“Dancing in Chains”: Single Women of the One-Child Generation Struggling for Empowerment in Contemporary Urban China

Urban only daughters, seen as the biggest beneficiaries of China's One-Child Policy since the 1980s, are often perceived as empowered due to the absence of sibling competition for resources, granting them the ability to challenge gender norms and support their aging parents (Fong, 2002). Despite their unprecedented access to resources, these women face persistent social and gendered dilemmas. Expected to balance roles as virtuous wives, good mothers, filial daughters, self-sacrificing girlfrinends and economically independent individuals, they navigate societal expectations shaped by the One-Child Policy and neoliberal capitalism in China. Drawing on 30 semi-structural interviews with single women of the One-Child generation in urban China, this project aims to explore the potential for empowerment in the single-woman position in mainland China, studying my participants’ diverse strategies of exercising agency and autonomy as a way to deal with new gendered forms of pressure, norms and dilemmas in their daily lives. Specifically, with a focus on the themes/spheres of the natal family, romantic relationships and contemporary practices and attitudes to childbirth, this thesis discusses the power struggles between single Chinese women of the One-Child generation and hegemonic sociocultural norms, political ideology, national policies, and the pressures of social and familial relationships as they operate in China today, at this unique moment for Chinese politics, culture and economy. This thesis challenges some scholars’ understanding of “empowerment” and “power” in the Chinese context (Fong; 2002; Yan, 2003), and gives new implications to these terms by analysing the everyday stories of 30 single Chinese women of the One-Child generation. Each chapter elaborates on how these women are influenced and shaped by varied gender norms and social pressures, and how they wield power to gain autonomy in their interactions with intimacies, cultures, traditions and national policies.