, waijianü activism and the intervention of upper-level government on behalf of these women activists have triggered a wave of protests from village collectives asserting their right to local autonomy and self-governance, and refusing on those grounds to allocate land-related shares and benefits to out-married women. Villages’ counter-activism demonstrates how different social groups within the rural community compete to capitalise on existing land resources to survive in a newly urbanised environment. This complex situation calls for more research to illustrate the gendered dynamics of the urbanisation process and how it affects men and women differently.

My research is designed to explore out-married women’s land activism from three perspectives: (1) How did shareholding reforms take shape and how were they shaped by gendered exclusions? (2) How did women fight against this exclusion? (3) How did the villages and the local state react to women’s resistance? The data were collected from over a decade of fieldwork on rural land rights in 16 villages across the Pearl River Delta region between 2004 and 2016. Initially, my research was about villages’ shareholding reforms. But in every village I visited, the waijianü disputes appeared to be the biggest challenge in their redefinition of villagers into shareholders. The protests of out-married women were also visible in my visits to those villages and towns where shareholding reforms were rushed forward and already in process, most notably in Guangzhou, Foshan and Dongguan. My fieldwork includes interviews with local officials and village shareholding cooperatives and, more importantly, a leadership team that was established by the Nanhai District Government in 2008 to mitigate waijianü disputes, the only special task force of this kind to have ever been put in place in China. Nanhai, which was turned into a district under Foshan Municipality in 2002, is a special case because it has been a designated pilot city in the State Council’s experiment of rural reforms and has since produced many local policies to promote and legitimate their reforms (Jiang and Liu, 2004). I collected documents that were created to cope with the waijianü disputes and focused my interviews on how the local rules were made and how women’s resistance challenged the rules. Outside Nanhai, shareholding reforms have been widely adopted in a more informal way, lacking standard local rules or uniform policies. Accordingly, waijianü activisms were even more scattered across jurisdictions. I therefore integrated legal cases collected by the WGSC at Sun Yat-sen University into my research. ¹ Under the leadership of lawyer/professor Lu Ying, the WGSC functioned as a legal aid centre in metropolitan Guangzhou and helped hundreds of rural out-married women bring their litigation to courts individually and collectively. I studied these legal actions and carried out follow-up interviews with waijianü activists who continued their battles, even after WGSC was forced to close down in 2008.

The out-married women’s property conflicts have laid bare some of the complexities of rural citizenship under the impact of urbanisation. This paper uses the case of waijianü conflicts in the Pearl River Delta to show how the rural society has responded to the challenges of urbanisation with a process of bottom-up reform and self-organisation. This reconsolidation of local collectives, taking the shape of shareholding reform and formal titling, however, has come at the expense of the further exclusion of women. Women’s land activism, in turn, contends that women who have been marginalised from these processes have a claim as both economic and political stakeholders in the rural–urban transition. In what follows, I reassess the concept of citizenship and explain how women’s land activism is a citizenship movement; this is followed by an analysis of the process through which waijianü activism came into being, the state’s positive response and the serious backlash that came from the village level. Finally, some ramifications of this citizenship struggle will be elaborated in the conclusion.

