Challenges to Women's Rights and Gender Equality in China

The status of women in China is one with a mixed and contentious history with a variety of events interwoven to create an inconsistent image of China as both attempting to be progressive in many respects, whilst simultaneously the government equally seeks to repress and control feminist elements it feels are inconvenient or adverse to its arguably patriarchal interests.To get more news about woman in ancient china, you can visit shine news official website.

There are a number of contextual examples which demonstrate this discrepancy in the status of women throughout China, and whilst there has been a great deal of progress made in some elements of the popular sphere, others have been brutally repressed by a government dominated by male influence.

This article seeks to highlight the extreme differences between progress made and the inequalities women in China still face every day in order to determine just how far the feminist movement within the country has come.
There is a long history to China’s women’s rights movement beginning with the fall of the traditional imperialist political structure and the rise of Mao Zedong. The communists believed that by enabling and enforcing gender equality, women would be able to more aptly assist the growing movement, and to help develop the society they as an institution idealised.
However, many within the feminist movement within China were quick to realise that the polemic often did not reflect reality, with accusations that the political elite had not actively taken action to ensure the equality of women. In more recent years, the new leadership of the party under Xi Jinping appear to have taken more proactive steps towards ensuring equality, with new legislation passed which defines and prevents sexual harassment within China, whilst China also had its first ever successful legal claim for discrimination based on gender in 2013.

However again, there are huge gulfs between the public representation of feminism in China and the sad reality of the obstacles faced by both the feminist movement and regular women on a day-to-day basis.

Women's Rights Activists Charged with 'Picking Quarrels'
As previously mentioned, the new leadership of Xi Jinping introduced legislation to prevent sexual harassment in 2006, which was heralded by many as a positive step in Chinese women’s rights. However, there a number of incidents which sharply contradict the positive image presented by the Communist party, beginning with the detention of five Chinese feminists for a period of 37 days throughout April and March.

The women had been aiming to place stickers on buses highlighting the daily harassment women face on public transport; they were instead arrested by authorities on the charge of ‘picking quarrels’ (which may be loosely interpreted as a charge to prevent forms of protest the state considers inconvenient).

The Prevalence of Sexual Harassment on Public Transport
The issue of sexual harassment on China’s overcrowded public transport system is well known; during my own time working in Beijing in 2013, a number of friends faced sexual harassment whilst on public transport including several female colleagues being groped whilst another faced an elderly man openly masturbating in front of her – whilst no one in the carriage appeared to bat an eyelid. When she later asked Beijing locals about the incident she was told that older men were allowed to take part in this kind of activity as they are senile and it was just the way things were.

Shocking though such incidents are, there appears to be a lack of public outcry, and although the five feminists protesting such harassment were released without charge, the fact they were detained at all speaks volumes about the state’s refusal to instigate change.