Author: Amelia

Introduced in 1979, the one child policy was put in place by China’s communist government with the belief that if would reduce the number of mouths the People’s Republic would have to feed. China abandoned its One Child Policy in late 2015 and raised the limit to 2 children in an effort to solve its aging population problem.
Effects of One Child Policy:
120 male births for every 100 female.
Aging population
Lower fertility rates with an increase in women’s education
But even with a looser two-child limit there were still rules that people found problematic, such as a requirement throughout the 1990s that women be sterilized after the birth of a second child, or a requirement that births must be spaced at least five years apart.
In 1983, just one year, China sterilized over 20 million people, more than the combined population of the three largest US cities, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
A mass sterilization campaign for close to 10,000 people was held in Puning City, Guangdong, as recently as 2010. According to Amnesty International, almost 1,400 relatives of couples targeted for sterilization were detained, to pressure these couples to consent.

UN Women has worked in China since 1998
Focuses on: Violence against women, leadership and political participation, economic empowerment, and national planning and budgeting
Violence against women – produced Judicial Guidelines on Domestic Violence Cases to be used by all judges in Hunan Province.
“The Guidelines give full consideration to women’s rights when domestic violence cases are tried in court, resulting in greater judicial support for gender justice. The Guidelines contain 21 provisions and address the issue of strengthening judicial protection for female victims of domestic violence.
According to these new Guidelines, a woman in Hunan who killed her husband after long term abuse was sentenced to only three years in jail. Before the Guidelines were established, such cases always resulted in the death penalty or life in prison.
Through the CGF, UN Women is currently working with Women’s Federation of Hunan Province, Hunan Public Security Bureau, and Hunan Police Officers Academy, to issue the first ever handbook for police officers on how to deal with domestic violence cases.”

UN Trust Fund in Support of Actions to Eliminate Violence against Women (EVAW TF) in collaboration with UNFPA, UNESCO, and UNDP.- goal is to decrease domestic violence in China. Focusing on Hunan, Sichuan, and Gansu provinces to create a multi-sector DV response model. Key strategies are:
Utilisation of a rights-based approach aimed at respecting, protecting and fulfilling women’s human rights under CEDAW;
Development of a multi-sector response model – referred to as the DV Prevention and Response Model – for scaling-up to the national level;
Prevention of DV through awareness-raising activities that target men and youth and challenge the underlying social norms that condone DV;
Advocacy aimed at policy and legal reform.
http://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/countries/china/eliminating-violence-against-women

Strengthening Women’s Economic Rights – UN Women wants to partner with the private sector in order to build new venues for the economic and social empowerment of women.

“In 2011, with the support of UN Women under the Youth, Migration and Employment (YEM) Joint Programme, the All-China Women’s Federation put forward an official proposal for a National Regulation on Domestic Service to the National Peoples’ Political and Consultative Congress. The proposal lays out the obligations and rights of employers, domestic workers and service agencies. The protection of (female) domestic workers’ rights is discussed, especially upholding minimum labor standards to ensure worker safety. Workers are ensured a contract, training, as well as social security and insurance and are protected against employers’ violence or sexual harassment.”
http://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/countries/china/strengthening-womens-economic-rights

Gender Responsive Governance and Women’s Political Empowerment –
“UN Women, through its Fund for Gender Equality (or in the framework of the Fund For Gender Equality grant-making process), has partnered with the All-China Women’s Federation to undertake activities promoting both oversight and impact of Chinese women’s political participation under the ‘Equal Political Participation for Chinese Women’ programme. Activities focus on sharing of experiences within the region, capacity building on reporting on progress made towards international agreements on participation as well as how to reflect gender in national budgets, plans and programmes. The aim of the programme is to support the government in achieving its goals on women’s political participation and enhancing abilities to reflect gender awareness in future decision making processes”
http://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/countries/china/gender-responsive-governance-and-womens-political-empowerment

While modern Chinese society has been making efforts for gender equality, much of Chinese culture is modeled after traditional Chinese values that emphasize strong gender roles. The terms Yin and Yang, Yin, or the feminine aspect, is described as weak, passive, and soft while Yang, or the masculine aspect, is depicted as dominating, assertive, and hard. Traditionally in China, Yang was always more dominate over Yang and lead to a male dominated household. This had a major influence on the thought that women were meant to follow the lead of the men in the household. At first, they were taught to be subservient to their father and brothers, and then once they married, that position was taken over by the husband. The woman’s entire purpose was to produce a male heir. The only time in which a woman was able to run the household was if her husband died and her son was not old enough to take over. The roles of Yin and Yang are also accountable to the high male birth rates in China due to the fact that males have all the power and therefore are the most desirable. Because of this, when China introduced the One Child Policy, people in China went out of their way in order to ensure that their one child was male. Thus leading to a huge surge in the adoption of Chinese girls in the 90s and a severely male dominated society today.

While modern day Chinese women have entered the workforce, it is still a severely male dominated environment. While the Chinese government has put in place legal and policy reforms in order to improve employment discrimination in the workforce, oftentimes there is not adequate enforcement of these policies and conflicting government policies can appear to promote the continuation of discriminatory practices as opposed to discouraging them. The practice of gender-based quotas and enrollment policies in higher education has resulted in women having to get better scores than men when taking entrance exams. When it comes to entry into the workforce in jobs seen as “male” environments, women have a very hard time finding work. Oftentimes job openings advertise white collar jobs for men while advertising sales and clerical positions for women.

Not only do women have to get better scores and search harder for jobs, they also have hoops such as maximum age, minimum height, and other physical preferences to jump through. Discrimination based on appearance is commonplace when hiring women for various positions. In addition, the Chances Labor law and Regulations on the Scope of Prohibited Labour for Female Workers further enforce the idea that women are weak by explicitly banning women from physically demanding jobs, such as logging, underground mining, or setting up power lines, and prohibiting menstruating, pregnant, or lactating women from doing certain jobs as well.

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