Abstract
From a demographic point of view, discrimination against girls and women is part of a family and social system that confers high value on men and keeps girls and women in an inferior position. The Chinese government’s actions to improve women’s status over the past 50 years have led to clear improvements. Despite persistent social and cultural issues, there is no doubt that Chinese women enjoy better treatment today than during the imperial period. Peasant women are in a more favourable situation than in most other developing countries, and the position of women in the cities, or at least the larger ones, is probably better than most. In theory Chinese women enjoy all the rights for which hundreds of millions of women around the world are still fighting, including the right to work, study, divorce, or have an abortion. Even if the laws relating to women’s rights and interests are often only partially applied, the country does have a comprehensive body of laws governing various aspects of women’s lives and gender equality, which is the prerequisite for any progress in this domain.
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Notes
- 1.
According to official estimates, the gap in GDP between the cities and the countryside rose tenfold between 1949 and 1990 and is still growing. “There is almost no other country in the world where the income gap between city and countryside is as wide as it is in China,” reported two researchers from the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences in 1999 (Fabre 2000).
- 2.
China’s women fight kitchen culture. BBC monitoring, 2 Feb 2002. Available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/monitoring/media_reports/1797524.stm. Accessed 17 Mar 2003.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Nine years of compulsory education will become widespread in China by 2008. Renmin ribao (People’s Daily) 26 Aug 2003.
- 5.
See note 17, page 107.
- 6.
Six years are required to complete primary school, 9 for lower secondary school and 12 for high school.
- 7.
Nine years of compulsory education will become widespread in China by 2008, op. cit.
- 8.
In 2000, 1.78 million children aged 7–14 were not in school, 1.02 million of whom were girls.
- 9.
India. An Overview of Women’s Work, Minimum Wages and Employment. Available at http://www.wageindicator.org/main/wageindicatorcountries/country-report-india. Accessed 14 Sept 2012.
- 10.
Females now play an active role in politics. China Daily. 25 Sept 2000.
- 11.
Ouzhou ribao (Europe Daily). 19 Nov 2002.
- 12.
In the 1950s retirement age was set at 60 for men but at 50 or 55 for women depending on the type of employment. This curtailed women’s career plans even though the measure was originally designed to protect them. Because women are in employment for a shorter period, they are deprived of any promotion that might have been due had they taken retirement a few years later. Furthermore, a shorter working life also means a lower pension. (China Daily. 8 Mar 2001).
- 13.
These are enterprises in the townships and small towns (xiangzhen qiye). They were key to the reforms and were set up to promote decentralized industrialization and enable peasants to “leave the land without leaving the countryside” (li tu bu li xiang), in other words to redeploy the rural labour force while limiting the exodus to the cities.
- 14.
Equal rights and important role in economic sphere. Information Bureau of the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, Beijing, June 1994. Available at http://www.china.org.cn/e-white/chinesewoman/11-4.htm. Accessed 8 Jan 2007.
- 15.
aIn 250 villages surveyed, land was redistributed every two years between 1983 and the early 1990s (Zhu and Jiang 1993).
- 16.
This was a survey carried out in 1997 by Li Shuzhuo and Zhu Chuzhu from Jiaotong University in Xi’an (China) in a county of Shaanxi province, whose findings appeared in several publications (Li and Zhu 2001; Li et al. 2004; Li and Zhu 2005). In addition to gathering quantitative data on gender differentials in the treatment of children, the interviewers organized discussion groups that brought together 64 members of the village community, comprising 19 cadres from the family planning bureau and 45 peasants. These discussions helped to identify families’ and couples’ attitudes to children, and the influence of social gender relations on excess female infant mortality (see below).
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Attané, I. (2013). Persistent Social and Economic Disparities. In: The Demographic Masculinization of China. INED Population Studies, vol 1. Springer, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-00236-1_9
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