Between Working Sisters and Net Mums: Information Technology
and the Question of Power
Wanning Sun, Curtin University of Technology
(This is a draft only. Please do not cite or circulate without permission.)
Introduction: A Tale of Three Women
A young woman in her early 20s straightens her back and looks up from her work
bench. The clock on the wall of the shop floor tells her - and thirty-some other women
on the same floor - that in about 30 minutes’ time, her shift will be over. She has been
working like this from 8:30 am. to 5:30 pm., Monday to Saturday, doing her bit on the
assembly line. Tomorrow is Sunday, the only day in a week that is her own. Since she
was recruited by the Electronics Company, a Hong Kong owned electronics
manufacturer in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of southern coastal China eight
months ago, her life has been confined mostly to this workshop floor, the factory
canteen, and her dormitory, which she shares with ten other young women like herself
from rural, inland provinces. There is a small black-and-white television set in the
dormitory but most of the time when she finishes work, she is too tired to watch it and
tends to fall asleep. She spends her waking time assembling computer parts, but she
has never used a computer before, nor does she know how to. All she knows that the
computer she is putting together with her hands is the most popular brand circulated
in the Chinese market.
Indeed, a few months later, the computer this young rural migrant worker assembles
finds its way onto the desk in a comfortably furnished office in another city miles
away. Prominently displayed on the desk alongside the computer is a tastefully
framed picture of a one-year old boy, smiling a broad and winning smile. The user of
this computer is an immaculately dressed woman in her mid-30s. The assistant to the
manager of her company, she beams confidence and contentment. She walks into her
office, switches on the computer on her desk – a brand assembled by our first woman
- and soon her deft, well manicured fingers start typing away on the keyboard. Since
she gave birth to her boy, this has been her ritual to start the day’s work. She enters
her login name and her password, and enters the chat room of parenting website. A
number of people have got there before her, some she knows, some new members. As
usual, conversations range from the recommended brand of talcum power for babies
in summer, to tips and hints on getting pregnant. While most are to do with babies and
parenting, conversations sometimes stray. On this day, the conversation seems to
centre around whether it is safe to travel by plane if one is to avoid virus and germs.
One visitor offers her view that plane trips which last longer than eight hours may
subject passengers to the viruses on board, whilst others chip in with questions about
SARS. Conversations flow freely and cheerfully, with new comers’ greetings and
others saying ‘bye’, ‘see you tomorrow’ before they log off. 1
Back home in an equally tastefully furnished apartment, the ayi , or the nanny2, has
just finished feeding the baby boy of her employer, the woman we have just
encountered. The nanny is now tidying up the kitchen and at the same time is
watching the morning television program. This is one hour in the day when she can
afford not to be run off her feet. Her employers have both left home for work, the
baby is fed and happy, and it may be a couple of hours before she has to do her daily
cleaning and thinking about cooking for dinner. The ayi is a woman in her early 30s.
She has a son of five years old, now living with his father and grandparents in the
village. Since leaving her village home a few months ago, she has been a live-in maid
for her employers, a couple living in a spacious three-bedroom apartment in a nice
suburb. Her job is to do whatever is necessary in the house, including most
importantly, looking after the child. The ayi has not had much education – only a
couple of years’ schooling back in the village school, so she prefers watching
television to reading as a form of entertainment when she gets a space in her day. She
sits down and starts watching whatever is being screened on the big state-of-the-art
television in the lounge on the day. Today the film is Not One Less, a film about Wei
Minzi, village girl wandering into the city in search of a run-away boy. Although
Minzi has not had proper schooling, she has been enticed to take a job as a substitute
teacher for the reward of 50 yuan, plus a 10 yuan bonus. Minzi is not a good teacher,
and her salary is contingent upon her making sure that no one goes missing from the
class. However, it so happens that a poverty-stricken boy does disappear from her
class, which sets Minzi off on a wild goose chase. She goes to the city to look for the
lost boy and meets with nothing but cold indifference and apathy from city folks.