Contesting citizenship in China’s urban–rural interface

Solinger’s seminal book Contesting Citizenship in Urban China (1999) set the agenda for research on citizenship, markets and the state in the context of post-socialist China. Following Bryan S. Turner (1993), Solinger (1999) points out two of the most salient dimensions of the citizenship issue: social membership and the right to allocation of resources. This book’s urban focus remains relevant, given the unprecedented scale and speed of rural–urban migration in China, which, however, is paradoxically embedded in a diehard hukou system that constrains freedom of movement. While the unequal citizenship of migrants in cities has increasingly been recognised in recent years (Li et al., 2010; Wu, 2010; Zhang and Wang, 2010), the narrative of ‘granting urban citizenship to migrant workers’ has, reinforced the assumption that only urbanites can be considered ‘citizens’ (Jakimów and Barabantseva, 2016). The emphasis on the dimension of citizenship regarding access to urban resources also has shadowed other alternative ways of configuring citizenship politics in China, including how marginal actors react against various ‘othering’ mechanisms and pursue their political and social rights (Fong and Murphy, 2006; Jakimów and Barabantseva, 2016). My case study of Waijianü activism thus intends to challenge existing study of citizenship in China by (1) re-examining the question of citizenship in China’s urban–rural interface; and (2) bringing ‘active citizenship’ back to the centre of the citizenship debate. I consider citizenship-making as an active process through which marginalised individuals fight against exclusion from their community and claim their equal membership and rights. In this sense, the struggle over village citizenship matters because ‘Who counts as a citizen?’ goes beyond a claim for equal access to resources to encompass demands for civic participation in local governance and rule-making (Lefebvre, 1996).

Situated within a nominally rural institutional framework, contested village citizenship in China’s peri-urban areas has not been considered an urban question, let alone a national issue. In rural China, village citizenship is directly linked to membership and thus to rural collective ownership, a socialist legacy. Chinese institutional economists use the notion of membership rights (chengyuan quan) to indicate how rural collectives give each member in the community equal rights to communal land (Zhou and Liu, 1988 [1994]). But the line between insider and outsider status, and thus the designation of who counts as members of a collective, is doomed to be unstable because of demographic change via birth, death, marriage or migration. This uncertainty has not only rendered ‘rural collectives’ an ambiguous notion in the post-commune era but also made women a particularly problematic group in the system since a woman’s membership status is subject to changes in her marital status – unless she marries a local man. Moreover, because of the impact of industrialisation and urbanisation, rural administrative and economic organisations are no longer as seamlessly integrated as communes once were. The economic right to collective property, the political right to vote and to participate in public affairs, and the social right to village welfare are no longer bundled together as with the communal membership rights in the socialist past, and the boundaries of membership are also changing. In other words, the demarcation of village citizenship is changing in post-reform China. Indeed, this peculiar process echoes contemporary contestations about the changing nature of citizenship, as well as the increasingly blurry boundaries between civil, social and political rights, in other parts of the world (Isin, 2009; Leydet, 2017). Thus, the contestation of village citizenship in rural China should be taken just as seriously as its urban counterpart.

In the process of rural–urban transition, the redefinition of village citizenship has involved struggles and negotiations among different social groups within rural communities. The hukou system has created a well-documented urban/rural divide in how people are granted differentiated citizenship in China (Chan, 1994; Solinger, 1999; Wu, 2010). However, in the urban–rural interface of Guangdong Province, the increasing flows of capital and labour through the Pearl River Delta region have led to the increasing discrepancies between hukou registration (huji), village membership (cunji) and a person’s actual residence. As a result, village membership, as distinct from hukou, becomes a decisive factor in excluding outsiders and protecting the interests of native villagers (Li, 2004; Zhe, 1997). The shareholding reform further formally grants the rights to collective property only to a more exclusively defined group of ‘shareholders’ (Po, 2008). It is in this context that some groups’ rights to full membership are questioned, including out-married women, widowed or divorced women, and villagers who have in the past moved their hukou out of the village for work or schooling. The list of problematic cases goes on and membership conflicts vary across different regions as a result of different local norms and differing pace of urbanisation. Here, for example, even a local hukou cannot guarantee an out-married woman full village membership and its associated rights to shares, welfare allocation and decision-making. In other words, a new village citizenship identity has been created to differentially grant economic, social and political rights only to the core members of the village, excluding all marginal individuals. Hukou here is no longer the only decisive mechanism for allocating or shaping village citizenship. Moreover, to cope with the rural–urban transition of villages, the central and local governments have issued a series of policies of ‘citizenisation’ (shiminhua) or ‘from village to community’ (cungaiju) to transform rural populations into urban citizens (Tang, 2019). The official discourse, on the one hand, supports the integration of urbanised villagers into urban life; but also, on the other, emphasises the protection of villagers’ existing land rights and property rights in relation to the village’s collective economy (State Council, 2016). In terms of neighbourhood governance, these urbanised villages are characterised by the continuous and ongoing presence of village collectives in their daily life (Tang, 2019). Therefore, uneven and gendered village citizenships have transformed into new forms of gendered urban citizenships in the ‘citizenisation’ process. In the Pearl River Delta region, peripheralised rural women and their children in particular have mobilised against their exclusion from village citizenship in the process of urban transformation of their communities, giving the label of waijianü a new and contested significance.

