The Chinese Communist Party Founded One Hundred Years: Women From “Capable of Holding Half of the Sky” to Returning to the Family to Build a Harmonious Society-BBC News

After the founding of New China in 1949, “equality between men and women” was written into the constitution, which recognized the status of women in law. In addition, China’s first marriage law passed in 1950 stipulated that “abolish the feudal system of forced marriages, the inferiority of men and the inferiority of women, and the ignorance of children’s interests. The freedom of marriage, monogamy, and equal rights for men and women should be implemented, and the legal rights of women and children should be protected New democratic marriage system.”

Women are allowed to divorce freely. For women who have experienced the old society, this is a major life-changing decision.

In the early days of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the CCP reformed prostitutes. In Beijing in 1949, 237 brothels were closed, and 1,303 prostitutes were sent to labor camps for reform. Since then, in Shanghai and other places, the transformation of prostitutes has spread to all of China.

At that time, the popular saying that “the old society turned people into ghosts, and the new China turned ghosts into people” aptly summarized the situation of prostitute transformation.

In the eighth year after the founding of New China, the whole society held high the banner of building socialism in 1957, striving to fully liberate women and enter the period of the Great Leap Forward.

Mao Zedong, the leader of the Communist Party of China, even cited the saying that “women can hold up half the sky”, advocating that women and men carry out labor and production and build socialism together.

“Women can hold up half of the sky” at the time meant that women had great potential. Whatever men can do, women can do the same. In some areas of China, there is even a slogan “One person must do the job with two people, and women must beat the man.”

Shandong girl Hao Jianxiu was welcomed by Mao Zedong, the then leader of the Communist Party of China, for trying to improve the output of the entire textile industry. Hao Jianxiu has also become a typical member of the “Iron Girl”. At that time, “Iron Girl” was regarded as a tribute to women’s perseverance. But this is also an example of women’s participation in production and construction after the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Hao Jianxiu was later trained by the CCP to become a ministerial-level official. He is one of the few high-level female officials, demonstrating the CCP’s recognition of the “Iron Girl”.

In the prosperous affirmative movement and nation-building at that time, women’s responsibilities and contributions in the family were ignored.

During the People’s Commune, China used “work points” as a distribution system. Work points not only measure the quantity and quality of group labor, but also the basis for the distribution of labor remuneration.

Gail Hershatter, a historian who specializes in modern China, believes: “On the one hand, they leave the family, learn new skills, earn wages or work points, and have a wider social circle than in the past. It has brought many benefits to women. “

On the other hand, they do dual work inside and outside. This is because after they finish their work in the factory or collective, they have to make clothes and shoes for the whole family at home, do all the housework at night, and raise the big family.

After the founding of New China, the Chinese government encouraged childbirth and the first wave of baby booms appeared. From 1949 to 1953, China’s first census showed that China’s population increased by 100 million people. Many women with many births were awarded the titles of “heroic mothers” and “honorable mothers”.

In the Mao era, in addition to participating in the construction of socialism, women had to support families with many children, solve their food and clothing problems, and take care of the elderly in the family. These invisible labors naturally fall on women.

He Xiao said: “I have never really talked about the burden of (alone) taking care of the family (bringing to women).”

The educated youth Wang Qin (pseudonym) is a generation “born in New China and growing under the banner of the red”. Under Mao Zedong’s call, as a woman who “can stand up to half the sky”, she also joined the mountain army and did the same work as the male educated youth.

Beginning in the 1950s, in order to alleviate the employment pressure in the cities, Mao Zedong stated that “the countryside is a vast world, and there can be a lot to do there.” “It is very necessary for the educated young people to go to the countryside to receive re-education from the poor, lower and middle peasants.” According to the instructions, the Chinese government organized a mass line movement for a large number of urban “educated youths” to leave the cities to settle and work in the countryside.

