One
day in late summer a thirty-year-old woman, slightly frail and
innocent-looking, was sitting on a hillside near the grain fields of Liaohepo
Village in Henan Province, Zuo Dechang, a young hoodlum who had been in and out
of the local police station for various crimes, spotted her and cozied up to
her. She wasn't much for conversation, for she was mentally retarded, but Zuo
didn't mind. He brought her back to his village and tried to find a man who
might buy her as a wife.
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"I
have no money," an unmarried peasant told Zuo, as the two negotiated a
deal. "But I have a small calf. What would you think if I gave you this
calf in exchange for this woman you've brought to our village.
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Well,
Zuo thought, I could sell the calf for a bit of money. "It's a deal,"
he told the farmer, and the woman changed hands.
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Her
new husband gave her hardly anything to eat and little clothing to protect
herself against the cold. A few months later, on a wintry day in 1990, she
died.
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A
woman for a calf.
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Something,
I decided, was wrong with the picture of Communist equality that I had
initially absorbed. When I first arrived in China, I was impressed that almost
every woman I met had an occupation or a career. I did not notice any
discrimination against women, and I met intelligent and capable women in
academia, business, and journalism, as well as gutsy female vegetable
merchants, engineering consultants, and toy makers. When we got to the Chinese
border on Macao during my first trip into China in 1987, a crowd of ambitious,
pushy cabdrivers crowded around Nick and me in pursuit of our fare. The most
reasonable price was quoted to us by the most levelheaded of them all, a
twenty-seven-year-old woman who owned her own taxi, and we chose her.
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I
thought, This is equality! I felt better about China itself, for as a Chinese
woman, I was troubled greatly by the traditional distaste and discrimination
that women faced. It was fine to be proud of the Great Wall but not of a
4,000-year legacy of abandoning female babies, of binding girls' feet, of
keeping girls illiterate. Until the turn of the century, many Chinese girls
were not even given names: They were called working-age women In the cities
hold jobs. These gains gave women some economic independence and
self-confidence. Side by side with their husbands, they built huts and tilled
the fields. Above all, the party oversaw a revolution in educational practices,
mobilizing peasant girls to go to school. For the first time in Chinese
history, large numbers of peasant women graduated from the status of donkeys; they
became almost human beings and not just walking wombs.
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To
be sure, even under Mao there was still a great deal of discrimination. But
factories and offices were motivated to improve conditions by enthusiasm for
change as well as fear of central leaders. And society was much more prudish
then, so It was hardly possible to emphasize sexual differences. Cosmetics were
effectively banned, and everyone wore the same blue or gray Mao jackets. Wolf
whistles would have been unrevolutionary.
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So
when I arrived in China, I was generally impressed by the status of women. And
with the new opportunities generated by a market economy, I expected life for
women to get even better.
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Then
one day, I met Yang Yanru, a middle-aged peasant near Tianjin whose husband had
become rich doing business. He asked her to stop working, and she was happy
Just to stay at home tidying up the house. That nagged at me. I could
understand that now that she was rich she had better things to do with her time
than to slave away in a factory for measly pay. But the same thing was
happening all over China, and It seemed funny to me that economic progress in
China would mean more housewives and fewer career women. What ever happened to
Mao's belief in equality?
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As
I talked to more women and got better acquainted with their status, it became
clear that the problems ran far deeper. The obstacle was not just the strength
of traditional beliefs but the invisible hand of the market itself. The market
economy raised living standards for women along with men, but it also led to
the return of the male-dominated Chinese society - coupled with the sexist
features of Western society. Advertisers quickly discovered that the best way
to market their products was by airing commercials showing lovely young women, preferably
wearing as little as possible. To promote sales of weapons abroad, the army
began publishing a calendar with a pinup each month of a buxom young woman
clutching a gun. In the 1994 calendar, for example, Miss February wears a
bikini top and a red skirt slit to the waist, accompanied by an AK-47 assault
rifle.
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Nicholas
Kristof & Sheryl WuDunn "China Wakes" (1994)
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