Abstract
Employing in-depth interview data from women of the Mao and post-Mao cohorts in urban China, this chapter examines women’s increasingly diverse work–family roles since the market reform. It mainly observes three types of women: stay-at-home moms, women who combine work with their family, and employment-/career-oriented women. Regardless of their work–family role arrangements, women of all three types are found to be subject to work–family conflict in the post-Mao period; this is indicated by longer working hours, excessive work demands, the rising costs of housing, education, health care and childcare, and fewer affordable social services for families.
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- 1.
This part of the book was written in the summer of 2015, ten years after my field work in Beijing, and while I could not find much information about the charging of entrance donation fees, I noticed that it was still common practice at least in some parts of the country. For example, according to an online report (Guo and Hu 2014), a prominent private elementary school in Guangzhou charged 80,000 yuan of donation per pupil for admission, 50,000 yuan more than in 2013. The tuition was 9000 yuan per semester, totaling nearly 200,000 yuan for a student to complete elementary education in six years. But this continuing practice is not limited to private schools. According to a list of donation criteria in the city of Guangzhou which I found online, the entrance donation fees charged by approximately 50 elementary schools for 2015 ran from 10,000 yuan to 190,000 yuan, and most of them were public elementary schools (source: http://jingyan.baidu.com/article/5d368d1e1349ae3f61c05762.html, first accessed on 20 July 2015).
- 2.
I did a follow-up interview with Xia in 2009.
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Zuo, J. (2016). Diverse Roles, A Common Dilemma. In: Work and Family in Urban China. Politics and Development of Contemporary China. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55465-9_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55465-9_7
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