Alone and helpless, she decides that she might find her student if she can manage to
get herself seen on television. Driven by this naïve faith, Minzi begs and pesters—
with a peasant’s graceless stubbornness—the television station’s security guards for
permission to enter the station. Her efforts finally pay off when the station manager,
by pure chance, stumbles across this persistent girl, who has by now become a fixture
at the entrance to the building. As it happens, the manager is a compassionate man,
and from then on, Minzi’s fortunes take a turn for the better. She appears on television
and makes a tearful plea for her wandering student to come home. The film ends with
Wei and her pupil happily going back to the village, with boxes of school stationery,
two television sets, and a big bundle of cash donated by urban television viewers.
The connection between the young woman on the assembly line making computers,
the city woman in the office using the computer, and the nanny staying at home
looking her the city woman’s baby, is logical but fictitious. I have invented them here
for the purpose of making what I think to be some cogent points regarding the
question of women and IT. However, although fictitious, the material realities behind
these imaginary women are very real indeed.
To start with, the young migrant worker in the electronics factory is typical of the
hundreds and thousands of China’s rural migrant women workers ( dagongmei,
working sisters) whose labour constitutes stable surplus value to the Chinese
transnational capitalists. Since the early 1990s, an increasing number of Chinese rural
labour migrants have left home to seek work in the prosperous urban areas and cities
of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This trend of mobility has continued
unabated, with villagers going to the city, northerners going south, and inlanders
journeying to the coast — all of them seeking work and income. Mostly producing
electronics, toys and other assembly lines of work, the labour market in southern SEZ
factories consists of more women migrant workers from various parts of China than
men, 3 and in this sense, our imaginary young woman embodies the labour relations in
this labour market which organised to reinforce and privilege a consistently male
bias.4 Carolyn Cartier, for instance, discusses the dynamics and intrinsic logical
connection between female migrant workers and transnational capitalism, and argues
that rapid economic development and industrialisation in southern China relies on the
exploitation of single young female migrants, who are most ‘susceptible to the
authority and demands of the management’. In addition, rural migrant women from
the provinces are also treated inequitably, in terms of wages and living conditions, in
comparison with their city counterparts, particularly if they are from across Hong
Kong.5 Usually referred to as dagongmei, these rural migrant women, by leaving
home and become a factory, actively participate in the process of becoming modern,
but their participation is premised on them accepting the terms and consequences of
modernisation process. On the factory’s shop floor, they are mostly treated as objects
to be ‘civilised’, ‘disciplined’, and ‘modernised’ so that both their ‘docile bodies’,
combined with ‘nimble fingers’6 are perfect condition of production for the
transnational capitalism.
Similarly, the imaginary middle-class city woman behind her computer – produced by
the nimble fingers of the migrant woman? – is portrayed in no less realistic vein. Due
to the rapid growth of urban, computer-literate women with both disposable income
and time, Chinese-language websites for women have mushroomed since the last
decade or so, ranging from commercially sponsored websites for women and personal
webpages run by women, 7 to governmental websites under the auspices of the China
Women’s Federation and its official publications.8 Also emerging is a small cluster of
websites of a non-governmental, non-commercial nature, maintained by women
professionals working in the IT industries.9 To obtain a clear understanding of the
politics of media consumption, we need to consider the ways in which the computerliterate, mostly urban, many middle-class, women, such as the one I have invented
here, are targeted and positioned variably as the political subject, consumer and
citizen at the same time. Government websites are worth considering because they
point to some of the ways in which “thought work” is done in state representations in
an age of increasing globalization and technological convergence. The use of
computer technology to reach the home—both national and diasporic—embodies the
desire and preferred approach of the Chinese government to link the state with home.
Commercial and non-governmental websites are worth considering because on the
one hand, these are spaces whereby some real possibilities for democratization lie but
on the other hand, they may also become new frontier to perpetuate the existing
practices of indoctrinating and commodifying women10 and to continue to inscribe
traditional social roles onto women. The two cohorts of websites need to be studied
together because only when they are juxtaposed can we see patterns of possible
ideological divergence and convergence in Chinese cyberspace. It is for these reasons
and in these contexts that I argue that the subject-formation of our imaginary middleclass woman’s consumption of media and communication technology should be
considered.
