Essay on Gender Inequality in China

It goes without saying that the world we know today is torn – be it wars, racism, segregation, elitism – all for the pursuit of one thing: power. A few moons ago, the ‘impending doom’ of the earth might have been viewed in direct correspondence to the ever-increasing frequency of natural disasters as well as global warming. However, many scholars are now of the view that, before anything else, the end of the earth will almost certainly be the result of a third world war. The fact of the matter is that the issues prevalent in the world have been significantly heightened to such a point that no one can claim to be safe anywhere, especially women and children.

No country is stranger to the term sexism. Defined as the oppression of a particular gender, sexism is, primarily, done against women. It is true that, over the last few decades, most developed countries have made substantial progress in combatting gender inequality, mainly vis-à-vis employment. However, high-profile issues such as the gender wage gap, occupational segregation, female strength in low-status jobs, and higher unemployment percentages of women remain pervasive and resistant to change (Goldin, C. 1994).

Now, one might think that it can’t possibly get any worse than this. Well, an even grimmer picture is painted by the People’s Republic of China. A place whose very landscape is discerned by the obstinate patriarchal view of female inferiority, China holds even more striking contradictions between the traditional view of sex roles and enhanced education of Chinese women as of now.

The western scholars have brought the issue of gender inequality in China to light and what has been said cannot be unsaid. These scholars have meticulously documented the circumstances of the rural and factory female workers. Gender inequality has been a long-standing theme when it comes to cultural lag in China. “The view that particular jobs are appropriate only for males or only females have been perpetuated by cultures and further reinforced by existing legal systems through marital and labor laws” (Brinkman, 1997).

The Aftermath of Rural-Urban Migration

Compelled by the force of global capitalism, China has faced rapid marketization, urbanization, and industrialization since the 1980s with the aim of accelerating integration and economic growth into the global market. The government of China executed the Household Responsibility System, taking agriculture as the very foundation of reform, and reverted to a peasant economy (Pan, Lu, & Zhang 2012). As a result of the loosening dualist social structure of the country, the most active of laborers have been granted permission to migrate into the cities. These migrants have been labeled as 农民工 that translates to ‘peasant workers’ (Chen 2005). The government departments of public education, urban administration, labor, and social security have effectively left out rural migrants from the entitlements of the citizen.

Ostracism of the Left-Behind Women

Their marginalized status of the migrants, along with a large number of the rural ‘left-behind’ population, are huge social costs that China has paid for its economic prosperity thus far. A key factor with regards to earning opportunities and family responsibilities is gender (Razavi, 2012). It is mostly the case that a couple is unable to migrate together. Therefore, the strategy is to have the husband migrate while the woman is left behind. The migration of unmarried women is more common than that of married women, and the former ones are prone to return to their village, either temporarily or permanently, due to subordination to the needs of the family. The left-behind women have developed into an ostracized group, constantly oppressed by many structural forces prevalent among Chinese society.

The rural left-behind women are obligated to take responsibility and care for their families, bear children, and play a key role in agricultural production. These left-behind women are made to suffer emotional hardship and marriage crises as a consequence of long-standing separation from their husbands. A metaphor of 3 Big Mountains (三座大山) is used to describe these women, with the mountains being: children, elderly people, and farming (Zhang & Zhang, 2006), or also ‘psychological stress, no safety, and heavy workloads’ (Chen, Qin, & Zhu, 2005).

Agricultural Feminization

The elevated burden of farm work on the left-behind women is evident, and, in addition, the comparatively low income that they receive for it puts these women at a significant disadvantage in their families (Gao, 1994). Agricultural feminization typically leads to the extensification of agricultural production, due to the underlying fact that the family is short of labor, and a left-behind woman’s weight of care for both the children and the elderly family members is amplified (Zhao, Hu, & Yang, 2009).

An overwhelming majority of the studies claims that this migration of husbands has adverse effects on the overall well-being of the left-behind women. Due to the heavy workloads, these women tend to be under a great amount of stress and thus experience deteriorating mental and physical health. Moreover, feelings of loneliness and insecurity begin to inculcate in them (Wu & Ye, 2010; Xu, 2009b) and, consequently, their relations with their husbands worsen over time. Considering a long-term perspective, outmigration of the male labor force adversely affects women’s own development (Li et al., 2000; Lin, 2003; Yuan, 2006; Zhang, 2006; Zhang, 1999; Zhu, 2001).

