Fair and unfair competition: the EU-China trade race and its gender implications

How gender is (mis-) used for EU-China trade

By: Wichterich, C
Published by: Women in Development Europe (WIDE), 2007
Via: Eldis

This paper highlights some critical areas of gender concerns related to EU-China trade:

• in China, gender differences have been re-discovered in the course of liberalisation, privatisation and the marketisation of the whole economy
• women's contributions to the economy are a comparative advantage for China as it competes in the world market
• gender has become a significant marker in the creation of new social classes in post-communist China
• the long standing claim of socialist policies for equal rights has been subordinated by the imperative of fast economic growth
  

While these processes were initiated by the Chinese government's "open door" policies to set up a market economy, after China's WTO accession they have been increasingly driven by a complex interaction between domestic policies, and foreign trade and investment policies. The author finds that China remains to a large extent a blind spot in the gendered analysis of neoliberal globalisation and therefore maps out areas for further gender research rather than attempting to provide comprehensive information.
(http://www.eurosur.org/wide/EU/Trade/EU-China07.pdf)