Abstract
Several profound demographic and socioeconomic transitions that have taken place since the 1980s have reshaped the everyday lives of women with children in contemporary China, as has the interaction between the Chinese modernisation process and transforming Confucianism. This thesis aims to investigate and compare the implications of these shifting social, institutional, and economic dynamics on women using a multiscalar and mixed-methods approach. The methods include the descriptive data analysis of national datasets and the thematic analysis of policy documents, which explore the breadth of socioeconomic transitions. A qualitative case study approach is also used to collect empirical data from a city and a village in Guangdong province. Empirical data are collected via sixty-nine semi-structured interviews with 13 stakeholders and 56 individual informants, which captures the complex and multidimensional experiences of women with children. As the foundation of this study, the human dignity approach is applied and developed to explore five interlinked dimensions of these lived experiences: physical and psychological well-being, care relations, social integration, self-determination, and equal value.The findings of secondary data suggest that Chinese families have become structurally independent under the transformation to a state-led market economy and its interaction with family planning policies. However, the lived experiences show that receiving support from older parents (in-laws) is still central to women’s coping strategies of the women to maintain care relationships, paid work, and further career development. The empirical evidence also reveals the rationale behind the different strategies, bringing to the fore how rural and urban women’s heterogeneous experiences are reconfigured through the interaction of the social stratifications of gender, place, and generation (age). Furthermore, this thesis further elaborates on the impact of continuities and changes in the labour market and family practises in relation to women’s self-determination in couple finance, household decision making, and parenting. Through rich empirical and theoretical analysis, this thesis has the potential to inform policy practises to address both institutional and spatial barriers facing women with children, promote the equal value of paid and unpaid care work, and meet women’s changing needs in different dimensions of everyday life.
Date of Award | 5 Dec 2023 |
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Original language | English |
Awarding Institution |
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Supervisor | Patricia A Kennett (Supervisor) & Misa Izuhara (Supervisor) |