Theme 2: Family - Women's changing status in China

Gu Xiulian, chairwoman of the All-China Women's Federation (ACWF), presides over the opening ceremony of the 10th National Women's Congress at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on Oct. 28, 2008. (Xinhua Photo)

by Xinhua writer Zhan Yan (7 March 2009)

BEIJING, March 7 (Xinhua) -- Li Guanyao felt honored when the bridegroom's family asked him, father of the bride, to give a speech at the marriage ceremony in Beijing.

The father knew that the bride's families would not be present at the marriage ceremony as a tradition. "Though the customs have changed, usually only the bridegroom's father can speak at a marriage ceremony. It shows the great respect they hold for myself and my daughter."

Li Lily, the daughter, earned much more than her husband and financed the apartment for their after-marriage living, though the two families are equally well-off. "My husband can accept the fact that I earn more than him. It makes me feel comfortable, because not every man can do that," she said.

Women are enjoying more important roles in China. From the age of foot binding through to today, the role and rights of women have undergone drastic transformation.

The country held the Tenth National Women's Congress in October last year, setting targets in the coming five years to boost women's involvement in social and economic development and their participation in state affairs.

"Chinese women's ability should be further improved so that they could play a bigger role in building a moderately prosperous society in an all-round way," said Huang Qingyi, All-China Women's Federation (ACWF) Deputy Chairwoman.

"Currently, women account for 45.4 percent of China's total employed population," said Huang, "Female officials account for more than 40 percent of all officials."
In political sector, Chinese women played a larger role.

Female deputies comprised 21.33 percent of the National People's Congress (NPC), up 1.09 percentage points from the previous congress, and women make up 17.7 percent of the 11th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), up one percentage point. The proportion of female deputies to the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China was up two percentage points. There are more than 230 female ministerial or provincial officials, Huang said.

China's maternal mortality rate has reduced to 36.6 per 100,000from 51.3 per 100,000 in 2003 and the infant mortality rate has dropped to 15.3 per 1,000 from 25.5 per 1,000 in 2003, Huang said.

"More women buy social security and their life expectancy has reached 75.25 years," Huang said. Statistics show China has about 27,000 women and children's rights protection agencies.

Women from ethnic minority groups and religious believers were also greatly motivated to contribute to the social development, Huang said.

These changes have been achieved against the background that women had been stereotyped to be inferior to men. For centuries before the early 1900s, there was a prominent male domination in China. Women were deprived of all rights and were present mainly to serve men. Women served as slaves, concubines and prostitutes. Marriages were arranged, sometimes preparing a female from infancy to serve her future husband.

This can be seen most effectively in the practice of foot binding. Beginning around the 11th century, foot binding became a tradition. When a girl became three or four, her mother would tightly wrap her daughter's feet in bandages with her toes tucked under the soles. On top of this excruciating pain, the bandages would be tightened each day. If a woman's feet weren't bound she was considered unsuitable for marriage.

Other customs prevailed such as housewives had to eat in the kitchen or at separate tables in formal family dinners, even if the visitors were their own relatives or friends.

Though enjoying improved status, some women complained the society adopts double standards to appraise men and women.

"I don't think women and men are equal. Living in a social circle dominated by men, I can feel the intangible pressure. It's not they don't respect us. My husband cooked for me and did everything right, but I can smell the male chauvinism in their bones. One man told me, he can't discuss anything serious with a woman. They just don't take women as intellectual equals," said Cao Chenhong, a white-collar woman in a foreign-invested company in Beijing.

For example, when it comes to social drinking, men get drunk at the dinner table and will be praised for their honesty and integrity, but when women get drunk, they will be criticized lacking self-discipline, she says.

By law, women have equality in education, marriage, rights and freedom, but the ingrained stereotype is hard to fight: boys are the ones to pass down family lines. The most worrying fact is China has an unnatural boy-girl birth ratio of about 118 males to 100 females due to sex-specific abortions every year.

Related article - Congress: China to boost women's status (China.com)

Question:
With reference to specific examples, discuss whether the status of women in China has changed over time.