Finally, my fictitious account of the ayi is couched in the material realities
experienced by thousands of migrant women, particularly rural migrant women, who
have left their village homes to eke out a living in the city. Alongside becoming a
factory worker in the factories in southern coastal cities, becoming a domestic servant
provides another channel of employment for rural migrants who want to leave home
and try for a better living. It is difficult to be exact about a maid’s wage, since it
depends on many variables, many of which hard to quantify. Some employers, for
instance, may set the wage low but complement regular pay with either material
rewards or a bonus. In addition, baomu's payment changes from time to time to reflect
the level of income of urban residents. However, it is safe to speculate that among
many trades engaged by migrant workers, baomu’s work mostly involves menial
chores, and is relatively speaking ‘unappealing’11 both in terms of job satisfaction and
wages.
As I admitted earlier, the character of the ‘nanny’ is a figment of my imagination, but
the film she is watching on television Not One Less is real. Made by Zhang Yimou,
one of the most well-known and respected Chinese film-makers with international
acclaim, the film is one of the many contemporary Chinese films using the experience
of the rural migrant – particularly female migrant - as the narrative fodder. As part of
my plot, my imaginary nanny watches this film on television because this allows me
to make some points about the politics of representing female peasants. First, we
know very little about the habits of media consumption of the migrant women, and we
know even less about how her viewing habits impact on the formation of her
subjectivity. In fact, among the plethora of magazines and print publications devoted
to women, only one targets rural women.12 My in-depth interviews with a group of
domestic maids and corporate cleaners from villages of Anhui Province indicate that
the media consumption of rural migrants has diminished, rather than increased, since
their arrival in the city.13 While television used to be a daily reality back in the village,
these village women now working in the city either do not have a television in their
dormitories or are too tired after a long day’s work to watch television. Some tell me
that they can only afford to read newspapers that are thrown out by people whose
offices they clean, since newspapers cost money.
Against the socio-economic background, and urging you to keep in your mind the
three imaginary figures, I now turn to the first observation or critique, if you like, that
I would like to make today regarding the status quo of women and information
technologies in developing countries.
The Individual, the Everyday, and the Development of the Self
Most research on IT in developing countries tend to focus on the ‘big picture’, usually
concerned with regulation, policy formation, and technology and economic growth. In
light of this, I argue that it is a matter of political and intellectual urgency that
research into women and IT start to pay attention to, firstly, the lives of the individual
women; secondly, their experience of the everyday; and thirdly, the processes by
which the subjectivity of the individual woman is reshaped and reconstituted. Such an
intervention enables us to unravel and account for the tensions, contradictions and
possible ambivalence experienced by women in their everyday encounters with and
the use of IT.
To further substantiate this point, let us now return to the net-mum, or should we say
‘white-collar professional beauty’ (bai lin li ren), as they are often referred to, who
starts her average day in the office by checking in the chats room of the parenting
website. Today she may find herself giving advice to a young woman, possibly
dressed in an equally expensive business suit, typing away on her office desktop. This
on-line friend, while appearing at work, may in fact be receiving tips from fellow
visitors in the virtual chat room about the most opportune time to conceive, what a
woman can do to increase her chance of getting pregnant, how to read the texture of
vaginal mucus for signs of fertility, or how many more days she should wait to have a
reliable pregnancy test.14
The proliferation of websites for women poses an urgent research question for those
who are concerned with gender and IT. How do we read these individuals’ activities
on an everyday basis, and what do they tell us about the (re)formation of new
feminine subjectivities? Here it seems to me that the signs available are as confusing
as they are illuminating, and as a result, are more suggestive of a subjectivity which is
marked by ambiguity and ambivalence. On the one hand, one may be tempted to think
that parenting websites serve as textual index to a desire of women to return to
conservative, traditional roles. Website visitors come from all geographical locations
both inside and outside China, and often encounter members who have made a
conscious decision to become full-time mothers, since the father’s income can support
the families. Wang Gan, a registered member of a parenting website,15 observes that
stay-at-home mothers have now become a ‘status symbol’, although loneliness is the
price one has to pay for ‘enjoying the real feelings of being a woman’. In this case,
Yaolan.com provides a strong sense of community for those women who, though
highly educated and having good career prospects, decide to quit their jobs and
become full-time mothers. This is, however, a double bind. On one hand, it seems to
provide a forum where women can safely articulate her femininity and subjectivity
through motherhood; on the other hand, it seems to lend weight to the powerful logic
