Jing Zhang’s Speech at the 65th UNCSW Forum: The True Situation of Women’s Social Status in China
Women’s Rights in China (WRIC) 03-18-2021
Editor’s Note: Due to the global pandemic of the Wuhan virus (COVID-19), the 65th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women panel meeting in 2023 was held via video conference. China Rights founder and CEO Zhang Jing was invited to speak on “The True Situation of Women’s Social Status in China.” The full text of her speech is as follows. （Chinese version: https://wrchina.org/archives/11628 )
The 2021 Women’s History Month is being observed during the Wuhan virus pandemic, but this cannot halt our focus on the world’s vulnerable populations. Today, we gather online for the 65th UN Women’s Forum, with our focus remaining on the rights of women and girls. Here, I will share with you the true situation of women’s rights and status in China, as well as the root causes of the increasingly severe discrimination against women in China, hoping to provide the world with a more comprehensive understanding of China.
.1. No Women in the Top Tier of the Chinese Communist Party in 100 Years
In the 100-year history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) since its founding, no woman has ever been among the members of the Politburo Standing Committee, which holds the highest decision-making power. Only six women have been able to enter the Politburo, the second tier of the CCP’s decision-making circle, and three of them are the wives of the country’s president and premier. This gender-imbalanced political participation is one of the main reasons for the deprivation of women’s rights in China. For a long time, the formulation and implementation of CCP policies and laws have been controlled by a few male Politburo Standing Committee members. For example, the national policy of forced birth control, the One-Child Policy: in the early 1950s, the CCP encouraged women to have more children due to a shortage of soldiers after the war; for 40 years after the 1970s, women were forced to undergo birth control through inhumane means to ensure each family had only one child; in the 2010s, it was said that one or two children were allowed; and in the current stage of the 2020s, women are being vigorously encouraged and forced to have more children for the country. These laws and regulations, which control women’s wombs and the life and death of infants, are all decided by a few men in the Politburo Standing Committee of the successive CCP’s top leadership.
In the Chinese government’s propaganda, beautiful and healthy female images often appear, portraying them as intelligent, confident, and living freely amidst various challenges. However, the latest data reveals the true picture of discrimination against Chinese women. The World Economic Forum’s “Global Gender Gap Report 2020” ranked China 106th out of 153 countries, even lower than the status of women in some extremely impoverished areas of Africa. In 2015, Xi Jinping donated $10 million to UN Women and obtained the opportunity to speak at the opening ceremony of the gender equality meeting held at the UN World Women’s Summit in September of the same year. However, just a few months before he went to the UN to talk about equality to the world’s women, the Xi Jinping government arrested the “Feminist Five,” who were peacefully holding placards against sexual harassment, in order to silence dissenting voices among Chinese women. The situation of women’s rights in China under Xi Jinping’s rule is deteriorating year by year, and the social injustices and gender discrimination faced by Chinese women are becoming more widespread and prevalent.
Life: Women’s Rights in China (WRIC) and other women’s rights groups supported the five women’s rights activists in front of the UN in 2015. (Photo by WRIC)
Right: In September 2015, Zhang Jing and WRIC members protested in front of the United Nations in New York against Xi Jinping’s suppression of feminists while delivering a speech at the UN Women’s Summit. (Photo by WRIC)
II. Sexual Assault and Rape Cases Evolving into Social Structural Crimes
In recent years, although the Western Me Too movement has also swept into major Chinese cities, almost all Chinese Me Too victims have not been able to pursue court litigation due to economic reasons or intimidation. Most of them only complain online or remain silent. In March 2020, a Chinese blogger named @梁钰stacey posted a survey on female sexual assault, which received 45,000 votes in just a few days, with over 85% of women admitting to having experienced sexual harassment or assault, and thousands sharing their stories. Cases of women being sexually harassed by male colleagues or superiors and then being dismissed after complaining to higher-ups are common. A report submitted to the World Health Organization by a professor named Xiang Ming pointed out that about 11.5% of girls and 9.6% of boys in China are sexually abused, meaning at least 20 million children in China are sexually abused each year. Legal researcher Tian Gang pointed out that at least 21% of Chinese women have been raped, with marital rape cases reaching 24.7%. These data are all officially released; the unpublished data is believed to be even more alarming.
