The final CCCI talk of the semester titled, "The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Socialist China" will be given by Yige Dong (Sociology, University at Buffalo). She is an assistant professor in both the Department of Sociology and the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Based on the speaker’s book-in-progress, this lecture examines how the way of doing care—performing paid and unpaid reproductive labor that maintains our daily life and attends to people who are in need—has changed among Chinese workers during the rise and fall of industrial socialism.

Drawing on archival data, oral histories, and participatory observation in a textile mill town in central China, this research compares three generations of manufacturing workers’ experience of doing care, with a focus on the realm of childcare and domestic labor, and explains why care work had changed from unpaid “women’s work” in the household to a core constituent of labor welfare during socialist industrialization, and then has been removed from welfare provisions in recent decades. Shifting the analytical focus from the sphere of production to that of social reproduction, this study offers a reinterpretation of Chinese socialism and highlights the indispensable role of gender in understanding political economy.

Prof. Dong’s primary research interest lies at the intersection of political economy, social inequality, and social change. Currently, she is working on a book project, The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in Industrial China, which examines the changing politics of care in China’s industrial sector in the past century. Prof. Dong has been awarded the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowship in China Studies (2021-2022).

Engendering China is the theme of the Cornell Contemporary China Initiative (CCCI) spring '23 lecture series hosted by faculty member, Yue (Mara) Du (History, Cornell), and the series corresponds to the course of the same name that she is teaching (Engendering China: CAPS2932, ASIAN 2291, FGSS 2932, HIST 2932).

In contemporary China, as in many other places of the world, the ideology and social reality of gender relations are highly paradoxical. Women are flattered for their power as consumers and commitment to the family while they are also expected to engage in wage-earning employment. Men, on the other hand, face the constant pressure of being tough and social problems such as skewed gender ratio and costly betrothal gifts as unintended consequences of a gender regime that is supposedly male-oriented. Are these paradoxes a betrayal of the socialist experiment of erasing gender differences? Are they remnants of China’s long imperial tradition? The series and course explore the power dynamics of gender relations in China from ancient times to the present.

Along with the East Asia Program, this lecture series is co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Studies, Cornell Center for Social Sciences, Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies, the Department of History, ILR School's Global Labor Institute, The Levinson China and Asia Pacific Studies Program, and Cornell's Society for the Humanities.