A Review of the Treatment of Female Characters in Chinese Fiction Reveals that Chinese Social Attitudes have Undergone Dramatic Changes.

Reading Passage Question

A review of the treatment of female characters in Chinese fiction reveals that Chinese social attitudes have undergone dramatic changes. Prior to the twentieth century, women in novels were stereotypes lacking any features that made them unique individuals and were also subject to numerous restrictions imposed by the male-dominated culture. While authors of these novels often sympathetically portrayed heroines who experienced social oppression, they never questioned the position of women in Chinese culture. Not until the early twentieth century did Chinese fiction focus on women's emancipation, and then the subject became the backdrop of most novels that addressed the issue. After the Communist party established the People's Republic in the late 1940s, attitudes changed again: the gaining of women's rights was treated as one of many ongoing social revolutions, although from the beginning Communist party policy subordinated the women's struggle to the class struggle.

In spite of the fact that the authors who dealt with women's issues prior to 1949 agreed in principle that reforms had to be instituted, the outlook they depicted for reform was bleak. In their novels, a pattern recurs: after an initial break with social conventions, women falter in their goals or tragically end their lives, defeated by the overwhelming pressures of those conventions. If some writers viewed the emancipation of women as an achievable end, most tended to regard it as related to other seemingly unattainable social changes. Individualism alone would not lead to emancipation. Taking his cue from Ibsen's play A Doll's House, in which the heroine, Nora, leaves home because she resents her husband's treating her like a child, the writer Lu Hsün warned that Nora would need money to support herself; she must have economic rights in order to survive.

In contrast to this view of women in fiction in the early part of the century, fiction after the late 1940's is not so pessimistic. The deeper problems of socially prescribed roles for wife and daughter, for example, are not explored, but greater freedom for women is presented as the product of collective action. Novels of this period focus primarily on two specific issues: voluntary marriage and equal participation in work. After Mao Tse-tung's announcement of guidelines for a literature of socialist realism, this emphasis on women's rights became more pronounced. Most women in fiction after 1949 conform to the goals set for them by Communist party policy but still experience conflicts within family and group relationships as a result of the double burden placed on them by their domestic and job roles. Fiction of this period also depicts the problems of compensating women adequately for their work and of giving them access to jobs previously performed by men. Although these novels forcefully suggest that such reforms face much resistance, all clearly conclude that eventually this resistance can be overcome. And, in fact, the past two decades have seen the beginnings of some of these reforms in the lives of women in the People's Republic of China.

“A review of the treatment of female characters in Chinese fiction reveals that Chinese social attitudes have undergone dramatic changes.”- is a GMAT reading comprehension passage with answers. Candidates need a strong knowledge of English GMAT reading comprehension.

This GMAT Reading Comprehension consists of 8 comprehension questions. The GMAT Reading Comprehension questions are designed for the purpose of testing candidates’ abilities in understanding, analyzing, and applying information or concepts. Candidates can actively prepare with the help of GMAT Reading Comprehension Practice Questions.

Solution and Explanation

1. The passage is primarily concerned with discussing which of the following subjects?

(A) The impact on the Chinese novel of Mao Tsetung's guidelines for literature of socialist realism
(B) The impact of Ibsen's plays on themes in twentieth-century Chinese literature
(C) Stylistic differences between pre-1900 and post-1900 Chinese fiction
(D) Changes in the role of women in Chinese society brought about by Communist party policy
(E) The characterization of women in twentieth-century Chinese literature

2. According to the passage, post-1949 Chinese fiction differs from earlier twentieth-century Chinese fiction in that it

(A) lacks a coherent philosophical point of view
(B) views the possibility of social change with greater optimism
(C) is concerned primarily with entertaining rather than educating its readers
(D) ignores the problems facing groups other than women within Chinese society
(E) ignores the traditions and social conventions of Chinese culture

3. The author mentions Lu Hsiin's comments on A Doll's House in order to make the point that

(A) individualism, as presented in the play, benefits only the individual, not the community in which he or she lives
(B) Chinese writers looked to Western literature for evidence of pressures of social conventions similar to those pressures in their own culture
(C) Chinese writers felt the need to focus on the practical problems presented by a particular social environment as well as on personal needs
(D) the preoccupation in Western literature with women's emancipation blinded writers and thinkers to the broader social issues involved
(E) the treatment of women's emancipation in Western literature has little relevance to Chinese literature

4. The passage provides information for answering which of the following questions?

(A) How did the government of the People's Republic of China deal with resistance to their policy of adequately compensating women for their work?
(B) What are some of the problems encountered by female characters in novels describing life in the People's Republic of China after 1949?
(C) What were the goals set for Chinese women by Communist party policy?
(D) Do the stereotypes prevalent in Chinese fiction before the twentieth century still appear in Chinese literature?
(E) What initiated the first changes in the depiction of women in Chinese literature?