The situation of left-behind children, whose parents work in cities and live with their grandparents for many years, is very serious, with them being raped or gang-raped by relatives or older men in the village. The perpetrators are often influential village cadres or their relatives, and even if the victims’ parents come forward, it is difficult to file charges. These cases usually only attract a brief period of online attention and then fade away. In primary and secondary schools, cases of minors being collectively sexually assaulted or induced into prostitution by teachers are serious crimes that have been ongoing for many years. The government has not increased efforts to effectively punish the perpetrators, making these teachers, who are beasts in human clothing, act with impunity. Wang Yu, a Chinese lawyer who recently received the U.S. State Department’s 2021 International Women of Courage Award, once joined several feminists in holding a “If you want to open a room, find me, leave the children alone” protest in Hainan Province, which was in response to six elementary school girls being taken to a hotel and raped by their principal.
In 2013, feminist Ye Haiyan and lawyer Wang Yi held a sign in front of Wanning Primary School in Hainan to support six little girls who were raped. The sign read, “Principal, come to me to get a room, and leave the little girls alone.” (Internet photo)
A foreign-born male chauvinist culture, PUA (Pick-up Artist), has found fertile ground in China’s local male chauvinist environment, and has flourished with a vengeance, showing the misogyny and myths of sexual violence in a male chauvinist society. The PUA culture, which is considered misogynistic in Western countries and is rapidly declining, has grown rapidly in China, a hotbed of rape culture, in recent years. A PUA company called “Langji” had more than 400 employees and 100,000 paying members in 2017 alone; another PUA company called “Paoxue.com” had nearly 2 million members by 2018. This online course, which specializes in psychological and spiritual humiliation, and occasional seduction and rape of women, costs as much as 10,000 to tens of thousands of yuan per course, yet it is still flooded with those who fantasize about sexual violence. This makes it easy to understand why Chinese officials like Lai Xiaomin would have more than a hundred mistresses and still not be satisfied, or why powerful figures like Zhao Liping and Wang Huaizhong would kill their girlfriends in broad daylight.
In September 2020, a 60-year-old man named Xu from Leizhou City, Zhanjiang raped an 8-year-old left-behind girl from his neighborhood. Her 11-year-old brother took a picture of the incident, and the picture of the girl being sexually assaulted went viral on the Internet. A few months ago, the victim’s parents had called the police to accuse Xu of sexually assaulting their child, but the police said there was no evidence and did not file a case. In fact, the girl had been raped for two or three years. (Internet picture)
III. Sexual Abuse in Detention Centers Evolving into Systemic Government Crimes
Sexual assault and rape in China have evolved from individual crimes to collective and systemic criminal culture. Rape crimes have evolved into different forms at different levels, and have also developed from individual behavior to organized criminal patterns within the government system, especially in prisons and other places where women are forcibly concentrated.
In the 1980s, I personally witnessed male prison guards raping female inmates in a women’s prison in Guizhou. They were often taken away by prison guards for “separate labor,” and when they returned to the cell, they were exhausted and dared only to cry quietly. Those who privately discussed or revealed secrets would be publicly criticized, physically punished, or have their sentences extended. Later, a large number of female Falun Gong practitioners who were detained revealed that they had been sexually assaulted and subjected to organ harvesting. More recently, the sexual assault and rape of female prisoners in the Masanjia Women’s Labor Camp in Shenyang has been exposed. Over the decades, the systemic rape culture in places where women are imprisoned has gone from being relatively hidden to being open sexual crime.
The systemic rape or assault of women who have lost their freedom is not only rampant in mainland China but also spreading to its border regions.
In Xinjiang’s “re-education camps,” which hold 2 million people, Uyghur women are not only forced to sing and dance for Han Chinese administrators but also subjected to gang rape and rape. Several women who escaped from Uyghur “re-education camps” have spoken to the media about their experiences and what they saw and heard. Tursunay Ziawudun told reporters about her nine-month ordeal in the camps: masked men in suits repeatedly raped her in a dark room without surveillance cameras. Women in the camps were taken from their cells every night and raped by one or more masked Han Chinese men. She herself was tortured three times and gang-raped, each time by two or three men. Ms. Ziawudun is one of the very few victims who have been able to escape, and many more have not had the opportunity to tell their stories to the outside world. The facts that have been revealed also include the CCP’s population control of Uyghurs and its forced birth control policies for Uyghur women.
