Fertility and Distorted Sex Ratios in a Rural Chinese County: Culture, State, and Policy

Fertility and Distorted Sex Ratios in a Rural Chinese County: Culture, State, and Policy

RACHEL MURPHY

SURVEYS OF SEX RATIOS among young children in East Asia, particularly in rural communities, reveal a deficit of females, often referred to as "missing girls" (e.g., Croll2000; Das Gupta and Li 2000). As Susan Greenhalgh and Jiali Li point out, while such statistics document specific demographic situations, they are only the end of a story that involves longer-term and complex interactions between culture and political economy ( 1995: 604). In this article I build on a rich body of scholarship about gender and reproduction in the Chinese countryside' (Anagnost 1997; Bossen 2002; Croll2000; Davin 1990; Gates 1993; Greenhalgh 1995, 1996; Johnson 1996; Yan 2002, 2003) to uncover some of that story for one county in the southeastern province of Jiangxi. The discussion explores how gender bias in state population policies interacts with local culture. In particular I show that population policies introduce new sources of inequality into local culture while, conversely, gender inequalities embedded in culture influence population policy and practice, generating a two-way process that continually reinforces distortions in sex ratios.2

In demographic transition theory and modernization t h e ~ r y , ~ culture has often been understood to be the "essence" of people who share a language, religion, ethnicity, territory, way of life, or some combination of these (Yuval-Davis 1997: 39-46). Cultures are classified as either traditional or modern, and each classification is associated with a particular demographic regime (for a critique, see Lee and Wang 1999).4 In traditional societies people are said to lack the rationality needed for choosing small families, and they are believed to manipulate the sex of their surviving offspring in response to the pressures of traditional patriarchy. Modernization is seen as

P O P U L A T I O N A N D D E V E L O P M E N T R E V I E W 29(4):595-626 ( D E C E M B E R 2003) 5 9 5

596 F E R T I L I T Y A N D D I S T O R T E D S E X R A T I O S I N R U R A L C H I N A

a means to remedy this gender bias and pronatalism. It is believed that by expanding women’s employment opportunities and by changing societal values, modernization increases the status of females, thereby reducing the preference for sons. Modernization is also credited with causing fertility decline because higher-status women are better able to resist demands of husbands and in-laws to bear many children and are better able to avoid the higher material and opportunity costs of having a large family.

This kind of static, reified, and deterministic view of culture has long been the subject of critique by anthropologists (e.g., Brightman 1995; Gupta and Ferguson 200 1). In particular, anthropological demographers complain that the perception of culture as an isolated and static variable renders it impotent in explaining complex processes of change-for example, why de- creasing family size in modernizing East Asia has been accompanied by increasing numbers of missing girls (Croll2000: 3) . Even though a static view of culture is undesirable both because of the paucity of its explanatory power and because this view of culture informs coercive policy interventions, the concept remains valuable in elucidating how population policies are interpreted and operationalized by those who bear their brunt.

Scholars who subscribe to the continuing relevance of culture for explaining behavioral change point out that the concept accommodates contestation, fragmentation, contradiction, and change as much as coherence and the communication of shared meanings within social relationships (Brightman 1995; Ortner 1999). So one finds diversity, struggle, and agency as individuals give meaning to their actions; and at the same time, one finds commonality and context because people inevitably draw on, contribute to, and change the pool of meanings and symbolic representations that exist within the cultural system. This process of diversification and change is not limited to bounded communities, but involves the trans-local circulation of cultural meanings across all forms of boundaries-administrative, geographical, historical, and hierarchical. Inevitably, though, it is within the context of people’s lives, relationships, and spaces that individuals rework cultural values, norms, rules, symbols, and resources from other spheres and spaces and from the trans-local circulation of meanings (Gupta 1995; Gupta and Ferguson 200 1; Schwartz 1978).

Scholars who argue for retaining the signifier of culture deal with the criticism that it is an objectified entity-”out there” to be found, observed, and described or else treated as an additional variable-by pointing out that culture is most analytically useful when situated “within and, as it were, beneath larger analyses of social and political events and processes” (Ortner 1999: 9) . To this, we can add also economic events and processes. Anthro- pological demographers, in particular, emphasize that culture is a set of values and norms that constitute economic and political spheres (Greenhalgh 1988). So, instead of simply supplementing these spheres, culture forms

R A C H E L M U R P H Y 597

part of the composite institutional setting of societies, or "whole demogra- phies" (Greenhalgh 1995: 12).

Increasingly, demographers influenced by anthropologists note the analytical value of culture. The work of institutional demographers considers how, in reproduction, as in other aspects of life, culture interacts with economic factors to generate a host of incentives that guide action (Johansson 1991; McNicoll 1998). Incentives have been observed to affect desired family size and composition as well as how people manipulate the proximate determinants of fertility, such as age at first marriage, ideas about respect- able unions, and culturally permissible techniques for regulating family size (sexual abstinence, contraception, abortion, and infanticide). Institutions such as the state, schools, hospitals, businesses, and the media should be seen as affecting the incentives (rewards and penalties) for different behaviors and as generating values that then contribute to social consensus on appropriate behaviors (Johansson 199 1; McNicoll 1998). This intertwining of economics and culture in generating reproductive incentives can be seen, for example, in inheritance customs, the role of children in providing security for aged parents, the gendered division of labor, laws and attitudes about child labor and schooling, and ideas about social status (Hammel 1990: 474; Jeffery and Jeffery 1997: 79; also Bourdieu 1990: 22) .5

Some institutional demographers imply that culture determines pref - erences and actions through a sort of "mental programming" (Johansson 1991)? While it is true that people's decisions are informed by social setting and cultural norms, this approach does not give sufficient weight to the role of agency. I therefore draw on and adapt the insights of a range of social and cultural theorists (Bourdieu 1977; Gupta and Ferguson 2001; Strauss and Quinn 1997) who overcome the theoretical binaries of determinism and agency, cohesion and contestation, territoriality and unboundedness, by focusing on the mutually constitutive relationship between context and meaning-making practices. Pertinent to this article is the work of anthropological demographers who examine how individuals use cultural norms and resources strategically in daily life, with special attention to those aspects of daily life associated with reproduction (Bledsoe and Hill 1998; Greenhalgh and Li 1995: 610; Hammel 1990: 456-457). Drawing on these insights, I interpret culture as a set of values and norms that constrain and permit action by establishing ideological parameters, offering reference points for rational decisionmaking, and providing cultural resources-values, norms, be- liefs, and their symbolic representations-that are used strategically by individual and institutional actors in everyday meaning-making activities.

Gender is an important component of culture. It refers to the way in which biological differences between the sexes are used in classifying, valo- rizing, and making meaningful the social relationships between human be- ings. This is not to claim that there is a clear divide between nature and


culture (Carsten 2000), or that there is a direct equivalence between “the natural world and the construction of a single set of meanings” (Jacka 1997: 18; see also Yuval-Davis 1997: 6). It does, however, mean that gender is ideological because the respective roles and attributes of men and women are seen to be the inevitable products of nature, rather than the contingent and unstable outcome of unequal power relations. Feminist scholarship therefore seeks to understand what social processes and relations of power, meanings, and values are acquired in specific societies at specific times and how these change (Scott 1988: 35, cited in Jacka). Attention to ways in which possibilities for human action are constrained by ideological parameters (Kabeer 2000; Sen 1991), including the many norms pertaining to gender that structure daily life in a given society (Greenhalgh 1995: 24- 25), offers a useful line of inquiry. Because ideological parameters are not fixed, cultural norms are contested and adapted, shaping and shaped by changes in political and economic systems.

Understanding the interaction between culture, gender, and policy is intimately tied up with the state, and state institutions and actors play a central role in policy formulation and implementation. Following Joel Migdal, the state is ”a field of power marked by the use and threat of violence and shaped by (1) the image of a coherent, controlling organization in a territory, which is a representation of the people surrounded by that territory and (2) the actual practice of its multiple parts” (2001: 15-16). Here, the image of the state corresponds to what Akhil Gupta refers to as the “trans-local discourse of the state” that is represented in public culture (Gupta 1995; also see Gupta cited in Midgal 2001: 20). This image gives coherence to a concept, “the state,” that exists not only in but also beyond the local setting. In the case of rural China, this trans-local discourse of the state has commonly been articulated through development slogans, campaigns, media education, and state pronouncements on behalf of the population-for example, “Birth planning is our nation’s foundation policy.” The other aspect of the definition of the state, the actual practices of its multiple parts, permits analysis of fragmentation, conflict, negotiation, and change because it refers to people and institutions disaggregated throughout society and space. In rural China, villagers’ interactions and negotiations with a whole array of foot soldiers-village cadres, township cadres, family planning workers, and educators-give texture to their experience of the state. Hence, villagers and local state agents engage and negotiate with each other, reproducing and modifying trans-local values, norms, meanings, languages, and symbols within the social, economic, and political context of the im- mediate locality. Through these processes, state and society constitute each other, blurring the boundaries between them.

This article examines four key ways in which, in one rural county in China, population policy and culture interact to produce gendered outcomes.


First, upper-level state institutions create official classifications to make sense of local family forms and reproductive practices, but these classifications become incorporated into local reproductive culture when they are used by cadres implementing policies at the grassroots level. For example, there have always been households with two or more daughters and no sons, but by classifying these as “daughter-only households” and targeting them with particular interventions, such as preventing them from trying for a son, state institutions produce a new social entity commonly associated with depriva- tion. Second, male bias is embedded in all government institutions in the county, including those responsible for birth planning work, and this con- tributes to the gendering of population policy and implementation. This bias has been exemplified locally by the recent replacement of women birth planning cadres with men in some rural townships. Third, certain cultural norms about gender are incorporated into official birth planning and education campaigns. For example, role models for good mothers and good wives pos- sess many of the virtues of traditional women such as caring for others, being nurturing, and being self -sacrificing, and this reinforces gender inequalities. Finally, official population policy and gender norms are subverted, reworked, or even ignored when interpreted by village cadres and other rural people.

