User:Liuaxb/Suzhi

Linguistic history
Suzhi (素质) is a Mandarin word made up of two characters, su (素) and zhi (质). Suzhi was rarely used throughout Chinese literary history, found mostly in poems and encyclopedias to describe the color white with an untouched connotation. After appearing this way for many centuries, Japan reintroduced suzhi to Chinese scholars as the translation of a German word that suggested a genetic disposition to behavior. In the late twentieth century, suzhi underwent yet another evolution, leading to its principal meanings today. In China during the late 1970s and early 1980s, suzhi became closely linked with politics, and the relationship between self and nation.

Translations
The two characters of suzhi are su and zhi: su (素) is defined as “unadorned, plain, white and essence”, and zhi (质) as “nature, character or matter”. Today, a simple and often used definition of suzhi is “quality.” This definition is overly simplistic, but captures the essence of the word. Commonly, suzhi refers precisely to the imprecise elements of a person’s quality. This may be their “attitudes towards politics, ideology, culture, arts and so on”, but a theoretically correct or ideal suzhi is always assumed. As a constantly evolving term, it is a tool in discourse that “is itself normative, playing a corrective and educational role”.

Relevant political campaigns
Among others, two major political campaigns in 20th century China redefined and familiarized the public with suzhi. One possible explanation for this popularization is that the malleable concept of suzhi helped the government to distinguish a new ethos for China from the Mao era. In his 2016 book, Zavoretti writes that the term suzhi is often linked to "contextual nationalism... citizens' efforts to improve their own suzhi correspond to their contributions to raise the quality of the nation".

Birth control
Policy reforms around birth control was one of the first political campaigns to have massively employed the term suzhi. The one-child policy, first promoted in the late 1970s, suggested one benefit of stricter birth control was the ability to put more time and care into the child a family does have. Consequently, the quality of the country’s population as a whole would be raised. Originally, officials used the term renkou (人口) zhiliang (质量) - renkou meaning “population” and zhiliang meaning “quality,” but with a slightly different connotation than suzhi. Indeed, “in 1982 the People’s Daily began using the terms renkou suzhi and renkou zhiliang in synonymous fashion… until 1986, when renkou suzhi begins to predominate”. Some scholars believe the emphasis placed on suzhi in the 1980s was a way for the government to break from earlier Mao-era policies. For example, Delia Lin points to the 1981 Report on the Work of the Government, where at the People’s Congress, “Chinese [new] population policy was clearly stated as ‘limiting population growth and improving the suzhi of the population (renkou suzhi)”.

The fact that the discourse shifted from zhiliang to suzhi is an important example of how suzhi is both a reactive and normative tool - it was a more flexible term that allowed policymakers to justify reforms. It also reframed discussions in China regarding how to increase the strength of the nation by suggesting it is possible to have "youshengyouyu (优生优育) (superior birth and superior education)” through more regulation in family planning.

Education
The other political campaign in the 1980s that heavily utilized the concept of suzhi was education reform. Policy makers implied that suzhi could be taught, popularizing slogans like ""education for quality" (suzhi jiaoyu 素质教育)". The causes of good or bad suzhi were not explicitly laid out in speeches, policy reports, or newspaper articles. However, its introduction signaled a new era and model of national education.

General popularization of suzhi in discourse
Gradually, suzhi became an established part of the Chinese ethos. Unlike other words that refer to quality, suzhi has a far more ephemeral connotation: this is intentional. Its ambiguity elevates its legitimacy, and provides an ideal to strive for. It suggests the quality of a person is determined by a mix of what a person is born with, as well as their socialization.

Examples of suzhi’s use through official channels of Party communication demonstrate the changing standards of socialization and quality. For example, the People’s Daily emphasized the importance of raising one’s suzhi repeatedly in the early 1980s, including an article appearing on International Women’s Day that called women “to get rid of their bad traditional habits, to meet the challenge of the reform and improve their suzhi” (Lin 94).

Another formational appearance of suzhi was in Deng Xiaoping’s 1985 speech at the first National Conference on Education. He spoke about not only the “suzhi of the working people”, but also how much the country’s strength depended on the “quantity and quality of intellectuals”. This was a marked shift from earlier rhetoric surrounding intellectuals, and suzhi played an important role in the transition, changing with the government’s direction.

Suzhi and rural migrant women
Suzhi is a discourse that structures how rural migrant women navigate their identities. It represents the potential and further development to be found in urbanity - not only economic, but also social and cultural.

