In China, the sexist term “leftover woman,” sheng nu, is widely used to describe an urban, professional female over the age of 27 who is still single. This derogatory term has been aggressively disseminated by the Chinese government, warning women that they will become spinsters if they do not marry by the time they turn 30. The irony of the media campaign is that China’s sex-ratio imbalance has resulted in a surplus of tens of millions of men who will not be able to find a bride.

In 2007, China’s Ministry of Education added the term “leftover woman” to its official lexicon, according to state media reports. In 2010, the All-China Women’s Federation and other government groups carried out a nationwide survey of more than 30,000 people in 31 provinces. Their findings on “leftover women” have been publicized repeatedly by China’s official media.

[...] China’s preference for boys, combined with its one-child policy, has resulted in the abortion of tens of millions of female fetuses. But does the resulting sex-ratio imbalance mean that women really have the upper hand in the marriage market? Although some women no doubt have married for money, I have so far found very little evidence that women overall have turned their scarcity into economic gain. On the contrary, my research suggests that Chinese women have largely missed out on what is arguably the biggest accumulation of real estate wealth in history, valued at more than $17 trillion in 2010, according to HSBC Bank. Many women have been shut out of the explosion of housing wealth because homes appreciating exponentially in value tend to be registered solely in the man’s name. Chinese parents tend to buy homes for sons but not daughters. And women often transfer all of their financial assets to their husband or boyfriend to finance the purchase of a home registered in the man’s name alone.

I believe that a key reason why so many educated women in their mid-20s act against their own economic interests when they marry is that they genuinely believe the government-propagated myth about “leftover women.” These women make excessive personal and financial compromises out of fear that they will never find a husband otherwise.

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Post tags: gender equality, gender imbalance, marriage, women's rights
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Kim Lee, wife of the “Crazy English” founder Li Yang, also posted several messages together with Monday’s picture lashing out at Li’s irresponsibility. 

Lee wrote, “I am done waiting for you to face your responsibilities as you continue promoting yourself! I didn’t post all the photos, but you seem to have forgotten how unacceptable your actions were. Only your hands are stronger than mine Li Yang. My character is kindhearted but not weak!”

Meanwhile, Lee stated her fearlessness to pressure imposed by Li Ning, the sister-in-law. In another message posted on Monday as well, she wrote, “…dear sister-in-law: I know my home is in your name. I don’t care if you refuse to pay the management fee. This does not scare me.”

In addition to the comments made by Lee yesterday, Shanghaiist also posted an announcement by Li Yang on Sina Weibo last weekend that he has decided to convert to Islam:

In a tweet on Sina Weibo, Li said,

” 我打算学习和信奉伊斯兰教，就因为《古兰经》中的一句话：学者的墨汁贵于烈士的鲜血。让我们真正去了解伊斯兰教！我为我以前对伊斯兰教的误解而感到羞耻！万物非主，惟有真主，独一无二。”I have decided to learn and to believe in Islam because of a verse in the Quran which says the ink of scholars is more precious than the blood of martyrs. Let us all understand the true Islam! I am ashamed of my previous misconceptions on Islam! There is no God but Allah.

 See also previous CDT coverage of domestic violence in China.

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You do not have to look far for part of the explanation. Shengzhou is, it boasts, International Necktie City of the 21st Century, making 350m ties a year – or 40% of the world’s supply – as well as huge quantities of gas stoves and cone diaphragms for speakers.

Its factories offer plenty of jobs for daughters, allowing them to make a hefty economic contribution to the household. Across the country, manufacturers have frequently preferred female employees, regarding them as more careful and less troublesome.

Many rural families have less land than they used to; and machinery is available to work the soil, making brute strength less important. China is beginning to develop a welfare system. And development has brought other changes – couples who move into cities have more exposure to new ideas, and less pressure from extended families, say experts.

Old habits and beliefs are eroding. In villages as well as towns, conjugal ties between husband and wife have become more important, while the filial links between parent and child have become less so. Young couples are more likely to live apart from relatives. Few parents can now count on a dutiful daughter-in-law caring for them; and many are noticing that daughters are doing a better job.

Read more about China’s gender gap via CDT. A recent book by Mara Hvistendahl, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men Asia’s Disappearing Daughters, looks at the problem throughout Asia.

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When Ma Jihong became pregnant for a third time, she looked forward to expanding her family. So many neighbours had broken China’s strict birth quotas she thought she could too.

But six months later she died in panic on an operating table after officials in Lijin, Shandong province, forced her into a late-term abortion, relatives have said ….

“Although the policies are less extreme than in previous decades, it is a mistake to think these issues have disappeared,” said Nicholas Bequelin, the senior Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. “Sanctions, fines and forced abortions continue to be imposed on rural women.”

See also past CDT coverage of forced abortion and forced sterilisation.