By exploring these four areas I seek to understand how gender norms are constructed and institutionalized within and between state institutions and the family, and how they influence population policy implementation and local reproductive practices. Before turning to this discussion I describe the rural county in which my study took place.

Field site and empirical data

This analysis is based on qualitative material that I collected between Sep- tember and December 2000 in Rivercounty, a predominantly agricultural county located in Jian prefecture, Jiangxi province, southeast China.7 I conducted open-ended, semi-structured interviews with men and women from 119 households. I carried out the interviews in villagers’ homes, often accompanied by a village cadre and in the presence of other family members. The questions covered reproductive history, desired family size and composition, assessments of actual family formation, and views about the roles and characteristics of sons and daughters.

The households were selected through a two-stage process. First, six villages were identified by county cadres. The cadres took into account my request to interview households from both poorer and richer villages, and also considered practicalities such as ease of access by vehicle. Next a village small group (zu) was selected at random from each village, and households within that group that had borne their children after the introduction


of the one-child policy in 1979 were interviewed. These village groups were broadly homogeneous. They had relatively large land allocations of more than 2.5 mu per capita,8 which enabled them to rely on agriculture. Their official annual incomes ranged between 2,100 and 2,600 yuan per ~ a p i t a . ~

Additionally, tape recordings were made of focus-group discussions and the life histories of 30 of the more outgoing and talkative married women from the interview households. I also conducted taped interviews with township and village cadres about their work in implementing population policy and their own reproductive histories. Further sources of information include observation notes I wrote in the course of my research, official documents, and local newspapers.

To explore the impact of culture on gender relations and fertility outcomes in Rivercounty, I analyze discourse, using an approach which suggests that cultural values and norms operate within a social setting on two levels of consciousness. The first are the norms that actors articulate at the discursive level as reasons for their actions. These are the norms that individuals select from to formulate their decisions, rationalize their actions, and cover up their inner conflicts (Bledsoe and Hill 1998; Giddens 1979, 1984). Second are the hidden values and norms embedded in the routine practices of everyday life. They appear natural and commonsensical-human actors internalize them and use them without being aware of them (Giddens 1979: 57).

Some discourse analysts uncover norms by examining narratives, that is, the ways in which people speak about their identities, histories, everyday lives, and aspirations (Constable 1999; Gutting 1996; Somers 1994). Many scholars also pay attention to the communicative activities of everyday life such as decorating the house with fertility posters and giving gifts at lifecycle celebrations as well as to the ways that individuals use official symbols from broadcasts, documents, and posters for their own purposes (Bourdieu 1977; de Certeau 1988: xiii).l0 Focusing on these discourses of daily life reveals how people use cultural resources strategically and how norms act as reference points for action and making sense of everyday experiences, often at an unconscious level.

Rivercounty is typical of counties in China's interior rice belt prov- inces in that approximately 80 percent of the population is officially classified as rural. Living standards as indicated by housing quality and by per capita income are also on a par with what I observed in several other Jiangxi counties. But Rivercounty's population density is about half that of most other Jiangxi counties, and per capita allocations of arable land are much higher than provincial and national averages. On account of the extra land, the economic activities of rural households in Rivercounty are less diversified than those of other counties: elsewhere in Jian prefecture over 50 percent of households combine agricultural income with local off-farm income

R A C H E L M U R P H Y 60 1

or migrant remittances, whereas this figure is just over 25 percent for River- county.” The main agricultural activities include double rice cropping, tobacco cultivation, and pig farming. The division of labor in the county follows a pattern common to many other Han Chinese areas. Men plow, take responsibility for cash crops (tobacco and vegetables), and participate in off- farm activities. Women are responsible for domestic chores, subsistence veg- etable cultivation, raising pigs, and various aspects of rice farming and tobacco production. The large land allocations combined with the labor intensiveness of plowing by oxen and the centrality of farming to the local economy all reinforce the perception that male labor is essential. At the same time, men’s dominant role in managing cash crop production and trade lends support to ideas that they are more skilled and able than women. By contrast, the work of women is seen as light, less skilled, and less productive (see Jacka 1997).

Previous surveys of rural China have found that most parents want two children with at least one son (Greenhalgh 1993; Greenhalgh and Li 1995). My survey suggests this is also the case in Rivercounty: respondents in 85 percent of the households interviewed voiced this ideal. Sons are Val- ued because they provide labor, economic security, and emotional care for their parents in old age, continue the male line, and perform ancestral wor- ship rites whereas, following marriage, daughters leave to become members of their in-laws’ families.

Another reason for valuing sons is that they bestow strength and pres- tige on their families and descent groups, thereby helping them to compete for economic and political resources. Male continuity of residence and patrilineal descent were certainly factors shaping “socialist patriarchy” during the Mao era. Production teams were organized along kinship lines, and descent groups influenced the leadership composition of brigades and communes (Johnson 1985; Stacey 1983). For the most part, however, descent groups could not openly exercise power or organize activities. Following the disband- ing of the communes in the early 1980s, economic and political reforms cre- ated opportunities for descent groups to exert their influence. Patrilineal norms were particularly evident in south China (Jiangxi, Guangxi, Guangdong, etc.), where these groups actively and openly repaired ancestral shrines and compiled genealogies recording the historical male membership of the group. In the last 10 to 15 years, descent groups have built ancestral halls in over 50 of 100 Rivercounty villages, and have compiled genealogies in over 65 of them.12 These cultural practices affirm the continuity of male residence, the ongoing agnatic ties, and the intense patriarchy that permeates the formal and informal decisionmaking structures of rural life (Judd 1994).

Despite the cultural and economic need of parents for a son, many mothers in rural Rivercounty also want a daughter because they act as caretakers and help with housework. Rivercounty mothers expressed their ideal

602 FERTILITY A N D D I S T O R T E D SEX R A T I O S I N R U R A L C H I N A

of also having a daughter through the use of such phrases as "one son and one daughter is a flower" or "one wants sun and rain" (tape 20, 22 October 2000).13 But these sentiments do not represent gender equality: a daughter is desired whereas a son is essential.

Table 1 shows the imbalance in sex ratios among young children in Rivercounty. These ratios are higher than those for China as a whole but are comparable to the figure for Jiangxi province. In both Jiangxi province and China, this imbalance has increased, though comparable data for Rivercounty are not available. The cause of the asymmetry has been the topic of much scholarly debate. During the 1980s scholars stressed female infanticide alongside the underreporting of girls (e.g., Croll 1987). How- ever, by the late 1990s, particularly in the academic discussions that followed the 1990 and 1994 censuses, a consensus emerged that abandonment and underreporting of girls and sex-selective induced abortion were the main explanations (Chu 2001; Croll 2000; Greenhalgh and Li 1995; Johnson 1996). Certainly getting rid of unwanted children, girls in particular, has been a culturally accepted means of regulating family composition, and before China's 1949 revolution female infanticide was a culturally sanctioned practice.

I am inclined, however, to concur with the growing consensus that infanticide has largely been replaced by sex-selective abortion (Chu 2001; Lee and Wang 1999: 6 10). In Rivercounty the technology for detecting the sex of a fetus had become available in most townships by 1990. My interviews with village women suggest that sympathy or money often induces disclosure by township clinicians, despite the illegality of such disclosure. Hearsay in Rivercounty also points to instances of baby girls being abandoned in baskets at night, with firecrackers set off to ensure that they are found.

The need of rural parents to have at least one son has resulted in a major shift in population policy throughout the Chinese countryside-a shift that Greenhalgh ( 1993) describes as the "peasantization of population policy." Drawing on extensive fieldwork in north China, Greenhalgh explains how

TABLE 1 according to age

Sex ratio (males per 100 females) of the population

Rivercounty Jiangxi province China Age (1999)14 (1999)15 (2000)'6

0-4 127.4 131.3 120.2 5-9 125.5 121.3 115.4 10-14 NA 108.8 108.8

Total population 106.3 106.4 106.3

N A = not available. SOURCES: See endnores 14-16.

R A C H E L MURPHY 604

parents' desire to have at least one son conflicted with the restrictions im- posed by the one-child policy. She shows how resulting tensions between cadres and villagers led, in 1984, to the informal practice of allowing farmers to keep trying for a son and then, in 1988, to the formal policy of "if the first is a girl, you can wait for four years then try again for a boy" (Greenhalgh 1993). Greenhalgh points out that the policy concession of permitting two children does not enable all parents to produce a son. In Rivercounty, as has been documented in other counties, the perception that women with two or more daughters and no sons are likely to continue having children has made them particular targets for birth planning campaigns. I turn to this topic next, in the first of the four main analytical points outlined above.

Gendering population policy and practice: Daughter-only households

Families with only daughters have always existed, but in Rivercounty (as elsewhere in China) it is through official actions such as classifying, label- ing, describing, counting, and regulating that the daughter-only household has been produced as a distinct social ~ateg0ry.l~ While "daughter-only household" (chunnuhu) refers to all households without sons, when the term is used in birth planning campaigns it usually denotes a subcategory of daughter-only households-"two-daughter households" (er nu hu) and households with even more than two daughters. Unless stated otherwise, I use "daughter-only household" to refer to households with two or more daughters. The category of "daughter-only household" derives its meaning not only from official discourse and intervention but also from the inter- pretations that Rivercounty villagers bring to this category and the concerns that they voice following its introduction to the local level.