Institutionally, out-married women’s activism has challenged functional, utilitarian views of property rights reform. In the post-reform era, the idea that the ‘clarification of property rights will increase the efficient allocation of resources’ has become hegemonic in directing institutional reforms in China (Cui, 1998). This rational perspective, however, falls short in analysing the political processes of the transformations of institutions. While political or business leaders who have triggered the reform have been considered ‘institutional entrepreneurs’ (DiMaggio, 1988), it is often neglected that marginal, underprivileged groups, via collective action, can also play a strategic role in changing the trajectory of institutional reform. This paper, therefore, uses the case of rural women’s activism around the issue of village citizenship to discuss the dynamics of socio-political processes of rural property rights reform. Out-married women’s conflicts have exposed how the discourse and practice of ‘clarification of property rights’ may itself intensify the social exclusion of the underprivileged. Through shareholding reforms, internal conflicts and unequal power relations at the village level are reinforced in the process of re-drawing the boundaries between insiders and outsiders. What needs to be carefully addressed, then, is how unequal social power structures are reshaped in different sites in tandem with social and institutional changes, and consequently, result in different tiers of battle over citizenship.

Charles Taylor’s framing of the ‘politics of recognition’ asks us to consider who counts by looking at who is politically visible (1994). Through the lens of waijianü activism, I argue that it is urgent to acknowledge new ‘acts of citizenship’ in China, for ‘how subjects act to become citizens and claim citizenship has thus substantially changed’ (Isin, 2009: 367, italics in the original). In China, the condition of possibility for the emergence of women as actors initiating land activism is precisely an urbanisation process that is unsettling the rural social order and compelling rural populations to bargain for their survival in a new world. While both men and women are victims of dispossession, women are much more marginalised in this process of social and economic renegotiation. By creating a class of rural female non-citizens, rural communities have deprived waijianü of opportunities to share land-related revenue, further perpetuating male dominance just as local economies and society are in flux. As activist citizens (Isin, 2009), waijianü are demanding women’s citizenship rights not only through issues of entitlements associated with hukou but also by revisiting questions of how citizens become political actors and how differential citizenship might be eliminated.

Gendered practice of rural shareholding reform

This section explains how out-married women have lost their citizenship in the process of rural shareholding reform. Since the early 1990s, villages in Guangzhou, Nanhai and Shunde have taken the lead in initiating rural shareholding reforms, converting collective land and assets into shares and villagers into shareholders (Fu, 2003). These newly established shareholding cooperatives typically would retain 10–30% of their income for collective uses and deliver the rest of the profits to individual shareholders as dividends. With existing regimes of collective ownership intact, the shareholding system has been considered a successful, bottom-up institutional innovation that has better protected individual villagers’ rights to collective property and provided clarity in the case of expropriations (Jiang and Liu, 2004). This new form of collective not only enhanced the persistent survival of villages in the Pearl River Delta amidst waves of urbanisation but also created a new class of well-off villager rentiers who live on the dividends of this process (Li, 2004). Institutionalists have considered the clear delineation of rights and titling a precondition to protect property rights, particularly in the case of governing common-pool resources (Ostrom, 1990). What has been downplayed, however, is how the delineation of rights can be based on social exclusion. In order to maximise the property that each shareholder is entitled to, villagers tended to label certain disadvantaged groups as outsiders and minimise the number of eligible shareholders.

