‘Wo Bu Care’: Choice, Freedom and Resistance Among Chinese Middle-Class Mothers

Since China’s transition to a market economy in the early 1980s, women have increasingly born the burden of child and elderly care within the home. Xi Jinping coming to power in 2012 led to a conservative shift in official discourse, urging women to further focus on the family, while continuing to balance employment. The party-state’s pro-natalist turn since 2016 encourages women to have more children, which puts further pressure on women’s everyday lives. The highly competitive neijuan (rat race) environment in first-tier cities has subsequently resulted in urban middle-class women struggling under the double burden of work and domestic labour, facing pressure particularly in relation to their children’s education.

This paper examines Shanghai based women’s everyday experiences of motherhood, contrasting them with the 2021 family-marriage drama A Love for Dilemma, which is analysed as a form of party-state propaganda on women’s role in society. I argue that while women may feel compelled to pursue family status improvement and children’s future success through educational pursuits, they also express resistance to prevailing gendered neoliberal societal values and expectations. They do this through discourses of ‘not caring’ about public opinion and future-proofing their children, and discuss how they realize individual freedom and choice in life decisions. Expressions of ‘not believing in gender equality’ while emphasising individual choice emerge alongside enduring socialist notions of ‘women holding up half the sky’ and perceptions of the importance for women to engage in professional roles. I argue that China’s state socialist feminist legacy lives on in urban educated middle-class women’s private discourses without incorporating an explicitly feminist stance. Contemporary urban China presents a complex reality where women resist neo-traditionalist notions of gender at a private level, through discourses that draw on both socialist notions of gender equality and neoliberal discourses of choice, emphasising women’s own agency.