Beginning in 1968, the policy of “going to the mountains and going to the countryside” began to be fully implemented in China. When the enthusiasm of urban educated youth to build the countryside burned to Wang Qin’s family, it was already in 1974, which belonged to the end of the movement.

Wang Qin was 21 years old. The Red Guards wearing red armbands came to their home in June to persuade his mother to support her daughter in going to the countryside. The mother was crying and whimpering, reluctant to give up. After urban youth went to the countryside, their household registration moved to the countryside. This means that the daughter’s status must be reduced from a city person to a country person, and it will be even more difficult to return to the city. This is a decision to change her daughter’s life. His mother held Wang Qin’s hukou book tightly in her hand.

“I grabbed my hukou at the time. I persuaded my mother that I was a young man who ate a lot and wanted to eat meat. What do I do at home if I don’t go to the countryside?”

So Wang Qin and 63 other educated youth came to a farm in southwest China. She said that eating at home was a problem, and she would starve to death if she didn’t go to the countryside. When going to the countryside, 32 pairs of men and women were arranged to work on the same farm. The organization hopes that these 30 pairs of young people who live in the fields day and night can take root and settle in the countryside.

Wang Qin recalled that in a farm with more than 60 pigs, a dozen chickens and a large area of ​​cultivation, female educated youths and male educated youths did the same work, picking the same weight of pig manure, and dared to drive tractors without training. : “At that time, men and women were still equal. As much as you do, I will do as much. If you do less, you will be criticized. Everyone is very active, thinking about working hard every day, and you can stop work when you are done.”

While women all over the country are rushing into the fields, the CCP has established female models to encourage women across the country to devote themselves to production.”Iron Girl” in Dazhai Village, Shanxi”Guo Fenglian and the other iron girls “worked harder than harder” and established Dazhai Village as a model of national agricultural production. “Only by labor can you liberate yourself.” Chinese media quoted Guo Fenglian’s evaluation of that period of agricultural production history. They do heavy physical work with the same labor intensity as men, “their spirit is free.”

During the seven years of going to the countryside, Wang Qin’s companions had 22 pairs of successfully combined families freely. The fate of the remaining 20 people was changed by the CCP leader Deng Xiaoping’s decision to resume the college entrance examination in 1977. Otherwise, they will continue to stay in the countryside for the rest of their lives.

In 1981, Wang Qin returned to the city and was assigned to a shoe factory as a female worker. “At that time, equal pay for equal work,” Wang Qin worked six days a week, working eight hours a day, earning 33 yuan a month. But the other educated youth who returned home with her were assigned to public institutions, and their pensions are now twice hers.

She thinks this is unfair, because all urban residents go to the countryside and do the same work and the same hours of work as their male counterparts when they go to the countryside. Why do they allocate better when they return home? “In any age, there is unfairness. Anyway, it can’t be changed, only recognition.” In Wang Qin’s eyes, the unequal pension directly affects her quality of life. She said that when a companion with a high pension went to a high-end restaurant for dinner, she made her own tea at home; when someone else drove in a private car, she would take the bus.

The 1980s was also the era when American student He Xiao came to China to discuss gender equality with Chinese classmates. Chinese classmates told her that the Chinese Constitution stipulates that men and women are equal. However, the dialogue between her and her classmates seemed to be in parallel time and space. The Chinese classmates did not understand the equality of men and women and did not delve into it. She is concerned about the implementation of gender equality.

In the early 1980s, China was beginning to reform and open up to encourage the development of the private economy, and a large number of rural women workers came to China’s coastal cities to “chase their dreams.” Family planning has also entered the first few years of strict implementation. Because of the small peasant’s patriarchal thinking, many families and mothers decided to have abortions after seeing that the fetus was identified as a female baby.

According to Chinese official data, the number of newly-added female babies decreased by 230,000 in 1981; in the 1980s, the government refused to announce the gender ratio of newly-added male and female babies. Research by demographers has shown that after the implementation of the family planning policy, about 25 to 30 million female babies will be born in China.