Before the shareholding reform, rural women had already suffered partial membership and disadvantaged access to resources. Constitutionally, all villagers – men and women alike – were entitled to the allocation of land. But in practice the unit of allocation was the household, not individuals, as suggested by the term ‘household responsibility system’. As changes in a woman’s marital status do not always come with a readjustment of land allocation, married women’s land rights were necessarily compromised (Hare et al., 2007; Judd, 2007). Strong patriarchal and patrilocal traditions have played a crucial role in the granting of village membership. Villagers frequently quote the saying that, ‘a married-out daughter is like thrown away water’ (jiachuqu de nüer, po chuqu de shui), thereby justifying the inevitability of the exclusion of out-married women. Yang and Xi’s research (2006) illustrates how this patrilocal custom has made married women feel that they are no longer members of their natal families. As a result, even if a woman’s contract land in the natal village is maintained, she would no longer have the right to obtain any benefit from it. The assumption remains that a woman will become a member of her husband’s village once she has left her natal home. This assumption, coming out of an agricultural tradition, however, is out of step with the reality of the Pearl River Delta. With increasing mobility in an industrialising society, it has become common for rural women to marry urbanites or migrants from other provinces – they constitute a significant proportion of the population in Guangdong – or others lacking a home village with which the newly married woman might affiliate. This ambiguous status thus has been used to ‘otherise’ out-married women (Chen, 2003). Although still retaining a hukou in their native village, this group of women find themselves labelled as married-out non-citizens and excluded from entitlement and rights to their villages’ membership, yet also lack a place to be married-in.

According to the survey conducted by Sun Yat-Sen University, in Nanhai where the shareholding system was initiated, of 152 surveyed out-married women, 115 (75.1%) were denied rights to their dividends and welfare in 1994, just as the shareholding reform which calls for exclusively defined eligibility of shareholders reached its peak (WGSC, 2008). As waijianü Yan comments: ‘things went wrong when the village started to hand out dividends to villagers’ (WGSC, 2008: 77). Many middle-aged waijianü activists recalled spending their teenage years working on the collective farms during the socialist era. After the adoption of the household responsibility system, they continued to work on their contract land and pay their dues for local taxes and fees. In those days, rural hukou were undesirable and married women were able to maintain land rights in their natal villages when the farmland was more a burden than an asset. Out-married women’s village membership increasingly became questioned when villages’ collective land was converted to non-agricultural uses and the shareholding reform put into place an exclusive definition of village citizenship. Waijianü Peng summarises this evolution of her village membership in these terms: ‘I had the shares to farm the land, but no shares to sell it’ (WGSC, 2008: 95).

It is important to note that the exclusion of out-married women has been instituted via nominal electoral consent at the village level in the context of a nascent rural grassroots democracy. The introduction of village-level elections since the 1990s has, to various degrees, challenged the monopoly on political power of the cadres in rural communities. However, because the Organic Law of Villager Committees (revised in 1998) does not clearly define the division of labour between Party branch and the newly elected villagers’ committees, power struggles over the financial control of collective assets have been intense (Guo and Bernstein, 2004; Oi and Rozelle, 2000). It is in this context that the shareholding system was introduced to reform existing governance structures in the monitoring and management of villages’ collective property (Po, 2011). The by-laws, board members and chairpersons of this new economic organisation were all established by elections among shareholders. Although the transparency of these elections remains a matter for debate, both the local state and shareholders care about the management of village collective assets, as long as the collective ownership of rural land remains unchanged. The shareholding reform has, on the one hand, facilitated the reconsolidation of state power in urbanising villages (Wong, 2016); yet at the same time grew out of villagers’ enthusiasm to better safeguard their land-related income. But it was also through this process that villagers voted to deny granting shares to out-married women, as a minority group in patrilineal villages. Worse still, as the local state repeatedly imposed the codification of shareholding agreements so as to curb village-level corruption, the villagers used these efforts to remake the by-laws and exclude the out-married women even more effectively. For example, waijianü Huidong in Wanggang village, Guangzhou, used to own 140 shares at the time her village adopted the shareholding system in 1994. But her shares were later reduced to 60 in 2005 when the village by-laws were revised; and then she further lost her right to vote in 2007 and was, as a result, excluded altogether from village affairs because of her marital status (WGSC, 2008: 74–75). Before the shareholding reforms, rural customs varied and women’s entitlements to economic, social and political rights were also uneven across villages. But the formalisation of village membership rights through the shareholding reforms, ironically, led to the outright disenfranchisement of out-married women.

