Education About Asia: Online Archives

Through Chinese Women’s Eyes

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Through Chinese Women’s Eyes was filmed in Shanghai and Beijing by Dr. Mayfair Yang, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. This film looks closely at the contrast between Maoist and post-Maoist China through the words and experiences of female factory workers, office personnel, academics, entrepreneurs, and women employed in new categories of service work like today’s popular “hospitality girls.” Using a seamless integration of narration, interviews, and background information, this very important film focuses on the dramatic effects on women and women’s lives of the shifts from socialism to a market economy and globalization in the 1980s and 1990s.