Theme 1 - One Child Policy

Background
China's one child policy was established by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to limit communist China's population growth. Although designated a "temporary measure," it continues a quarter-century after its establishment. The policy limits couples to one child. Fines, pressures to abort a pregnancy, and even forced sterilization accompanied second or subsequent pregnancies.

It is not an all-encompassing rule because it has always been restricted to ethnic Han Chinese living in urban areas. Citizens living in rural areas and minorities living in China are not subject to the law. However, the rule has been estimated to have reduced population growth in the country of 1.3 billion by as much as 300 million people over its first twenty years.

This rule has caused a disdain for female infants; abortion, neglect, abandonment, and even infanticide have been known to occur to female infants. The result of such Draconian family planning has resulted in the disparate ratio of 114 males for every 100 females among babies from birth through children four years of age. Normally, 105 males are naturally born for every 100 females.

Recent Effects of the One Child Law
Now that millions of sibling-less people in China are now young adults in or nearing their child-bearing years, a special provision allows millions of couples to have two children legally. If a couple is composed of two people without siblings, then they may have two children of their own, thus preventing too dramatic of a population decrease.

Although IUDs, sterilization, and abortion (legal in China) are China's most popular forms of birth control, over the past few years, China has provided more education and support for alternative birth control methods.

Statistically, China's total fertility rate (the number of births per woman) is 1.7, much higher than slowly-declining Germany at 1.4 but lower than the U.S. at 2.1 (2.1 births per woman is the replacement level of fertility, representing a stable population, exclusive of migration).

In 2007, there were reports that in the southwestern Guangxi Autonomous Region of China, officials were forcing pregnant women without permission to give birth to have abortions and levying steep fines on families violating the law. As a result, riots broke out and some may have been killed, including population control officials.

The Future of China's One Child Law
China's eleventh Five-Year Plan Period is from 2006 to 2010. Minister of the State Commission of Population and Family Planning Zhang Weiqing confirmed in early 2006 that China's one child policy is consistent with the nation's plan for population growth and would continue indefinitely. He denied rumors that the policy become less stringent to permit a second child.

Movie: China's Lost Girls

Article - China's modernisation: No great leaps but little steps forward

An elderly Chinese couple negotiate through traffic on their scooter on the busy Nanjing Rd shopping area of Shanghai, 05 December 2006. The case of a 71-year-old homeless man who committed arson to get a place to live - jail - has highlighted the plight of millions of desperately poor elderly and reflects growing social pressures in China, as the number of elderly without family networks explodes. China's modernization is partly to blame, because old customs like the obligation to venerate and care for the elderly are breaking down.

Photo (MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images)

Straits Times (3 July 2008) - By Goh Sui Noi

SOME 100 years after the process started, Chinese intellectuals are still grappling with modernity.

The times and the circumstances have changed, of course. China is no longer a melon being carved up by Western imperialists, as it was in the late 1800s.

Neither is it the bamboo curtain of the Mao era, which saw brutal and disastrous campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. It is now an economic powerhouse and a rising political and military power.

But its intellectuals are still seeking to complete the modernisation process begun a century ago, as Beijing-based philosopher Zhang Boshu put it. This new intellectual stirring is the subject of a book - What Does China Think? - by Mr Mark Leonard, executive director of the European Council of Foreign Relations.

Published early this year, it suggests that China's ascent is changing the world's ideas about politics, economics and order. The West, he argues, faces a formidable alternative in the Chinese model.

Some analysts think it is too early to talk of a 'Chinese model', as the Chinese themselves have yet to reach a consensus on how they should move forward. Others, like Professor Zhao Suisheng of Denver University in the United States, say there is already a 'Beijing consensus' - a model of success that combines authoritarian rule with free-market capitalism.

Chinese intellectuals who advocate this model believe rule of law, good governance and stability are more important than liberal democracy. But many disagree.

The first flowering of modern Chinese intellectual life was in the 1910s and 1920s, after the Qing dynasty fell. Precisely because there was no central power, there was relative freedom. And there was also the 'tremendous stimulus' of foreign thought during this period, as the late distinguished China scholar John King Fairbank noted.

