The brush-off
Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. By Leta Hong Fincher. Zed Books; 213 pages; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
IN
2007 China’s official Xinhua news agency published a commentary about
women who were still unmarried at the age of 27 under the title, “Eight
Simple Moves to Escape the Leftover Woman Trap”. The Communist Party had
concluded that young Chinese women were becoming too picky and were
over-focused on attaining the “three highs”: high education,
professional status and income. Newspapers have since reprinted similar
editorials. In 2011 one said: “The tragedy is they don’t realise that as
women age they are worth less and less, so by the time they get their
MA or PhD, they are already old, like yellowed pearls.”
The
tone of these articles is surprising, given the Communist Party’s past
support for women’s advancement. Mao Zedong destroyed China, but he
succeeded in raising the status of women. Almost the first legislation
enacted by the Communist Party in 1950 was the Marriage Law under which
women were given many new rights, including the right to divorce and the
right to own property. Though collectivisation made the latter largely
irrelevant, women played an active role in Mao’s China, and still do
today. By 2010 26% of urban women had university degrees, double the
proportion ten years earlier. Women now regularly outperform men at
Chinese universities, which has led to gender-based quotas favouring men
in some entrance exams. However, many of the earlier advances have been
eroded in recent years by the gradual re-emergence of traditional
patriarchal attitudes.
Leta
Hong Fincher, an American journalist-turned-academic, argues that the
same party that pushed through the elevation of women’s status in the
1950s is now trying to engineer their return to the kitchen. The new
campaign seems to be working. In 1990 urban Chinese women’s salaries
were 78% of the level of men’s pay. In 2010, that had decreased to 67%.
The female urban employment rate also fell, from 77% in 1990 to 61% in
2010.
Under
Mao almost all women married, but now the expanding social freedoms of
the new century have led more women to remain single, whether by choice
or not. That alarms the party, says Ms Fincher. Society, it believes, is
more stable with fewer single people. New families, it argues, can
drive consumption and the property boom, and if most educated, alpha
females are married, then, it believes, better “quality” children will
be born.
The
party has joined an alliance of property companies and dating websites
to confront the issue. Government surveys on marriage and property are
often sponsored by matchmaking agencies, and perpetuate the perception
that being “leftover” is the worst thing that can happen to a woman.
They also promote other myths, such as the idea that a man must have a
house before he can marry.
The
law is reflecting the shift away from women’s empowerment too. An
interpretation by the Supreme Court in 2011 of the 1950 Marriage Law
stated that, when a couple divorces, property should not be shared
equally, but each side should keep what is in his or her own name. This
ruling, says Ms Fincher, has serious implications. In the big cities a
third of marriages now end in divorce but, based on hundreds of
interviews, she finds that only about 30% of married women have their
name on the deeds of the marital flat. Women believe the party hype
about becoming a “leftover” woman so strongly, she says, that many rush
into unhappy marriages with unsuitable men, made on condition that the
brides agree not to put their name on the property deeds. Consequently,
many women have been shut out of “possibly the biggest accumulation of
residential real-estate wealth in history”, worth more than $30 trillion
in 2013.
“Leftover
Women” is a compelling piece of original research, though the author
may be over-egging the pudding a little. Compared with women in most
developing countries Chinese women are still doing quite well. Even
compared with Korea or Japan, in many areas of society their status and
participation are high. And there are signs that they are fighting back.
Determined not to be re-subjugated, some have taken a word that sounds
like “leftover” in Chinese but means “triumphant”, and are using it to
describe themselves and defend their decision to remain single.