英文摘要 |
This paper discusses in detail two paradigmatic images of contemporary Chinese women represented in popular narratives, that of a female entrepreneur, exemplified in "China's Richest Woman Zhang Yin: From Waste Paper Recycling to Queen of the Paper Industry" (2009), and that of the white-collar office lady, represented in A Story of Lala's Promotion (2007). Throughout this inquiry, female "successology" is built around gender roles and, at the same time, the gendered language found in these narratives can be circulated back to, or used to explain or legitimize, the urban development discourse of south China. My readings of Zhang Yin and Du Lala are conducted critically in parallel with the economic development of the Pearl River Delta and Guangzhou, which pursued development with the fundamental premise of regionalization and the goal of first-tier world city status. I explain how the gendered life experience as elites in the metropolis reflects the diversity of urban connections, giving life to what Jennifer Robinson means by the term "ordinary city" in the global south. Paradoxically, both the strong emphasis on the PRD as a precondition for success in Zhang's biography and the partial portrayal of Guangzhou in the Du Lala novel reproduce the dominant ideology of development, the hierarchical power relationship among cities and the fictional paradigm of the "world city," which has bearing on the development of many other ordinary cities, by means of the dubious representations of gender roles and the issues therein. |