Yet because of regional differentiation in how the category of "daughter-only" is mobilized in policy implementation, and because of regional differences in the cultural institutions that interact with national population policies, the connotations of the label daughter-only household are not necessarily the same in Rivercounty as in other areas. For instance, in a north Chinese village studied by Yan Yunxiang (2002), the category carries no stigma: it has not been singled out for special attention in birth planning crackdowns, and son preference is less deeply entrenched in local culture owing to strong affinal ties, weak patrilineal kinship organization, and a diversified and commercializing economy.

In Rivercounty the label daughter-only household has been activated in an effort to counter son preference as a motive for higher-order births, and ironically it reinforces the local gender inequalities that underpin the perceived need for a son. Policy implementation measures and local culture combine to make daughter-only households widely associated with "hard-

604 F E R T I L I T Y A N D D I S T O R T E D S E X R A T I O S IN R U R A L C H I N A

ship." This association is threefold. First, daughter-only households are seen to suffer because they lack the expected labor and care by a son, and therefore lack a source of security in old age. Second, they have been subject to harsh birth planning campaigns. Finally, they are seen as intrinsically weak since otherwise they would have been able to produce a son. Given that sterilization is mandatory for all couples who have two children and that around 10 percent of Rivercounty couples who were sterilized between 1990 and 2000 had only daughters, a substantial proportion of parents in the county fall into this hardship category.

The association in Rivercounty between hardship and the official daughter-only category was evident during the early 1980s when, as in many other parts of China, local cadres permitted those households with only one daughter that faced genuine hardship to have a second child. The hope was that small- scale appeasement would encourage villagers to be more accepting of fertility control: "hardship household served as a euphemistic code for a sonless household (Davin 1990; Greenhalgh 1993). By the late 1980s the policy was altered to explicitly allow all households with one daughter to try again for a son. However, this policy has never been extended to sonless households with two daughters (Greenhalgh 1993). Rather, local cadres have been in- structed to be firm when conducting birth planning work with households that have two or more daughters, while at the same time providing "care" to alleviate their hardship. Here, care involves offering comforting words, ensuring that the health of the woman is looked after, promising pensions, and providing technical agricultural help so that these households can prosper and the parents can enjoy economic security in old age. Nevertheless, this care comes at a price: mothers must accept state control over their bodies and their fertility. It is instructive here to refer to Cecelia Milwertz's finding that a "care as control" relationship is used in official birth planning work in urban China as well: the cadres provide care (zhaogu, guamin, guanhuai) and in re- turn the women accept state control over their fertility and sacrifice their personal desire to have another child for the collective good ( 1997: 1 1 1-120).

Much birth planning work in rural China has been carried out through seasonal campaigns, for example IUD inspections in spring, collecting fines in summer, third-trimester terminations for third births in autumn (Greenhalgh 1994; Zhang 1999). Increasingly, such campaigns have targeted daughter- only households, thereby reinforcing the perception that these households are particularly prone to hardship and misfortune. My interviews with Rivercounty women and birth planning cadres suggest that households with out-of -quota births in general and daughter-only households in particular were targeted for sterilization between 1990 and 1992. This contention is supported by sterilization data from three rural townships in Rivercounty (see Figures 1 and 2).18 The crackdown was followed by a period of relaxation, coinciding with the issuing of the nine "do-nots" forbidding cadres from work style abuses such as confiscating property, using violence, or swearing.

FIGURE 1 Total number of sterilizations in three townships in Jiangxi province, 1990-2000

600

500

400

b $ 300 2

D

i \ \

- \ \ \ \ \

- \ \ \ \ \ \ \

-

\ \ \ Township2

200

100

0

- . . .' ., . . . . . . _ ,

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

SOURCE: See endnote 18.

FIGURE 2 Annual percent of sterilized households in three townships of Jiangxi province that are daughter-only housholds, 1990-2000

45

40

35

30

2 25

:: PI

2 20

15

10

5

0 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

NOTE: Most of these households have two daughters, while some have more than two. SOURCE: See endnote 18.

606 F E R T I L I T Y A N D DISTORTED S E X RATIOS I N R U R A L C H I N A

Although in the late 1990s some parts of China introduced so-called client-centered approaches to family planning whereby women have been given information and resources to regulate their own fertility (Wang and Jing 2000; Winckler 2002; Zhou 1999),19 there was no evidence of this in Rivercounty. Rather, during the late 1990s, quotas and crackdowns continued to be the main means for conducting birth planning work. And since 1999 there has been renewed focus on daughter-only households, subject- ing them to campaigns and at the same time making efforts to address their hardship. In 1999 the administrative level immediately above Rivercounty, the prefecture government, issued a document setting the target of sterilizing 1 in 5,000 households, with the final quota to be determined according to the population structure of each county and its constituent townships (interview with township deputy head, 18 November 2000). The document also called for attention to sterilizing daughter-only households. At the same time, the prefecture stipulated that any daughter-only household in which a parent (usually the woman) volunteered for sterilization would be eligible for social security payments of 800 yuan per year.

The importance of alleviating the hardship of daughter-only households as part of carrying out birth planning campaigns is illustrated by the following extract from a local newspaper:

On 14 September, 15 out of a total of 17 daughter-only households in the township have already been sterilized, placing the township in first place in the county for sterilizing daughter-only households. The township has em- ployed four concrete measures. (1) Improving the cadre responsibility system, with . . . everyone sharing the burden of responsibility.. . . (2) Strengthening the system of reward and punishment. Every time one or more daughter- only households are sterilized, there is a reward for the cadres and this is linked with salary bonuses. ( 3 ) Strengthening the sense of responsibility.. . organizing people.. . to find and target daughter-only households escaping to other places, and supervising the implementation of sterilization procedures. (4) For daughter-only households sterilized within 20 days of the local campaign, organizing the township cadres to visit the household to express care and warmth and to help them resolve real problems in production and in life. The township has set aside 60,000 yuan to establish old-age pensions for daughter-only househoIds, thereby eliminating their worries. (Jinggangshan Baa 2000: 2 )

The association between daughter-only households, hardship, and the integral role of care in birth planning work is also evident in the words of a village birth planning cadre:

They do not receive pensions and they must pay school fees, but the fees are slightly cheaper. We are caring toward daughter-only households. The township cadres visit daughter-only households and hardship households to express care and to give a little money. Secretary Zhou gives 400 to 500 yuan


for each child. Each township cadre is linked up with a couple of daughter- only households and hardship households. They help to alleviate their production and life problems, and help them prosper. This is called family planning support. (tape 8, 3 November 2000)

But despite official recognition that alleviating the hardship of daughter-only households is central to birth planning work, money is often in- sufficient to provide the necessary care. For example, fiscal shortages in Rivercounty have meant that daughter-only households with a parent sterilized received only 400 yuan in 1999, half the amount stipulated by the prefecture, while those sterilized in other years, including 2000, received nothing (interview, 18 November 2000).

To be fair, providing care in the form of such subsidies is a short-term measure for dealing with the popular and perceptible association between a lack of sons and impending economic hardship, especially in old age, and such subsidies exist alongside educational and other strategies aimed at encouraging equality between sons and daughters. Even so, parental percep- tions of ideal family composition have continued to be shaped by the discursive construction of the daughter-only household as a hardship category that needs "care"-care that seldom arrives in a tangible form.

The following extract from an official journal for cadres describes the hardships of daughter-only households in a village in rural Jiangxi as well as local government failings to provide care:

The writer visited five daughter-only households.. . . For various reasons, this type of family often meets with hardships and even ends up in very difficult situations. Yet it is difficult for them to receive help from the party organization or government departments. For example, in my village the wife of He Dongyue suffered from mental illness after being sterilized and so all the work in the fields and in the home fell on the husband's shoulders. Their life was poverty-stricken. And yet, the village party and the village committee did not care and nobody from the county or township birth planning departments came to ask after them. The government and birth planning departments should not only care about sending people to the hospital to be sterilized. They should visit those rural households, especially daughter-only households, who respond to the birth planning call of the government, and when they discover problems they should immediately help to solve them.. . . When doing birth planning work, smoke one less pack of good cigarettes, drink one less bottle of good liquor, and use the money saved to help daughter-only households develop, expand their crop cultivation and animal hus- bandry, and prosper. Only in this way can the old-age security concerns of daughter-only households be alleviated. (He Rusheng 2000: 56-57)

Clearly, there is a widespread association in much of rural Jiangxi between having only daughters and suffering hardship. But the causality of

608 F E R T I L I T Y A N D D I S T V R T E D S E X R A T I V S I N R U R A L C H I N A

the relationship, if any, is less clear. In the quotations presented above, the suggestion is implicit that health problems and vulnerability are caused by households‘ not having a son. Yet there is also a perspective, common among villagers, that households lack sons because biological misfortune has combined with their poverty and “weakness.” Rather than hardship being caused by the absence of a son, anecdotal evidence from Rivercounty and the research of other scholars (e.g., Zhang 1999: 203) indicate that “stronger” households (those in higher socioeconomic positions or with many male members in their descent group) are better able to pursue tactics for producing a son. Such tactics include hiding out while campaigns are in operation, paying bribes in order to be allowed to try again, or brazenly resisting birth planning cadres. The leaders of small single-surname hamlets (that is, small descent-group settlements) in administrative villages dominated by cadres from hamlets with a larger surname group told me that birth planning campaigns targeted smaller hamlets with particular fierceness. Likewise, members of households with fewer men in their extended families told me that they felt less able to resist birth planning cadres. Thus, villagers see being without a son as caused by various kinds of weakness: lack of cleverness, lack of resolve, lack of fighting spirit, lack of money, lack of male family members. Consider the following remarks from a village Party secretary:

It is very difficult for a person to actually be sterilized after the birth of two girls. It is only possible with simple people. For example, one household in our hamlet in this administrative village was done: and four out of the five brothers were simple. Otherwise if you want to take the woman out to be sterilized, her family would block your car and fight with you to the death, but some people dare not stir up a fuss. The birth planning campaign was carried out for four days in our hamlet and several simple people were done, but only 2,000 yuan was collected in fines, not even enough for the cost of our food. A few days ago our team went to another hamlet and we collected 5,000 yuan in fines. This was because that is a tiny hamlet, not even a third the size of our hamlet. So overall, after the start of the household responsibility system, one point is that the country cousins want sons at home to farm, and another point is that people without sons are bullied. (tape 2 1, November 2000)

Living in an environment where the official terminology of the daughter-only household is adopted by villagers and associated with bad fortune and hardship inevitably affects how such parents see themselves and their situation. It is helpful at this point to refer to the argument made in different ways by Jenkins ( 1996) and Ong ( 1996), namely that identities are produced through an ongoing interaction between external objectifying labels (which Ong calls “being made”) and internal subjective responses (which she calls “self-making”). This process can be seen in the words of a woman with three daughters who was sterilized in the 1990 crackdown:


We are a daughter-only household.. .. My husband and I both have problems with our health. In our countryside to be without a son means there is no one to care for you and you face hardship when you are older. Girls marry out. In this village I am the only one who has not had a son. (tape 2, 6 No- vember 2000)

Thus, in Rivercounty the association between being a daughter-only household and hardship is strong. This association, which has arisen through the interplay between policy implementation and local gender norms, ultimately reinforces parental resolve to have a son.*O

Gendered institutions: Hiring able male family planning cadres

Feminist scholars have long asserted that male bias is embedded in the structures and practices of all institutions (Elson 1995; Pearson 1992). They emphasize that the cultural division of labor into the private, female domain and the public, male domain systematically excludes women from the concerns of public institutions, limiting their participation to secondary and nurturing roles (Goetz 1997). Such bias is evident in rural China, where women cadres are nearly always assigned the posts of "women's director" or "birth planning special cadre"-positions that are paid piecemeal from village funds. In contrast, the important posts of "Party secretary," "village head," and "accountant," which have salaries and pensions provided by the township government, are nearly always given to men (Howell 2001). This division of work reinforces two cultural norms, namely that men and women cannot substitute for each other and that women are less suited to highly responsible posts, thereby underscoring the belief that women, and by extension daughters, are less valuable.

In Rivercounty, women birth planning cadres see being compassion- ate as an important part of their job. Their claim is supported by one cadre's statement that female family planning cadres provide home visits to women recovering from sterilization. She explained her work to me as follows:

In 1979 when birth planning work just started, I had to support sterilized women and help them look after their children. I had to bring eggs, sugar, and nour- ishing tonics for them. I had to comfort them. I had to do this for about a month after sterilization.. . . I still go to care and comfort now.. . . [If some women do not want to be sterilized, I tell them]: "Haven't I been sterilized for many years? And am I not in good health?" If the first child is a daughter, then a woman may use contraception so that she can space her second pregnancy for four years and three months. During this time, if she does not want to use an IUD she can take the pill. All she has to do is speak to me about it and I help her go to the birth planning office to collect the tablets. (tape 8, 3 November 2000)

610 F E R T I L I T Y A N D D I S T O R T E D S E X R A T I O S IN R U R A L C H I N A

This woman is not unusual in having devoted more than 20 years of her life to supporting the birth planning policies of the state: persuading villagers of the benefits of small families, comforting them after sterilization, and being available to discuss problems related to contraception.

However, in assessing the effectiveness of policy implementation, public institutions often fail to recognize the importance of feminine attributes, preferring instead the more quantitative and purportedly "male" evaluation criterion of quota completion (Goetz 1997: 22-23). In 1998 some township governments in Rivercounty prioritized the completion of birth planning quotas and upgraded the position of special birth planning cadre to a formal salaried post to reflect this commitment. As a consequence of this upgrade, many female incumbents were replaced by more "effective" male candidates: in the words of the men, "what women are too soft to do, men must do." In one township 12 of 14 village women cadres were replaced.

At this point I should note that Rivercounty's practice of replacing women birth planning cadres with men may be a localized phenomenon. Even though male-dominated village committees are commonplace in rural Jiangxi and in the countryside generally, I have seen no reports of the masculinizing of birth planning posts in other counties. Scholarly research in some other parts of China even suggests that recent central state initiatives to encourage female participation in village committees and community politics have yielded some positive results (Gao 200 1 : 202-203; Lipinsky 200 1 : 297-298). While the masculinization of the birth planning post may be exceptional in Rivercounty, noting this phenomenon is nevertheless valuable in elucidating the ways in which policy processes are applied at the local level.

In the case of Rivercounty, the replacement of women cadres by men contradicts the official slogan that "giving birth to a girl and a boy is the same." The replaced women, for their part, have not been convinced by the explanation that men are more able. Rather, they put it down to women's lack of influence and contacts in the village. It is not only the replaced cadres who are dissatisfied with the policy shift, but also ordinary village women because it adversely affects their access to support. The women are reluctant to talk to men about physical and contraceptive problems. They feel that the men are concerned only with quotas and that they cannot empathize with them because they do not experience childbirth, are not subject to IUD in- sertions and inspections, and are seldom sterilized. The women also explained to me that they now receive less follow-up care after sterilization because of the perceived impropriety of a man visiting another man's wife.

Official appropriation of local gender norms

In carrying out birth planning work, state institutions often promote and reinforce those local gender and family norms that suit their purpose. For

R A C H E L MURPHY 61 1

example, they emphasize the “good parent” norm of a mother with one child whom she educates well, rather than the “glorious mother” norm of a woman who produces several sons. In Rivercounty, too, some of the local norms that are promoted in the official publicity campaigns reinforce women‘s sub- ordinate position in society. In particular, birth planning institutions and the Women’s Federation run community education activities that encourage rural women to be good domestic caretakers who uphold the economic and moral standing of their families. These model women exemplify norms such as vir- tue, purity, a self-sacrificing and caring nature, acceptance of authority, in- dustriousness, and an aptitude for meticulous work.

Many community education activities are guided by the “three unity” ( SCIM jiehe) principles of birth planning work: implementing birth planning policies, prospering through hard work, and creating “happy and civilized” households. Through these activities, cadres provide both present and future mothers with guidance and encouragement to make theirs a “three unity” household. Chinese policymakers and commentators explain the ra- tionale for the three unities by equating the interests of the family with the interests of the country (Huang, Bi, and Wang 1999: 55-57).

In rural Jiangxi, I encountered several examples of community education activities related to birth planning. One program practiced in rural Rivercounty and common in other parts of rural China is the “two studies and two competes” (shuangbishtrangxtre htradong) (Wang and Jing 2000: 60), which involves urging women to achieve literacy and learn technical skills through studying and competitions (Jacka 1997: 96-97). The aim is to reap the development-oriented benefits of educating women: lower fertility, increased economic productivity, and lower child mortality that in turn results in lower fertility (Wang and Jing 2000: 61-62). A second example, from elsewhere in Jiangxi, is the “good mother micro-credit scheme,” whereby poor rural women who abide by birth limitation regulations are eligible for interest-free loans for production and agricultural innovation.21 A final example is the convening of “praise meetings” that urge women to emulate ”good mothers and virtuous wives,“ “good daughters-in-law,” and “industrious women who lead their households to prosperity.”

Although these officially sanctioned pedagogic activities may well em- power women by providing them with knowledge and resources, their over- riding objective is to guide women in regulating their conduct in ways that are compatible with their role as mothers of the next generation of Chinese citizens and in ways that advance the country’s wider development agenda. In other parts of rural China-for example, Shandong province-scholars have documented a number of substantive and credible educational activities, including those events carried out under the banner of the “two studies and two competes” (Judd 2002). In rural Rivercounty, however, the “three unities” activities are generally carried out on a perfunctory basis.22

612 F E R T I L I T Y A N D D I S T O R T E D S E X R A T I O S I N R U R A L CHINA

But even though these activities are largely formalistic, the surrounding publicity has the tangible effect of promoting certain norms above others. Many of the norms espoused in the educational activities in Rivercounty reinforce existing ideas about the obligations of women within their households and about the attributes of good women.

Reproductive norms and narratives

Official policy and gender norms are subverted, reworked, or even ignored when interpreted by village cadres and other rural residents. Here I explore this filtering process by analyzing the words of villagers in general and cadres in particular. It is especially interesting to see how rural cadres discuss their birth planning work, reproductive aspirations, and histories, because they are charged with implementing government policy and yet are members of the village community, hence both constrained and enabled by its cultural norms and gender relations (Greenhalgh 1993: 226-228; Shue 1988).23 The same observation applies to other villagers, albeit to a lesser extent, because there is no simple divide between the state and the people (Gupta 1995; Midgal 200 1 ). All registered residents of a village aged 18 and older are members of self-governing village assemblies, while all rural people are subject to the pedagogic efforts of state institutions; are encouraged to regulate themselves in accordance with exemplary models for good citizenship; and are expected to supervise the behavior of others both in daily life and through specially organized household evaluation campaigns.

