The Long March of China’s Women

A rape case brought by a Chinese woman working for Alibaba has sparked intense discussion on social media over sexual harassment and the practice of binge drinking at business dinners.

The pressure to participate in drinking with officials, clients, and general stakeholders at banquets does not necessarily involve large amounts of alcohol, but often focuses on shots, usually high octane. Driving this custom is a sense that whatever project one is trying to advance will be enhanced by getting comfortably inebriated with the other stakeholders. As in many societies, alcohol is used in China as a means to drive relationships forward.

In the Alibaba case, the woman said she was ordered by senior management to drink heavily at a business dinner, which she did. She later woke up in her hotel room, completely unclothed, and with no memory of what had happened. Hotel security footage found that her manager had gone into her room four times during the night.

The offender was fired by Alibaba, but the legal system failed the victim. The case was dropped, and the offender spent only 15 days in detention.

The case highlighted a nexus between two issues about which women in China are becoming more vociferous: sexual harassment in the workplace and “work drinking.”

Women’s Progress Under the CCP

In the not so distant past in China, it was common to encounter older women whose feet had been bound as children, over time breaking the toes, deforming the foot, and functionally crippling the victim.

In explaining this cruel practice, the generally accepted theory is that a woman with small feet was seen as a more desirable sexual object. There are other theories as well. One suggests an economic motivation: Girls and women whose mobility was limited were captive laborers. As such, they were often tasked with working at home in cottage industries, making products that could be sold. Creating handicapped girls created valuable workers.

For all its many flaws, the Communist government under Mao was relentless in striking down discriminatory traditions, including food binding as well as forced marriages. Officially, women were equal to men in Mao’s China. If this rhetoric was not fully matched by reality, we should still keep in mind that in the 1950s, no top leader in the West was even committing to the rhetoric of gender equality.

Since 1949, women in China have, in one sense, come further than Western women, not in terms of being farther along the scale of equality than in the West, but because they started so much farther back. As an example, through the 1980s the Chinese Communist government, like the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc countries, graduated a much higher percentage of women scientists and engineers than the West and Western-leaning democracies.

The statistics on women's development in China tell a lot of the story. In 2019, which marked the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, the State Council Information Office released a white paper on the “progress of women’s cause” during those 70 years. Even taking into account the possibility that the numbers have been massaged to look more favorable, the trends are remarkable.

The social status of women has been changed from “an oppressed and enslaved group in the past thousands of years to masters of their own fate,” the report declared.

Law in China is often a weak and unwieldy instrument, certainly in comparison to the power of the Chinese Communist Party itself. Nonetheless, it is important to note that women in China, by law, have the right to equal employment, and importantly, equal pay for equal work. Gender discrimination is, by law, not permitted.

Illiteracy among females is down to just 7.3 percent, from an estimated 90 percent prior to 1949. More than half of students in China’s higher education institutions are women.

The maternal mortality rate has declined dramatically in the last 30 years as well. In 1990, nearly 89 out of 100,000 Chinese women died in childbirth; that figure plummeted to just over 18 out of 100,000 by 2018.

In a related development, China’s women are also living much longer. A Chinese woman’s life expectancy of 79.4 years in 2015 was an astonishing 42.7 years longer than her life expectancy of just 36.7 years in 1949.

A More Mixed Picture

However, these statistics mask a more nuanced reality. Even the State Council Information Office report admitted that women's “overall development” still has a long way to go.

The role of women in the workforce is an area that can be viewed as either a success or a cause for concern, depending on your perspective. On the positive side, China’s women are strongly represented in the workforce. Forty percent of the labor force is made up of women; in 2017, that accounted for 340 million women. Not only the number of women in work but also their options for work have grown. Women's presence in the industrial and service sectors has expanded to nearly 47 percent, up from under 25 percent in 1982.

However, the percentage of women who work has been dropping steadily since the 1990s, going from a high of 73 percent in 1990 to 60 percent in 2019. In that sense, China is an outlier, as much of the rest of the world is seeing the percentage of women who work rise.   

Women’s political participation is also a mixed bag. Importantly, laws have been implemented to protect and promote women's role in the political and administrative affairs of China. In 2017, women accounted for more than 52 percent of new recruits for central government and affiliated organs. Among local governments, women represented 44 percent of new recruits.

Yet since 1949, no woman has ever served on China’s top political body, the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, much less holding the top leadership slot. On the next political tier down, the Politburo, there is currently only one woman among the 25 members. Numerous analyses, in fact, have found that women’s representation falls off swiftly the higher you go in the CCP’s hierarchy.

For example, in the current 13th National People's Congress, nearly 25 percent of the deputies are women. But at the last National Party Congress in 2017 – the once-every-five-years gathering of CCP elite – only 83 out of 938 delegates were women, according to China Data Lab. That’s less than 9 percent.

Social and economic development has also led to setbacks for some Chinese women, even as many have become more empowered.

During the 1990s, educated and gainfully employed women found themselves increasingly targeted as women – no longer as comrades – in the workplace. Women faced rising pressure to call on “feminine wiles” to close a business deal, please a boss, and enlist the support of a colleague. The Alibaba rape case embodies this practice. The woman recalled that when she arrived at the dinner, her manager told the other attendees: “Look how good I am to you. I brought you a beautiful girl.”

Impoverished women and girls, meanwhile, faced increased risk of being forced into prostitution, as sex work (though still illegal) spread rapidly at karaoke and other clubs throughout the country. There are disturbing parallels between these trends: In both cases, women are seen as sexual objects to be bought and traded for men’s benefit.

Despite its remarkable progress on women’s rights in some areas, China only created a legal framework for dealing with workplace sexual harassment in 2020. Even then, few women have had success seeking justice for sexual harassment or sexual assault in the courts. Most, like the Alibaba worker, have seen their cases summarily dismissed.

From Foot Bound to Space Bound

As with many women around the world, the development of women in China has improved, in some cases dramatically, over the last 100 years. Grandmothers with bound feet now have granddaughters with Harvard MBAs. Wang Yaping, now aboard the Chinese space sation Tiangong, will soon be the first Chinese woman to walk in space.

But at the same time, China is also dealing with social issues arising from the role of women in the workplace and in society at large. The modern Chinese woman is still fighting for the equality that the PRC promised at its founding.