of gender inequality intrinsic to global capitalism. There is a third possible way of
reading this: as an active disavowal of the social role prescribed for women under the
rubric of socialist ideology, which is characterised by a false gender equality, a stateprescribed social role as a good mother and a good wife, and a denial of the feminine
agency. In fact one would be forgiven for wanting to read these parenting sites as an
articulation and celebration of an emerging new female subjectivity, which is
translocal – as well as transnational, Chinese, and modern. There is indeed an
interesting ontological dimension to such daily online activity. It is, first of all, both
local and translocal – women log in from Beijing and New York, Shanghai or Perth,
since it is the technological competence and access to IT which grant entry to this
community. It is, secondly, both virtual and embodied. Although members do not
have face to face contact, their concern - ranging from the change in the texture of
mucus for ovulating women to the temperature of a feverish baby of a worried mum –
is explicitly about the physical aspect of the self – and that of their children. Thirdly,
while eschewing the state position on a number of issues ranging from the number of
children permissible in one family, birth control, to the (dis)advantages of
breastfeeding, women freely participate in the discussion of these issues, thus actively
shaping and reshaping discourses of motherhood and femininity and at the same time
calling into question the distinction between the public and the
private/domestic/personal. Finally, it is self-consciously Chinese, as one would need
both literacy and word-processing skills in Chinese in order to be a real member of
the community. Again, as Wang observes, parenting websites such as yaolan.com
allow anyone who ‘can input Chinese’, or ‘with some computing knowledge’ to
celebrate femininity and/or motherhood.
Questions of Inequality: Between the working sisters and the net-mum
This argument about the importance of focusing on the individual and the everyday
may come across as a desire to return to the mundane or even trivial. In fact it stems
from a dissatisfaction with existing research 16 which sets out to investigate
relationship between gender and technology in contemporary China. These works, as
I have mentioned earlier, tend to look at the ‘big picture’, and in doing so, mostly fall
into the category of structural analyses, framed in quantitative, measurable terms.
They provide statistics on the number of households with personal computers, the
number of women working in the IT industry, or the content or programs serving or
targeting women audience/users. Tangential to such structural analysis is a tendency
to approach the issue of IT development from policy and regulation perspectives.17
These perspectives could be problematic as they are often underpinned by an
assumption that technology is necessarily empowering and enabling. In other words,
when and where gender and IT is examined, it usually has a technological
deterministic underpinning: any technology is better than no technology, high-tech is
better than low-tech, and technology is the answer to the liberation and enlightenment
of the population, and therefore a significant goal in the modernisation process. In
addition, there is a bias which intrinsically favors the higher end of the information
and communication hierarchy, i.e. the Internet, CMC (computer –mediated
communication), convergent and interactive technologies, therefore running the risk
of omitting the experience of large number of women who are not users of IT
industries and technologies. Indeed, the growth of IT industries in China is
impressive, as is Chinese women’s growing participation in the IT industry as both
producers and as consumers. In fact, trotting out what seems like staggering numbers
and figures about home computers ownership, or the number of people having e-mail
or Internet access in China seems to be a standard practice among both journalists and
academics who wish to make a point about the exponential development of IT in
reforms China. In reality, such figures can be misleading, when taken out of the
context. Studying the IT industries in both China and India, Franda, for instance,
observes that when it comes to assessing the development of the IT and the use of the
Internet in both China and India, the world’s two largest developing nations, it is
important to ‘gain a more balanced perspective on Internet use and the place of the
Internet in modern Chinese life.18
There may be a number of reasons why statistics - though they may be accurate or
true in their own right - can be misleading. Apart from the problematic assumption of
technological determinism, fetishizing numbers or figures may hide rather than reveal
the inequality which exist in the way new technologies are distributed, accessed and
controlled. After all, it does not take a sophisticated ‘China-hand’ to realize that
market liberalization, globalization and economic reforms have resulted in significant
social stratification among the Chinese population, resulting in unprecedented
disparity between the information rich and the information poor, the techno-haves and
the techno-have-nots. Mobility – both social and geographic – has become the most
palpable social reality, which has given rise to hitherto unknown social groups,
ranging from ‘white-collar beautiful women’ to ‘the working sisters’, ‘laid-off factory
workers’.19 Also at the bottom of the social rung, and largely denied access to
information technologies are the vast population of the female rural population, which
constitute around 48% of the rural population, which in turn constitutes around 70%
of the Chinese population (Chen, 2001, 178).
