2005/10/01 by Zheng Wang, Wang Zheng · 6 citations
Social Sciences · #Historical Gender and Feminism Studies
paper · doi:10.2307/20459044
crossref issued 2005/10/01 · crossref published 2005/10/01 · crossref published-print 2005/10/01 · openalex publication_date 2005/10/01 · crossref created 2010/05/03 · crossref deposited 2018/04/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · crossref indexed 2026/07/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
ALTHOUGH THE COMPOUND PHRASE has a relatively short history, it has acquired various meanings in its transnational usage. Evolving from an early usage of feminists, referring to feminists employed as bureaucrats in positions of power or women politicians who promoted gender equality policies in Scandinavia, has been conceptualized to enable scholarly examinations of the institutional ization of feminism in state agencies in a variety of political and economic systems.' The term has also been adopted in scholarly discussions of the Chinese socialist state's gender policies but with a significant twist.2 When applied to China it often portrays a paradoxical image of a state patriarch championing women's liberation, although with vacillation and inconsis tency. The conceptual chasm deserves a close examination. Does the chasm reflect fundamentally different sets of relationship of gender and the state between socialist state and capitalist state? Or could it be as much a function of intellectual parameters of feminist scholars as that of politi cal realities under investigation? This empirical study on gender and Chinese socialist state formation attempts to shed some light on this curi ous phenomenon.3 Studies on gender and the Chinese socialist state have convincingly