On Monday, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) addressed the Leaders’ Meeting on Women in Beijing, extolling his government’s support for many aspects of women’s rights. Yet having grown up in China, my vivid memories over the past few decades paint a starkly different picture of how women have fought to change the way they have been treated and were persecuted by the government.
Today, while the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has grudgingly permitted some improvements, those few gains are at risk of being rolled back — an ironic way of marking the 30th anniversary of the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women. The 1995 gathering was a landmark for independent domestic and international civil society; it produced the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, setting out lofty goals for women’s rights — and handed the Chinese government a decades-long propaganda win.
The UN hosting this anniversary provides Beijing another win in claiming the mantle of women’s rights champion, when it is women across the country, facing government repression, who fought for and achieved modest progress. In the 2000s and 2010s, up to 2015, when Xi consolidated his power, activists worked hard to raise awareness of women’s rights as human rights, struggling to change a deeply patriarchal society.
An emerging cohort of women’s rights defenders in China, calling themselves feminists, made demands of authorities. From street protests to courtrooms, they championed the rights of migrant women, victims of domestic violence and sexual harassment in workplaces, discrimination in employment and college admissions, and married rural women’s land rights.
Facing growing public outrage over shocking abuses, authorities finally adopted a law against domestic violence in 2015. Confronted by a looming demographic disaster and labor shortage, and after decades of international outcry, the government loosened the abusive one-child policy in 2016.
However, the anti-domestic violence law remains largely on paper, criticized by experts and advocates for its shortcomings. A recent study showed that “out of more than 100,000 divorce rulings between 2017 and 2023 ... judges referred to the domestic violence law as grounds for granting a divorce in only three cases.”
Authorities recently censored debates about whether engagement or marriage constitute sexual consent.
The one-child policy is now swinging to the other extreme — an invasive campaign to turn women into baby-making machines, with Xi championing an ideological drive to put women back in their place to fulfill their traditional roles as wives and mothers to maintain “harmony” in the family. The government is pressuring employers to use demotion, job hiring or firing, bonuses or having officials knock on doors to force women to have more babies.
Beijing’s crackdown on women’s rights advocates ironically began on International Women’s Day in March 2015. Authorities detained five feminist activists — Li Tingting (李婷婷), Wei Tingting (偉婷婷), Wang Man (王曼), Wu Rongrong (武嶸嶸) and Zheng Churan(鄭楚然) — who tried to campaign publicly against sexual harassment to mark the occasion. The state’s broader assault on feminists has not let up, and a decade later, all independent women’s rights groups have been forced to shut down. State and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) institutions increasingly insert themselves into quasi-independent organizations to control them, and outspoken activists and academics face censorship and harassment, sexual violence or arbitrary detention.
Female activists account for a disproportionately high number of those wrongfully detained by authorities. Fifty-eight percent of all prisoners of conscience currently held are women, although they make up only 48 percent of the total population. Among the more than 700 older prisoners of conscience — defined as older than 60 — two-thirds are women.
China’s economic growth has improved some women’s lives, but deepened inequality. The gender pay gap is growing. The most recent World Economic Forum Gender Gap Index, released in June, shows that China slipped from 63rd for gender equality in 2006 to 103rd. The government continues to fail to enforce anti-gender discrimination laws by banning job ads for “men only” positions. There are fewer women in senior levels of government than at any time in recent decades; there are no women on the powerful CCP Politburo, the top decisionmaking body.
The Chinese government should mark this anniversary with real change: committing to freeing all wrongfully detained women’s human rights defenders, removing all state controls over reproductive rights and complying with all UN treaty body recommendations on women’s rights. Beijing should eliminate discriminatory land rights for married rural women, improve and enforce the anti-domestic violence law and encourage women’s public participation at all levels of governance. These would be accomplishments worth celebrating.
Renee Xia is the coexecutive director of the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
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