Background on rural migration (1980s - 1990s)
At the same time suzhi became a more popular term, there was the “quick creation of a vast migrant-labor force”. Temporary mass migration from rural to urban areas presented “a grave challenge to social management for stability”, but also presented an opportunity for cheap labor. These migratory populations have especially been used as a source of labor in "newly established export processing zones".

Gendered and classist discourse of suzhi around rural-urban migration
Suzhi appears heavily in discourse around migrants, involving connotations of gender and class. The rural-to-urban migration process to China is gendered, given the patrilocal nature of marriage in rural areas, the intersection of class and gender, and the gendered division of work in cities.

Rural women have a less stable status than men. The patrilocal nature of marriage means that women eventually leave their family to live with her husband and his family. Although this type of migration is usually contained between rural areas, it still signifies a less permanent home for women. Therefore, it is possible that rural women pursue raising suzhi more strongly and incorporate migration into their identities more easily, “as they are less attached to the villages due to their ‘temporary’ status in the family as daughters and their role of an ‘outsider and stranger’ as wives when they move into their husbands’ villages upon marriage”. While this difference may suggest more opportunity in migration, it also suggests greater risk for rural women with fewer support systems to depend on at home.

The rural/urban divide also signifies a class difference. Urban automatically connotes modernity, sophistication, and white-collar work. Within this hierarchy, “urban Chinese were generally thought to have higher suzhi than rural people". Over the years, suzhi was connected to a range of policies and political campaigns that reinforced this message. For example, the household registration system often used a “pervasive discourse that categorized rural people as inferior in suzhi, continu[ing] to render them contingent and vulnerable dwellers in the cities”. This classification has material implications as well - the devaluation of a population’s labor and “quality” is linked to denial of “equal access to social welfare… that are guaranteed for people with urban hukou”.

In a qualitative study consisting of interviews with rural women migrants, Zhang reports that “few rural women identify themselves with rural migrant men”. She describes an attempt to elevate the female worker above the male, as the type of labor a woman more commonly performs allows for “more free time, more income, a more stable job, higher moral standard and less hardship”. The notion of suzhi is highly evident in this self-perception, as women seek to attain an urban, modern quality for themselves.

Self-improvement as motivation for rural women
The desire for suzhi can be understood through an often cited reason for migration: self-improvement (needs citation). Beginning in the 1980s, campaigns proposed that raising suzhi was an individual and national obligation, and in turn, it became a common motivation for women who chose to migrate. Suzhi is an ephemeral term, but in reality, encompasses practical elements of identity like “educational level and economic self-reliance [and] bodily comportment”. In these aspects, a middle-class urban population is seen as superior. Therefore, the decision to migrate and pursue a more urban identity is tied to repeated campaigns calling on citizens to raise their suzhi.

Different studies show the influence of suzhi discourse in rural women’s decisions to migrate. In her book Factory Girls, Leslie Chang interviewed women who migrated from villages to the city of Dongguan. The women that she interviewed often emphasize their self-reliance and rapid professional development under a capitalist ethos. Raising suzhi is closely related to both clerical and entrepreneurial employment, as well as dressing in an urban style.

While rural women may desire a more urban identity in the process of migration, Zhang notes “they are fully aware of the inequality between urban and rural areas and the superior status of the urban locals”. In her 2003-2005 study, Zhang describes a simultaneous sense of belonging and alienation in the city as rural women discover the difficulty of feeling urban but also separate from home villages. Several of their status contributes to this: “their rural hukou registration, their temporary and secondary status in the urban labour market and their gender specific waged work”. Scholars like Chang and Zhang emphasize that despite restrictions, these women have agency in their identity formation. The ways in which they negotiate their identities is “directly influenced by the hegemonic discourse on ‘suzhi’”.

Other factors
Different factors affect how migrant women view their suzhi, and their identification with other women and migrants. These include employment type, marital status, and age. The suzhi discourse is a part of “rural migrant women’s identity negotiation in contemporary China”, along with descriptors such as dagongmei (打工妹) or chiku (吃苦).

Age and marital status can “undermin[e] gender solidarity among rural migrant women”, as they seek to exclude types of rural women.

Employment type is an additional factor. In her 2008 book Maid in China, Waning Sun traces the portrayal of women on TV - urban middle-class women, urban factory workers, and rural migrants who become either factory or domestic workers. Sun analyzes Chinese dramatic media to understand how women of different classes, professions, and migratory backgrounds are perceived. For example, she suggests that the rural-to-urban maid is represented in dramatic media as a class “wedged between the urban middle class, who are the exemplary citizens in the discourse of civilization, and rural migrants, who in many cases are configured as the object of the nation’s civilizing project”. Sun’s analysis is one way of understanding the suzhi of rural migrant women in relation to their professions, as well as the local urban working-class.