Article 48 of China’s 1982 revision of its Constitution states: ‘Women in the People’s Republic of China enjoy equal rights with men in all spheres of life, political, economic, cultural and social, and family life.’ Furthermore, the Protection of Women Law, adopted in 1992 and revised in 2005, also prohibits social and economic discrimination against women. While out-married women have thus been granted legitimacy to fight for their rights, they must still negotiate tensions between state laws and village autonomy, on the one hand, and between these nominal legal protections and the daily practice of patriarchal customs, on the other. The following sections demonstrate how they engaged in activism and how governments and rural villages responded.

Waijianü activism and the villages’ counter-activism

Out-married women’s protests started in the 1990s in tandem with the progress of village shareholding reforms in the Pearl River Delta region. The activism mushroomed rapidly in the early 2000s and then subsided around 2009 after ‘stability maintenance’ (weiwen) was increasingly emphasised by China’s central administration. The term waijianü in practice refers to women who retain their hukou in the village after they are married to someone outside of their natal village. During the mobilisation process, divorced and widowed women, single mothers and their affected children have also been enlisted as participants, forming an activist phalanx of non-citizens claiming citizenship. Their activism mostly took the form of shangfang or lodging complaints with various state agencies. ² In general, waijianü’s acts of village citizenship are not photogenic. They only show up singly or in groups of two or three at village or township offices without banners or fanfare, month after month. I have seen village and township officials try to exit office buildings through the back door in order to avoid petitioning waijianü. Even though most waijianü protest peacefully and make no noise, local officials consider them a headache simply because they do not go away.

Very often the grievant has received no response, in which case they have continued to petition at even higher levels of the government: township, county, municipal, up to the provincial level and, finally, to the central government. In 1997, for the first time, six out-married women from Nanhai made it to Beijing (WGSC, 2008). They petitioned the National Women’s Federation, the National People’s Congress and various government agencies, hoping that institutions at the centre of government power could help solve their problem in Nanhai. Over two decades, similar kinds of activism spread across the Pearl River Delta region and tensions escalated. For example, on 15 April 2006, five out-married women from Dongqu’er Village knelt down to petition the Mayor of Zhongshan City on ‘Meet the Mayor Day’. As this action yielded no result, they headed for Beijing. But before they had started to take any action in the capital, officials from Zhongshan apprehended them and brought them back south. ³ They were detained for ten days for kneeling at the mayor’s office and ‘disturbing public order’. This group of waijianü later filed a lawsuit against the Police Department of Zhongshan city but, unsurprisingly, lost. ⁴ Although these actions yielded very little results for the petitioners personally, collectively they have made waijianü politically visible.

In the meantime, courts across Guangdong Province received hundreds of cases of out-married women suing their village collectives. These cases were mainly dismissed for the reason that disputes regarding the ownership and management of rural collective property are subject to the jurisdiction of administrative units, not the courts (Sun et al., 2004). The WGSC at Sun Yat-sen University filed a class action Administrative Reconsideration case against the Nanhai district government on behalf of 122 out-married women and their 144 children, yet none of these litigations yielded results (WGSC, 2008). Nonetheless, over time, these legal battles forced the courts and local governments to take this issue seriously. For example, the Guangzhou Intermediate People’s Court concluded in their research report that the court should accept out-married women’s rights disputes as civil cases (Sun et al., 2004). This claim would be eventually realised and help some out-married women win their cases years later. For example, with the assistance of lawyer Lu Ying, more than a dozen out-married women from the Baiyun District in Guangzhou, after decade-long litigation, regained their membership rights and some had received their dividends as of 2015 (Interview, Guangzhou, 20 July 2016).

