A famous Confucian, Cheng Yi, urged widows–but not widowers–to starve themselves to death rather than remarry. Yet Confucius, often regarded as “The Grand Emancipator,” neither denied women’s agency nor their need for spiritual development, insisting that everyone, regardless of gender, could improve through education and self-cultivation.
Of all people, girls and servants are the most difficult! If you are too familiar with them, they lose their humility. If you are reserved, they sulk. Confucius
Confucius was born into a selfishly hierarchical society in which women had always been subservient. Parents and brothers chose marriage partners who would control women’s lives and own their property. Husbands took as many concubines as they could afford, and, when husbands died, sons assumed their responsibilities. We associate his core teaching of ren, compassion, more with women than men as we do his notion of equality based on a social hierarchy of relationships, so it is no coincidence that some of the world’s most liberated women appeared during a Confucian Golden Age:
When a book was bought, he and I would always read it together, mending the text, repairing the manuscript, and writing the captions. And when a painting or a bronze was delivered, we would together open it, play with it, study its merits, and criticize its defects. Every evening we studied together till our candle was burned up, and, after supper, we sat together in the Kuei-lai Hall and made our own tea. We wagered against each other that such and such a quotation was to be found on a particular page in a certain chapter of a specific book. We would give the exact line, page, chapter, and volume and then check them from the bookshelf. The winner was rewarded with the first cup of tea, but when one of us did win, the first cup was rarely drunk: we were so happy that our hands trembled with laughter, and the tea spilled all over the floor. We swore to grow old and die in that little world of ours. –Li Qingzhao, Poetess, Song Dynasty, 1000 AD.
Tales of Song women made a deep impression on young Mao who first came to national attention at the age of twenty-six, for writing The Death of Miss Cha1o, about a local girl who committed suicide rather than marry a man she despised:
Miss Chao found herself in the following circumstances: One, Chinese society. Two, the Chao family of Nanyang Street in Changsha. Three, the Wu family of Kantzuyuan Street in Changsha, the family of the husband she did not want. These three factors constituted three iron nets, a kind of triangular cage and–once caught in these three nets–she sought life in every way possible, but in vain. There was no way for her to go on living. It happened because of the shameful system of arranged marriages, the darkness of our social system, the negation of the individual will and the absence of freedom to choose one’s own mate.
Later he added, “A man in China is usually subjected to the domination of three systems of authority: political, family, and religious. Women, in addition to being dominated by these, are also dominated by the authority of their husbands. These four authorities–political, family, religious, and masculine–are the embodiment of the whole feudal-patriarchal ideology and the oppressive system it supports”. He called Chinese women “the greatest mass of disinherited human beings the world has seen”.
Insisting that women PLA volunteers be treated equally, he attributed success in the war to them as much as anyone and made colleagues promise that, if they won the war, they would ‘grant freedom of marriage and equality between men and women’.
Thus it was that, in 1950 that Chinese women gained their democratic rights earlier than most.
Mao’s first official act as Head of State was signing the Marriage Law of the People’s Republic of China, which he had drafted. A prequel to America’s failed Equal Rights Amendment, it declares, “Women in the People’s Republic of China enjoy equal rights with men in all spheres of life, in political, economic, cultural, social, and family life.
The State protects the rights and interests of women, applies the principle of equal pay for equal work to men and women alike, and trains and selects cadres from among women”. It provided a civil registry for legal marriages, raised the marriageable age to 20 for males and 18 for females, and banned marriage by proxy; and both parties had to consent to a marriage.
To reassure conservatives, Mao insisted, “Genuine equality between the sexes can only be realized through egalitarian transformation of our entire society. Men and women must receive equal pay for equal work”.
In 1955, he drove home his point by promoting Li Zhe2n, sixth daughter of a peasant family, to the rank of combat Major General–the first female commander in history to reach that rank. He also advocated gender balance in education, and his successors have made steady progress.
Today, more girls graduate from university than boys and, normalized for job position and seniority, gender and wage gaps have almost disappeared. Modern women keep their surnames after marriage, take International Women’s Day off, enjoy a year’s maternity leave, and can retire younger. And tall tales about thirty-million ‘missing girls’ are being discredite3d.
Women now constitute fifty-three percent of university students and forty-nine percent of academics. One-third of full professors are women, and women graduates outnumber men in science and finance. Women professors, scientists, and entrepreneurs regularly lead glamorous projects. A woman designed the Navy’s Houbei Class missile patrol boats, and the country’s first native Nobel Laureate, Tu Youyou, is a woman whose discovery of artemisinin prevented millions of malaria deaths. Ms. Lu Yutong designed the world’s fastest computer, Mme. Wang Shufang created Beidou, the world’s most accurate GPS system, and Dr. Liang Jianying is lead designer for the new 500 mph maglev trains.
Half of all homebuyers are women. Eighty percent of venture capital companies have at least one female partner–which is why the 2020 Hurun Global Rich List found that ninety percent of the world’s richest self-made women and eighty percent of the world’s self-made female billionaires are Chinese. Zhou Qunfei, the most famous, was raised by her blind father in rural Hunan and dropped out of school at sixteen to make watch lenses for $1 a day.
She invested her savings in a startup to make touch screens and went public in 2015. China’s glass ceiling is higher, too. Sun Yafang chairs Huawei, the world’s biggest telecom; Jean Liu is President of Didi Chuxing, the world’s biggest ride-sharing company, Rachel Duan is CEO of GE China, and Dong Mingzhu is CEO of the world’s largest appliance manufacturer, Gree.
Somewhere, Miss Chou is smiling.
Women in Politics
Though women enjoy official favoritism in promotions and unofficial preference in transfers, only one-fourth of National Congresspeople are female, and only one woman, Health Minister Sun Chunlan, serves in the twenty-five-member Politburo. The six-man Steering Committee is a boys’ club.
Discrimination, or career choice?
Reaching the pinnacle of power in China is much harder than winning an Olympic gold medal. A Chinese political career is a single-minded, forty-year marathon that begins with decades of physical and mental hardship in poor, remote villages, frequent changes of location, relentless demands for performance, and increasing public scrutiny. If we blame anyone for the scarcity of women at the top, we should blame their mothers and grandmothers.
