Johanna Son, Director, IPS Asia-Pacific
Angry outbursts and tears. A motley mix of humanity rubbing elbows with one another.
By Johanna Son
Angry outbursts and tears. A motley mix of humanity rubbing elbows with one another. Activists of all political stripes thrusting pamphlets about the world’s ills into your hands. Long rides on noisy buses headed for the civil society meetings, which were being held as far away (70 kilometres) from the official conference as Chinese officials could make it.
These are my memories of covering ‘Beijing 1995’ – the Fourth World Conference on Women that was held in the Chinese capital in September 1995, drawing thousands of participants from around the globe.
Inside the airconditioned hall, government delegates from 189 countries, activists and others huddled in small groups as the UN negotiations went on. The name of the game? ‘Busting brackets’. Governments discussed the controversial or ‘bracketed’ provisions of the Beijing Platform for Action, debated on at times conflicting language proposed by different countries, and haggled over the final wording in order to reach consensus – and remove the brackets.
Over at Huairou – a county whose name was virtually unknown in international circles until its selection as the site of the NGO discussions – it was a different world. Sisterhood was in full bloom, be it through music, dance, protest art or banners in and out of the spartan buildings used for the NGO events.
What were just distant news articles to me before, played out in real life. At one seminar on the impact of the Chinese occupation of Tibet on women, near-mayhem erupted when what looked like Chinese state-supported attendees tried to yell down the Tibetan speakers.
Looking back, a universe of causes intersected with one another through those 11 days in Beijing, in a China that 15 years ago was less confident a power than it is now.
China continues to receive brickbats for its human rights record today. But in hindsight – and with a tinge of irony – China is part of history as the venue for a historic moment in international policy: the Beijing conference enshrined women’s rights a basic human right, something that may sound fundamental today but was far from a norm in the past.
(Johanna Son, IPS Asia-Pacific director, was part of the TerraViva team of IPS journalists who covered the Beijing conference in 1995.)