In 1980, Wang Qin gave birth to a boy. Due to the family planning policy, she could only give birth to one child. She said that she was also pregnant with a second child later, but because she had returned to work in the city and could not have another birth, she was forced to have an abortion. Wang Qin didn’t want to say more about the details.

She said that a female friend who was pregnant with a second child in a business unit would either give up work to take care of the child, or change a place to have a child, and then stop working as a housewife.

Thirty years later, the impact of the family planning policy of that year has become apparent. The results of the 2021 census show that the birth rate of China’s population has fallen and the population has experienced negative growth. The male population is 30 million more than the female population.

Thirty years later, He Xiao became a historian and taught at Stanford University in the United States, focusing on issues such as modern China, gender, and labor. She believes that the family planning policy that causes many female infant deaths is a perfect example of not considering gender factors in decision-making.

She said (China) that the national level did not directly require the strangulation of female babies, but it is obviously more in line with the interests of individual families to give birth to boys. In the context of the family as a production unit, they need boys economically. The consequence of abandoning baby girls is an imbalance in the population structure.

He Xiao said: “Therefore, under this kind of policy, what is good for an individual’s family is harmful to the whole society.”

On the surface, strict family planning has liberated a large number of rural women. They come to cities and become migrant workers, repeating the same actions on the factory assembly line day after day, or doing low-income housekeeping jobs.

At the same time, some unwilling women choose to enter bath shops and other places to engage in sex work. China’s pornography industry has revived and flourished since the 1980s, with a larger scale than before the liberation. But women in prostitution are labeled “degenerate and dirty”.

He Xiao commented that reform and opening up provide new opportunities for rural women. Many people go out of the countryside to improve their material and social status, but they also bring new contradictions.

Many of these women have many dreams. They come to the export processing zone to pursue their dreams. On the other hand, they often find that there is a lot of exploitation here, the work is hard and dangerous, and in some cases, prostitution is also affected by the authorities and the authorities. Exploitation by various evil forces.

She believes: “Prostitution is another way for women to earn a living. In an extremely discriminatory situation, for many people, their livelihood options are limited, and sex work is the best-paid job, more than other jobs. It is profitable. And buying prostitution is not as difficult as dealing with dangerous materials in a battery-producing factory.”

Li Yinhe, a professor at the Institute of Sociology of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is one of the few sexology researchers in China, and even one of the few Chinese scholars who openly support the legalization of prostitution. She believes that there is a large-scale sex service industry in China. First, the industry has a market under the polarization of the rich and the poor—the rich pay for the money and the poor provide services; the second is the inequality between men and women. In the prostitution industry, the number of women More than 90%. Therefore, this is still an issue of inequality between men and women.

In the 1990s, China launched a large-scale ban on pornography. The anti-pornography was once so severe that the owners of bathing centers, brothel owners and others were killed, but this failed to stop the development of the prostitution industry.

Until entering the 21st century, this industry is still booming. In 2014, the Guangdong government of China had to mobilize more than 6,000 police forces to conduct an anti-vice operation against the porn industry in Guangdong for three months. Among them, Dongguan City, known as the “Chinese Sex Capital” by the people, bears the brunt. Dongguan is also an important industrial place in the Pearl River Delta, where foreign trade factories and Hong Kong and Macao investments are being promoted here to export Chinese-made products to the world.

Perhaps seeing the fate and hard work of the previous generation in the 1960s and the rising cost of living and education, after entering the 21st century, Chinese women of childbearing age are reluctant to marry and have children. The CCP officially ended its family planning policy in 2016 and relaxed its second-child policy across the board, but the policy did not work after the liberalization.

In China’s job market, where there is a ceiling in the workplace, women of childbearing age with two children face more serious workplace discrimination than those of the first child. Some women in the workplace have to sign a promise of infertility or late childbearing with the company in order to get promoted smoothly. Individual families are even more under pressure from housing, medical care, and education, and the arrival of second children has discouraged many women.

