Credit: Claudius
Fifteen years after Hillary Clinton, at the time the US’s first lady, famously irked China’s censors
By Antoaneta Bezlova
Fifteen years after Hillary Clinton, at the time the US’s first lady, famously irked China’s censors by declaring at the UN women’s conference in Beijing that “women’s rights are human rights”, China has parted with many of its old ideological trappings. Nowadays it impresses with its confident handling of international forums and eagerness to display how women have shared in the economic boom of the last few decades.
Chinese leaders – the majority of them male – pride themselves on the fact that the world’s fastest growing economy has lifted millions of rural women out of poverty, empowered girls to pursue education in fields once dominated by men, and that it delivers job growth for the thousands of university female graduates.
But the advent of market economics has been a mixed blessing for the one-quarter of the world’s women who are Chinese. The emergence of China as the world’s largest export powerhouse rests on the slight shoulders of more than 36 million peasant girls toiling in the exportprocessing factories in China’s east and south provinces. Those young girls – many of them fleeing the drudgery of rural farms – work in sweatshop-like conditions long hours for very little pay. They stitch sweaters, make parts for DVD players or soles for running shoes sometimes for more than 18 hours in a row. The money earned flows back to their village homes miles away from China’s booming coast to support parents and children left in the care of someone else.
In recent years the plight of these women has been well documented in journalistic accounts like ‘Factory Girls’ by Leslie Chang and ‘The China Price’ by Alexandra Harney, throwing unflattering light on China’s export miracle.
Media accounts in China rarely depict the sweatshops in China’s Guangdong and Zhejiang provinces in the Dickensian colours chosen by their foreign observers. But factory conditions in China are as harsh as those in the industrial west of the 19th century.
During a visit last year to Dongguan – one of the largest manufacturing centres in China’s south – this correspondent saw girls in the shoe factories there tended the factory machines working 12-hours shifts with 50 minutes off at lunch, and often worked seven-day weeks. Many of them were 16-year-olds, and those were the first to be let to go once the financial crisis hit, squeezing export orders.
It is only now – nearly 20 years after China’s economic reformer Deng Xiaoping created the coastal special economic zones for exports – that the city pioneer, Shenzhen, in the southern province of Guangdong, is mulling the country’s first Gender Equality Regulations to be implemented on a trial basis.
Guangdong may be China’s richest province but its gender equality conditions are not a match, says Lu Pin, a Shenzhen-based expert on gender issues.
“Women here are slandered for choosing to marry for money, but this is a real life choice,” she says. “It reflects the fact that there are not many options for women to change their poor economic fortunes.”
During Deng Xiaoping’s visit to Guangdong in 1992, the economic reform architect challenged the province to meet the goal of overtaking “the four little dragons of Asia” in 20 years. Since then Guangdong, where half of the country’s exports are made, has become a magnet for foreign investment and the envy of other Chinese regions.
The wealthiest province in China overtook Singapore and Hong Kong in terms of GDP a few years ago. But women’s low status has earned Guangdong another, rather infamous reputation for being the province with the largest number of “er nai” or mistresses, kept by rich businessmen and high-ranking officials.
Guangdong tried a few years back to clean up its image by legislating on sexual morality, and drafting a law that prohibited married people from “building love nests” and from “cohabiting” with non-spouses. But although loftily named the Women Rights Protection Law, the legislation has failed to stem the number of women going into the ranks of “er nai”.