In Uyghur communities in Xinjiang, after the men in the families are taken to “re-education camps,” the wives and children are usually left at home. At this time, a Han Chinese “cadre” is often assigned by his superiors to live in the family, which is a method of the CCP’s “pairing and befriending” program. In recent years, the CCP has sent 1 million Han Chinese people into Uyghur families, appearing as civilians, to complete 24-hour precise monitoring of Uyghurs.
Tursunay Ziawudun, a Uyghur woman, tells her story in an interview with a BBC reporter.
(Screenshot from BBC)
In 2019, a Uyghur woman who escaped from a Xinjiang education camp to Taiwan was interviewed by Taiwan’s CTS News. She talked about her experience of being sexually assaulted and tried to hold back tears several times. (Screenshot from CTS News)
In Hong Kong, some young female protesters who opposed the government’s amendment to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance have also been subjected to varying degrees of sexual harassment, sexual violence, and even rape by the police after being arrested. Even more appalling is the case of a 15-year-old girl who participated in the anti-extradition bill “street walk” (a phrase from Chen Yanlin’s last video) and was found naked and floating in a bay a few days after she disappeared. This vocational school girl, who was a good swimmer, was found floating in the sea in September 2019, at the height of the anti-extradition bill movement. In September 2020, under the pressure of the CCP’s National Security Law, the Hong Kong court only dared to rule that the girl’s “cause of death was suspicious,” and the case was closed, allowing the criminals to go unpunished. During arrests, Hong Kong police took the opportunity to grope and grab young girls’ bodies, some of which were accidentally captured on video or photos, but in most cases, no one saw what happened, or the criminal police officers thought they were in hidden corners, and the victims could not leave evidence.
A girl arrested during a counter-protest march in Hong Kong in 2020 was repeatedly grabbed and pinched on her private parts by police. (Hong Kong photo)
A girl arrested during a counter-protest march in Hong Kong in 2020 was sexually harassed by the police. (Hong Kong photo)
A 15-year-old girl who died of “suspicious causes” (Internet photo)
IV. Severe Workplace Discrimination, Blatant Everywhere
In the past 40 years, China’s economic growth has benefited men more than women, but women’s average income is still far lower than men’s. A Chinese recruitment platform said in its “2020 Report on Gender Pay Gap in Chinese Workplaces” that they tracked the salary ratios of urban employees in China for the five years leading up to 2020 and found that women’s salaries were only about 70% of men’s; the longer the seniority, the greater the gap between men’s and women’s salaries. This shows that women still face severe workplace discrimination, whether in university admissions, industry recruitment, or even civil service recruitment. According to Human Rights Watch, 11% of the positions in the Chinese government’s 2020 national civil service examination job list were limited to male applicants or prioritized male applicants, while in the 2018 and 2019 job lists, male-preferred or male-only positions accounted for 19%. China Rights has received complaints from many women in China about unfair treatment in job applications, including being required to sign a contract with the recruiter stating that they cannot become pregnant for at least five years when applying for journalism positions. Workplace injustice is so prevalent in cities, and it is even worse for female migrant workers from rural areas, whose income is 20% lower than male workers for the same amount of labor.
According to a sample survey of female migrant workers in private enterprises in 18 provinces by the Women Workers’ Department of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, 29.6% of female employees in the chemical building materials industry were assigned work that was prohibited during pregnancy; 98% had no maternity insurance, and 72% had no medical insurance.
Data from China’s official All-China Women’s Federation shows that 22% of Chinese women believe that gender discrimination in employment is severe, and 59% of women believe that there is general gender discrimination in employment. A private “2020 Survey Report on the Status of Chinese Women in the Workplace” shows that 58.25% of women have been “asked about their marital and fertility status during the interview process,” 27% of women have encountered recruiters who limit job positions to men, 8.02% of women have experienced “workplace sexual harassment,” and 6.39% of women have been “transferred or demoted during their marriage and childbirth period.” It is worth noting that these surveys are officially allowed to be released to the public, and the actual data is much more severe than what can be published.