Then in 2021, the policy once again relaxed the birth limit to three births. Even so, on the Internet in China, ridicule of the relaxation of the three-child policy is endless. Young women choose to “lie flat” and take the country’s “call” as a breeze, leaving their left ears in and out of their right ears.

He Xiao commented that the CCP now needs female labor to build a stable and prosperous society. “China is putting pressure on women to return to their families. The central government believes that social stability depends on the family. For families to be strong, women need to return to the family to support the breadwinner. This person is usually a male in the family.”

“The Mao era would also call on women to come out and build socialism.” “China claims that the family is the cornerstone of a stable society at the national level. Now China is promoting a more traditional division of labor. Just like the Qing Dynasty, it believed that women exist for the purpose of Make the family stable and strong.”

In the 100-year history of the founding of the Communist Party of China, only eight women have ever entered the Politburo of the Communist Party of China, and two of them are alternate or designate members of the Politburo. The number of CCP members in the past century has grown from more than 50 in 1921 to 90 million by the end of 2019. Women who were once able to hold up half the sky now account for only 27.9% of the CCP. There has never been a woman in the highest decision-making body of the CCP: a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo.

Even Wu Yi, who ranked second in the 2007 Forbes “World‘s Most Powerful Women” list, failed to make it to the CCP Politburo Standing Committee. Wu Yi, also known as the “Iron Lady”, is an expert in China’s foreign economic and trade negotiations, and was in charge of foreign economic and trade and health fields during his ruling period.

It is difficult for women to become permanent members, and no one has made history today. Even after women enter the Politburo, they become “party and state leaders” in charge of government work, but they are interpreted as insignificant positions by the outside world.

Liu Yandong, a member of the 18th Politburo of the Communist Party of China, is in charge of education, science and technology, culture and sports from the Chinese government official to the vice premier of the State Council, and is considered a “vase” role.

His successor, Sun Chunlan, the current Vice Premier of the State Council, is also a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China. She is also in charge of education and culture in the government.

The lack of a female voice in the top decision-making level of the CCP and the inability of women to break through the ceiling to enter the top decision-making level seems to be an unsolvable problem.

He Xiao said that this is a “chicken and egg” problem. “There are no women in the leadership because it is not a priority to have women hold important positions and responsibilities. Therefore, no one in the leadership is to empower women. Usually social movements put some pressure on this. But compared to the Mao Zedong era and the early reforms, the CCP The tolerance for sports is lower.”

In 2015, China’s “Five Sisters of Women’s Rights” planned to organize public rights protection activities against sexual harassment on public buses before Women’s Day, but they were arrested and detained on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”. They have initiated street activities such as “Occupy Men’s Toilets” and “Blood Brides” in an attempt to advise the authorities on issues such as daily gender inequality and women’s right to speak.

Under the pressure of international public opinion, they were allowed to “release on bail pending trial” after being detained for several months. From then on, it is hard to see a feminist movement that can take to the streets again in China. When women’s rights turned to the Internet, their official accounts and Miss Douban were closed and bombed. The sound space is further compressed.

“This is very unfortunate. I think it is the interaction between social pressure and national response that opens up more and more space for social change. This problem is not unique to China, but the current situation in China is that it is almost impossible to do much. Things to solve the problem.”

But He Xiao also sees hope from the younger generation in China. “They have all kinds of ideas and are very proficient in social media, which means that their ideas will spread for a while before they are removed from the Internet or closed.”

The general public in China is accustomed to dealing with policymakers in their own way. Maybe they are not one of the people who take to the streets to pull banners, and maybe they will not speak up on the Internet. However, the declining birth rate in recent years and the continuously postponed age at first marriage have shown women’s decision: they do not want to be used as a reproductive machine, do not want the uterus to be controlled by others, and do not want to return to the family.