Women at the margin: Challenging boundaries of the political in Hong Kong, 1982--1997 (China)

There is extensive research on the roles played by states and organized women in broader processes of change like transition, but the connections between these two groups of actors remain relatively unexplored. This dissertation offers a gender analysis of why the colonial government instituted pro-women policies during Hong Kong's authoritarian transfer of rule (1982–1997), from British colony to a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China (PRC), and the differential impact this policy-making had on politically active women. Fieldwork included interviews, participant observation, and archival research. A multi-leveled, civil society-based analytical framework is developed to examine three case studies of pro-women policy-making: indigenous women's equal inheritance rights, anti-discrimination legislation, and grassroots women's political participation rights.; Drawing from studies on gender, the state, and policy-making and debates on civil society in the contemporary PRC, the dissertation offers three theoretical propositions to explain the official adoption of women-related legislation and the outcomes of policy-making for women. The research suggests that the Hong Kong government's use of pro-women policies for larger political goals, the influence of organized women's mobilization on official pro-women policymaking, and the politicization of gender issues in local struggles backed by opposing versions of national identity are all factors that significantly shaped the relationship between transition and women in colonial Hong Kong.; The dissertation builds on revisionist perspectives of state-society relations in Hong Kong, which challenge official claims of local political apathy and ideas about transient local democratization, but fail to consider gender politics. The dissertation contributes more generally to studies on civil society in the contemporary PRC by showing that further economic reform and political opening would serve the Beijing leadership's goals of unity and stability better than harsher authoritarian solutions. The dissertation also improves on unitary definitions of the state in the feminist literature and provides knowledge about engaging the state for women activists, the international community, and contributors to U.S. debates on China policy.