The crisis of masculinity: Class, gender, and kindly power in post‐Mao China

Abstract

In this article, I examine how Chinese state enterprises sustain social stability in the wake of mass unemployment caused by privatization. At the same time that China, in its attempt to sustain stability, unmakes, or remakes, state workers into entrepreneurial subjects, it attempts to remake itself as a benevolent patriarchal government exercising kindly power. State enterprises translate labor unrest into a crisis of masculinity and the sustaining of stability into governing men and masculinity. For men, mass unemployment has meant the loss of virility associated with life‐tenured employment, and this loss of livelihood and virility results in social instability, which is embodied in the unemployed male. Male workers then use the language of gender and family and translate it back into an expression of class antagonism.

Expressions of Masculinity and Femininity in Husbands’ Care of Wives with Cancer in Accra

“…Class, therefore, has become quite a fluid concept, and more and more evidence suggests an almost uniform social system in which, for women, gender itself is the most salient characteristic (Yeboah et al 2014). These observations align with Ortner’s (1991) suggestion that “class, as a fundamental category, is often deflected or dispersed into categories like gender, race or ethnicity, which are more easily reconciled with the demands of a liberal ideology and its solution to social problems” (cited in Yang 2010:552).…”

Blogging Chinese new masculinities: An analysis of a Chinese A-list personal blog

“…Compared with the old generations, their lifestyles are developed with decreasing consideration of social solidarity (and/or conformity) and increasing awareness of individuality or the 'self". In the media, however, Chinese young men are framed as being amid a socalled 'men's crisis' in which men are criticized for being overpowered by women's rise in the public sphere (Yang, 2010). In 2007, for instance, a featured news story reported that about 85% of higher education enrolment in Anhui Province consists of female students and suggested that action be taken to 'save boys' (Huang, 2007).…”

“Fake Happiness”: Counseling, Potentiality, and Psycho‐Politics in China

“…China has only 2.4 counselors per one million people—a stark contrast with the United States, which has 3,000 counselors per one million people (Han and Kan ). Meanwhile, efforts have been made by state planners to create jobs (through major campaigns between 1998 and 2003), but these have been insufficient to make up for 35 million layoffs that resulted from privatization of state enterprises since the mid‐1990s (Yang ).…”

“…These negative potentials are “hidden dangers or risks” ( yinhuan )—a buzzword in Chinese propaganda on sustaining stability. These dangers or risks include more explicit factors or groups that are perceived by the party to be hostile and likely pose direct threats to stability, for example, falungong practitioners, and less explicit factors or groups such as those who experienced drastic downward mobility in social status because of ongoing economic restructuring, especially urban workers who, as the ideological representatives of Mao's socialism, have been marginalized and impoverished since the mid‐1990s (see also Yang ; Zhao ). Such potential dangers can become the objects of psychological “care.” In the Chinese context, the threat and its nature are unspecifiable and indeterminately potential.…”