Chinese Cultural Studies: Women in China: Past and Present
Chinese Cultural Studies:
Women in China: Past and the Present
Compiled from various sources, including Compton's Living Encyclopedia on
America Online (August 1995), The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The San Jose
MODERN CHINESE SOCIETY AND THE FAMILY [Compton's]
Traditionally the family has been the most important unit of society, and this is still
true. The family is also an important economic unit. In rural areas, where about 74
percent of China's people live, the traditional family consisted of the head of the
household, his sons, and their wives and children, often living under one roof. Common
surnames gave families membership in a clan. In some villages all families had the same
surname, or four or five surname clans might account for most of the villagers.
Land, the main form of wealth in traditional China, was divided equally among all the
landowner's surviving sons when he died. Thus, as China's population grew, the
landholdings became smaller and smaller, and many people were very poor. In the first half
of the 20th century the family as a social unit came under severe stress. Rural conditions
were bad, income was low, and food was often scarce. Health care was poor or nonexistent
for most peasants, and mortality rates were high. Civil unrest, warfare, and foreign
invasions added to the difficulties.
After the Communist revolution in 1949 rural conditions stabilized. Private ownership
of land was abolished, but each peasant family was given a small plot to farm. Health care
improved. The fluctuations in the food supply leveled off and life expectancy increased.
Living conditions for the average peasant are generally better today than they were in
1949, and there are opportunities for at least some education. All these things have meant
a considerable improvement in the quality of life and greater security for the family as a
social unit.
Today some rural families are still likely to have three generations under one roof.
Despite state ownership of the land, they once again serve as basic production units. The
Production Responsibility System, initiated in 1978, permits individual families to
contract with their local production team or brigade to lease land for farming. Production
quotas are also contracted. Whatever is left after taxes are paid and quotas are met
belongs to the family. If a family works hard, it can meet its contract quotas and also
produce a surplus for consumption or sale. This program was designed to stimulate
production, but one result has been to strengthen the role of the traditional family as a
consuming and producing unit.
Urban family life is different from that in rural areas. In the cities, families
usually are smaller, often composed only of parents and children. Since both parents work,
the children are left in day-care centers or schools. Sometimes couples are split up if
their work units are not close together, and husband and wife may see each other only
rarely. Despite such problems, family life for most people in the cities is stable, and
family ties continue to play a major role in the lives of both parents and children.
THE BURDEN OF WOMANHOOD: THIRD WORLD, SECOND CLASS
Washington Post , April 25, 1993
By JOHN WARD ANDERSON AND MOLLY MOORE
When Rani returned home from the hospital cradling her newborn daughter, the men in the
family slipped out of her mud hut while she and her mother-in- law mashed poisonous
oleander seeds into a dollop of oil and forced it down the infant's throat.
As soon as darkness fell, Rani crept into a nearby field and buried her baby girl in a
shallow, unmarked grave next to a small stream.
``I never felt any sorrow,'' Rani, a farm laborer with a weather-beaten face, said
through an interpreter. ``There was a lot of bitterness in my heart toward the baby
because the gods should have given me a son.''
Each year hundreds and perhaps thousands of newborn girls in India are murdered by
their mothers simply because they are female. Some women believe that sacrificing a
daughter guarantees a son in the next pregnancy. In other cases, the family cannot afford
the dowry that would eventually be demanded for a girl's marriage.
And for many mothers, sentencing a daughter to death is better than condemning her to
life as a woman in the Third World, with cradle-to-grave discrimination, poverty, sickness
and drudgery.
``In a culture that idolizes sons and dreads the birth of a daughter, to be born female
comes perilously close to being born less than human,'' the Indian government conceded in
a recent report by its Department of Women and Child Development.
While women in the United States and Europe often measure sex discrimination by pay
scales and seats in corporate board rooms, women in the Third World gauge discrimination
by mortality rates and poverty levels.
``Women are the most exploited among the oppressed,'' said Karuna Chanana Ahmed, a New
Delhi anthropologist. ``I don't think it's even possible to eradicate discrimination, it's
so deeply ingrained.''
