Date: Monday, August 19, 2024
Time: 5 – 6pm AEST
Location: Online
Women’s Entitlement in China’s Urbanization: Family Division of Relocated Housing Properties
This event is part of the mini seires on “Women in China”. Please join us for the other two webinars online.
When Socialist Legacy Meets International Norms: Gender Quota Adoption and Institutional Change in China (Monday 12 August 2024)
Media, Gender and Politics: Representation of Female Political Leaders in The People’s Daily (Monday 26 August 2024)
This study examines family property structures in relocated rural communities in the urbanizing China. Drawing on survey and interview data from Ningxia, Northwestern China, this study illustrates how relocated housing properties were divided between male and female family members. The findings suggest that both gender and family structures matter in shaping family property structures. On the one hand, men tended to receive more housing properties across different families. On the other hand, women’s access to family properties is affected by mechanisms different from that of men. Given the changes in government policies and local customs, rural families have adapted their strategies of property management but patriarchal traditions have coexisted and interacted with new demands and new tensions among family members in the era of urbanization.
About the speakers
Jing Song is an Associate Professor in Gender Studies Programme at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and an Associate Researcher (by courtesy) at Shenzhen Research Institute, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She got her BA and MA in sociology at Peking University and PhD in sociology at Brown University. Prof Song studies gender and family issues with a focus on work, property, and political participation, as well as how gender roles and family lives are shaped by migration, urbanization, and market transition. She has published in China Quarterly, Journal of Contemporary China, American Behavioral Scientist, Urban Studies, Journal of Rural Studies, Work, Employment and Society, China Review, Gender in Management, Housing Studies, Population, Space and Place, Journal of Sociology, etc. Her book Gender and Employment in Rural China was published by Routledge in 2017.
Louise Edwards (Moderator) is Emeritus Professor of Chinese History at UNSW, Sydney. She is also Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong’s School of Modern Languages and Cultures and the University of Technology of Sydney’s Australia-China Research Institute and a Senior Advisor to Asialink at Melbourne University. In 2022 she was appointed as Chair of the Board to the ANU’s China in the World Centre. Her most recent sole-authored books include Citizens of Beauty: Drawing Democratic Dreams in Republican China (Washington University Press, 2020), Women Warriors and Wartime Spies of China (Cambridge University Press 2016), and Women Politics and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage in China (Stanford University Press 2008). Edwards is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities.
