Abstract
Jieyu Liu is a must-read feminist author in the field of gender and work in urban China. Her work explores the continuing position of women as second-class citizens in the workplace since the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. Considering the continuity and relevance of the issue of gender in the workplace in China, Gender, Sexuality and Power in Chinese Companies: Beauties as Work reads like a sequel to Liu’s book Gender and Work in Urban China: Women Workers of the Unlucky Generation (2007). The new book unveils the gendered and sexualized work experiences of urban female professionals born after the economic reform in China as the Only Child Generation influenced by the one-child policy of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Growing up in the market economy, young and well-educated ‘beauties’ have struggles similar to those of their mothers, the Cultural Revolution Generation, who were deprived of material resources and educational opportunities, a theme the author discussed in her previous book.
Liu defines her research subjects ‘white-collar beauties’ as neoliberal, cosmopolitan, desiring and enterprising. Liu attributes this to qualitatively better opportunities for university education and the change in public culture as well as the media’s representation of women, which was the result of market reform and one-child policy mentioned above. Liu worked in a state-owned foreign trade company in Jiangsu province as a ‘white-collar beauty’ for six months in 2008 with follow-up visits in 2010 and 2011, and interviewed saleswomen in other professional organizations in 2007, 2008 and 2011. Liu does not reveal the name of the city where she conducted her research to protect her informants’ anonymity, so her decision to avoid discussing how local urban culture shaped gender, sexuality and workplace is understandable. The book demonstrates that institutional discrimination of women continues in organizations through resexualization of white-collar beauties (as opposed to the ‘gender-neutral’ women workers of the work unit in the planned economy era), and the naturalization of a gender hierarchy that assumes women to be the weaker sex in the workplace. Women, however, use different strategies to manipulate the patriarchal system to their own ends, as Liu demonstrates with her empirical case studies.
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 examine the organizational apparatus of the overarching corporate-state structure that objectifies, commodifies and subordinates women. Chapter 4 unveils how biological determinism, introduced to China with modernization and imperialism, helped naturalize the discourse of women’s inferiority and sabotage women’s work performance. The author also introduces the three paths women resort to in response to the repressive apparatus and systemic gender discrimination: (1) creating alternative and flexible definitions of success; (2) prioritizing family over work; and (3) quitting work. In Chapter 5 (‘Sex in Work’), Liu argues that women are constantly subjected to objectification, if not sexual harassment, in organizations. She demonstrates that the ‘female’ value in the workplace is to boost the morale, ease the pressure and stimulate the atmosphere to enhance collective productivity in the company, mainly of male workers. Chapter 6 is structured around interviews with saleswomen in companies focused on the domestic market, which are characterized by a sexualized business culture. Saleswomen are required to perform desexualized femininity in a business setting that revolves around a culture of banquets, karaoke and saunas. Under the pressure of gossip and their intimate partners’ insecurity, ‘professional women walk a very fine line between respectability and disreputability’ (p. 104).
Besides disclosing the subtle naturalized mechanisms of patriarchal oppression, Liu also contributes to our knowledge about the agency of women in terms of gender and sexuality. She explains how the hierarchal but harmony-centred yin–yang and the Confucian familialism have shaped gender in China throughout its history. Within that framework, Liu contributes to our understanding of how female professionals utilize the organizational pursuit of harmony for their own ends. Despite being privileged in the company, male workers are expected to show consideration for women’s emotions and establish good relationships with their female colleagues in order to maintain a harmonious working atmosphere, which is linked with their work performance and evaluations. As for sexuality, Liu argues that women’s sexual respectability is deeply rooted in Confucian morality, but that the relatively flexible inner–outer differentiation still provides women with some forms of agency. Although both the public sphere and private sphere are usually considered sources of oppression of women in the Western context, Liu argues that women gained agency with continuation of the inner–outer differentiation after the historic breakdown of the work-unit system. Compared to the Mao-era work-unit system that guided and surveilled all aspects of workers’ lives, the outsourcing and commercialization of welfare – and especially housing – in the post-Mao era enabled women to reclaim the inner sphere. Although not free from normative regulations, they gained more bargaining power within their natal family as the only child. They also gained significantly more autonomy in choosing and divorcing their partners and could therefore manipulate their normative gender weakness in the outer sphere to gain power in the inner sphere by controlling family finances and winning leverage in divorce settlements. Moreover, linked to the Chinese concept of the relational self, the concept of inner–outer difference is also used by Liu to theorize about friendship and customer relations in the workplace.
Liu considers local theories from a position that interacts with other historical and geographical locations and provides innovative theoretical interventions and insights by proposing a local-centred theoretical framework, which is exemplified by her meshing of local concepts and paradigms such as yin–yang harmony and Confucianism with Euro-American-Australian theory. Her book is an important step toward a more local approach to the study of China and has the potential of being further developed by contextualizing China with other Confucian-infused Asian localities as well as by further analysing the genealogy of concepts that matter for Chinese studies, such as ‘Western’.
Jieyu Liu’s book is well-structured, jargon-free and covers a wide range of the collectively shared experiences of the Only Child Generation in the inner and outer space. Liu has a consistently clear writing style. She provides brief overviews of Anglophone scholarship on each theme and critically enriches them by using the Chinese praxis and philosophies. The book will be of great value to scholars, students and non-academics interested in how urban young female professionals navigate the sexualized workplace. It also touches on the transformation of the family and intimacy values for the Only Child Generation. Overall, the book offers valuable original insights that enrich the existing scholarship on gender and sexuality in the workplace in China and is certainly worth a read.