From South America to South Asia, women are often subjected to a lifetime of
discrimination with little or no hope of relief. As children, they are fed less, denied
education and refused hospitalization. As teen-agers, many are forced into marriage,
sometimes bought and sold for prostitution and slave labor. As wives and mothers, they are
treated little better than farmhands and baby machines. Should they outlive their
husbands, they frequently are denied inheritance, banished from their homes and forced to
live as beggars on the streets.
While the forms of discrimination vary tremendously among regions, ethnic groups and
age levels in the developing world, Shahla Zia, an attorney and women's activist in
Islamabad, Pakistan, said there is a unifying theme: ``Overall, there is a social and
cultural attitude where women are inferior -- and discrimination tends to start at
A woman's greatest challenge is an elemental one: simply surviving through a normal
life cycle. In South Asia and China, the perils begin at birth, with the threat of
infanticide.
Like many rural Indian women, Rani, now 31, believed that killing her daughter 3 1/2
years ago would guarantee that her next baby would be a boy. Instead, she had another
``I wanted to kill this child also,'' she said, brushing strands of hair from the face
of the 2-year-old girl she named Asha, or Hope. ``But my husband got scared because all
these social workers came and said, `Give us the child.' `` Ultimately, Rani was allowed
to keep her.
She paused. ``Now I have killed, and I still haven't had any sons.'' Amravati, who
lives in a village near Rani in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, said she killed two of her
own day-old daughters by pouring scalding chicken soup down their throats, one of the most
widely practiced methods of infanticide in southern India. She showed where she buried
their bodies -- under piles of cow dung in the tiny courtyard of her home.
``My mother-in-law and father-in-law are bedridden,'' said Amravati, who has two living
daughters. ``I have no land and no salary, and my husband met with an accident and can't
work. Of course it was the right decision. I need a boy. Even though I have to buy clothes
and food for a son, he will grow on his own and take care of himself. I don't have to buy
him jewelry or give him a 10,000-rupee ($350) dowry.''
Sociologists and government officials began documenting sporadic examples of female
infanticide in India about 10 years ago. The practice of killing newborn girls is largely
a rural phenomenon in I although its extent has not been documented, one indication
came in a survey by the Community Services Guild of Madras, a city in Tamil Nadu. Of the
1,250 women questioned, the survey concluded that more than half had killed baby
daughters.
Sex-selective abortion
In urban areas, easier access to modern medical technology enables women to act before
birth. Through amniocentesis, women can learn the sex of a fetus and undergo sex-selective
abortions. At one clinic in Bombay, of 8,000 abortions performed after amniocentesis,
7,999 were of female fetuses, according to a recent report by the Indian government.
Female infanticide and sex-selective abortion are not unique to India. Social workers
in other South Asian states believe that some communities also condone the practice.
The root problems, according to village women, sociologists and other experts, are
cultural and economic. In India, a young woman is regarded as a temporary member of her
natural family and a drain on its wealth. Her parents are considered caretakers whose main
responsibility is to deliver a chaste daughter, along with a sizable dowry, to her
husband's family.
``They say bringing up a girl is like watering a neighbor's plant,'' said R.
Venkatachalam, director of the Community Services Guild of Madras. ``From birth to death,
the expenditure is there.'' The dowry, he said, often wipes out a family's life savings
but is necessary to arrange a proper marriage and maintain the honor of the bride's
After giving birth to a daughter, village women ``immediately start thinking, `Do we
have the money to support her through life?' and if they don't, they kill her,'' according
to Vasanthai, 20, the mother of an 18-month- old girl and a resident of the village where
Rani lives. ``You definitely do it after two or three daughters. Why would you want
Few activists or government officials in India see female infanticide as a
law-and-order issue, viewing it instead as a social problem that should be eradicated
through better education, family planning and job programs. Police officials say few cases
are reported and witnesses seldom cooperate.
``There are more pressing issues,'' said a Madras police official. `Very few cases come
to our attention. Very few people care.''
Surviving childbirth is itself an achievement in South Asia for both mother and baby.
One of every 18 women dies of a pregnancy-related cause, and more than one of every 10
babies dies during delivery.
For female children, the survival odds are even worse. Almost one in every five girls
born in Nepal and Bangladesh dies before age 5. In India, about one-fourth of the 12
million girls born each year die by age 15.
