Asian Arguments. London: Zed Books; Chicago: University of Chicago Press [distributor], 2016. 215 pp. (Figure) US$15.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-78360-789-1.
Leta Hong Fincher, a former journalist and daughter of China academics, is the first US citizen to earn a Tsinghua University doctorate in sociology. Her dissertation traced Chinese women’s de facto exclusion from the exponential wealth accumulation created by China’s expansive urban property market. Fincher’s book, Leftover Women, builds on this research and connects it to what she terms “resurgent” gender inequality in post-socialist China. Women not only earn less than men, but they have less parental help with home purchasing. In 2011, marital property rights were legally redefined to emphasize ownership by the party named as owner on the deed. Because married women are pressured to leave their names off deeds, they often lose control of substantial assets. Although Fincher touches on rural ownership, her main focus is the urban property-owning elite.
The title, “Leftover Women,” refers to a fabricated crisis of single educated urban women. These women have been derided in state media and in the rhetoric of the official All China Women’s Federation since 2007, when the Chinese Ministry of Education “added the term to its official lexicon” (3). Educated women are urged by the state, society, and their families to marry before the age of twenty-seven, lest their own choosiness, education, and career focus result in their becoming “yellowed pearls,” no longer marriageable (and thus unlikely to produce the high-quality eugenic children upon whom China pins its future). Fincher argues that pressures on educated women to compromise their standards so they can marry young result in their acceptance of unequal marriage conditions that intensify the gender wealth gap, creating dependence and susceptibility to marital abuse. Fincher’s work, which emphasizes gendered disparities in property ownership, suggests that the leftover woman discourse has played a causative role. Although Fincher reflects that messages she has received via Twitter from women in South Asia, Russia, Turkey, and Singapore evince similar social pressures to marry, pressures that may also be felt in the US and the UK, she concludes that in China the “one-party state intent on social engineering” exacerbates gender discrimination by means of a one-two punch of propaganda and information controls that disadvantage women (4).
Leftover Women is based on observation of purchasing norms in Beijing real-estate agencies, Chinese online surveys of home buying, and approximately 150 e-mails that Fincher received after posting a solicitation on Weibo, a platform that combines Twitter and Facebook functions. Her e-mail correspondence samples 151 college-educated women and 132 men in as many as twenty Chinese cities. She also conducted sixty in-depth interviews, and analyzed media portrayals of home-buying and gender. She supplements discussion of “leftover women” and men’s advantaged accumulation of real-estate wealth, with examination of inequality within extended families (in which savings for home purchases flow preferentially to sons and nephews over daughters); connections between women’s limited property rights and domestic violence; challenges for feminist and LGBTQ communities; and state constraints on feminist activism. Along the way, she draws on interviews and newspaper reports for illustrative stories of women’s victimization and resistance.
Fincher’s slim book, aimed at a general audience, achieved immediate acclaim for exposing new facets of gender inequality in China. Although already in its second edition, it is unfortunately unlikely to satisfy China specialists or other well-informed readers. Although she traces some symptoms of new gender discrimination, she does not offer a compelling analysis. Links that are drawn between “leftover women” discourse and a variety of inequities rest on murky argument, uneven evidence, and inadequate citation. (Zed Books’ minimalist citation style may also be to blame.)
The organization of the book works against the clarity of its argument. At the approximate midpoint of the volume, an odd place to introduce history into the narrative, Fincher briskly surveys the shifting character of Chinese women’s property rights over the past millennium. Whereas the introduction evoked a retreat from revolutionary gains, this historical interlude highlights the Song dynasty as “the golden age for women’s property rights” (110). Thus the baseline for “resurgent” inequality is unclear. If, indeed, “more property was transferred to women” during the Song than at any other historical moment, and the problem of women’s diminished rights began with the Ming dynasty, then readers need a great deal more context on family property and law in late imperial China—and on the enduring connections between this past history and the present—to effectively comprehend contemporary inequalities. If today’s inequalities result instead from reform-era “erosion” of the Communist celebration of gender equality (7), the interpretive lens should reflect more substantively on shifts in political economy. Without this framework, the socialist allocation of shared housing and contemporary market-based property rights are not easily compared. If, in the past, the one-party state intervened on the side of greater equality, is the one-party state the key problem in the re-emergence of inequality, as Fincher appears to suggest?
In terms of grasping the dynamics of the contemporary urban gender wealth gap, Fincher provides no explanation for the 2011 shift in the legal definition of property rights that she emphasizes. The precise dimensions of the wealth gap are unclear, moreover, because Fincher does not consider other forms of wealth accumulation outside of housing. Absent from analysis is the recent explosion of wealth management services, a venue for investment that—in contrast to urban housing—is recognized for high levels of female investors.
Fincher correctly calls attention to conservative rhetoric and retrograde laws that disadvantage women. Nonetheless, in the pattern of inequality that has emerged with China’s accommodation of capitalism, the most brutally disadvantaged are rural people and workers. Within this broader picture, even within its gendered landscape, the urban women who are Fincher’s focus might best be contextualized as both beneficiaries and victims. The partial scope of Fincher’s focus, though attentive to urban women’s vulnerability and activism, does a disservice by obscuring this larger picture.
Bryna Goodman
University of Oregon, Eugene, USA
pp. 145-147