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Oftentimes, what state-run news outlets don’t say is as important as what they do say. Today, for example, the Xinhua news agency only has a three-paragraph brief on the Liberian and Yemeni women who won the Nobel Peace Prize this morning, and other major sites aren’t covering the news at all. The Xinhua item includes “Backgrounders” on past winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Physics. But there’s no Backgrounder on Peace. Why? Last year’s winner was dissident Chinese writer and human rights advocate Liu Xiaobo, who remains in prison ….

Also absent from Xinhua’s coverage were denunciations of the prize as “a farce” awarded by “clowns” indulging in “Cold War practices”.

Human rights groups, on the other hand, drew attention to the continued imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo and house arrest of his wife, Liu Xia:

Mr. Liu has rarely been allowed to talk to family members since the Nobel committee made its announcement on Oct. 8, 2010, and he has been allowed to leave the prison where he is being held in Liaoning Province only once, according to the groups, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and China Human Rights Defenders. Ms. Liu has been kept under detention in the couple’s home in Beijing but has not been charged with any crime.

“The only thing that would force the government to reassess the decision is if there was some strong international pressure on China in this case, but the pressure is not there,” Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said in a telephone interview. “There’s no incentive for the government to revisit this decision. We’re talking about a climate where standing defiantly against the West is reaping more political awards than collaborating.”

Human Rights Watch accused the authorities of attempting to deflect criticism by allowing family visits to Liu Xiaobo ahead of the 2011 Nobel announcement and anniversary of his own award:

In early October, the Chinese government allowed Liu’s brothers to release information that Liu had been allowed out of prison briefly on September 18 to see family members. They also said that Liu’s wife, Liu Xia, who has been held under legally baseless house arrest since the prize was announced, was allowed to visit Liu Xiaobo in August. Liu’s brothers’ reports of Liu’s apparent good health were positive news, Human Rights Watch said, but the Chinese government’s consistent refusal until those visits to allow him the family visits permitted under criminal law are cause for serious concern.

That this information was made available in the days before the Nobel anniversary, a time of renewed interest in Liu’s case, reflects the Chinese government’s calculated and cynical strategy to blunt international criticism, underscoring the extent to which Chinese authorities will go to avoid negative publicity, Human Rights Watch said.

See also China’s Jailed Nobel Laureate One Year Later, on CDT.

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Post tags: Amnesty International, human rights defenders, human rights watch, Liu Xiaobo, Nobel Peace Prize, Nobel Prize, women's rights
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The report estimates that in 2008, the number of females who died at birth or before being born in China was 1.1 million, while in India the figure was 260,000. Northern India was identified as being particularly bad. In China, this is a significant increase from 1990, when the figure stood at 890,000.

The findings of the World Bank’s study are the latest indication that the cultural preference for boys over girls in both China and India persists despite the rising incomes of their populations.

If anything, the report notes that improved economic conditions are, for the time being, actually making things worse since “higher incomes have increased access to ultrasound technologies that assist in sex selection at birth.” Although it is illegal in both India and China to know the sex of a baby before it is born, the practice remains common.

Critics blame the preponderance of boys in China on the one-child policy. The nation now has about 120 males for every 100 females. While Chinese officials continue to stand by the policy, it faces pressure from a number of academics and foreign officials who worry that it is leaving China with an aging work force that could be less productive in coming decades and more expensive to look after. Officials have launched pilot programs in a few places toward liberalizing the policy. For example, under a pilot program proposed in China’s southern Guangdong province, a couple would be allowed to have two children if just one of the parents was an only child.

The rise in China since 1990 comes despite a dramatic fall of 62% in neonatal mortality over a similar period.

In an interview at Shanghai Scrap in June, Mara Hvistendahl emphasised the present role of selective abortion over other frequently cited factors, including the one-child policy, in feeding China’s gender imbalance:

Scrap: Focusing on China – it’s almost accepted gospel, for those not familiar with the issue, that infanticide, the one-child policy, and abandonment account for the country’s skewed sex ratio, and that abortion is only part of the mix. Yet you not only object to that formulation, you seem to imply that it’s both condescending and a gross distortion that obscures the real issues. Could you give a sense of how important each of those facts is, in fact, to China’s gender issues, and why they are only a small part of the overall picture?

Hvistendahl: That is the typical explanation given for China’s skewed sex ratio at birth, and it’s amazing how consistently it crops up in reports by news organizations and NGOs. I think abandonment is on the radar in the West because of our history of adopting children from China. But it is a relatively small part of the story in 2011, and infanticide happens very rarely today. Skewed sex ratios at birth are now found in many countries with no tradition of infanticide and no one-child policy. By and large, the gap is the result of sex selective abortion.