To be sure, statistical information about the growth of IT industries in developing
countries is not to be rejected, for in order to make the argument that the benefits of
IT are unevenly distributed, one needs to be use statistics. Also, for those who are
numerate, it should not be difficult to see that a rise in absolute numbers of people
owning or using IT may not necessarily mean an even distribution through the
population. However, I am concerned by a possibility that the ‘explosive’ figures
indicating growth or development of IT in China may sometimes be read in isolation.
I am arguing that in order not to perpetuate and reinforce inequality, one always needs
to ask the implications when juxtaposing statistics of IT growths and statistics of
unequal ratio between those who access IT and those who do not. In other words, to
conjure up our imaginary women again, I stress that a female body whose vision and
imagination is greatly enhanced and extended beyond the physical via keyboard, thus
enjoying ‘mobile privatizations’20 needs to be looked at alongside the ‘docile body’
on the assembly line whose yearning for mobility seems to be forever delayed. I raise
this concern because, as it may not be surprising to us by now, IT is a gendered
field,21 as is the concept of literacy. IT employs more men than women – although
cheap labor on the assembly line is done by women, speaks to men more than to
women, hence the rationale and significance of a forum such as this. What is less
acknowledged is the fact that the level of media literacy is determined by the
dynamics among three sets of hierarchies: the level of technological competence,
socio-economic status, and gender. Put in the context of China in the reform era, what
we see is the following scenario. While women are targeted as consumers and objects
of consumption across all forms of media – may it be newspapers, television, or
websites, it is often the case that the higher the social and economic status is, the more
likely one is to benefit from access to higher end of the information technology. In
other words, men and women with tertiary education, in the city, and working in
professional positions are more likely to participate in the production and
consumption of information technologies at the high end (the Internet, CAC, and
other forms of convergent and interactive technologies), whereas if you are a rural
migrant, having low social and economic clout, and having low media literacy, you
are likely to hold little sway in the production and consumption of media
technologies, even though the manufacture of IT technologies relies on the
exploitation of the cheap labor provided by the rural migrant woman. Though
contributing enormously to the industrialization and modernization processes, this
large social group has little voice or visibility in the high-tech domain, not in spite of
but precisely because of their deniable presence as sources of cheap labor. Similarly,
if you are a rural migrant, a woman, and also economically marginalized, you are
likely to have fewest choices as a media consumer and subsequently the lowest media
literacy. This may explain why out of seventy-odd women’s publications, only one, as
mentioned above, speaks to the rural migrant. And this may also explain why, in spite
of its target audience, Rural Women Know It All, a state-funded publication, often
speak to and on behalf of rural women, and positions them as targets of education and
indoctrination rather than as individuals with political agency. Given this, I argue that
we should take seriously the critiques of technologies which foreground, rather than
background, the issue of inequality.22
Given this, it is critical that we do not succumb to a celebratory modernist way of
thinking which views the arrival and adoption of IT as necessarily emancipatory,
enlightening, and implicitly democratizing. Again, there are a wide range of reasons
why it would be dangerous to do so. After all, one cannot really lump women of many
social and economic situations under the general category of gender. We must come
up with research perspectives that consider and account for the fact that, after all,
women in any given national context do not have the same political, economic
interests, nor do they have the same social imagination and consciousness. This leads
me to the second point or argument which I wish to make here. We need to adopt a
more productive approach in asking questions of gender and technology. Such an
approach should adequately describe, understand and account for the differences in
the ways in which modernity changes and is changed by, women. Since some women
are agents of technological change and may stand to benefit from modernity, other
women may in fact stand to see their role of subordination reinforced and have to
accept the terms and consequences of modernity. A critical perspective therefore must
be incorporated so as to highlight and understand the inequality inherent in the
modernization process.
