Anita Anand | Chinese going a step backwards, taking away the sky from women

In the last week of October 2023, the 13th National Women’s Congress of China opened in Beijing. President Xi Jinping, addressing the 1,800 delegates, said: “We should actively foster a new type of marriage and child-bearing culture.” He went on to say party officials must influence young people’s views on “love and marriage, fertility and family”.

The National Women’s Congress is the most powerful organisation among Chinese women’ federations at all levels, bringing together women’s views and aspirations and making inputs into policies which have consequences for gender equality, social justice, and women’s rights.

Held every five years, the congress is a forum for the ruling Communist Party of China to demonstrate its commitment to women. But recently, there is some backsliding. The central message at this year’s congress was for women to get married and have babies. In previous years, the speeches also included women’s participation in the workforce. This year, Mr Xi made no mention of this. And, for the first time in two decades, this year there were no women in the Communist Party’s main executive policymaking body. Backsliding.

What can explain this? Among other things, China has a demographic crisis. In the beginning of 2023, the government figures indicated that the year before there were 9.56 million births and 10.41 million deaths, making it the first time that deaths outnumbered births since Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and economic experiment that led to famine and death in the 1960s. Faced with this, a slowing economy and what it sees as the rise of feminism, the party is choosing to push women back into the home, to take care of children and the elderly. According to President Xi, this is essential for “China’s path to modernisation”.

Is it possible that China and other countries now see their path to modernisation by riding on the backs of women? Or more precisely, the wombs of women? In the late 1970s, China’s challenge was to curb a large and growing population and for women to be part of the much needed labour force. In 1979, China adopted the one-child policy, mandating that a married couple could have only one child except in the case of extraordinary circumstances. In 2015, it was replaced by a two-child policy. In 2021, all restrictions were lifted, allowing Chinese couples to have any number of children.

The current policies define a mother as a married woman and favour married mothers. Cash bonuses are given to families with new babies. Many cities and workplaces have expanded maternity leave and added an extra month for second-time and third-time married mothers. These rewards are available only for married couples, not for single and independent women who, in some cases, would prefer to adopt, parent alone or not bear children at all. Subtle and not-so-subtle forms of discrimination. The government’s focus on increasing the birth rate does not commensurate with assistance in childcare, one of the main reasons women are having less or no children.

It was not always like this. The leader Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in 1978 included women in diverse ways, changing their image as “iron women”, or women who could do men’s work too, propagated during the pre-reform period. Increasing globalisation and China as a choice of location for the UN Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995 gave a boost to Chinese women’s aspirations and their mainstreaming into the international feminist movement.

In contemporary China, while women’s rights have improved a great deal, they face discrimination in the workforce. There is a wide and persistent gender pay gap and many private firms turn down female job applicants in case they choose to have children, despite the fact that women are more qualified than men.

Under President Xi, the gains of women have been lost. The government has shut down many activist NGOs, censored feminist platforms, and feminism is seen by nationalists as a toxic Western ideology.

China and other countries use women as ping pong balls to increase and decrease their populations. Contraception enabled women to find agency and determine if and when they want children. Women and men are socialised to believe that they are not complete until they have a partner in marriage and become parents. These new policies capitalise on the guilt, especially women, experience should they choose to do otherwise. Women, no matter how attractive the incentives, will become resentful wives and mothers when their independence and agency is taken away from them. This is not helpful to society, even a modern society as

President Xi wants and sees it.

The path to modernisation by China and other countries calls for new ways of thinking and acting. Current policies of incentives for increasing births by encouraging women to stay home and raise children is not modernity. It is moving backwards.

The reason birth rates are going down and women do not want to have children is because of insufficient childcare and the abdication of the state’s responsibility to provide such services.

Besides being wives and mothers, women want to work outside the home, often because they need money, want to be engaged in and contribute to society, and feel good about themselves.

They need to be outside the home, interacting with the world.

In the mid-1960s, during the Cultural Revolution, the Communist leader Mao Zedong proclaimed that “women hold up half the sky”, a slogan that personified freedom and liberation for women, and equality between men and women. Today, China’s leaders have taken away the sky from women.