The Construction of the Double Burden: Gendered Childcare System in Post-Mao China

Abstract

This paper examines the shift of the childcare system in post-Mao China, by reviewing the “children's project” (ertong gongzuo) during the 1980s and the early 1990s from a gender perspective. The children's project is a comprehensive child welfare project including nurseries and preschool education. It was assigned to the All China Women's Federation (ACWF) after 1981. In the earlier years, the ACWF mainly addressed women's contribution on Socialist Modernization, and paid less attention to child welfare. Official statements, documents, and personal memoirs at that time reveal that there were disputes among ACWF cadres on whether and how they should “balance double burden on a yoke”. That is to say, ACWF itself was facing the “double burden” on their policies, when the well-known “Women-Go-Home” (funü huijia) debates retargeted women to take the double burden of production and reproduction. Moreover, presumably ACWF had a small budget for this policy under the reduction of public investment. Local women's federation encouraged jobless youths and retirees to run “home-based nurseries” (jiating tuo'ersuo), which required a smaller budget. This paper shall discuss how the double burden was politically constructed and how the cost of reproduction was controlled in the gendered economic regime of post-Mao China.