COVER STORY The Grapes of Wrath
The economy has been expanding madly, but not fast enough to stave off a gigantic wave of joblessness. The human toll is grim—and the threat to China's stability looks increasingly dire.
Wang Xiaohong spends her nights in the ballroom of the Workers' Cultural Palace in Shenyang's industrial Tiexi district. The hall is the sort of place where factory laborers once gathered to study Mao Zedong Thought and to cheer propaganda operas. Today, waltzes from a cheap keyboard echo crazily from walls stained with decades of cigarette smoke. Wang, 34, hopes her tight green sweater will win her an invitation to dance—she charges a dollar for four songs. A man reeking of sorghum liquor and rotten teeth sidles by, inspecting her. Wang lost her job in a state-owned department store in March, two years after her husband's last paycheck. Now she's the family breadwinner. Rotten Teeth approaches again. "I can't do anything else, and this pays the bills," Wang says, and heads to the dance floor with him.
Lifted by ideology from their historical roles as property or prostitutes, China's women arguably gained the most from Chairman Mao's revolution. Under communism, nearly all urban females who wanted work found employment in state-run factories, which offered free schools and day care. More Chinese women took senior government positions than in any other Asian nation.
But during the country's push to build a free market economy, women such as Wang are increasingly finding themselves back where they started, victims of a post-commune misogynistic backlash. When state enterprises cut staff or go broke, women are the first to lose their jobs. And while laid-off men grab the best private-sector positions or choose to remain unemployed in hopes of finding suitable work later, women are being forced to take whatever menial jobs they can find to support their families. "Men won't work for a pittance," says Hu Guirong, who works a $30 a month job scrubbing backs in a Shenyang bathhouse while her unemployed boyfriend watches over her eight-year-old child. "I'll do what it takes to keep my daughter in school."
Walk through the industrial district in just about any city in China and you can see women falling from loftier economic stations: the vendors peddling cheap calculators and fake Hello Kitty notebooks, restaurant helps, street sweepers and ragpickers are all disproportionately female. "Most bosses would rather hire men, so for too many women these are the only jobs available," says Liu Suling, herself a former street vendor who now runs an employment agency. Since 1994 the number of women working for government or state enterprises has plunged 24%. While job retraining centers teach men to become chefs, mechanics and carpenters, women learn less lucrative trades like haircutting and cosmetics. A recent Ministry of Labor and Social Security study concluded that the re-employment rate for women is 19% lower than that for men.
Yet to some, China's fallen women retain a certain dignity, representing a capitalist-era replacement for communism's selfless "model workers." Cut loose from the security blanket of the state, they continue to provide by any means possible. "What happens when it's time for school? I can't disappoint my child," says a woman selling name-card holders in a Tiexi market. Says Li Hongtao of the China Women's College, who has researched how men and women handle job loss: "Men will hold out for factory work, even if it doesn't exist. Women rise to the occasion." These days China's unemployed women are holding up more than their half of the sky.