The tension between the official and the personal in rural Rivercounty is evident in the juxtaposition of official population messages with reproductive symbols from local culture. On the one hand are official slogans on village walls such as "girls are also descendants" (aiier ye shi hotldui) and plaques mounted above doorways praising progressive households (non- feudal households that practice birth planning and prosper through hard work). On the other hand decorations inside rural houses affirm patrilineal norms, remind villagers that the greatest unfilial act for a man is to fail to produce a son, and associate sons with prosperity. One finds pictures of plump, happy baby boys holding peaches, posters of the Guanyin fertility goddess, red couplet wall scrolls asking Fortune and Guanyin to deliver sons and prosperity for generations, and ancestral altars with the words "protect my sons and grandsons" tended by women as part of their caretaking role in the domestic realm.

Erving Goffman's (1959) work is useful in interpreting the narratives from Rivercounty because it shows the ways in which one's setting influ- ences what people say. He argues that actions or performances take place within a particular interactive framework that includes certain assumptions and conventions, and that actions and facets of self that are seen as unsuited


to a particular “front region” are repressed and reserved for other places and interactions. Since my interviews were conducted in homes rather than the village office, the responses include personal as well as official narratives.

Two interrelated themes about gender and the interplay of policy and local culture recur in these narratives. First, parents recognize and feel an internal conflict between what is officially correct and their personal desires: this corresponds to Milwertz‘s differentiation between politically correct attitudes (skiung) and heartfelt preferences (xinli) ( 1997: 19 1 ) .24 Second, some parents overlook or modify official norms either because they have internal- ized local norms or because it is in their interests to do so. These processes are not mutually exclusive, but for the purposes of clarity I discuss each in turn.

To take up the first theme, many cadres and other villagers recognize that gender equality is a politically correct viewpoint, but one which conflicts with their personal feeling that rural families need a son. One female township cadre, the only township-level cadre interviewed in this study, explained to me that there is a legal requirement that both sons and daughters look after their parents in old age; but in reality, ”people will only criti- cize sons who don’t, they won‘t say anything about daughters.” She later explained her own experience as a mother:

My greatest source of dissatisfaction is that I do not have a son.. . . I very much agree with the birth planning policies and I do not look down on daughters, but in my heart I often wish for a son.... My deepest memory is when I gave birth to my daughter. At the time I was still in the birth bed. My husband had returned home to cook noodles.. . . The first thing that he said as he came through the door was: “Is it a boy or a girl?” I said: “It’s a girl.” As soon as he heard that it was a girl, the words that spurted from his mouth were: “Aye, when we are old there really will be no one to carry water for us. And we can only give birth to one.” I cried when I heard this ... . He should have given me some words of comfort.. . . (tape 2, 26 October 2000)

As a township-level cadre, this woman would have jeopardized her career had she tried again for a son, and she accepted that her sacrifice was for the good of the state.

Ordinary rural women are in a different situation because in villages the cultural and economic need for a son is much greater. Villagers have no old-age pension and rely on the land. Moreover, they live in a patrilineal environment where to be without a son is to feel that one is “without face” (meiyou miunzi), “without power” (meiyou shili), and “without voice” (jiung huu shengyin meiyou bie ren d ~ ) . ~ ~

The importance of a son is manifest not only in the strenuous efforts that people make to produce one, but also in the preferential allocation of household resources to sons over daughters. William Lavely, James Lee,


and Wang Feng point out that gender differentials in educational attain- ment are greater in parts of China where the sex ratio is more distorted- for example, in the southeast (1990: 189); these are also the areas where patrilineal descent groups are most active in compiling genealogies and re- pairing ancestral shrines.

Figure 3 shows the proportion of students in Rivercounty who are female for three levels of schooling from 1990 to 2000 and suggests that there are substantial inequalities between boys and girls. It should be noted, however, that less than half the school-age population is female, so female en- rollments at the 45 percent level are likely to represent gender equity. To further qualify the data, the enrollment figures are likely to overstate school attendance because there are political pressures on local officials to reach attendance targets. Finally, enrollment figures do not necessarily reflect parental attitudes toward education, especially at the primary and middle levels where state compulsion is a major factor affecting school attendance. The high school figures provide a clearer indication of parental attitudes toward investing in sons compared to daughters because this level of schooling is not compulsory. Even so, the figure suggests that state policy has benefited girls, with a noteworthy increase over the course of the decade in the

FIGURE 3 Percent of females among students in the three levels of schooling, Rivercounty, 1990-2000

5 0

45

40

* E g 3 5 k

30

25

I High ,:"

20 ' I I I I I I I I I

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

NOTE: Primary refers to grades 1-5 (ages 7-12); middle refers to grades 6-8 (ages 12-15); high refers to grades 9-11 (ages 15-18). SOURCE: Rivercounty Education Bureau.

R A C H E L MURPHY 615

proportion of female students at the middle level that is continuing on to the high school level.

In my interview sample,26 15 households showed clear evidence of preferential investment in the education of sons, as demonstrated by earlier male school enrollment, earlier female withdrawal from school, and parental ad- mission that they would give more education to their sons. This limited information suggests that daughters may miss out on education in two situations. One is where a daughter must compete with one or more brothers for parental investment: in three households a daughter competed with two brothers, and in five households a daughter competed with one brother. The other is where several daughters must compete with a younger brother. In this situation, which accounted for six of the 15 households, the families’ resources are often drained by fines and the expenses of rearing four or more children, and whatever scarce resources remain go to the son. Finally, I encountered one very poor household where the daughter had been withdrawn from middle school on the death of her mother. She spent her time keeping house for her father and two elder brothers. It should be noted that in a further two households daughters received more education than their brothers-according to their parents, this was because they were more able students.

The situation in Rivercounty suggests that over the past decade both boys and girls have benefited considerably from educational investment in the reform era, but that gender bias in the allocation of resources for education has continued, particularly at the high school level. The parents who spoke with me smoothed over the tension between what they recognized “ought” to be the case, namely that they ought to invest equally in the well-being of sons and daughters, and actual practice, namely that scarce resources are allocated preferentially to sons. They did so by invoking cultural norms about the qualities of boys and girls: for example, “girls do not do as well at school because the older they get, the more complicated their thinking becomes.” However, in my focus-group discussions, some women spoke openly of widespread discrimination against daughters. Their narrative strategy for dealing with their inner conflict between “ought” and “actual” involved resigning themselves to the idea that “this is just how it is in our countryside” (women nongcun jiu shi zheyang) (tapes 2A and 2B (group discussion), 6 November 2000; tape 20, 22 October 2000).

Turning to the second theme, Rivercounty villagers‘ reproductive aspirations are at best weakly influenced by official norms on gender and reproduction because local norms are too deeply ingrained. Even women, who would appear to benefit from adopting official norms on gender equality, accept instead the gender and reproductive norms of rural patriarchy. This fact resonates with Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that the exercise of power rests on a foundation of shared belief, and that even those who benefit least often partake to some extent in their own subjugation (1992: 162). The


role of such complicity in maintaining unequal power relations between men and women can be seen in the reproductive aspirations of women in households where the husband is an only son (or the only son with reproductive ability) who in turn had only one son. These women explained their desire for another son in terms of their concern about the shortage of people in their family and the threat that this posed for the continuity of the male line. A woman cadre told me the following:

In 1983 I gave birth to a son and then in 1984 they cracked down hard on birth planning work and wanted me to be sterilized. At the time I could not accept it because there are too few people in our family. From the two brothers [the husband and his brother] there are only two children-one boy and one girl. My brother-in-law hasn’t got a wife. He has no reproductive ability. There is only my son and daughter, so in fact there is only one son in our family, only a single line of descent, so in the end I did not go to be sterilized. (tape 20, 22 October 2000)

Other women in the same family situation also told me that they wanted to try for a second son because ”there are too few people in our family”- literally, “too few male descendants.”

Another example of complicity in perpetuating gender inequality is the case of a sterilized woman who, although despising her husband and resigned to a poor fate, nevertheless wished to have another son to give to her bach- elor brother-in-law. She described her brother-in-law as being “a little bit slow” and “without reproductive ability.” But she wanted to have a son with her husband to give to the brother-in-law because “in the countryside, to be without a descendant is very pitiful.” As Lee and Wang argue, the perception of an entitlement to a patrilineal male descendant has historically been so important that it has overridden “the limitations of human and social biol- ogy,” with widowers, bachelors, and even eunuchs adopting sons (1999: 109). This particular woman had watched a program in the documentary series Shehui Chuanzhen (Social Fax) about reproductive health, which said that sci- entific methods exist that can enable an infertile woman to conceive. Although there was no way she could afford such treatment, the program gave her hope that the door on her fertility might not be completely closed. This example suggests that even though the state can control bodies, individuals still resist in the domains of thought and narrative, even if this involves invoking the norms that subjugate them.