Gender Relations

As far as gender relations go, even after having been migrated to the cities, men still remain to be in charge of the family decisions, especially those related to investments in production (Zhou, 2006). The left-behind women are still seen as inferior to men when it comes to making important choices, and, as such, men have been granted the role of ‘managers’ while women are the ‘producers’. In this particular case, the wives who have to stay behind are burdened with farm work and housework, while being reliant on the men for providing them with both economic as well as emotional support. These terms of gender relations tend to reduce women to a mere subordinate position to men in rural China (Jiang & Zhou, 2007). Studies suggest that the left- behind women have much worse mental health as opposed to other women vis-à-vis fear, pressure, stress and, most of all, loneliness.

The One-Child Policy and Its Effect on China’s Gender Imbalance

The significance of China’s one-child policy cannot be understated, having played a key role in the economic prosperity of the country. The Chinese government employed the use of economic incentives in order to reach their demographic goals (Howden & Zhou, 2014). As far as reducing the population growth goes, this was achieved by confining 91.5% of the population to bear only one child per couple. Perhaps, one of the biggest consequences of this policy is the distorted sex ratio, which, appallingly, has halted the birth of millions of girls around China (Hesketh et al., 2005).

The cultural, ‘son-preference’ mindset prevalent in China is what inevitably led to the imbalanced gender gap. A recent study discovered that over millions of missing girls were lost to this one-child policy. It was also found that the implementation of the family planning policy was to be held responsible for sex-selective abortions. According to Chu (2011), the one-child policy pushed the Chinese couples into putting a lot of effort in foretelling their baby’s gender, which led to the formation of gender-specific abortion technology.

Bulet et al. (2011), discovered that between the years 1981 to 2000, the one-child policy was responsible for the absence of roughly 15 to 20 million women. These numbers are sufficient to elucidate the 38 to 48% female deficiency during this particular period of time. In addition, Bulet et al. (2011), also came upon the realization that the one-child policy was accountable for around 50% of the gender gap, even long before the existence of prenatal sex-selective technology.

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‘Leftover’ Women

Over the last couple of decades, there has been significant growth in the number of unmarried Chinese professional women. In China, these women have been ‘slapped’ with the label of剩女or sheng nu which literally translates to ‘leftover women’. In the year of 2011, Xinhua News Agency stated: “The tragedy is they don’t realize that as women age, they are worth less and less, so by the time they get their MA or Ph.D., they are already old, like yellowed pearls” (Business Insider, 2013). This statement is a clear reflector of the misogynistic attitude of the Chinese men with regards to working women in China. Patriarchy reigns free as the qualified, self-sufficient, and career-oriented women in China struggle to find suitable partners without being labeled as being too ‘controlling’.

China has observed a steady reappearance of traditional attitudes concerning gender roles, beginning from the market reform era to this very day. A survey that was carried out by the All-China Women’s Federation and China’s National Bureau of Statistics disclosed that the number of both Chinese men and women who hold firm belief in the customary gender split and who claim that ‘men belong in public, women belong inside’ or, in Chinese, 男主外,女主內, has effectively grown by 8 percentage points to 61.6% of men, and by 4 percentage points to 54.8% of women over the course of 10 years (New York Times, 2013).

A study conducted by Christina Hahn and Katarina Elshult in 2016 concluded that by employing an interactionist grounded theory method, the interactional constraints that 50 single Chinese professional women were faced with, were, in fact, issued by their male romantic partners and parents. The predominant gender constraints being ‘discriminatory’ and ‘controlling’ issued by the women's male suitors as well as partners echoed the prevalence of the Chinese male-controlled structure. As a matter of fact, this was discovered to be the principal cause of women being ‘leftover’ in the marriage market in China. It seems to be the case that accomplished women pose a threat to the Chinese men who, in turn, view these women to be ‘useless’ or ‘uncontrollable’.

Family’s Take on Women’s Rights in China

According to a study conducted by Emily Hannum et al., 2009, an overwhelming majority of mothers in China continue to rely on their sons for providing them with old-age support. In addition, roughly one in five mothers who were interviewed were consistent with the traditional saying that still proves to be highly popular in China, ‘Sending girls to school is useless since they will get married and leave home’.

