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Global Restructuring and the Production of Femininities in China's Emergent Service Industry
Eileen M. Otis
Department of Sociology
University of California, Davis
When in 1949 the Chinese communist party introduced women en masse into wage labor, work
was not concomitantly feminized. The Maoist state made a concerted effort to eliminate and make
irrelevant distinctions between men and women in order to facilitate women’s transition into paid labor
(Yang 1999). The state introduced women into work that had been deemed unsuitable for most of them in
the pre-revolutionary period and attempted to mandate sex equality defined by a male standard women
were expected to approximate. The masculinization of jobs was a mechanism to afford women legitimacy
and dignity on the shopfloor. It eliminated an “inside/outside divide” that in traditional China mapped onto
gender and stigmatized woman in waged work for transgressing proper gender boundaries (Rofel 1999).
Women in the Maoist era were to become the “New Socialist Man.”
The global restructuring of China’s economy in 1980’s profoundly altered this state of affairs.
Policies that masculinized women’s engagement in wage labor have been reversed in the reform era,
particularly within the burgeoning service sector which is now major employer of women and produces
commodified femininities consumed by a predominantly male clientele. As China’s rapid economic growth
creates a vigorous demand for consumer services by urbanites, international tourists, and business travelers,
service has become one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy (Luo 2001). By 1999 the service
sector represented over thirty percent of China’s GDP, creating seventy percent of new jobs in China and
employing a majority of the country’s new urban workers (Luo 2001; China Economic Times 2000).
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Today’s service sector brings into sharp relief the Maoist era masculine model of work that enabled
women’s employment and today’s employment structures as working women are pushed out of jobs in
professional, entrepreneurial, and industrial sectors and increasingly pressed into service jobs. This paper
analyzes the global segment of China’s service sector and argues that as China engages in the process of
market restructuring, the service sector is a central site for also restructuring gender. By examining China’s
new global service sector we can better understand not only how globalization structures gender processes
but also the gender processes that structure globalization.
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It is estimated that the service industry will account for between forty-five to fifty percent of China’s GDP in the next
twenty yearsThis growth is largely due to China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which is predicted to double its
share of world trade from five to ten percent over the next twenty years (Luo 2001).
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