The making of ‘state-subjects’: a neo-institutional analysis of communist women cadres involved in China’s local governance
Keywords: gender
politics
governance
China
representation
communist

While scholarly work on women’s political participation and representation in liberal democracies has been developed extensively, few researchers have theorised about the different nature of women’s political involvement inside of Leninist parties and authoritarian states. The existing literature on Chinese women’s involvement in politics is still limited to the ‘add women and stir’ approach and lacks in-depth analyses of the gendered nature of the coercive state power and state institutions. Using China’s post-socialist governance as an example, my doctoral research investigates the following research question: how are the political subjectivities of communist women cadres made? How do such subjectivities interplay with the inner processes and functions of political institutions? By highlighting an anthropological understanding of state institutions, my thesis aims to bring new insights to the nature of authoritarian state power and state institutions with gendered perspectives.
The empirical basis for this research consists of political ethnography conducted over one year in three different provinces in China. The data collection involved carrying out continuous participant observation and in-depth interviews with over 40 female leading figures in China’s local governments, party committees, Party schools and Women’s Federations. Field notes, policy documents and press articles were collected during the course of the ethnography. The thesis utilises a neo-institutional approach to embed the stories of women cadres into China’s political system and create a synthesis of political discourses, norms and practices that have formed the basis of women cadres’ encounters with the state.
My dissertation demonstrates there is a kind of political parallelism that isolates women’s politics from the mainstream politics within China’s political sphere. On one hand, in order to maintain political legitimacy and the socialist tradition of gender equality, women cadres are often assumed by the state to be the representatives of women’s interests and are therefore constrained within the marginalised sphere and a semi-political ‘mass organisation’ in charge of ‘women’s work’. On the other hand, to gain access to greater political opportunities, women cadres have to give up their gendered political agendas to meet both the masculinised political norms and more pragmatic interests of economic development and social stability in the local Party-States.
Another contribution of this thesis is the concept of state-subjects, which illustrates both the process and the final result of how individuals working inside authoritarian regimes are subjugated to the transformative state power. The concept illustrates that while on the surface, women cadres (especially those who stepped out of the ‘women’s sphere’ of politics) belong to the privileged political elite and the ruling class, as state-subjects they are in fact sandwiched between the coercive power of the state and the rising demands of the civil society. Women cadres, who are cultivated, sponsored and appointed by the Party-State to their positions, are pressured to perform both the role of a charismatic agent of the state in front of their subordinates and ‘the masses’, and, simultaneously, are subject to ubiquitous and masculine disciplinary norms of the state in their everyday work.
While both theories reveal the inherent dilemmas of women cadres’ existence within a masculinist authoritarian state, the thesis also substantiates their creative agency and camouflaged resistance at play in everyday political life. Through the revelation of these highly individualised, gendered and politicised stories, this research expands the existing theorisation on the state-society relationship, revisits the limitations of the gender political representation theories and brings back the human factor to the study of the state institutions.