Men also form their reproductive aspirations in the local context. In Rivercounty, as elsewhere in rural China, they have a filial obligation to father a son. One male village cadre explained to me:

At the time I didn‘t really do myself credit because several offspring were all daughters. Daughters have to be raised too, you know! But what can one


do? Outside, people would whisper that I am only able to produce daughters and lack the ability to produce sons. On hearing these words my heart was troubled and my face was dishonored. This is what I said to myself: "This is not possible. I am still young. It is impossible that I cannot produce a son. I will certainly not rest until I have produced a son." (tape 6, 10 October 2000)

He continued by saying that after the birth of four daughters and two sons, his wife was sterilized. He explained how they decided that it was she who would be sterilized:

If I went, who would shoulder the burden of looking after the six children? After a man has been sterilized he cannot do physically demanding work in the fields. Who would provide for the six children? From our point of view, a woman is after all a woman and a man is after all a man. I can say that several women are not equal to one man, but of course that man also has to have a certain level of ability. Like here, we also have several men without ability who can hardly support themselves, let alone support a wife, children, and [ancestral] spirits! (tape 6 , 10 October 2000)

Here the speaker selects and uses village gender norms about the characteristics and worth of male and female roles in forming the decision about sterilization. The work of women in rural China is commonly characterized as domestic and light despite the fact that they carry out a substantial part of the farm work and heavy tasks (Jacka 1997). Hence, wider gender inequalities, for example the differential valuing of male and female labor, affect and are affected by local reproductive culture.

Female strategies

The women of rural Rivercounty are clearly aware of what they are expected to think and practice, and this awareness reflects some degree of educational influence and ideational change. The potential for such ideational change to usher in a new fertility regime has been explored in Yan's careful study of a village in rural Heilongjiang. Yan found that two decades of family planning education and socioeconomic transition produced new norms relating to the utility of children and family size (2002, 2003). He also discovered that within a wider village pattern of increasing distortions in sex ratios, a small group of young couples with one daughter were indif- ferent about trying again for a son. Yan explains the emergence of the new gender norm among these couples with reference to weak descent-group consciousness and strong affinal ties in the community; the emergence of more individualistic love-based relationships in which wives had higher status and good communication with their husbands; the declining importance

618 FERTILITY A N D D I S T O R T E D S E X R A T I O S I N RURAL C H I N A

of land in the rural economy; the emergence of economic opportunities that enabled the elderly to save for their old age; and the shift in obligation for parental care away from sons toward both sons and daughters. Although new fertility norms are also evolving in Rivercounty, these changes, like those Yan finds in his Heilongjiang village and as Greenhalgh finds in Shaanxi, have been overwhelmingly in relation to family size.27

While changes in fertility norms in Rivercounty pertain to family size rather than composition, many of the women’s narratives about gender and reproductive aspirations nevertheless suggest points of ideological depar- ture from the patriarchal norms of the village. In focus-group discussions many women said daughters should not be excluded from descent-group genealogies, that daughters are also people and should be treated the same as boys. In some instances mothers and even fathers have insisted that their daughters attend vocational college or university so that they can enjoy a better life. Indeed, as I have mentioned, state strategies for ensuring compulsory education for boys and girls have increasingly offered daughters the opportunity to prove their worth and claim educational investment.

Although rural women in Rivercounty are undoubtedly disadvantaged by the unequal power relations embodied in dominant gender norms and although they comply in perpetuating them, they are far from being completely ”hoodwinked.” Like women in other parts of the world (see, e.g., Gheytanchi 2001), they use norms of motherhood to claim resources and rights that help them perform their caretaking and work roles: more rest time, the building of kindergartens, control over money for childrearing expenses.

The parents in daughter-only households also find ways to come to terms with their situation. These parents praise their daughters for understanding the “hardship at home”-the absence of a son-by being caring and helping with farming and domestic work. It is also possible that the daughters in these households receive more education because they do not need to compete with brothers for parental investment, a phenomenon that has been observed among urban parents with only daughters (Fong 2002). Even so, in the uniform absence of uxorilocal marriage strategies and with the dearth of old-age pension schemes, daughter-only households in rural Rivercounty are likely to remain objects of pity for the foreseeable future. Daughters can ameliorate this circumstance by supporting their parents af - ter their marriage into another household and village, but many daughters lack the financial means to do so.

Given that distorted sex ratios at birth are indicative of wider gender inequalities, female contestation of patriarchy must be transformed into a social force visible in the public sphere if it is to effect change. But in River- county there is no indication of the kinds of grassroots female mobilization against patriarchy that has been observed in other parts of China (see, e.g.,


Hsiung et al. 2001). In the realm of politics, administrative and party activities and community decisionmaking in Rivercounty villages are characterized by the same male dominance that characterized the Mao years, even if the nature and institutions of male control have changed. Since the 1990s, patrilineal lineage committees in single-surname villages have become increasingly dominant in managing community affairs, with common over- lap between the membership of the lineage committee and the village administrative committee (Chen and Guo 1995). In late 1999, electoral reforms in Rivercounty (whereby villagers nominated candidates and voted by se- cret ballot) enabled dominant members of the largest patrilineal descent groups to claim formal positions of power in many villages (see also Howell 1998: 107). Women rarely participated in these elections: men cast votes on behalf of the household members and filled key positions in all villages. Moreover, as I mentioned earlier, women have been removed from the post of birth planning cadre as part of “professionalizing” it. At the same time, the use of campaigns and quotas as instruments for carrying out the official work of birth planning suggests to society that it is acceptable to subordi- nate the bodies of women. Even though women are dissatisfied with male domination over birth planning and with the forceful aspects of policy implementation, their laments were voiced in the quiet female quarters of households rather than in the public sphere.

Conclusion

I have examined four ways in which the interplay between official state policy and local reproductive norms in one rural county in China reinforces gender biases that are manifest most particularly in distorted sex ratios. I have shown how, in making sense of local family forms and reproductive practices and in adapting policy to local gender norms, state institutions create official classifications that are incorporated into local reproductive culture. For example, the introduction of the official classification “daughter-only household” has produced a new category commonly associated with hardship. Moreover, male bias is inherent in the state institutions that imple- ment population policy; official publicity campaigns appropriate and rework certain gender norms; and official norms are reinterpreted at the grassroots level in subjective ways that affirm the gender bias embedded in local reproductive cultures. Ultimately this gendering of population policy and practice reinforces parents’ desires for a son, thereby contributing to imbalanced sex ratios.

But even though the distortion in sex ratios among young age groups in rural Rivercounty mirrors the pattern at the provincial and national levels, rural Rivercounty is not completely representative either of rural Jiangxi or of rural China. Although Rivercounty shares many of the cultural, eco-

620 FERTILITY A N D D I S T O R T E D S E X R A T I O S I N R U R A L C H I N A

nomic, and political institutions of other Han Chinese areas, it also has particular local characteristics. Examples include large land allocations, limited off-farm employment, strong descent-group activism, and sex ratio distortions above the national average. Rivercounty therefore differs from other places in the extent to which the values and norms embedded in state policies are in conflict or congruence with the values and norms embedded in local family life. It also differs from other localities in terms of the particular factors causing either conflict or congruence.

The study of Rivercounty suggests two points in particular about culture and fertility processes. First, the findings confirm that local-level policies are never applied as mechanistically as the discourses of development and population planning suggest. It is therefore important to understand how gender preferences are shaped at the local level, how they are produced and reproduced, how strong they become (Bossen 2002: 306), and how they reinforce and are reinforced by gender inequalities embedded in both state policy and local culture.

Second, the study highlights again the importance of local economic and cultural institutions in producing demographic outcomes. Such micro- studies are revealing because even though the demographic patterns observed in several places might appear to be the same, in each instance a particular configuration of cultural and economic factors is at work. For example, some rural and urban localities maintain balanced sex ratios (Bossen 2002: 294) while in other such localities severe distortions are the rule (White 2000: 196). To be sure, the inhabitants of any particular locality are influenced by the circulation of meanings and gender norms of a wider trans-local public culture, which includes meanings embodied in population policies and the publicity associated with their implementation. But these meanings and norms are given substance within a local context, and this context has an impact on the experiences and opportunities of girls and women.

As demographic trends in South Korea, Japan, and north India reveal, distorted sex ratios occur even in the absence of coercive population policies. Increases in childrearing costs, norms requiring parental investment in education, and the availability of modern consumer goods all create demand for smaller families. At the same time, ultrasound technology and sex-selective abortion enable parents to ensure that within the con- fines of fewer births they have at least one son (Croli 2000; White 2000: 196). In China, too, socioeconomic changes increasingly generate incentives for lower fertility independently of coercive state policies (Gates 1993; Greenhalgh 1993; Murphy 2004; Yan 2002), while technology enables parents to realize their preference for a son.

Referring to the situation in rural Shaanxi, Greenhalgh and Li argue that there is a direct relationship between the intensity of birth planning campaigns and distortions in sex ratios (1995). Owing to a lack of data, I am unable to comment on whether or not Rivercounty has also experi-


enced a clear and direct relationship between policy enforcement and sex ratio fluctuations. I have been able, however, to build on Greenhalgh's work on the peasantization of population policy by pointing to some of the dif- fuse and indirect ways in which the form and content of population policies and the nature of their implementation affect parental and societal per- ceptions of the relative worth of boys and girls and the gendered nature of their reproductive aspirations. In particular, the situation in Rivercounty has shown that the tools of policy implementation-language, categories, targets, and state institutions-are never neutral, let alone gender neutral. Rather, they absorb and reinforce existing inequalities and introduce new ones. As a result, they alter and often constitute demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural realities in unintended ways, compounding the problems that they are supposed to ameliorate. In a county in which son preference is particularly strongly embedded, the impact has been manifest in the continuation of discrimination in favor of sons and against daughters.

Although there are encouraging indications that women and men in Rivercounty are contesting the gender norms in their society, state and society on the whole constitute each other in ways that reinforce an established patriarchy and sustain the devaluing of daughters-and this circumstance is reflected in an imbalance in sex ratios at the youngest ages that is well above the national average.

Notes

This research was funded by a British Acad- emy postdoctoral fellowship and a grant from the Simon Population Trust. It was facilitated by the Jiangxi Academy of Social Sciences and by Academy scholar Liu Liangqun. An earlier version of this article was presented to the Gender Theory Study Group at Cam- bridge University, 28 January 2003, and I am grateful for comments and encouragement. I thank Tim Wright and Jeremy Riley for their careful reading of this article.