As compared to the boys, girls tend to face a much greater probability of being asked to perform household chores. However, the performance of girls in academia effectively left behind or, in the very least, stood in comparison to that of the boys. About seven years later, the boys had attained more schooling as opposed to the girls by roughly one-third of a year. This was indeed an unassertive advantage that one could not explain entirely through early parental investments or student engagement.

The fieldwork affirmed that parents of sons and daughters tended to view their boys as being the ones with superior talent, whereas their girls as being more dedicated and hardworking. Hannum’s work suggested that, in the very least, in the Chinese province of Gansu, the educational attitudes and practices of the parents toward both boys and girls are much more complicated and not as much uniformly negative for girls as is commonly perceived to be in general.

The Result of Gender Imbalance China

The gender gap has effectively doubled the divorce rate in the past 10 years from 1% in 2003, to 2.57% in 2013 (Powell, 2015). This is a significantly low rate when we compare it with international standards. Yet still, Powell has discovered that in the urban areas of China, where women are starting to become much more economically independent, and have begun to have demographically more choices, the divorce rates are around 30%. As a result, Fincher (2014) and Powell (2015) are of the view that the gender gap also sparks a trend among the women for increasing the empowerment of women in urban areas, the ones who manage to break through the stereotypical, traditional values and norms of the society.

In addition, perhaps the biggest consequence of the gender imbalance in China is that the Chinese women have begun to make sure that they are financially stable and perfectly capable of supporting themselves before they dive into the marriage market (Ji, 2015; Asia's Catastrophic Gender Imbalance, 2011).

On the word of Asia’s Catastrophic Gender Imbalance Report 2011, the Chinese Government’s response to the rapidly increasing sex imbalance is to ratify campaigns and administer laws that are aimed at changing the mindset of the masses in order to effectively put a halt to sex-selective abortions. However, Powell (2015) has pointed out that the Chinese government views the empowerment of Chinese women with regards to marriage and divorce as a moral ‘disgrace’, and wishes to curb this newfound mentality.

Conclusion

The People’s Republic of China has undergone significant gender inequality issues and continues to do so to this very day. What started from Mao Zedong’s famous saying in 1968, “Women hold half the sky”, has turned to a land of “Women belong inside”. It has not once been the case in the history of Chinese politics that a woman gets appointed to China’s highest political body, that is, the politburo standing committee. So, becoming the leader of the country does not even seem to have a one in a million likelihood of occurrence.

The phenomenon of the ‘leftover’ women came into existence due to the trickle-down effect that began from enforcing the one-child policy and effectively ended with the leftover women. This highlights the fact that the one-child policy gives rise to a skewed sex ratio that concluded in China’s gender imbalance and, consequently, its gender inequality. Owing to the drastic economic transformation of the country, the leftover women now have to fight against a whole generation of patriarchal parents.

Furthermore, due to China’s restructuring of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, women were influenced adversely. This was mainly owing to the privatization process that led to layoffs of, primarily, female workers. The country’s development has also unfairly benefited men – the income gap between the urban male and female workers has increased from 15% in 1990 to 25% in 2000. In fact, a 2017 poll conveyed that, on average, Chinese women earn 22% less than their male counterparts.

Subsequently, gender inequality plays a pivotal role in regards to the economic stability of the country. Women in China have always been sidelined and reduced to mere objects. Most of their job adverts are a clear portrayal of patriarchy, often being ‘only for men’. The fact of the matter is that if China carries on with ignoring the economic potential of its women population, it will inevitably face immense penalties with regards to long-term economic growth. It won’t be until China realized the underlying truth behind Mao’s claim that this country will see real progress.

References

1. Bauer, J. et al. (1992) ‘Gender Inequality in Urban China: Education and Employment’, Modern China, 18(3), pp. 333–370.
2. Fincher, L. H. (2014) ‘Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China’, Zed Books Ltd.
3. Hannum, E. et al. (2009) ‘Family Sources of Educational Gender Inequality in Rural China: A Critical Assessment’, International Journal of Educational Development, 29(5), pp. 474-486.
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