In order to quell controversy, the district government of Nanhai District, where both shareholding reforms as well as the waijianü conflicts started, was forced to continue their ‘institutional innovations’ to cope with new troubles as they emerged, one after the other. From 1998 to 2008, Nanhai district government issued three ordinances directly in response to the waijianü disputes (Table 1). The evolution of policies shows how the local government was pushed by local activism as well as the changing central policies step by step to eventually recognise out-married women’s full village citizenship. The first waijianü document, Nanhai Ordinance No. 133 of 1998, stated that the allocation of shares and welfare would be subject to the decisions made by the shareholders’ congress. This policy, although designed to cater to the region’s strong village autonomy, legitimised the deprivation of minority interests through majority rule and only resulted in a further spike in out-married women’s grievances. In the second stage beginning in 2003, the Nanhai government employed a market mechanism to support differentiated citizenship within the villages under the banner of ‘fixing share rights’ (guhua guquan). The demographic change in the rural community has been considered the biggest obstacle in defining individuals’ property rights in relation to the collective economy. In order to fix the shareholding structure once and for all and prevent any future changes of membership, those who had not been allocated shares were given the option of purchasing them, aided by a lump sum matched by the government. Out-married women therefore were allowed to purchase a partial membership in order to get dividends in the long run; and the villages’ financial losses would be minimised via the government subsidies. Out-married women, however, did not consider this new rule fair. Long-term activist Deng contended: ‘I am not convinced. We are all villagers in the same village, why are we treated differently?’ She described this condition as ‘same village, different fates’ (tongcun butong ming)’ (WGSC, 2008: 73).

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Table 1.

Three stages of waijianü-related local ordinances issued by the Nanhai district government: 1998, 2003 and 2008.

Year	Document number	Title of document	Main policies
1998	No. 133	Notice on Safeguarding the Legal Rights and Interests of Waijianü in Rural Areas of Our City	Waijianü membership is subject to the decision of shareholders’ congress
2003	No. 30	Guiding Opinions on Deepening the Reform of Rural Stock Cooperative System in Nanhai District	Solidifying stock rights via allocation, purchases or monetary compensations
2008	No. 11	Opinions on Promoting Rural ‘Two Confirmations of Rights’ and Implementing the Legitimate Rights and Interests of Waijianü and Their Children in Rural Areas	Same membership, same rights

At the turn of the millennium, disputes over land expropriation had become a major source of rural unrest (Yu, 2004), forcing central government to initiate new policies to protect China’s farmland and rural communities. In response to out-married women’s persistent protest against their partial citizenship, especially their high-profile petitioning to Beijing, the State Council announced in 2001 a notice enjoining authorities to defend rural women’s land rights. ⁵ The revision of the Women’s Protection Law in 2005 lent further hope to out-married women. Back in Nanhai, the district government no longer sought to effect compromises between out-married women and village collectives. Instead, they began to urge the villages to allocate shares to out-married women. The policy shifted to its final stage in 2008 under the leadership of the district head Li Yiwei, who commented in an interview that waijianü are ‘a thorn in his heart’, one that had cost the district government considerably. ⁶ Nanhai Ordinance No. 11 was promulgated in 2008 to protect out-married women based on the principle of ‘same citizenship, same rights’ (tongji tongquan), granting out-married women’s entitlements to shares equal to those of male villagers. Determined to solve these conflicts, the district government also established a special-task team in May 2008, nick-named the ‘Out-married Office’ (waijiaban). ⁷ This agency was made up of 34 staff members, each responsible for a number of out-married women in a specific jurisdiction, in order to thoroughly solve all the disputes case by case. Specifically, they were dealing with 802 out-married women in 67 villages; many of these villages had been the most stubborn in terms of their refusal to give rights to out-married women (Interview, Nanhai Out-Married Office, 9 September 2009).