This generation of intellectuals, he wrote, 'had run the gamut from the breakdown of Confucianism to the acceptance of progress, evolution, and social Darwinism, combined with the rise of fervent nationalism and reappraisal of Chinese tradition in order to save the nation'.

Indeed, 'save the nation' was the watchword then. It is telling that the intellectual drive of that period is dubbed the May 4th Movement, after the student demonstration against the terms of the Treaty of Versailles on May 4, 1919. The treaty, among other things, had handed the former German concession of Shandong to Japan.

Exercised by the urgency of saving their country, intellectuals put science and democracy on the back-burner, noted Dr Wang Fei-ling, visiting senior fellow at the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore.

'Unfortunately, because of various domestic and international events, the Chinese intellectual enlightenment was sidetracked by the rise of nationalism,' he said.

The intellectuals felt that only force could safeguard the country and that only Soviet-style revolution could help that cause. The gradualist approach of Chinese liberal reformers was swept aside by revolutionaries impatient to save China overnight.

After the communists won power in 1949, intellectuals were tightly controlled. Independent thought was stifled and political dissent suppressed. There was an attempt in 1956 to enlist the support of intellectuals - 'let a hundred flowers bloom, let the hundred schools of thought contend,' Mao Zedong urged - but this turned into a persecution of intellectuals in the Anti-Rightist campaign of 1957. Intellectuals were also persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.

After Mao's death in 1976, in the relatively free atmosphere of the late 1970s and 1980s, intellectuals again took an active part in the modernisation drive.

In the 1910s and 1920s, they pushed for a strong state because of the circumstances of the time. In the 1980s, they fought for democracy in response to their painful experiences under Mao. But they played the role of a 'loyal opposition', focusing on reforming the system rather than overturning it.

This should not be surprising. A salient feature of traditional Chinese social structure is the close identification of the scholar with the state, wrote Fairbank. This is still true today, with leading intellectuals aspiring to give advice to the state.

Still, there has been a widening of intellectual culture since the late 1990s, with some intellectuals keen on fostering intellectual autonomy and others seeing themselves as critics of the state, noted Dr Gloria Davies of Monash University in Australia.

The late dissident writer Liu Binyan wrote scathingly in 2004 that most elite intellectuals from the 1980s were 'interested in reform primarily as a way to recoup their own social status, material comfort and creative freedom. They were not very interested in moving the larger society forward'.

This is a little harsh. Many Chinese intellectuals have indeed been co-opted by the government. But there are also many who, disillusioned by the brutality with which the authorities suppressed the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations, work outside the system to agitate for change. And there are those like Dr Zhang Boshu who, though part of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, do publicly express independent views.

But those outside the establishment charge that yuyong intellectuals - or intellectuals used by the emperor, like those working in think-tanks - are too timid.

For example, Dr Yu Keping, the deputy director of the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau, who wrote in 2006 a controversial article Democracy Is A Good Thing, has been criticised for not stating clearly the kind of democracy he is advocating. He called for a more responsive intra-party democracy and stopped short of calling for a multi-party system.

'Most intellectuals are careful to neither criticise one-party rule nor advocate multi-party democracy. The few who venture to do so are prevented from publishing in China and their activities are closely monitored,' said Dr Davies.

Dr Wang noted the lack of freedom of speech meant there is no great innovation among Chinese intellectuals - only copying, applying and marginally improving the ideas of others.

Dr Zhang thinks Chinese intellectuals have become less courageous as their living conditions have improved and they have more to lose now than before.

Still, there is no doubt that today's China is more open than before, and the Chinese can and do speak their minds more often. And as they did 100 years ago, they are now energised by interaction with foreign thought.

Though it would be an exaggeration to say there are 100 schools contending in China today, there is a great deal of debate going on.

It is anybody's guess what this churning will throw up in the end. What is clear, though, is that urbanites - intellectuals included - are not contemplating a revolution.

The gradualist approach seems to be the way forward for now. One-party rule coupled with capitalism will be the order of the day for a while yet.

Social Stratification in China

Social Stratification in China

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