5. According to the passage, the struggle of Chinese women for liberation is portrayed in post-1949 Chinese literature as

(A) a struggle with roots in pre-twentieth century events
(B) a product of pre-1949 social reforms
(C) subordinate to the maintenance of traditional social patterns
(D) part of a much larger struggle for liberation
(E) hampered by unrealistic Communist party policy

6. Which of the following plots exemplifies what the author describes as the pessimism of the Chinese literature written between 1900 and 1949?

(A) A woman trained as an economist takes a position in her field, only to relinquish it because she realizes she cannot overcome her male colleagues' antagonism toward professional women.
(B) A 60-year-old widow, who manages her village's nursery, refuses to quit her job to help her daughter, who has just given birth to a child.
(C) A man in charge of a tea-curing plant selects a woman to fill his position when .he retires, but she must spend a long time battling the resentment of the male workers.
(D) A woman whose illness forces her temporarily to resign her full-time job in a food cooperative elects to work part-time in a bookstore.
(E) A daughter-in-law chooses not to stay home to care for her in-laws as is the custom, but takes a job in a factory and plans to advance to a management position.

7. Which of the following statements would be most likely to begin the paragraph immediately following the passage?

(A) The subject of women's emancipation, which had germinated years before, surfaced in public debate in the period after 1919.
(B) The pessimistic view of the emancipation of women in the 1920s was dispelled when it was seen that emancipation could be achieved by working with a series of limited and specific goals.
(C) A vivid reflection of the changes that occurred in Chinese fiction is found in Lo Pin-chi's novel, Mother Wang (1953).
(D) In an interesting reversal of the problems produced by the generation gap, Ju Chihchiian's novel, Wish Fulfilled (1959), depicts a son's difficulty in adjusting to his mother's newly acquired job and independence.
(E) Recently written Chinese fiction, unlike earlier works, is didactic and not philosophical.

8. The passage suggests that the author would most probably agree with which of the following statements about the relationship between Chinese novels written after 1949 and life in China during that period?

(A) The novels were slow to reflect changes in culture.
(B) The novels reminded citizens of their heritage and traditions, as well as pointed the way toward future possibilities.
(C) The novels provided government-sanctioned role models for citizens.
(D) The authors presented a variety of experiences far wider than normally common to their audience.
(E) The authors seemed to be indifferent to the problems created by women's familial and job responsibilities.

Suggested GMAT Reading Comprehension Samples

• Citing the Fact that the Real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita was Higher in 1997
• The General Density Dependence Model can be Applied to Explain the Founding of Specialist Firms
• In the 1980's, Astronomer Bohdan Paczynski Proposed a Way of Determining Whether the Enormous Dark Halo Constituting the Outermost Part of the Milky Way Galaxy
• The United States Hospital Industry is an Unusual Market in that Nonprofit and For-Profit Producers Exist Simultaneously.
• Although the Industrial Union Organizations that Emerged Under the Banner of the Congress of Industrial Organizations
• According to P. F. Drucker, The Management Philosophy Known as Total Quality Management
• The Professionalization of the Study of History in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
• Conventional Wisdom has it that Large Deficits in the United States Budget Cause Interest Rates to Rise.
• In a New Book About the Antiparty Feeling of the Early Political Leaders of the United States
• The System of Patent-Granting, Which Confers Temporary Monopolies for the Exploitation of New Technologies
• Traditional Social Science Models of Class Groups in the United States are Based on Economic Status
• Solar Ponds are Bodies of Water in Which Circulation is Incomplete and There is a Very High Salt Concentration that Increases with Depth
• Ethnohistoric Documents from Sixteenth-Century Mexico Suggesting that Weaving and Cooking were the Most Common Productive Activities for Aztec Women
• A Recent Study has Provided Clues to Predator-Prey Dynamics in the Late Pleistocene Era.
• The Black Death, a Severe Epidemic that Ravaged Fourteenth Century Europe
• The United States Government has a Long-Standing Policy of Using Federal Funds to Keep Small Business Viable.
• Comparable Worth, as a Standard Applied to Eliminate Inequities in Pay
• Some Historians Contend that Conditions in the United States During the Second World War
• More Selective than Most Chemical Pesticides in that they Ordinarily Destroy only Unwanted Species
• Historians have Identified Two Dominant Currents in the Russian Women's Movement of the Late Tsarist Period.