Discrimination not only occurs in the workplace; it appears in every corner of society. A court judge’s verdict reflects the blatant discrimination and bullying of women by male chauvinist society, from government law enforcement officials to the general public. In March 2021, a “blackmail case” in Jiangsu Province was shocking. A single woman had sexual relations with nine officials in five years, and the judge sentenced the woman to 13 years in prison, confiscating 3.726 million yuan and fining her 5 million yuan, which she had “blackmailed” from the nine men. In this case, the nine married men and superiors all became victims. The government profited 8.7 million yuan from the girl, and the girl was “prostituted” and sentenced to 13 years in prison. This verdict will encourage powerful officials to play with and sexually abuse women with impunity.
In addition, “naked loans” are prevalent in China, with loan companies colluding with gangs to conduct large-scale sexual abuse and usury targeting young female college students, covering tens of thousands of university and high school campuses across China. Poor students from rural areas cannot afford the high living and tuition costs in cities and cannot obtain financial support from government departments, so they turn to underground loans. Female students must take photos and videos of themselves holding their ID cards and performing erotic actions specified by the lenders as collateral for the loans. Once the principal and interest are overdue, the loan companies will publish the girls’ nude photos, videos, and personal information online, or the girls will be raped, gang-raped, and forced into prostitution to repay the debts, and some girls will commit suicide as a result. China Rights obtained electronic files in 2018-2019 that documented the sexual abuse of nearly 100 girls who took out loans from gangs, as well as their nude photos and videos. Considering the prevalence of collusion between the police and gangs in China, we, as an NGO, do not have the ability to ensure that the girls will not be subjected to secondary harm, so we have not published any victim interviews. Due to the Wuhan virus pandemic and public condemnation, the “naked loan” industry has shifted from public to hidden. In September 2020, the Ningbo police in Zhejiang Province released a naked loan case, which included 3TB of girls’ information and “naked loan” videos.
In June 2016, loan company staff publicly placed advertisements to recruit college students and promote “Jiedaibao” near the Wuhan University campus.
The borrower must take a photo and video of herself holding her ID card and her naked body, and then send it to the lender via mobile phone. (Online pictures)
The borrower must take a photo and video of herself holding her ID card and her naked body, and then send it to the lender via mobile phone. (Picture from Zhihu.com)
VI. Domestic Violence and Female Suicide are Commonplace
Data from China’s official All-China Women’s Federation shows that about 25% of the 270 million families in China experienced domestic violence in 2019; 157,000 women in China commit suicide each year, 60% of which are due to domestic violence. A woman in China is abused every 7.4 seconds; victims report to the police after being abused an average of 35 times; domestic violence accounts for more than 40% of female homicides; and most perpetrators of domestic violence are men. A semi-official Chinese women’s rights organization pointed out that in the more than 600 days from March 1, 2016, to October 31, 2017, there were 533 domestic violence deaths in China, including 635 adult and child deaths, an average of more than one domestic violence death per day, most of whom were women.
Since China’s divorce rate is alarmingly high, the new “Civil Code” in China in 2020 added a 30-day “divorce cooling-off period,” which is particularly unfair to women, as it may cause victims of domestic violence to suffer more violence or even death threats during the 30-day “cooling-off period.” A young Tibetan woman, Ram, who lived in a Tibetan rural area in Aba Prefecture, Sichuan Province, was killed in September 2020 when her ex-husband, who was prone to domestic violence, broke into her house with a knife and gasoline, poured gasoline on her, and died from severe burns two weeks later. She had been subjected to domestic violence for a long time and had repeatedly reported it to the police without success and without court protection.
Photo of Ram before his death. (Internet photo)
The world average male suicide rate is 25% higher than the female suicide rate, but China was once the country with the highest female suicide rate in the world, especially the suicide rate of female farmers, which was 60% higher than the male suicide rate. Scholars believe that the main reason for the decline in China’s high female suicide rate is economic reform and urbanization, which has kept female farmers away from the large amounts of deadly pesticide “omethoate” stored in every household. However, a serious problem is now at hand: when female migrant workers are driven back to the countryside by the government and return to their hometowns, where they have easy access to deadly pesticides, will the suicide rate reach a new peak?
