Conflict between Political Ideal and Reality: The Life Stories of Female Leaders in the PRC

This study starts at understanding the reasons of low women political participation rate since the 1980s in the context of discourse of "gender equality", which has been established for 60 years in the socialist Chinese mainland. After reviewing the Chinese and English literatures on women political participation, I decide to adopt the integrative approach of feminism, critical theory and post- structuralism to study the life stories of 9 female leaders in socialist Chinese mainland.;In the past twenty years, I had chances to participate in the female leaders training program as the trainers. Based on the in-depth interview with the female leaders and the participant observation in the training class, I would like to answer the following questions: how did the female leaders' awareness of political participation emerge and form their political subjectivity in different stage of their life? How to understand their agency in the process of their political participation?;My conclusion is that the female leaders have different sort of subjectivities and views of political participation in different stage of their life. However they have never ever had the view of serving for the women via political participation. I argue that dominant discourse could not shape the political subjectivity of the female leaders and their political identity. Besides, I also find that even though the female leaders had obtained high position in political hierarchy, they still experienced the discrimination and exclusion in political arena. They found it very difficult to actualize the ideal of political participation for women and fulfill their political responsibility. In this difficult situation, there were no collective actions or movements against the exclusion of women's political right. However, the National Women Federation still played the "rightful resistance" and the female leaders also adopted the strategy of "everyday forms of resistance" in defending their political right. In the process, we can discover that they are active agents rather than the passive dominated objects.