Few would have predicted that the state’s efforts to protect out-married women would engender fierce resistance from the village collectives. The local government carried out the new waijianü policy from the top down as a political task (zhengzhi renwu). Political pressure was imposed hierarchically from district to county to township to village governments. However, this top-down approach, which had previously proved successful in the implementation of the one-child policy, was unable to resolve the waijianü disputes this time. Unlike the upper-level officials who preside over them, village heads as well as the chairs of shareholding cooperatives are elected to their posts. Even though the district government placed a great deal of pressure on village heads to allocate shares to out-married women, the village heads themselves were pressured by their fellow villagers not to give in. When political measures failed to function as a result of villagers’ contrary pressures, the Nanhai district government sought judicial enforcement of these measures. In March 2009, 1403 villages received a ‘Written Decision of Administrative Handling’ (xingzheng chuli jueding shu) from the court, urging them to allocate shares to out-married women within 10 days. This sparked heated discussions in the villages. Danqiu Village of Dali Township, for example, held a villagers’ meeting on 15 March. Of 277 household representatives, ⁸ 265 advocated non-compliance with the court order. Nanhai Out-Married Office admitted that in the end, only some ten villages followed the court order. Upset by state intervention, a total of 381 villages across Nanhai even counterclaimed their township government to protest against this top-down judicial enforcement (Interview, Nanhai Out-Married Office, 9 September 2009).

The villages’ counter-activism shifted the tenor of local politics. Unlike out-married women, who constituted a minority interest, village activism was larger in scale, more visible and sometimes violent. In order to succeed in their political mission to maintain stability, local officials sought to moderate their implementation of protections for out-married women’s rights. Over the course of the research I conducted in Nanhai in September 2009, officials admitted that they had to slow down and even roll back enforcement on the eve of China’s 60th anniversary, a season in which there was zero tolerance for social unrest. Any public demonstration by villagers during the national holidays would cost local officials their political career. In other words, the politics of ‘stability maintenance’ or ‘weiwen’ has reshaped the battle to realise out-married women’s hard-earned rights.

By the end of 2012, the majority of out-married women in Nanhai had received shares under the principle of ‘same membership, same rights’. This was the fruit of a two-decade-long struggle. However, as shares held on paper do not guarantee the delivery of dividends, every distribution of dividends continues to be the scene of a battle between the village administration, high-level government offices and out-married women. With an increasing emphasis on social stability, many activists were severely suppressed. Others were co-opted – for example, an out-married woman in Zengcheng was hired by the town government as a temporary worker to handle out-married women’s disputes. Yet there were also activists who had become so tough that they dared to taunt the authorities. In July 2012, when I interviewed Hui, an out-married woman activist from Nanhai, at a market where she runs a small shoe business, her face lit up when she told me: ‘Let’s see if we can get some unpaid dividends on the eve of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China!’ ⁹ Hui had more than ten years’ experience as a petitioner. She regularly petitioned three to four times each week. In 2009, she started to get 3000 yuan of dividends on a yearly basis, but she did not receive the arrears she was owed from the village before 2009. As a small-business owner, Hui commented: ‘The money is meagre. I fight because I am so angry that I have difficulty breathing freely (qibushun). What I fight for is equal status, and I would continue to fight even if I lose money.’ She added: ‘I can’t stand how they look down on women, how they ignore our persistence.’ For years, Hui and her family members endured verbal attacks and everyday harassment from their fellow villagers. But, Hui contended, ‘now we have won the battle and villagers have started to respect out-married women’. Another long-term activist, Meihua, even taught herself to become an informal legal representative after years of struggle. ‘Many girls who we’ve played together with have received their dividends.’ She used ‘play’ (wan) as the verb to refer to their activism. Meihua not only fought for the out-married women in her own village, but she also represented some 40 out-married women in a neighbouring village in the legal battle for their membership rights. Eventually, Meihua simply took on activism as a career. When I interviewed her in 2012, she was handling 18 waijianü cases. She commented: ‘I have grown from knowing nothing about the law to being someone who can defend our rights using the law. It’s a real pleasure.’ Meihua had grown accustomed to arguing with conservative villagers. But she said, ‘villagers now treat me with special respect. Young people ask me about the progress of our battles whenever they see me.’ ¹⁰