Technology and Power: from the Material to the Symbolic
My last observation is closely tied with the first two, and has to do with a dearth of
critical attention to the relationship between technology and power. As can be seen
from my juxtaposition of two imaginary figures. On the one hand, there are rural
women migrants, many of whom are ‘working sisters’ (dagongmei) in the city, who
have become objects of the urban gaze as a result of visual communication
technologies such as film and television. The other group consists of urban middleclass mums on the Internet, who seem to be actively reworking and redefining their
social roles and relations as they routinely log in to chat with other net-mums. The
contrast between these two disparate groups of women is which silence the voices of
their female characters in spite of their presence, while on the other hand, a particular
form of female subjectivity is actively (re)produced by the sharing of motherhood
experiences via the Net. Such a contrast usefully reveals the inequality which exists at
both material and symbolic levels.23
Let us first look at inequality in the material sense. Needless to say, it is the servitude
of the thousands of nannies which enables many urban educated women to cope with
having both a family and a profession in the market economy. Among many
employment options taken up by rural migrants, becoming a domestic worker, one of
the most menial and lowly paid jobs, provides opportunities for many rural women to
enter the labour market in urban spaces. Often referred to as baomu, 'nanny' or ‘the
maid’, her work has diversified to include cleaning, cooking and baby-sitting, and she
works on either a casual, part-time, full-time or live-in basis. However, the service
provided by baomu not only caters to practical and material needs of her employer,
but more importantly, helps to enhance the social status and identity of the person
who employs her. Increasingly, the use of domestic help has become, alongside a big
apartment, a passport, or a car, a sign of good living. While many hire part-timers to
do housework which needs to be done but cannot be done by themselves, a growing
number of middle-class people or families are hiring maids mainly because they are
available and affordable. To put it bluntly, the servitude offered by the nannies is
crucial to the emergence of urban middle-class elites such as the net-mums one
encounters in cyberspace. Here we can see that the mobility of one sector of the
female population can trigger a chain of consequences for another sector. In the urban
family where housework was previously done by the wife, the acquisition of the maid
frees the wife from these household duties so that she can seek employment in a job
which offers more pay, a higher degree of job satisfaction and in short, provides
upward social mobility. In this sense, it may be true that while in the past one could
say that behind a successful man there is a woman, one can say nowadays that behind
a successful woman there may be a maid. Maybe we can go even one step further and
say that behind a virtual online mother who is busy celebrating her modern femininity
and motherhood, there is a physical body, tolling away at the most menial housework
in real space.
However, what is equally important but much less acknowledged or examined is the
fact that these emerging urban middle-class residents are not only the consumers of
the servitude of rural migrant workers, but also the consumers of a range of dominant
urban folklores and narratives which objectify rural migrants, including the ayi
looking after their babies and factory workers producing their computers. What
Mackie (2000) refers to as the ‘metropolitan gaze’ is clearly present in most of the
popular representations of migrant women. The construction of the baomu, for
instance, exemplifies the nature of this gaze. Urban, well-to-do residents - both male
and female - often find themselves caught in a situation whereby they do not trust
baomu yet put her in charge of duties in the house involving great degree of intimacy,
responsibility and confidentiality. Like the maid in Victorian England, whom
McClintock describes as 'a threshold figure',24 the baomu transgresses the boundaries
of the public and the private, the waged and the unwaged, and the boundaries of the
family. For this reason the maid is the object of intense social scrutiny, anxiety, and
fascination. The mass-appeal papers often tell stories about the maid’s escapades,
ranging from stealing money from employers, or being negligent of babies in their
care, or seducing the man in the household (sometimes the husband and at other times
the son), to being sacked after proving to have unclean habits or being diagnosed to
have a contagious disease. Some employers are also known to resort to various kinds
of 'integrity tests' to ensure that their maid is honest and trustworthy. For these
reasons, the experiences of the baomu (domestic maid) and her relationship with her
employers provide staple fodder for popular representations, ranging from feature
film (The Girl From Yellow Mountain (1983) (Huangshan lai de gu niang) to
television dramas (Professor Tian’s Household and Their 28 Maids (1999) (Tian Jia
Shou Jia de Er Shi Ba Ge Baomu). At the risk of saying the obvious, in spite of the
abundance of media narratives focusing on the experience of the migrant women,
both in the print media and on the electronic screen, few are produced by and on
behalf of rural women. They are largely represented as the objects to be civilized, who
exist at the intersection between state indoctrination, commodification, and the
compassion of the urban middle-class. The truth is that whilst where is a dearth of
media outlets which operate in the interest of the rural migrant women, there are an
abundance of narrative materials, in both print and electronic forms, whereby the
migrant woman is actively and profusely ‘constructed’ or ‘produced’.