The high death rates are not coincidental. Across the developing world, female children
are fed less, pulled out of school earlier, forced into hard labor sooner and given less
medical care than boys.
A girl's life
Boys are generally breast-fed longer. In many cultures, women and girls eat leftovers
after the men and boys have finished their meals.
Women are often hospitalized only when they have reached a critical stage of illness,
which is one reason so many mothers die in childbirth. Female children often are not
hospitalized at all. A 1990 study of patient records at Islamabad Children's Hospital in
Pakistan found that 71 percent of the babies admitted under age 2 were boys. For all age
groups, twice as many boys as girls were admitted to the hospital's surgery, pediatric
intensive care and diarrhea units. Mary Okumu, an official with the African Medical and
Research Foundation in Nairobi, said that when a worker in drought-ravaged northern Kenya
asked why only boys were lined up at a clinic, the worker was told that in times of
drought, many families let their daughters die.
``Nobody will even take them to a clinic,'' Okumu said. ``They prefer the boy to
survive.''
For most girls, however, the biggest barrier -- and the one that locks generations of
women into a cycle of discrimination -- is lack of education.
Across the developing world, girls are withdrawn from school years before boys so they
can remain at home and lug water, work the fields, raise younger siblings and help with
other domestic chores. By the time girls are 10 or 12 years old, they may put in as much
as an eight-hour workday, studies show.
Held out of schools
Statistics from Pakistan demonstrate the low priority given to female education: Only
one-third of the country's schools -- which are sexually segregated -- are for women, and
one-third of those have no building. Almost 90 percent of the women over age 25 are
illiterate. In the predominantly rural state of Baluchistan, less than 2 percent of women
can read and write.
Across South Asia, arranged marriages are the norm and can sometimes be the most
demeaning rite of passage a woman endures. Two types are common: bride wealth, in which
the bride's family essentially gives her to the highest bidder, and dowry, in which the
bride's family pays exorbitant amounts to the husband's family.
In India, many men resort to killing their wives -- often by setting them afire -- if
they are unhappy with the dowry. According to the country's Ministry of Human Resource
Development, there were 5,157 dowry murders in 1991 -- one every hour and 42 minutes.
A pregnant life
According to a 1988 report by India's Department of Women and Child Development: ``The
Indian woman on an average has eight to nine pregnancies, resulting in a little over six
live births, of which four or five survive. She is estimated to spend 80 percent of her
reproductive years in pregnancy and lactation.''
A recent study of the small Himalayan village of Bemru by the New Delhi- based Center
for Science and the Environment found that ``birth in most cases takes place in the cattle
shed,'' where villagers believe that holy cows protect the mother and newborn from evil
spirits. Childbirth is considered unclean, and the mother and their newborn are treated as
``untouchables'' for about two weeks after delivery.
``It does not matter if the woman is young, old or pregnant, she has no rest, Sunday or
otherwise,'' the study said, noting that women in the village did 59 percent of the work,
often laboring 14 hours a day and lugging loads 1 1/2 times their body weight. ``After two
or three . . . pregnancies, their stamina gives up, they get weaker, and by the late
thirties are spent out, old and tired, and soon die.''
In Kenya and Tanzania, laws prohibit women from owning houses. In Pakistan, a daughter
legally is entitled to half the inheritance that a son gets when their parents die. In
some criminal cases, testimony by women is legally given half the weight of a man's
testimony, and compensation for the wrongful death of a woman is half that for the
wrongful death of a man.
Widows weep
After a lifetime of brutal physical labor, multiple births, discrimination and sheer
tedium, what should be a woman's golden years often hold the worst indignities. In India,
a woman's identity is so intertwined and subservient to her husband's that if she outlives
him, her years as a widow are spent as a virtual nonentity.
In previous generations, many women were tied to their husband's funeral pyres and
burned to death, a practice called suttee that now rarely occurs.
Today, some widows voluntarily shave their heads and withdraw from society, but more
often a Spartan lifestyle is forced upon them by families and a society that place no
value on old, single women.
Widowhood carries such a stigma that remarriage is extremely rare, even for women who
are widowed as teen-agers.
