From The London Review of Books:
I have never felt the need to call myself a feminist, no matter how often my late-developed gender awareness tells me I ought to be one. In my primary school in China in the mid-1980s, the most ferocious person in class was a girl. She used to carry a tree branch to beat boys with and absolutely no one dared to offend her. Our desks were designed for two, usually a girl and a boy; the better student was supposed to help their neighbour. We drew a line (called the ‘38th parallel’ after the line separating North and South Korea) down the middle of the desk and neither side was allowed to cross the border. I had a compass with one needle leg as a weapon, ready to attack the boy when his elbow strayed into my territory. One day his mother found some blood on his sleeve when she was washing his clothes and asked him what had happened. He told her that he had had a minor nosebleed: it was too shameful to admit that he was being bullied by a girl (male pride prevented him from retaliating). Poor boy. After the bloodshed I stopped using the compass and adopted a softer tactic: pinching.
Academically, girls weren’t, and aren’t, in any way inferior to boys. The Chinese education system favours cramming, and girls are more focused and better behaved than boys, at least at certain ages. For us, the one-child generation, the gender ratio in school was about fifty-fifty, and girls’ academic scores varied from the middle to the upper range; very often they came top. In 1999, Chinese universities expanded enrolment by 48 per cent (1.6 million freshmen compared to 1.1 million in 1998), and it’s no surprise that more girls than boys have been getting into university ever since. In 2018, the proportion of female college students is 52 per cent. Women are on the whole more qualified than men in the job market. In fact any HR expert from the big Chinese firms will tell you – in private – that it’s difficult to find qualified men. So they have to improvise, which means lowering the standard of recruitment to get the gender balance they require. Some feminists see this manoeuvring as systematic discrimination against women, but if they look more closely they are liable to find that the story doesn’t fit their narrative of oppression.
Many of today’s successful Chinese startups were founded by women in their thirties, and I’ve seen companies with all-female staff. Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, who has access to the data of the billion or so Chinese consumers on the Taobao and Alipay platforms, says that ‘women are the economy, today and in the future.’ One recent report suggests that 79 per cent of technology firms in China have at least one female executive; in the US the figure is 54 per cent and in the UK 53 per cent. According to Bloomberg, ‘women launch more than half of all new internet companies in China.’ It’s hard to imagine that men could conspire to stop the rise of women in the Chinese economy. The younger the age group, the less the gender distinction seems to matter. When it comes to millennials, you see hardly any signs at all of male dominance. Male pop idols are styled as ‘little fresh meat’ (the unisex look), partly to appeal to the ‘female gaze’, but maybe unconsciously they want to look feminine – girls are better and cooler in school after all.
. . . .
We should, of course, keep in mind that the cities and the countryside are like different planets. Rural life is still dominated by the patriarchy, untouched by modernity. Women are expected to fulfil their duty as wives and mothers, otherwise they are viewed as flawed goods and cast away; it is unthinkable for women to initiate divorce proceedings. Husbands beat wives for no reason. Many women go to cities to be cleaners, care workers or housekeepers and don’t want to go back to their villages. My housekeeper has a lazy husband and a jobless, videogame-addict son in the countryside, and to feed them she has to work for several families, seven days a week. I asked why she doesn’t get divorced and save up some money for herself; she said that if she did she would lose her purpose in life.
It is impossible to ignore the fact that China’s top leadership are all male, which could easily lead to accusations of misogyny in politics. But I think it’s more of a generational than a gender issue. The seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee are of my parents’ generation, and came of age at a time when, thanks to the Cultural Revolution, higher education was unattainable for many. In ten or fifteen years’ time, when the one-child generation ascends to power, the leadership of China is likely to reflect the gender balance of my university cohort. Education matters here. The present party leadership has no particular reason at the moment to object to female power. President Xi Jinping himself has had to learn to live with it: when he worked as a provincial official his wife was a superstar singer and a household name, and their only child is a daughter. Yet in her new book, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening, Leta Hong Fincher claims that the subordination of women is fundamental to the Communist Party’s dictatorship and the ‘stability’ of the system. Xi, she maintains, sees patriarchal authoritarianism as critical to the survival of the party. But she doesn’t pay enough attention to the Chinese bureaucratic system, in which rank counts much more than gender. Male officials have no problem following a woman’s lead if she has a higher rank. One of the strengths of the party is its ability to welcome talent from all quarters. Jiang Qing was the leader of the Gang of Four and there were plenty of female zealots in the Cultural Revolution.
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This is not to say that things are easy for feminists in China. There is no lack of news about the crackdown on feminists’ activities; but compared to the human rights lawyers and political dissidents, feminists are handled rather gently by the authorities. Xiao Meili, a close friend of the Feminist Five in Guangzhou, gave an account on Weibo of a visit by National Security officers in 2017:
National Security officer: The political tasks in the second half of this year will be really, really heavy [the then upcoming 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China] … You girls are too famous. Could you please co-operate and move to the lake area [far from the city centre]. Have you ever been there? The scenery is very beautiful.
Xiao Meili: Why don’t you move there then?
NS: I have to go to the office every day.
Xiao Meili: We really don’t want to move. This is too much trouble.
NS: We’ll help you find the apartment and relocate, and pay for your first month’s rent.
Xiao Meili: You should cover the agent fee and all the rent …
NS: If it was up to me, you girls could remain in Guangzhou. No problem. But it’s not up to me any more; we’re just passing on the directive from above. You girls are too famous now, and you should know what happens to fat pigs … When you move, don’t forget to mention on Weibo that you are being forced to move away from Guangzhou city centre. You have to say it loud and clear, so my boss knows that I’m doing my job.
Xiao Meili says that NS officers also harassed her landlord and her friends’ landlord to push them to move to the suburbs.
Link to the rest at The London Review of Books