Zhang Yimou’s film is one of these cultural products which contribute to such
objectification. Zhang Yimou, in making the film Not One Less, wanted to be as
realistic as possible by documenting China’s rural poverty so as to awaken the
compassion of the urban viewers.25 Like many of his journalist counterparts, however,
Zhang’s story of compassion is significant in the formation and articulation of an
urban middle-class sensibility. Like them, Zhang was, while empathetic and
sympathetic to the migrant 'other', nevertheless insisted on seeing the rural migrants as
the 'other': devoid of agency, silent or inarticulate, and incapable of speaking on their
own behalf. This is, as I have argued elsewhere, usually achieved through a default
association between poverty, women, children, and rural life. In order to turn an
ordinary peasant girl like Wei Minzhi into one with maximum cinematic appeal, she,
as the film suggests to us, must remain inarticulate, clumsy, and, in short, un-modern.
Helpless and clueless, Wei in the story appeals to the “metropolitan gaze” of urban
television viewers within the film—as well as of the film audience itself—not in spite
of, but precisely because of, her gracelessness and clumsiness. For this reason, it
appears to us that her pursuit of modernity via television must be held in check. Her
television appearance objectifies, rather than emancipates, her. To ensure her status as
the recipient of urban sympathy and support, Wei must not only appear incapable of
becoming modern, but she must also be content never to want to become the speaking
subject. When her wish to appear on television finally materializes, she does not know
what to say; all she can do is cry into the camera. Unable to speak for herself, she
becomes an object to be constructed and produced, and it is television, the epitome of
the technology of control, that assumes this role.
Conclusion
I have, admittedly provocatively, started my discussion about women and IT in China
by putting these three imaginary figures – that of the factory worker on the shop floor,
a net-mum in her office, and her nanny – together. I am doing so in order to make a
few observations, or dare I say, critiques about the existing research paradigms in
raising questions about information technology and society. In other words, I hope
this can be heard as a cautionary tale against a number of possible blind spots when
we – rightly, of course - raise the question of the relationship between women and IT
in developing countries such as China.
This is because, in these countries’ efforts to modernise and catch up with the
Western world, what we are confronted with is the fact that modernity does not arrive
everywhere at the same time, nor does it arrive in the same sequence of forms. Also,
modernity may arrive again and again, layer upon layer, and as a result we must deal
with it — and its implications — each time it manifests itself in different shapes and
colours. The paper thus argues that question of women and IT must start and end with
asking whether new technology empowers women, and such a question must be
considered not only by measuring women’s access — or lack of it — to information
and communication technologies, but more importantly, by looking at and
understanding the various and unequal ways in which information and communication
technologies construct various forms of female subjectivity.
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I am indebited to Wang Gan’s work for drawing my attention to this kind of website
at first place. I am now a registered member of one of the parenting websites. I am,
however, more of a ‘lurker’ than regular contributor to the on-line conversations. The
detailed information listed here comes from a given day in July when I went into the
chats room when this paper was being written. It seems that on average, on most
1
given days when I go on-line, there are usually about 40 to 50 on-line, and
conversation flows really steadily. Last accessed August 2003.
2
She is most often referred to as baomu, the maid, although she is addressed by
employers, especially the children of the employers’ family, as ayi, which literally
means ‘aunty’. The fact that she is called ayi regardless of her age testifies to the fact
it is more a description of her social status rather than an accurate indication of her
age.
3 See Ching Kwan Lee, Factory Regines of Chinese capitalism in Ungrounded
Empires, in eds. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini for a detailed discussion of the
organisation of the female migrant workers in this labour market.
4 Cartier, Globalising South China, 2001, p.193.
5 See again, Lee Kwan Ching (1997) and Pun (see below) for a discussion of the
differences in the perception and treatment of different groups of factory women.
6 Pun Ngai’s ethnographic work describing the work and life of some migrant
workers in a factory in southern China, for instance, supports this view. See Pun,
‘Becoming dagongmei’, China Journal, 2000. The combination of the ‘docile body’
and ‘nimble fingers’ offered by the rural migrant workers has been discussed in many
places, including, instance, Cartier, Pun, and Lee.