In South Asia, women have few property or inheritance rights, and a husband's
belongings usually are transferred to sons and occasionally daughters. A widow must rely
on the largess of her children, who often cast their mothers on the streets.
Thousands of destitute Indian widows make the pilgrimage to Vrindaban, a town on the
outskirts of Agra where they hope to achieve salvation by praying to the god Krishna.
About 1,500 widows show up each day at the ShriBhagwan prayer house, where in exchange for
singing ``Hare Rama, Hare Krishna'' for eight hours, they are given a handful of rice and
beans and 1.5 rupees, or about 5 cents.
On a street there, an elderly woman waves a begging cup at passing strangers. ``I have
nobody,'' said Paddo Chowdhury, 65, who became a widow at 18 and has been in Vrindaban for
30 years. ``I sit here, shed my tears and get enough food one way or another.''
Divorce in Modern China. New York Times August 22, 1994
By SETH FAISON
c.1995 N.Y. Times News Service
BEIJING - For centuries, ordinary Chinese have greeted each other on the street with a
question that reflected the nation's primary concern: ``Chi le ma?'' or ``Have you
Now, according to a popular joke in Beijing, people who see a friend on the street
voice a new concern with a new question: ``Li le ma?'' - ``Have you divorced?''
In China, where rapid economic growth is creating new hopes and fears and where
government interference in personal lives is receding daily, many Beijing residents say
one of the most profound changes in their society is the surge in divorce.
The divorce rate in Beijing leapt to 24.4 percent in 1994, more than double the 12
percent rate just four years ago, Beijing Youth Daily reported this month. Although
statistics can be misleading - the divorce rate is measured by comparing the number of
marriages and divorces in a given year - officials say it is rising all over China, and
faster in cities than in the countryside.
The national divorce rate is now 10.4 percent, still far behind the United States,
where the divorce rate rose sharply in the 1970s to around 50 percent, where it has
The U.N. conference on women, to be held here from Sept. 4 to 15, is expected to draw
attention to the social and economic ills facing women in China and elsewhere.
Yet for women in Beijing, the growing divorce rate is a reflection of a new social and
economic freedom, of the rising expectations that women bring to marriage, and of damaging
effects from what many Beijing residents say is a remarkable increase in adulterous
affairs. More than 70 percent of divorces are now initiated by women, divorce lawyers say,
and the most common reason given is that a husband has had an affair.
``Only a few years ago, people would let a temple be destroyed before they would let a
marriage fail,'' said Pi Xiaoming, a leading divorce lawyer whose work at the East Beijing
Women's Federation used to involve applying intense pressure on couples not to divorce.
``We did everything possible to keep people from separating,'' Ms. Pi said. ``If there
was 1 percent chance of saving a marriage, we'd expend all our effort to overcome the 99
percent of difficulty.''
Now, Ms. Pi and other government officials who once actively opposed divorce support it
as an acceptable alternative to an unhappy marriage, and a divorce that once took years to
win approval can now be processed in three days if both side agree. Many officials even
recognize a positive side of divorce.
``The high rate of divorce reflects a kind of `master of my own fate' notion among
urban residents,'' wrote the Beijing Youth Daily. ``From an overall perspective, the high
rate of divorce represents a kind of social advancement.''
But the government's shift in attitude is only one ingredient in the rising divorce
rate. A larger one seems to be growing demands by women in an era of expanding
opportunity.
``My husband used to say, `You have your job, your study overseas, a roof over your
head, what more do you want?' '' said Liang Hua, 41, who divorced last year. ``What I
wanted was a husband who didn't sit at home all day, watching sports on television.''
If most Chinese men still look for a stable home and a reliable mother for their
children, several women in different professions agreed, women who used to be content with
a steady family income now want more: romance, sex, and affection.
``My husband never kissed me, not once,'' said Lan Ding, 40, a self-employed tailor who
said she had divorced her husband, an air force officer, because of the way he treated
her. ``We had a child, but he never kissed me. I only learned how to do that much later.''
One of the most popular books in Beijing this year is ``The Bridges of Madison
County,'' the American best seller whose story of a midlife affair that brings romance to
a woman's life clearly struck a chord here. Several women said they had spent evenings
sitting around with friends, debating whether the romance described in the book is
possible in marriage.