The harm caused to migrant workers by the low-human-rights, low-cost economic development model that maintains high growth is borne primarily by rural women and children in China. In recent years, the Chinese government has determined that urban construction has become saturated and that the temporary use of cheap labor from migrant workers has been exhausted. Therefore, driving migrant workers back to their hometowns is the CCP’s established policy. In 2017, Beijing launched the most intense campaign to expel migrant workers in history. Under the pretext of a “fire,” the government destroyed the homes of more than 10,000 migrant workers and their families, whom the mayor of Beijing called “low-end population,” overnight, and entire neighborhoods were razed to the ground. Women and children cried helplessly on the streets, like scenes from a war. Since then, Beijing has had no migrant workers, only the beautiful city buildings built by migrant workers and city dwellers with urban household registration.
During the 2020 Wuhan virus pandemic, governments in major cities, under the pretext of controlling the epidemic, cruelly forced hundreds of millions of migrant workers and their families to return to the countryside, to their hometowns where only barren land remained. This is bound to be a new nightmare for rural women in China, who once had the world’s highest suicide rate. Unemployment, discrimination, helplessness, and the fact that they have missed their childbearing years after working in cities for many years, even if they are allowed to have children, the 70’s generation of women who cannot bear children for their husbands, will they inevitably return to the past of “a mouthful of pesticide and a clean break”? It is foreseeable that the suicide problem will become more serious. Without unemployment benefits, basic medical subsidies, or psychological counseling, coupled with the impact of the 2020 Wuhan virus pandemic, rural women’s living conditions for maintaining their families are even worse. The Chinese government turns a blind eye to the seriousness of the consequences and has no corresponding measures to prevent women’s suicide.
The cold wind in Beijing’s Daxing District overnight evacuated the homes of “low-end population” farmers, which reminded people of the areas destroyed by war. (Photo by Bryan Denton)
VII. Conclusion: Systemic Harm to Women
Scholars attribute China’s high female suicide rate to three main factors, also known as the three Cs: Communism, Confucianism, and Commercialism. I believe that commercialism is fundamentally not a major cause of suicide, especially for Chinese people who are accustomed to poverty, and there are few historical examples of people choosing to end their lives due to poverty. The 40-year-long forced birth control policy and the systemic policy and legal failures and crimes of the communist regime are the root causes of the resurgence of dregs in traditional culture, which has further lowered the social status of Chinese women, who are already heavily discriminated against, and led to their high suicide rate.
In Beijing’s little-known “China Women and Children’s Museum,” there is not a single exhibit of various contraceptives and drug samples that have subjected three generations of Chinese women to forced birth control; there is no data, stories, photos, or videos about the personal injuries and family deaths suffered by hundreds of millions of Chinese women in the national birth control policy, let alone the stories and records of 40 million fetuses who were forced to abort. The 40-year history of blood and tears, the largest massacre in human history, will quietly disappear from the Chinese mainland after the opening of the two-child policy, as if it never happened! It’s like the generation born in the 80s and 90s, who don’t even know about the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. Covering up the truth of history with lies, suppressing human rights, and cracking down on those who tell the truth to achieve a balance of terror and divert public opinion are their most prominent skills.
Since taking office, Xi Jinping has called on Chinese women to be virtuous wives, “to take the initiative to assume the responsibility of educating children and taking care of their husbands in the family…” As a result, all walks of life in China, especially the education sector, have begun to vigorously promote traditional cultural garbage such as the “Tao Te Ching” and “Daughter’s Scripture,” which imprison people’s minds and discriminate against women, redefining women as housewives. These “feudal historical and cultural products,” which were once thrown into the eighteenth level of hell by Mao Zedong, have been brought out again by Xi Jinping as spiritual opium. Weakening women’s self-confidence and social roles helps the CCP stabilize its regime. Xi Jinping’s government’s severe crackdown on women who dare to stand up for their rights has made the male chauvinist social pattern more complete, and the living space for women’s rights has become narrower. The extremely small number of urban women’s rights advocates are mostly limited to expressing their demands through sporadic performance art and on the heavily censored internet. The road to women’s rights in China is bleak.
Due to the global pandemic of the Wuhan virus (COVI-19), the 65th UN Commission on the Status of Women panel meeting in 2021 was held via online video. The screenshot shows Zhang Jing speaking on behalf of Chinese Women’s Rights through an interpreter.