1 Susan Greenhalgh is the pioneer in this field.

2 My analysis is inspired by a state-in-society approach, which explores how state and society constitute each other. See Migdal (2001) andMigdal, Kohl, and Shue (1994).

3 In orthodox demographic transition theory, fertility decline is explained primarily in terms of the effects of socioeconomic transition and industrialization. In the late 1960s, the Princeton European Fertility Project introduced "culture" as an explanatory variable to

the field of demography. This project found that fertility decline started earliest in the agrar- ian society of eighteenth-century France, well ahead of its industrialized neighbors. Even though orthodox demographic transition theory has been mainly concerned with the impact of socioeconomic factors on fertility decline, the concepts of "poverty" and "devel- oping societies" have been conflated with traditional and backward cultures. For critiques of orthodox transition theory see Greenhalgh (1995, 1996) and Sveter (1993).

4 Lee and Wang argue against the sim- plistic assumption that the demographic regime of the West was modern and rational and based on preventive checks to population, whereas China's demographic regime was traditional and determined only by the Malthusian positive checks of famine and disease. They contest the ethnocentric West- ern view that only the West was sufficiently rational to regulate family size by demon- strating that historically Chinese culture had

622 FERTILITY A N D D I S T O R T E D S E X R A T I O S I N R U R A L C H I N A

its own repertoire of strategies for actively shaping family formation. Their argument suggests the need to move beyond the as- sumed dichotomy of traditional versus modern cultures and demographic regimes.

5 Pierre Bourdieu has theorized about the convertibility between cultural and economic forms of capital and proposed that cultural and economic incentives are not separate, but mutually constitutive.

6 I adopt much of the argument proposed by S . Ryan Johansson, in particular her discussion of fields of incentives, but am less convinced by her interpretation of culture as a kind of mental programming, as of a computer.

7 My host institution during the fieldwork was the Jiangxi Academy of Social Sciences. Academy scholar Liu Liangqun was stationed in Rivercounty (a pseudonym) as a county deputy head (responsible for general rural affairs and education) at this time. For most of the interviews I was accompanied by either a township official or a village cadre, usually a woman. Most of the time, I lived in the county seat and commuted to the villages by car or, in the case of the two villages close to the county seat, by bike or by foot. Quotations from various cadres are drawn from transcripts of interviews conducted together with Liu as part of a joint project on life histories. Other quotations are taken from my interviews with 30 women I encountered in the course of conducting the survey of 119 households (actually 143 households if those households with children born before 1979 are included) as well as with other cadres. This article also draws on insights gained when conducting extensive fieldwork in another part of Jiangxi between October 1996 and February 1998 for a project on the impact of outmigration on rural society. AU transla- tions from Chinese to English are mine.

The qualitative nature of this study means that the findings are difficult to replicate, and I was unable to gain sufficient in-depth data and ethnographic information to explore in- tervillage and interhousehold differences. County-level data for sex ratios, sterilization, population policies, cultural practices, and education have nevertheless allowed me to treat the county as a cultural unit, to place inter- pretations of the narratives of the interviewees in context, and to use qualitative testimonies to elucidate county-level trends.

8 1 mu = 0.1647 acres = 0.0667 hectares. The per capita land allocation of 2.5 mu is relatively large in Chinese terms. For comparison, the provincial and national per capita amounts are 0.8 mu and 1.2 mu.

9 In 2000 per capita incomes averaged 2,517 yuan for Rivercounty, 2,135 yuan for Jiangxi province, and 2,253 yuan for China (China State Statistical Bureau 2001). These figures are at best a guide as the reporting of income figures at the local level tends to be overstated.

10 Here Michel de Certeau's general observation about interpretative practices is instructive to the Rivercounty case: "the presence and circulation of a representation (taught by preachers, educators and popularizers as the key to socio-economic advancement) tells us nothing about what it is for its users" (p. xiii).

11 Calculated from figures in Jian Prefec- ture Statistical Office 1998: 3 4 .

12 Survey conducted by Liu Liangqun, Jiangxi Academy of Social sciences, 2000.

13 Other societies similarly embrace a cultural ideal of having both a son and a daughter to perform distinct but complementary roles. For example, mothers in rural Rajasthan, In- dia speak of wanting milk and curd, a son and a daughter. See, for example, Pate1 (1994 81).

14 Rivercounty Bureau of Statistics.

15 China State Statistical Bureau 2000: Table 2 -6, Population Composition According to Age and Sex, p. 42.

16 National Bureau of Statistics 2002: Table 4-5, Population Grouped by Sex and Age, p. 96. (Comparable figures for 1999 are not available in the 2000 or 2001 China Sta- tistical Year Books.)

17 Michel Foucault (1972, 1977) shows that discursive formations bring populations and categories of people with defined characteristics into being. The role of the post-socialist Chi- nese state in constituting particular social enti- ties through the creation of discursive categories is discussed by Ann Anagnost (1997) in her study of the production of "civilized citizens."

18 The data in Figures 1 and 2 were ob- tained by a Rivercounty official from the family planning offices of the three townships in 2000.


19 Naila Kabeer notes that the development literature is optimistic about the potential for empowered women to control their own fertility. See Kabeer (1994: 187-222).

20 Out of all rural Rivercounty couples with two children who were sterilized between 1990 and 2000, roughly 10 percent have two daughters and no son. This proportion of daughter-only households is less than one would ex- pect if there were not substantial parental intervention aimed at trying to obtain a son.

2 1 I did not encounter "good mother" micro-credit schemes in Rivercounty. The scheme is widespread in Yunnan and Guangxi prov- inces and in other counties in Jiangxi.

22 In Rivercounty the "two studies" activities were reported by villagers and offiaaIs alike to be "formalism," involving someone coming to talk to women about skills training for one morning a year. In rural Shandong, however, Judd (2002) documents more substantial "two studies" activities.

23 Shue observes this about Maoist China, but I would argue that it applies equally to the

present. Greenhalgh adopts Shue's insight to explain the position of birth planning cadres.

24 I am grateful to a reviewer for pointing out the relevance of Milwertz's analysis here.

25 These terms recurred in daily conver- sation and also in several of my interviews with rural women.

26 In 55 of my sample of 119 households, it was not possible to compare the education of sons and daughters because the children were not of schooI age, or they were of the same sex, or there was only one child; in 47 households there was no evidence of gender bias in the allocation of household resources, though in 40 of these households there were children still in school so it was too soon to see whether boys or girls would end up with more schooling.

27 Indeed, for Chinese policymakers, discussions about gender bias have been more concerned with mitigating the role of son preference as an incentive for higher-order births than with gender equality per se.

References

Anagnost, Ann. 1997. National Past-times: Narrative, Representation and Power in Modern China. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Bledsoe, Caroline and Allan G. Hill. 1998. "Social norms, natural fertility and the resump- tion of post-partum 'contact' in the Gambia," in Alaka Malwade Basu and Peter Aaby (eds.), The Methods and Uses of Anthropological Demography. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Brightman, Robert. 1995. "Forget culture: Replacement, transcendence, relexification," Cul- tural Anthropology lO(4): 509-546.

Bossen, Laurel. 2002. Chinese Women and Rural Development. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1977. Outline o fa Theory ofpractice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1990. In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology. Stanford: Stanford Univer-

. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press. sity Press.

Carsten, Janet. 2000. "Introduction: Cultures of relatedness," in Janet Carsten (ed.), Cul- tures of Relatedness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chen Zuhui and Guo Xisi. 1995, "Dangqian nongcun zongzu huodong huifu yu manyan de zhuangkuang fenxi" (Analysis of the present revival and extension of rural clan activities), Jiangxz shehui kexue (Jiangxi Social Science) 4: 12-18.

China State Statistical Bureau. 2000. Zhongguo wushi nian de Jiangxi, 1949-1999 (Jiangxi in China's fifty years, 1949-1 999). Beijing: Zhongguo tongji chubanshe. . 200 1. China Statistical Yearbook 2001. Beijing: China Statistical Publishers.

Chu Junhong. 2001. "Prenatal sex determination and sex-selective abortion in rural cen-

Constable, Nicole. 1999. "At home but not at home: Filipina narratives of ambivalent re- tral China," Population and Development Review 27(2): 259-281.

turns," Cultural Anthropology 14(2): 203-228.

624 FERTILITY A N D D I S T O R T E D S E X RATIOS I N R U R A L C H I N A

Croll, Elizabeth. 1987. "New peasant family forms in rural China," Journal of Peasant Studies 14(4): 469-499. . 2000. Endangered Daughters. London: Routledge.

Das Gupta, Monica and Li Shuzhuo. 2000. "Gender bias in China, South Korea and India 1920-1990: Effects of war, famine and fertility decline," in Shahra Razavi (ed.), Gendered Poverty and Well-Being. Oxford: Blackwell.

Davin, Delia. 1990. "Never mind if it's a girl, you can try again," in Jorgan Delman, Clemens Stubbe, and Flemming Christiansen (eds.), Remaking Peasant China. Denmark: Aarhus University Press.

de Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Elson, Diane (ed.). 1995. Male Bias in the Development Process. Manchester: Manchester Uni- versity Press.

Fong, Vanessa L. 2002. "China's one child policy and the empowerment of urban daughters," American Anthropologist 104(4): 1098-1 109.

Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock.