``Before, marriage was very stable, but the quality was very low,'' said Wang Xingjuan,
who listens to hundreds of complaints each month on the women's hot line she runs in
Beijing. ``It was something you did and didn't think about. Now, people have high
expectations from marriage.''
Ms. Wang also said that most Chinese women traditionally had sex only for the purpose
of bearing children. But China's one-child policy, while resisted by many women in the
countryside, has made urban women freer both to pursue careers and to pursue sex. ``Now
it's for pleasure, for health,'' Ms. Wang said.
Wu Liyong, a 36-year-old director of a food products company in Beijing, said one of
the causes of her divorce earlier this year, after 12 years of marriage, was an
unsatisfactory sex life.
``We were taught that the man is the one to intitiate sex,'' she said. ``I didn't say
anything for a long time. But when I finally talked about it with my friends, they told me
I was stupid. I feel like I wasted 10 years.''
If China's economic reforms have brought greater independence to women in some ways -
more choice of career, place to live, husband, lover - they have also brought women a
greater danger of unemployment than men face.
At the same time, the loosening of government control has also meant a resurgence of
traditional attitudes among men: that money means access to women.
``Men like to see women as objects,'' said Feng Yuan, an editor at China Women's News
who has written extensively on how social changes affect women. ``They feel that the more
they achieve, the more ability or charisma they have.''
A 32-year-old man who works for a securities company in Shanghai said that he was
faithful to his wife during the three years they dated before marriage, but that he
started having affairs about six months afterward.
``Chinese men need other women,'' said the man, who added that many of his friends feel
the same way. ``Fami life outside is another. You don't have to hide
everyone at work knows who my girlfriend is.''
Part of the broader problem, both women and men say, is that Chinese society does not
teach men to treat their wives well.
``My husband was a good worker, a good son to his parents, a good father to his son,
and a terrible husband,'' said Ms. Lan, the woman who divorced an air force officer.
``That's what our society teaches men to do.''
Ms. Feng, the newspaper editor, thinks that one of several causes of the rising divorce
rate is the influx of books and movies from the West.
``Ten years ago, the government blamed affairs on `bourgeois liberalization,' '' code
words for Western influence, she said. ``But it was counterproductive because it made a
lot of people think, now that capitalism is OK, it's also OK to have affairs, too.''
The current surge in divorce is not the first in modern China. The 1950 constitution
and a new marriage law, which redefined rights within families, encouraged a wave of
divorces in the early 1950s. Many of these were initiated by communist army soldiers who,
after their victory in 1949, moved to cities and divorced wives they had married in rural
hometowns but abandoned during the long years of war against the Japanese and Chinese
Nationalists.
At the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when millions of lives were shattered
by accusations of political incorrectness, many people were forced to divorce a spouse for
political reasons. After that period of turmoil ended in 1976, many others divorced
spouses they had married in unusual circumstances, though no reliable statistics have been
kept on what the divorce rates were at that time, Ms. Feng said.
For all the women who have divorced, there are countless more who have considered it
but been unable or unwilling to do so.
At the women's hot line, run out of a small office in central Beijing, a recent caller
described herself as a 31-year-old doctor who has been married to a businessman eight
years and has a small daughter.
When she discovered that her husband was having an affair, she asked for a divorce. He
refused, saying that he wanted to stay married for the sake of their child, and tried to
soothe his wife by saying he would buy them a new house and give her a car of her own,
still a rarity in China.
``I don't know what do,'' said the woman, who can still win a divorce if she
demonstrates that she is incompatible with her husband. ``I want to rely on myself, but I
don't want to have a less comfortable life.''
Ms. Lan said she urged many of her friends not to follow her own example, because of
the economic difficulty she has had raising a son on her own, and because of the hard time
she has had finding another man.
``A lot of people still see a divorced woman as immoral, but see a divorced man as
fine,'' Ms. Lan said.
As for her son, Wang Xiyue, 14, Ms. Lan used to worry that he would be the only student
in his class whose parents are divorced. She doesn't worry any more.
``There are six of them now,'' she said, affectionately rubbing a hand over his head.
``It's getting more and more common.''