To review this two-decade long movement, marginalised out-married women have enabled a convergence of persistent demands on the part of individuals and the power of collective action. Yet, the economic gains waijianü have received over two decades of petitions and lawsuits remain limited. ¹¹ Persistent activists tend to make claims beyond economic rights, arguing for the recognition of their community and the equalisation of their rights. To them, recognition is indeed ‘a vital human need’ (Taylor, 1994). Out-married women have suffered discrimination and exclusion in villages for a long time and the shareholding reform opens up a new battlefield for equal citizenship. Their claims prove that the ‘politics of redistribution’ and ‘politics of recognition’ are fundamentally and mutually irreducible (Fraser, 1997).

Conclusion

This paper argues that out-married women’s land activism is a citizenship movement that calls for rights and recognition, while promoting subject-making through the practice of resistance. Waijianü conflict stems from the actions of rural women who have lost their land rights in the process of urbanisation. These disputes remained unresolved in the Pearl River Delta area. Yet, rural women’s land rights have been increasingly placed at risk throughout the rest of the country in the process of land conversion. The China Women’s Social Status Survey shows that more and more women have become landless: 21% of rural women owned no land in 2010, a massive increase of 11.8% over the same survey of 2000. Among these landless women, 27.7% have lost their land because of changes in marital status, compared with only 3.7% for landless men (All-China’s Women’s Federation, 2011). Documenting differentiated citizenship in China, Wu likens migrant workers to ‘aliens in their own nation’ (Wu, 2010). The situation is even worse for out-married women as they have become aliens in their own community. They have to fight against formal and informal discrimination from both the state and society at the same time.

Chinese villages are restructuring themselves to meet the challenge of urbanisation. Villages are not simply absorbed by the cities; the structure of collective land ownership has bound their members together even more tightly and the village collectives continue to play a leading role in neighbourhood governance even in an urban setting (Tang, 2019). But the fact that out-married women are becoming non-citizens of their own villages implies that the rural patriarchal tradition has deprived them of the last protection that the socialist collectives offered to their members. The moral economy of Chinese villages has been eroded (Scott, 1977). As Zhao comments, out-married women have resumed the socialist rhetoric of gender equality and equal membership in defence of their rights (2007). However, it is important to note that these socialist ideals were never fully fulfilled even before economic reform, as demonstrated in the deprivation of women of their land rights across the country. The activism of out-married women has, in fact, opened up the black box of the socialist ‘collective’ and, consequently, created new battlefields for mobilisation, self-defence and local empowerment. Out-married women have become a new political actor, one that challenges land, social and property relations in the process of rural–urban transition. They are asserting their right to change the urbanisation process not only through issues of redistribution but also by demanding recognition of their membership in the community. Facing the reality of the gendered citizenship that excludes waijianü at the village level and marginalises rural populations in the allocation of urban resources, out-married women have become ‘activist citizens’ (Isin, 2009), using laws and state policies to fight against customary discrimination and defend their constitutional rights. These women, in engaging in ‘rightful resistance’ (O’Brien and Li, 2006), invoke their right to the city even on its peri-urban fringes and thus herald a new figure of citizenship in an urbanising China.