Gao Xiaoxian. 2001. "Strategies and space: A case study of the Shaanxi Association for Women and Family," in Hsiung Ping-Chun, Maria Jaschok, and Cecelia Milwertz with Red Chan (eds.), Chinese Women Organizing: Cadres, Feminists, Muslims and Queers. Oxford: Berg.

Gates, Hill. 1993. "Cultural support for birth limitation among urban capital-owning women," in Deborah Davis and Stevan Harrell (eds.), Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era. Berke- ley: University of California Press, pp. 25 1-276.

Gheytanchi, Elham. 2001. "Civil society in Iran: Politics of motherhood and the public sphere," International Sociology 16(4): 557-576.

Giddens, Anthony. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. London: Macmillan. . 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity

Press. Goetz, Ann Marie. 1997. "Introduction: Getting institutions right for women in develop-

ment," in Ann Marie Goetz (ed.), Getting Institutions Right for Women in Development. London: Zed Books.

. 1977. Discipline and Punish. London: Allen Lane.

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Selfin Everyday Life. New York: Anchor. Greenhalgh, Susan. 1988. "Fertility as mobility: Sinic transitions," Population and Develop-

ment Review 14(4): 629-674. . 1990. "Toward a political economy of fertility: Anthropological contributions," Popu-

lation and Development Review 16( 1): 85-105. -. 1993. "The peasantization of the one-child policy in Shaanxi," in Deborah Davis

and Stevan Harrell (eds.), Chinese Families in the Post-Mao Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 219-250. . 1994. "Controlfing births and bodies in village China," American Ethnologist 21( 1): 3-

30. . 1995. "Anthropology theorizes reproduction: Integrating practice, political economic,

and feminist perspectives," in Susan Greenhalgh (ed.), Situating Fertility: Anthropology and Demographic Inquiry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. . 1996. "The social construction of population science: An intellectual, institutional,

and political history of twentieth century demography," Comparative Studies in Society and History 38( 1): 26-66.

Greenhalgh, Susan and Jiali Li. 1995. "Engendering reproductive policy and practice in peasant China: For a feminist demography of reproduction," Signs: Journal of Women i n Cultureand Society 20(3): 601-641.

Gupta, Akhil. 1995. "Blurred boundaries: The discourse of corruption, the culture of politics and the imagined state," American Ethnologist 22(2): 375-402.

Gupta Akhil and James Ferguson. 2001. "Culture, power and place: Ethnography at the


end of an era," in Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (eds.), Culture, Power and Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Gutting, Daniel. 1996. "Narrative identity and residential history," Area 28(4): 482-490. Hammel, E. A. 1990. "A theory of culture for demography," Population and Development Re-

view 16(3): 455-485. He Rusheng. 2000. "Qing guanzhu nongcun chunnu hu" (Please pay attention to daugh-

ter-only households in the countryside), Ban yue tan (China Comment) 14: 56-57. Howell, Jude. 1998. "Prospects for village self-governance in China," The Journal of Peasant

Studies 25( 3): 86-1 1 1. .2001. "Women's political participation in China: Struggling to hold up half the sky,"

paper presented at the British Political Studies Association Annual Conference, Manchester, April.

Huang Guilan, Bi Baosheng, and Wang Yadong. 1999. "Deng Xiaoping renkou sixiang dui jihua shengyu gongzuo 'san jie he' de shenyuan yingxiang" (The deep and far reach- ing impact of Deng Xiaoping thought on the "three unities" family planning work), Renkou xuekan (Population Journal) ( 6 ) : 55-57.

Hsiung Ping-Chun, Maria Jaschok, and Cecelia Milwertz with Red Chan (eds.). 2001. Chi- nese Women Organizing: Cadres, Feminists, Muslims and Queers. Oxford: Berg.

Jacka, Tamara. 1997. Women's Work in Rural China. New York: Cambridge University Press. Jeffery, Roger and Patricia Jeffery. 1997. Population, Gender and Politics. Cambridge: Cam-

.Jenkins, Richard. 1996. Social Identify. London: Routledge. Jian Prefecture Statistical Office. 1998. Zhongguo diyi d nongye pucha jian d i p n'liao huibian (Sta-

Jinggangshan Baa (Jinggang Mountains Newspaper). 2000. "Yitian ernu hu jiezha jinzhan

Johansson, Ryan S. 199 1. "'Implicit' policy and fertility during development," Population

Johnson, Kay Ann. 1985. Women, the Family, and Peasant Revolution in China. Chicago: Uni-

. 1996. "The politics of the revival of infant abandonment in China, with special

Judd, Ellen. 1994. Gender and Power in RuralNorth China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. . 2002. The Chinese Women's Movement Between State and Market. Stanford: Stanford

bridge University Press.

tistical Book for China's First National Agricultural Survey, Jian Prefecture) Nanchang.

kuai" (Fast progress on family planning work in Yitian), 7 October, p. 2.

and Development Review 17(3): 377-414.

versity of Chicago Press.

reference to Hunan," Population and Development Review 22( 1): 77-98.

University Press. Kabeer, Naila. 1994. Reversed Realities. London: Verso.

. 2000. "Resources, agency, achievements: Reflections on the measurement of women's empowerment," in Shahra Razavi (ed.), Gendered Poverty and Well-Being. Ox- ford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 27-56.

Lavely, William, James Lee, and Wang Feng. 1990. "Chinese demography: The state of the field," Journal ofAsian Studies 49(4): 807-834.

Lee, James 2. and Wang Feng. 1999. One Quarter of Humanity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lipinsky, Astrid. 200 1. "Abstract of 'Reinventing the grassroots: Structure and organisation of women's federation work in rural Hebei,"' in Hsiung Ping-Chun, Maria Jaschok, and Cecelia Milwertz with Red Chan (eds.), Chinese Women Organizing: Cadres, Femi- nists, Muslims and Queers. Oxford: Berg, pp. 297-298.

McNicoll, Geoffrey. 1998. "Institutional analysis of fertility transition," in Paul Demeny and Geoffrey McNicoll (eds.), The Earthscan Reader in Population and Development. London: Earthscan Publications, pp. 165-175.

Migdal, Joe1 S. 2001. State in Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Migdal, Joel S., Atul Kohl, and Vivienne Shue. 1994. State Power and Social Forces. Cam-

Milwertz, Cecelia. 1997. Accepting Population Control. Surrey: Curzon Press. bridge: Cambridge University Press.


Murphy, Rachel. 2004. "Turning Chinese peasants into modern citizens: Population quality discourse, demographic transition and primary schools," The China Quarterly 177 (March).

National Bureau of Statistics. 2002. China Statistical Yearbook, 2002. Beijing: China Statistics Press.

Ong, Aihwa. 1996. "Citizenship as subject-making: New immigrants negotiate racial and ethnic boundaries in the United States," Current Anthropology 37(5): 737-762.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1984. "Theory in anthropology since the sixties," Comparative Studies in Society and History 26: 126-166. . 1999. "Introduction," in Sherry B. Ortner (ed.), The Fate of Culture: Geertz and Be-

yond. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 1-1 3. Patel, Tulsi. 1994. Fertility Behaviour: Population and Society in a Rajasthan Village. Delhi: Ox-

ford University Press. Pearson, Ruth. 1992. "Gender matters in development," in Tim Allen and Alan Thomas

(eds.), Poverty and Development in the 1990's. Oxford: Oxford University Press and Open University.

Schwartz, Theodore. 1978. "Where is the culture? Personality as the distributive locus of culture," in George D. Spindler (ed.), The Making of Psychological Anthropology. Berke- ley: University of California Press, pp. 419-441.

Scott, Joan. 1988. "Deconstructing equality-versus-difference: Or, the uses of post-struc- turalist theory for feminism," Feminist Studies 14( 1): 33-50.

Sen, Amartya. 1991, "Gender and co-operative conflicts," in Irene Tinker (ed.), Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 123- 149.

Shue, Vivienne. 1988. The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Somers, M. R. 1994. "The narrative constitution of identity," Theory and Society 23: 605- 649.

Stacey, Judith. 1983. Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China. Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press.

Strauss, Claudia and Naomi Quinn. 1997. A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Szreter, Simon. 1993. "The idea of demographic transition and the study of fertility change: A critical intellectual history," Population and Development Review 19(4): 659-701.

Wang Shaofeng and Jing Yuejun. 2000. "Jihua shengyu 'san jie he' dui nongcun jiating shengyu guannian zhuanbian de yingxian" (The impact of birth planning's "three unities" on changing the reproductive outlook of rural households), Renkou xuekan (Popu- lation Journal) 1: 59-63.

White, Tyrene. 2000. "Domination, resistance and accommodation in China's one-child campaign," in Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden (eds.), Chinese Society: Change, Con- flict and Resistance. London: Routledge, pp. 183-203.

Winckler, Edwin A. 2002. "Chinese reproductive policy at the turn of the millennium: Dy- namic stability," Population and Development Review 28( 3): 379-418.

Yan Yunxiang. 2002. "Planning birth: Changes in fertility culture in a Chinese village," &udes Rurales no. 161-162 (January-June): 129-152. . 2003. Private Life Under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Vil-

lage, 1949-1999. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage. Zhang Weiguo. 1999. "Implementation of state family planning programmes in a northern

Chinese village," The China Quarterly 157: 202-230. Zhou Changhong. 1999. "Jihua shengyu 'sanjiehe' fuwu xuqiu yu gongji diaocha fenxi"

(Investigation and analysis of the "three unities" family planning service needs and supply), Zhongguo renkou kexue (China Population Science) 2: 53-60.

Documents

Fertility and Distorted Sex Ratios in a Rural Chinese County: Culture, State, and Policy