7
Examples of commercially sponsored websites targeting women can be found in
http://cn.dir.yahoo.com/society_and_culture/cultures_and_groups/women/.
8
For those we are not aware of the state agencies on women’s affairs, the All-China
Women's Federation is a mass organization under the leadership of the Chinese
Communist Party, comprising a hierarchy of organizations reaching from the national
level down to the village. The Federation has its own publications such as Chinese
Women’s Movement, and China Women’s Daily. The latter went on-line in 1998. See
http:://www.cwwomen.ac.cn. Last accessed August 2003.
9
http://www.webgirls.com.cn
10
I have discussed elsewhere how a co-existence between state control and market
liberalisation has resulted in the media – both official and commercial – positioning
women, particular migrant women, as objects of indoctrination and fetishisation. See
Sun in Arianne Gaetano and Tamara Jacka, 2003 (in press).
11 Michael Dutton, for instance, compares the work of baomu an prostitution, and
argues although being a baomu is more ‘respectable’ in moral terms, it is much less
rewarding in financial terms, which is why some migrant women turn to prostitution.
(Dutton, 1998, 79).
12
Nongjianu Baishitong (Rural Women Know It All), under the auspice of China
Women’s Daily, is the only publication targeting rural woman among around 70
women’s magazines. It also has an on-line version, which stands out among a plethora
of websites and web pages devoted to women.
13. Wuwei is a county in Anhui Province that has a tradition of exporting domestic
servants to middle-class families in Shanghai, Beijing, and other big Chinese cities. I
have conducted some in-depth interviews with domestic workers from Wuwei and
contract cleaners from Mengcheng County Anhui, all of whom are presently working
in Shanghai. See Wanning Sun, “Anhui Baomu in Shanghai: Gender, Class and a
Sense of Place”, forthcoming.
14
My on-line lurking experience tells me that sharing tips about conceiving a baby is
a most perennial topic, alongside dietary information for babies.
15
Wang Gan is a research fellow affiliated with the China Academy of Social
Sciences and a mother of a young child. She is both a registered member of the
website and an academic who has written about the site. See her article “Building A
Mothering Community On the Internet in China”, 2002.
16
For instance, Bu, 2001(a); Feng, 2001.
17 See for instance, Bu, 2001(b).
18
Marcus Franda (2002), for instance, observes that when it comes to reporting IT
growth in China, figures are often presented to indicate ‘explosive’ growth. See
China’s Domestic Internet Development’, in China and India Online: Information
Technologies Politics and Diplomacy in the World’s Two Largest Nations. In reality,
Franda argues, such figures can be misleading, when taken out of the context. Franda
adivses us to ‘gain a more balanced perspective on Internet use and the place of the
Internet in modern Chinese life.
19
‘White-collar beautiful women’ (bailing liren), refers to women professionals who
are well-educated, Westernised and good-looking. ‘’The working sister’ (dagongmei)
refers to rural women who have left village homes and try to eke out a living in the
city, doing menial work. ‘Laid-off factory women workers’ (xiagang nugong) refers
to a significant number of factory workers who have been retrenched from the state
enterprise restructuring, and have thus become the urban poor.
20 The concept is first used by Raymond Williams whose writing on technology has
greatly informed generations of scholars writing on the relationship between
technology and culture. It refers to the dramatic retreat of social life into privatised
settings, on the one hand, and opportunities for people to be transpotted to
destinations well beyond the confines of physical spaces. See Williams, Television:
Technology and Cultural Form, 1974.
21 There is a plethora of works examining the relationship between gender and
technologies. See for instance, Adam and Green (1998), Everts (1998), Jensen (2002),
Gree (2001), and Cockburn and Furst-Dilic, eds., 1994.
22
There is, not surprisingly, established work which takes a critical view of the place
of technology in society. See for instance, Wyatt et al, 2000; Mackay, 1995; Thomas,
1995.
23 See Herwood, 2001, for a thoughtful discussion on material and symbolic
inequality.
24
McClintock (1995) examines the relationship between power and desire in the imperial
metropolis of the Victorian England through a case study detailing Author Munby, a wellknown Victorian barrister’s, life-long obsession and - erotic - fascination with his maid and
maids in general.
25
Zhang is documented as saying that he intended to make the film resemble a
documentary, so that it looks as close to reality as possible. See Liu, 2000.