Eva Cheng
On founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Communist Party of China (CPC) declared that "women shall enjoy equal rights with men in political, economic, cultural, educational and social life". In the years after 1949, monumental efforts were made to take China towards that goal, albeit with mixed results.
However, under the "economic reform" that started in the late 1970s and which escalated into a drive to restore capitalism in the 1990s, women's position in China has taken a big step backward. "Traditional values" have returned that encourage women to be "feminine", submissive and content as a second-class gender. Also widely accepted now is the capitalist beauty myth, which seeks to drive women into the obsessive quest to be slim and "pretty".
The CPC's initial proclamation of equal rights for women was backed up by a series of laws regarding pay, educational opportunities, marriage and other social rights. Laws and decrees aren't everything, but they can lay the legal basis for real changes.
In the eight years to 1957, the number of women workers in China's modern industries rose six-fold to 3 million, from 15% of the total industrial work force to 17%.
Conscious efforts were made to promote women in the male-dominated skilled sectors. According to C.K. Yang's 1959 book The Chinese Family in the Communist Revolution, by 1951, in the north-eastern cities of Luda and Lushun, there were already 1196 women in 35 kinds of technical and skilled jobs in heavy industry, including operating lathes, repairing ships and casting metal. According to the Far Eastern Economic Review, the number of women professors, lecturers and assistant professors soared from 2319 in 1949 to 11,207 in 1957.
Helen Snow pointed out in her 1964 book The Chinese Labor Movement that in 1960, 42% of medical students and 17% of engineering students were women, a proportion that compared favourably even with developed capitalist countries at the time.
According to William Goode's 1963 book World Revolution and Family Patterns, women constituted an impressive 25% of Chinese railway workers and in 1957 China had a squadron of jet fighters operated entirely by women.
In 1956-57, Beijing made a brief policy retreat into urging women back to the home. But the need for a massive increase in the work force associated with Mao Zedong's bureaucratic-adventurist Great Leap Forward campaign in 1958 once again motivated women to join the waged work force. This was accompanied by a push to "socialise housework", which according to the Beijing People's Daily in March 1959 led to the establishment of nearly 5 million nurseries and kindergartens and millions of communal kitchens that freed women from many domestic chores, enabling most rural women to take part in productive labour in the communes.
The power struggle within the ruling bureaucratic elite of the CPC in the 1960s — the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution — undermined some social gains for women. However, the biggest retreat in achieving equality for women has come over the last few decades.
Declining female births
One of the starkest indicators of Chinese women's deteriorating social position is the highly abnormal and worsening gender ratio at birth. This ratio has worsened from 106 male births to every 100 female births in 1979 to 111:100 in 1988, 117:100 in 2001, and 119.86 male births to every 100 female births in August 2005.
The one-child policy, started in 1979, is most strictly enforced in the urban areas. Rural households are often allowed to have a second or even a third child, with even greater leniency for ethnic minority groups.
Gender-biased pregnancy termination is undoubtedly the main cause for the abnormal pattern considering the gender ratio at birth for the first child in the rural areas was around 105:100 but rises sharply with the second and third child. Similarly, the gender ratio for the first child in the urban areas is 113:100 but is 130:100 for the second child.
Increasing access to ultrasound technology in urban areas has allowed parents to discover the sex of the foetus and have female foetuses terminated.
One major reason why a female foetus is terminated rather than a male foetus is linked to the "traditional" rural custom that a son will take care of his aging parents. This dynamic is particularly strong in rural China where aged pensions are non-existent. This explains the even more shocking gender ratio of 130:100 in rural Anhui province, Guangdong and Qinghai.
Another stark indicator of Chinese women's inferior status is in illiteracy. According to the UN's China Human Development Report 2005, while the illiteracy rate among Chinese males aged 15 or above was 6.1%, it was 15.9% for their female counterparts.
According to the Chinese government's Gender Equality and Women's Development in China report, issued in August 2005, while there is virtually no gender difference in the near universal access to primary education in China, girls' share in junior and senior middle school enrolment were 47.4% and 45.8% respectively in 2004, decreasing to 44.2% and 31.4% in the postgraduate and doctoral levels.
Female graduates' chances of finding a job are slimmer than those of male graduates. According to the Summer 2003 Harvard Asia Pacific Review, a 2002 survey of 1068 students in China found that while only 63.4% of female graduates found a job shortly after graduation, 72.1% of male graduates did.
These figures for education, however, come from urban areas. The big majority of China's population lives in the rural areas where even middle-level education is a luxury. According to China's fifth national census in 2000, Chinese women received on average only seven years of education.
Employment inequality
Women also bear the brunt of attacks on the job front. According to the China Human Development Report 2005, not only were Chinese women earning less than men, that gap was also increasing. "Between 1988 and 1995, the ratio of female-to-male earnings dropped from 0.84 to 0.82", the report states.
The report further reveals that a consistently bigger proportion of female workers worked in blue-collar and low-paid jobs — 91% and 95% respectively, as opposed to 88% and 90% for their male counterparts.
According to a survey by the All China Women's Federation at the end of 2000, urban women workers consistently lose out to their male counterparts in terms of work entitlements. For example, only 52.3% of urban women workers are covered by free medical care or medical insurance, as opposed to 60.2% for male workers.
For unemployment insurance, the figure was 41.8% v 48.3%; pensions 60.5% vs 65.9%; work injury insurance 46.8% vs 57.3%; sick leave pay 55.1% vs 62.1%; child birth/maternal health-care benefits 63.3% vs 71.3%; housing subsidy/housing 44.2% vs 50.9%; and paid vacation 42.9% vs 50.3%.
In an article in the Summer 2003 Harvard Asia Pacific Review, Jing Lin summarised the impact of so-called economic reform on Chinese women: "[They] have been especially disadvantaged in several ways: 1) more women are laid off than men; 2) women are forced to retire at a younger age than men; 3) women receive less social support after being laid off; and 4) the chance of re-employment are lower due to lack of social connections."
Similar discrimination existed in the rural areas. According to a 2000 survey by the China Research Centre on Aging, while 9.2% of men received government aid, only 6.6% of women enjoyed that benefit. In addition, men received almost twice as much per month as women.
According to the Gender Equality and Women's Development in China report, women accounted for 18.6% of CPC membership in 2004, 18% of the delegates to the party's 16th Congress in 2002, 7.6% of its Central Committee, 16.9% of all county cadre, 12.6% of all prefecture cadre and 9.9% of provincial cadre. While the report points out that all these represent an improvement from the 1990s, the current figures are far from encouraging.
Even among government workers, women accounted for 27.8% of those hired in 2003. Of those recruited to serve the organs of the CPC Central Committee and the central government, only 37.7% were women.
The January 11, 1999 Vancouver Sun quoted Chinese official figures reporting that since 1990, 64,000 women, or 8000 a year on average, have been rescued by the authorities from "forced marriages". One wonders how many women haven't been rescued.
From Green Left Weekly, March 29, 2006.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.