1 “Yuelai yueduo de funü dangxuan cunweihui zhuren,” Zhongguo ribao, 6 March 2007.

2 Village committees are the “basic unit of village self-management” (1998 Organic Law on Villagers Committees, clause 2).

3 The Shaanxi Research Association for Women and Family is the standard English name.

4 See below, n. 7.

5 This was the Yichuan project on rural community development in a poor area, funded by Oxfam Hong Kong between 1998 and 2008. Situated on the banks of the Yellow River and under the administrative jurisdiction of Yan'an municipality, Yichuan county was officially designated a “poor county” by the State Council.

6 The author was one of the group who visited India in 2002 to investigate gender and issues of basic level rural governance, funded by the Ford Foundation.

7 Youhui, Hu (ed.), Zhixing yanjiu: lilun, fangfa ji bentu nüxingzhuyi yanjiu shili (Qualitative Research: Case Studies of Theory and Methods of Local Feminist Research) (Taipei: Juliu tushu gongsi, 1996), p. 239.Google Scholar See also Hart, E. and Bond, M., Action Research for Health and Social Care: a Guide to Practice (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995).Google Scholar In 1994 the author received funding from the Ford Foundation to study reproductive health and social science research methods at Griffith University, Australia, where she attended courses on feminist research methods and began to develop an interest in action research. The Research Association for Women, of which she was already a member, then began to change its research orientation and to initiate a series of interventionist projects.

8 “Gender training” began in China in the late 1990s, alongside international support for development projects. Initially, the materials used in such training were edited and amended versions of training materials on gender and development produced by Oxfam UK.

9 An example of this was asking them to do something they would never normally “dare” to do, like writing with their left hand “I want to be village head” on a coloured piece of paper, and then sticking all the pieces of paper up on the wall. This kind of activity would produce much excited discussion, and was invariably a great boost to women's determination to participate.

10 Heyang county's publicity for this election featured 340 big character slogans, 42 banners, 358 different blackboard items, 300 posters, 1,000 publicity manuals and one special feature that was shown every day for a week on Heyang television.

11 The last of the 20 women who were elected as village heads, Li Chuncao, was directly inspired by this process to participate.

12 According to the Organic Law on Villagers Committees and the Chinese Communist Party's Work Regulations for Basic Level Rural Organization, the village committee and the village Party branch are qualitatively different organizations. The former is the basic mass organization of rural self-government and autonomy, whereas the latter is the basic rural organization of the Party. The village committee is under the leadership of the Party branch.

13 The “15 October Planning Recommendations” passed by the Fifth Plenum of the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in October 2005, put forward strategic measures and goals for the development of the new socialist countryside: “productive development, comfortable lives, civilized rural environment, clean and tidy villages, democratic management” (shengchan fazhan, shenghuo kuanyu, xiangfeng wenming, cunrong zhengjie, guanli minzhu).

14 The project recommendations describe the project goals as follows: “This project seeks to improve newly elected women heads’ abilities in village management and participatory community planning, promote practices of participatory community development through activities such as creating new model villages, encourage village committees to emphasize and give full play to villagers’ and especially women's participatory and supervisory functions, and publicize the exemplary influence of the project's experience, and thereby achieve the dual outcome of consolidating women's political participation and advancing village democracy.”

15 In other words, learning from practice, raising capacity and accumulating experience through practice.

16 See n. 13.

17 The term for these visits used in the Chinese original of this paper is “on location meetings to exchange experience” (jingyan jiaoliu xianchang hui 经验交流现场会) (translator's note).

18 The promotion and appointment of cadres in China's political system is decided by the organizational department of the Party at the same or higher levels. Leading cadres above the township level are promoted either through the system of nomination (renming zhi), such as for the main leaders of Party committees and the leaders of the various Party committee and government departments, or by the electoral system, for the leaders of the People's Congresses and government. However, all are decided by the Party committee at the same or higher levels. The numbers of women cadres on Party committees above the township level are thus determined by Party policy and the importance Party cadres attach to women's representation. The Organic Law on Villagers Committees requires village committees to carry out self-government, and committee members are directly elected by ballot by the entire village. Only those with more than half the votes may take up office, and the township and small town leadership is not allowed to intervene directly. Policy therefore can only function as a general guide and has no power to exercise direct control, meaning that policy at this level has less direct capacity to intervene than at township level and above.

19 The Eight Immortals are a group of legendary Taoist immortals in Chinese mythology, representing amongst other things prosperity and longevity.

20 For example, the Women's Federation in Hanzhong municipality proposed a plan for training women village cadres and Women's Congress officials, in groups according to age and educational attainment, in order to raise the rate of participation in elections. Ankang municipality proposed “a leadership responsibility system,” in which each cadre of the Women's Federation was to take responsibility for a particular area. Baoji city proposed an annual assessment system of individuals’ performance in carrying out relevant work.

21 The Chinese phrase in the project document contains 16 characters (dangwei zhongshi, xuanzhun miaozi, jifa reqing, dingsi kanlao 党委重视, 选准苗子, 激发热情, 盯死者牢) and was selected for its correspondence with the terminology of dominant discourse.

22 Fa wen (issuing documents) refers to the forms in which Party committees and relevant departments of Party committees and government disseminate their policies, ideas and documents down to the various units (danwei). For example, in 2005, in order to raise the proportion of women elected as village committee members, the Research Association urged the organization department of the Shaanxi Provincial Committee, the Shaanxi province CAAO and the Shaanxi province Women's Federation to “issue a document’ called “Opinions on the political participation of women throughout the province in village level Party organizations and village committee elections.” These three bodies issued a further document in 2008, under the title “Opinions on carrying out good work throughout the province to promote political participation of women in village level party organizations and village committee elections.”

23 This refers to the village Party branch and the village committee.

24 Specifically, the reports were from officials of the provincial Women's Federation, the CAAO, the chief secretary of the Research Association, and the Party Committee secretary of Heyang county.

25 The “black hole” means that the villages’ money and accounts are all kept in the township, and if the village wants to spend money, the village committee has to submit an application agreed by its financial group to the township. The implementation of this system means that the village has no independent account, and all external project funds are deposited in the township's general account. Township funds are generally limited, so village project funds are often taken for township purposes, creating shortages in the project budget. Since such shortages cannot be openly discussed they are known as the “black hole.” As women take up office on village committees they actively try to set up projects to improve the public infrastructure of the village, so it is likely that as the number of projects increase, so will their shortages.