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The War on Women: The View from China

Podcasts Jun 18, 2019 Leta Hong Fincher and Elmira Bayrasli

When Mao Zedong declared in 1968 that “women hold up half the sky,” many were taken aback. No one expected such a progressive stance from the Communist founder of the People's Republic. Today, however, rather than seeing women as a key driver of economic advancement, China’s leaders have been cracking down on the feminist movement. Leta Hong Fincher, a scholar on women in China, explains why.

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Leta Hong Fincher

Leta Hong Fincher is a scholar on women in China and the author of Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China.

Elmira Bayrasli

Writing for PS since 2016
3 Commentaries

Elmira Bayrasli is the co-founder and CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted and the author of From The Other Side of The World: Extraordinary Entrepreneurs, Unlikely Places.

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j. von Hettlingen Jun 19, 2019

Elmira Bayrasli speaks to Leta Hong Fincher about the war on women in China in the era of strongman politics in many parts of the world. Authoritarian leaders like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines are notorious misogynists. While Trump sees women as sex objects and prey, Xi Jinping, Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Putin push women to have more children to boost population growth, while denying them a role in high politics.
Mao Zedong, the founder of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, famously said women could “hold up half the sky” as he underscored the central importance of gender equality during the revolution. The early Communists enshrined “the equality of women and men” in the Constitution. Under Mao the fledgling government introduced ambitious initiatives to put women to work in building a new Communist country.
By the 1970s, the Chinese government boasted the biggest female workforce in the world. Women performed multiple tasks – at home and at work. With the onset of market reforms under Deng Xiaoping and the dismantling of the planned economy in the 1980s and 1990s, gender inequality was scaled back, leading to the rise of the contemporary feminist movement. Today, Mao’s vision of gender equality is still a long way from fruition.
Hong Fincher points out how feminists in China are posing an “unprecedented challenge to the patriarchal, authoritarian state.” In 2015, Chinese authorities thought they could crush a nascent feminist movement by jailing five young women for handing out stickers against sexual harassment on public transport. But they were mistaken. News of their arrest spread swiftly, sparking protests and global outrage. Although they were released after 37 days, authorities began a systematic crackdown on feminist activism, which continues to this day.
The Communist Party (CPC) perceived the threat from feminist activists to be so dire that in May 2017, the People’s Daily online – its official mouthpiece – published a statement from the vice-president of the All-China Women’s Federation warning that “Western hostile forces” were using “Western feminism” and the notion of “putting feminism above all else” to attack China’s views on women and the country’s “basic policies on gender equality”.
In 2018, the #MeToo hashtag on sexual harassment was one of the top 10
censored topics on China’s popular messaging app, WeChat, according to the University of Hong Kong’s WeChatscope.
Hong Fincher is hopeful that feminist activism in China will not be quelled. Today, the women’s rights movement has not only survived an intense crackdown by the government, but grown larger, posing a threat to the CPC. The party rules with an iron fist – no press freedom, no freedom of assembly, no independent judiciary – and oversees the world’s most aggressive system of internet censorship and surveillance.
Since China abolished its “one-child policy” in 2016, it has aggressively promoted a new two-child policy, urging women – especially college-educated, Han Chinese – to marry and have children as soon as possible to address demographic decline, an ageing population and a shrinking workforce. But women are fed up with misogyny and paternalism, demanding self-determination, “equality, dignity and an end to pervasive gender-based violence.”
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Godfree Roberts Jun 18, 2019

"When Mao Zedong declared in 1968 that “women hold up half the sky,” many were taken aback. No one expected such a progressive stance from the Communist founder of the People's Republic."

Just shoot me!

at twenty-six, published The Death of Miss Chao, about a local girl who committed suicide rather than marry a man she despised. “Miss Chao found herself in the following circumstances: One, Chinese society. Two, the Chao family of Nanyang Street in Changsha. Three, the Wu family of Kantzuyuan Street in Changsha, the family of the husband she did not want. These three factors constituted three iron nets, a kind of triangular cage and once caught in these three nets she sought life in every way possible, but in vain. There was no way for her to go on living.. It happened because of the shameful system of arranged marriages, the darkness of our social system, the negation of the individual will and the absence of freedom to choose one’s own mate.”

He began campaigning for women’s rights the following year, “A man in China is usually subjected to the domination of three systems of authority: political, family and religious. Women, in addition to being dominated by these are also dominated by the authority of their husbands. These four authorities–political, family, religious and masculine–are the embodiment of the whole feudal-patriarchal ideology and the oppressive system it supports.”

Mao knew that Chinese women comprised the greatest mass of disinherited human beings the world had ever seen. When he found the key to their hearts he also found one for the keys to victory in the war. Insisting that women volunteers be treated equally throughout the war, he made colleagues promise that, if they were victorious, they would ‘grant freedom of marriage and equality between men and women’. His first official act as Head of State was signing the Marriage Law of the People's Republic of China–which he had painstakingly drafted–protecting women and children, guaranteeing women’s choice of partners, equal pay for equal work, gender equality in monogamous marriages, maternity leave and free childcare. A prequel to America’s failed Equal Rights Amendment, Article 48 declares, “Women in the People’s Republic of China enjoy equal rights with men in all spheres of life, in political, economic, cultural, social and family life. The State protects the rights and interests of women, applies the principle of equal pay for equal work to men and women alike and trains and selects cadres from among women.” To critics Mao insisted, “Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work. Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized through egalitarian transformation of our entire society.” He emphasized his point by promoting to the rank of Major General a famous woman combat commander. Sixty years later, in 2016, Education Ministry officials pledged to complete his work of achieving gender balance in education by the 2021 centennial and, in the process, discovered thirty-million missing girls hiding in plain sight, in the homes of canny peasants who dodged family planning laws. In 2018 they had almost reached one goal: almost half of all homebuyers were women.
- Elmira Bayrasli Jun 19, 2019
  
  Thanks for this insight and background.
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The War on Women: The View from China

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