This article analyses the representation of women in two 1933 short story collections by Shi Zhecun: An Evening of Spring Rain and Exemplary Conduct of Virtuous Women. It discusses how the New Woman image was a site of contestation in Republican China, and argues that Shi Zhecun’s short stories contain four basic stereotypes: the enigmatic woman, the estranged wife, the prostitute, and the inhibited woman. Using these narratives of women and how they were perceived by men, Shi Zhecun deconstructed the New Woman image by subverting the various ways modernity was projected onto women.

In the past few decades, China has witnessed the emergence of a psychological discourse of childhood.This new discourse portrays children as persons with unique emotional needs and seeks to redefine childhood as a time of play and relaxation rather than study or toil. Drawing on the results of ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai's schools and homes in 2004-2005, the present article describes the complex ways Shanghai's teachers and parents engage with this normalizing, developmental discourse. It argues that the rise of a psychological discourse of childhood signals a shift in Chinese modes of governing school and family life, and in current conceptualizations of the child-as-citizen and the child-as-subject in postsocialist, urban China.

The future of Chinese agriculture lies not with large mechanized farms but with small capital-labor dual intensifying family farms for livestock-poultry-fish raising and vegetable-fruit cultivation. Chinese food consumption patterns have been changing from the old 8:1:1 pattern of 8 parts grain, 1 part meat, and 1 part vegetables to a 4:3:3 pattern, with a corresponding transformation in agricultural structure. Small family-farming is better suited for the new-age agriculture, including organic farming, than large-scale mechanized farming, because of the intensive, incremental, and variegated hand labor involved, not readily open to economies of scale, though compatible with economies of scope. It is also better suited to the realities of severe population pressure on land. But it requires vertical integration from cultivation to processing to marketing, albeit without horizontal integration for farming. It is against such a background that co-ops have arisen spontaneously for integrating small farms with processing and marketing. The Chinese government, however, has been supporting aggressively capitalistic agribusinesses as the preferred mode of vertical integration. At present, Chinese agriculture is poised at a crossroads, with the future organizational mode for vertical integration as yet uncertain.

The early twentieth-century transformations of rural Chinese women’s work have received relatively little direct attention. By contrast, the former custom of footbinding continues to fascinate and is often used to illustrate or contest theories about Chinese women’s status. Arguing that for rural women at least, footbinding needs to be understood in relation to rural economic conditions, the authors focus on changes in textile production and in footbinding in two counties in Shaanxi province. Drawing on historical sources and their own interview data from rural women who grew up in this period, the authors find evidence that transformations in textile production undercut the custom of footbinding and contributed to its rapid demise.

This article deals with the formation of Taiwan’s homosexual cultural politics in the 1990s, the impact and implications of which are yet to be examined within the larger context of Taiwan’s cultural and political development and ethnic relationships. It is argued that the rise of this cultural politics is both a reflection and a source of a growing sense of identity crisis on the island. By examining the configurations of “queer” in various discursive domains, this interdisciplinary study seeks to delineate the cross-referencing ideological network of this cultural movement and its entanglement with the complexity of Taiwan’s nationalism. At the same time, to the extent that this movement tends to present itself as a radical politics from a privileged epistemological and cultural standpoint, this claimed radicalism is also scrutinized for its problematics and ironies.

Most social science theory and the currently powerful Chinese ideology of modernizationism assume that, with modern development, family-based peasant farm production will disappear, to be replaced by individuated industrial workers and the three-generation family by the nuclear family. The actual record of China’s economic history, however, shows the powerful persistence of the small family farm, as well as of the three-generation family down to this day, even as China’s GDP becomes the second largest in the world. China’s legal system, similarly, encompasses a vast informal sphere, in which familial principles operate more than individualist ones. And, in between the informal-familial and the formal-individualist, there is an enormous intermediate sphere in which the two tendencies are engaged in a continual tug of war. The economic behavior of the Chinese family unit reveals great contrasts with what is assumed by conventional economics. It has a different attitude toward labor from that of both the individual worker and the capitalist firm. It also has a different structural composition, and a different attitude toward investment, children’s education, and marriage. Proper attention to how Chinese modernity differs socially, economically, and legally from the modern West points to the need for a different kind of social science; it also lends social–economic substance to claims for a modern Chinese culture different from the modern West’s.

This article explores, through the lenses of text, practice, and life narrative, how Chinese peasant women as daughters manage patrilocality and carry out—or fail to carry out—filial piety toward their parents. Based on field research in a locale in southern China conducted since 1992, this article focuses on four women’s life histories and juxtaposes how these women articulated filial piety as daughter-brides in wedding lamentations and how they practiced it after marriage. This research illuminates how peasant women perceive daughterly filial piety as a complex entailing not only emotional attachment but also peace of mind, tolerance, and material support. For these women, concerns about filial piety emerge as a focus of their maneuvering and negotiating among the strategic possibilities in their lives—their social responsibilities, personal conditions, the broader social–political milieu, and above all, the male support that is often ignored but indispensable in these women’s stories.