Suku and the Self-Valorization of Chinese Women Workers: Before, during, and after Enterprise Privatization

Abstract

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used suku (speaking bitterness) in ideological education movements to teach subaltern women to give voice to their personal narratives of oppression in accordance with Maoist political doctrine. Suku is thus a historically specific practice and a culturally specific form of women’s narrative practice. By listening to and observing the post-Mao suku narrative performance of my grandmother, a retired State-Owned Enterprise (SOE) worker, I show that her suku is a gendered performance, a form of labor that blurs production and reproduction, and a form of embedded personhood; and that suku as a form of narrative persisted through the period of economic reforms, even though its intent and audience became transformed. My kin relationship with this particular suku performance allows an analysis of the impact of suku on cross-generational relationships—those between first-generation SOE workers and laid-off SOE workers in former SOE families. Furthermore, I argue that suku can be seen as a form of labor and self-valorization of Chinese women workers discarded in the new economy, and contrary to its original disciplinary purposes, as a form of resistance.