"For a woman to be without ability is a virtue" is a view attributed to Confucius but still very much alive in contemporary China. It is a paradox--a proposition widely accepted as true by both women and men but in practice denied in the conduct of everyday life. The author explores the recreation of this paradox in the processes of rural reform in China during the 1980's. In the wake of the Cultural Revolution and the rejection of collectivism, the Chinese leadership initiated a series of rural policy changes that included the transfer of collective resources to individuals, households, or...

When China embarked on its rural economic reforms in the early 1980s, changes for women were not a planned part of its program for economic development, in the countryside or in the nation at large. In the late 1980s the official arm of the Chinese women's movement, the Women's Federations, began experimenting with a series of strategies designed to position women in the mainstream of the reform-era economy. A distinctive feature of this initiative was its focus on -quality- (suzhi), including literacy, general education, and practical technical training, and extending to a general...