I think these local or cultural explanations persist in part because they’re easy. It’s easier to say this is a culture that has a tradition of killing girls than it is to interrogate our own role in bringing sex selection to Asia. Too often Western narratives about China explain what happens there as either the product of a monolithic government or an immutable past—as if China were not home to the same complexity and deep, varied history as the West.

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ZHANG YIN (also known by her Cantonese name, Cheung Yan) was the eldest of eight children of a lowly Red Army officer who was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution for “capitalist offences”. Today she is one of the world’s richest self-made women, with an estimated fortune of $1.6 billion. In the early 1980s, as a dogsbody in a paper mill, she noted that the waste paper her superiors so casually discarded was actually worth something. She has been capitalising on her insight ever since. Nine Dragons Paper, which she founded with her husband in 1995, is now one of the world’s largest paper recyclers.

The emerging world is home to many businesswomen like Ms Zhang. Seven of the 14 women identified on Forbes magazine’s list of self-made billionaires are Chinese. Many firms in emerging markets do a better job of promoting women than their Western rivals, some surveys suggest. In China, 32% of senior managers are female, compared with 23% in America and 19% in Britain. In India, 11% of chief executives of large companies are female, compared with 3% of Fortune 500 bosses in America and 3% of FTSE 100 bosses in Britain. Turkey and Brazil come third and joint fourth (behind Finland and Norway) in the World Economic Forum’s ranking of countries by the proportion of CEOs who are women. In Brazil, 11% of chief executives and 30% of senior executives are women.

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A report from the All China Women’s Federation released last year found that 64 percent of Chinese adults have experienced violence at home at some point. Another study from from the China Law Institute estimates that more than one-third of Chinese families have experienced domestic abuse and the vast majority of victims are women.

Yet this is also a society where few people are willing to talk openly about domestic abuse. It’s unusual to discuss one’s private problems outside the home, and domestic violence is still largely considered a family affair.

Advocates hope the pending passage of the country’s first domestic-abuse law could change that, and make families more aware of the problem.

China Daily has more on the law, which has been in the works for years, but may finally be passed:

Many countries have set up laws to prevent all forms of violence against women, including domestic abuse. In China, many regulations have been issued to punish perpetrators, but they are scattered through different laws, said Liu at the Women’s Studies Institute.

“To better protect women’s rights, we need a dedicated law,” she added.

Chen Wei, a Beijing-based attorney specializing in marriage cases, said the most difficult thing for victims is proving their physical and mental injuries.

Even if violent partners are punished, they are often only given short-term detention or ordered to pay compensation, which does little to solve the problem, she said.

Liu agreed and urged legislators to include heavier punishments in the new law. It should also clarify the responsibilities for all relevant departments, she added, such as what police stations and courts should do to bring an end to violence in the home.

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In March 1997, Jia Hongling was raped by a low-level manager of a mining company in Henan Province. The 28-year-old daughter of a farmer and a construction worker, Jia reported the sexual assault to the police in her hometown of Jiyuan in central China.

That July, the policeman assigned to investigate her allegations invited Jia to a room and then, with two men standing watch outside, raped her, according to Jia’s account.

It took Jia eight years of filing complaints in Jiyuan and making trips to Beijing to beg for justice before the first man was sentenced to five years in prison. The policeman in the second incident, however, was never brought to trial — despite a report from the Jiyuan prosecutor’s office saying there was “strong evidence” a rape had occurred.

Source:
Woman’s Rape Case Shows Pitfalls Of Chinese Justice. McClatchy

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Three decades after China embarked on dazzling economic reforms, much has changed for women. Unlike their mothers, whose working — and, often, private — lives were determined by the state, women today can largely choose their paths. Rural women are no longer tethered to communes; urban women no longer are assigned jobs for life or need permission from work units to marry, although all women must apply for permission to have a child.

Yet along with freedom has come risk, as socialist-era structures are dismantled and powerful cultural traditions that value men over women, long held in abeyance by official Communist support for women’s rights, return in force. Many employers are choosing not to hire women in an economy where there is an oversupply of labor and women are perceived as bringing additional expense in the form of maternity leave and childbirth costs. The law stipulates that employers must help cover those costs, and feminists are seeking a system of state-supported childbirth insurance to lessen discrimination.

The result is that even highly qualified candidates like Ms. Feng can struggle to find a footing. Practical concerns about coping in a highly competitive world are feeding into a powerful identity crisis among China’s women.

“The main issue we face is confusion, about who we are and what we should be,” said Qin Liwen, a magazine columnist. “Should I be a ‘strong woman’ and make money and have a career, maybe grow rich, but risk not finding a husband or having a child? Or should I marry and be a stay-at-home housewife, support my husband and educate my child? Or, should I be a ‘fox’ — the kind of woman who marries a rich man, drives around in a BMW but has to put up with his concubines?”

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