Family, tradition and culture of motherhood. These are some of the values that Beijing proposes to women in today’s China, according to a speech given this week by President Xi Jinping. “It is necessary,” Xi said Monday, “to guide women to play a unique role in promoting the traditional virtues of the Chinese nation and establishing good family customs.” The message resonates loud and clear in a country plagued in recent times by a birth rate problem and a rapid aging of the population.
“We must actively cultivate a new culture of marriage and motherhood,” Xi said, sitting at a table next to the new leadership of the All-China Women’s Federation, an organization linked to the Communist Party. “Doing good work for women is not only related to their own development, but also to family harmony and social harmony,” added the president of the Asian giant. The Chinese leadership’s proposal also involves guiding young people’s vision of “marriage, motherhood and family,” according to the transcript collected by state media.
The meeting took place just after the National Women’s Congress. The inauguration of this quinquennial event in the Great Hall of the People last week left paradoxical images: nearly 1,800 delegates sat in the audience and the stands, but the nucleus of the first row of the stage, that reserved for the leaders of the Party, It was populated by men, with Xi at the center.
China currently does not have any women in the main power bodies of the Communist Party. In the last Congress of this organization that governs China’s designs, held in 2022, for the first time in 25 years, no woman was named among the 24 people who make up the Politburo, the second step of the pyramid. Her absence among the seven members of the Standing Committee, the highest body in the hierarchy, was also no surprise: they have never been part of the small nucleus in which key decisions are made. Only men over 60 sit there, with President Xi, the oldest of them all, at the top.
The battle for equality still has a long way to go. “The Chinese concept of society and family is deeply sexist,” analyzes a European diplomatic source based in Beijing. “Women have the right to work and, in general, the same rights as men,” she clarifies, “but subject to their role in society, which is to be mothers.” For this reason, she continues, there is a shortage of women in really high positions. “It would be incompatible with his family obligations.” In China, he continues, a woman who voluntarily decides not to be a mother is not considered “trustworthy.” And she concludes: “To say that the European Union and China are aligned on gender issues would be a lie.”
In this country, feminism—and in general any civil society movement that challenges the system—is silenced, silenced and censored. Women who try to mount awareness campaigns risk being arrested. And protest messages often disappear from social networks that are always under surveillance. At the end of September, the trial was held against Chinese journalist and MeToo movement activist Sophia Huang Xueqin and labor activist Wang Jianbing (also a MeToo sympathizer) accused of “inciting the subversion of state power.” Both were arrested in 2021 and face sentences of up to five years in prison. Huang Xueqin had participated in several MeToo movement campaigns to provide support and assistance to survivors of sexual assault and sexual harassment.
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“Harmonious families”
“Only when families are harmonious, well educated and have a decent family culture, can children grow up healthy and society develop properly,” Xi Jinping stressed in his speech this Monday, an act that Trivium China analysts define as a true “bigmansplaining“, adding the prefix “big” (large) to “mansplaining” -of “man” (man) and “explaining” (explaining)—an English term that refers to the situation in which a man explains to a woman something that she actually already understands or knows.
In the official statement from Xi’s previous meeting with the Women’s Federation, in 2018, there was no mention of “marriage” or “motherhood.” On the other hand, “equality” between men and women was mentioned up to six times, compared to only two mentions in this year’s official reading. In it, the president also asks to “promote the improvement and application of policies to support birth rates, improve the quality of demographic development and actively confront the aging of the population.”
“Xi Jinping wants Chinese women to have more babies,” summarize the aforementioned Trivium analysts in their latest newsletter. “No matter how much Xi asks,” they say, “the birth rate will continue to fall until policymakers offer better paternity leave and more financial aid for the care and education of children.”
“These statements do not seem to indicate any tangible benefits for women or significant progress in promoting gender equality,” says Zhen, a twenty-something Chinese woman who confesses how, despite her studies at one of the best universities in the country, she finds it difficult understand the “true meaning” of Xi’s speech.
“I have no idea what the ‘socialist path with Chinese characteristics’ means for women’s development,” she says. “From what I know,” she adds, “the pressure on women to have children is potentially even greater, especially those working in the Communist Party system, state-owned enterprises, and government systems.” She is aware that, for the Government, “the resolution of gender conflicts must involve making women conform, instead of addressing real inequalities,” she adds. The educational system, furthermore, “tends to reinforce the idea that young women should be selfless and devoted, instead of teaching young men to be better husbands and fathers.”
The decline in births and the aging of society has become a central concern of the Chinese Government; is among the political priorities set at the last conclave of the Communist Party in 2022. The birth rate has fallen by more than half since 2016, the year after Beijing decided to end the harsh one-child policy, devised years ago to limit the population. Now, however, Beijing encourages having two or even three children. Numerous initiatives have been launched. But the Government still has not found the formula. This year, China suffered a population decline for the first time since the famines of the late 1950s and early 1960s, ceding its position as the most populous nation on the planet to India. Marriage ties have also collapsed.
The change responds to multiple factors, among them, China’s own development and modernization, as has happened in other societies, which implies the break of young people with the most traditional values. But there are also monetary reasons: it is very expensive to raise children in China, and the current environment does not seem the most conducive to reversing the trend, with a shaken economy that has not yet recovered after the end of pandemic restrictions. “Most families do not have more children because it is expensive,” summarizes the European source. “In fact, two salaries are needed to support the family.”
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