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Through Chinese eyes
by Sarah Barnett
China has come a long way from the days of foot binding and feminine servitude – or has it? A bestselling Chinese author reveals what life is like for women in the new China.
She moved to New Zealand, her mother wrote, “with a beautiful wish to pursue knowledge and consummate her self-desire and happiness”. But the man who made An An Liu’s wish possible is now wanted for her murder, and her three-year-old daughter Qian Xun Xue is expected to spend at least some of the coming years in China in the care of her grandmother, Xiao Ping Liu.
An An’s short, sad experience in New Zealand is now well known: her 2003 marriage to the 50-years-older Nai Yin Xue became violent.
And then last month little Qian Xun Xue – “Xun Xun”, in her grandmother’s affectionate words – lost her mother to a shameful corner of the New Zealand way of life: our rising violent crime rates.
But New Zealand was still the country in which An An chose to raise her daughter. China has come a long way from the days of foot binding and feminine servitude: at least, in the big cities. Economic reform has marched on, China is a member of the World Trade Organisation and there are unprecedented opportunities for wealth and success in the People’s Republic. But what is life really like for the women of China?
Author Xinran Xue – who simply uses Xinran when writing – left China for the UK in 1997. As a broadcast journalist in China and host of the popular late-night radio show Words on the Night Breeze, she had earlier begun a crusade to answer that question – what is life like for Chinese women?
On a radio station that was a mouthpiece of the Communist Party, it proved a difficult task. Her male colleagues thought the idea naive: either women would have too much self-respect to talk, or it would make no difference anyway.
No? Her 10-minute radio segment was deluged with letters and callers. Too many of the stories simply couldn’t be told – they might bring the party into disrepute or damage her colleagues’ careers. Instead, they became the backbone of her heart-breaking first book, The Good Women of China, which she published from London, now her home.
She wrote in the epilogue that “At that time in China, I might have gone to prison for writing a book like this. I couldn’t risk abandoning my son, or the women who received help and encouragement through my radio programme.”
Now, on the phone from London, she says she felt a “deep hurt” that she had been isolated from the dark side of women’s lives in China by her comfortable city upbringing: “Somehow I was cheated by something I didn’t realise through society or the media, and by the time I found out – this was real life.”
And it was grim. A 12-year-old girl, kidnapped and held by an iron chain around the waist in a peasant village by her 60-year-old husband. Posthumous letters from another young girl, killing herself by degrees to stay in hospital and away from her abusive father. Women so unworldly that despite having several children, they didn’t know that they had a uterus – and suffered prolapsed wombs as a result of poor hygiene. Sophisticated city girls who saw their best chance of influence as being compliant mistresses to their bosses.
The fate of China’s 15 million orphans – most of them young girls abandoned because of the single-child policy – led Xinran to found the Mother’s Bridge of Hope. Its mission is to reach out to “Chinese children in all corners of the world: those who have been raised abroad, and those living in China, often in destitute conditions”.
Now, Xinran says, “I think women in the cities have much better lifestyles than 10 years ago … Since then, the situation for women, for society, has improved. A lot. There is not that much difference between a London street, or Auckland or Wellington street, and a Chinese street in the cities.”
In fact, one of China’s richest people is waste-paper tycoon Zhang Yin, worth about $US3.4 billion. A soldier’s daughter, Yin is believed to be the richest self-made woman in the world – richer than Oprah and J K Rowling – and was the first woman to top the China rich list. Now her wealth has been surpassed by yet another woman, Yang Huiyan, who now sits at the top of the list with the $US9 billion she gained after her father transferred 70 percent of his company’s shares to her before it was floated. Both women are often held up as examples of the success of China’s economic reforms and education.
Female illiteracy may have dropped from 99 percent in rural China in 1949 to 13 percent today, but Xinran still sees a massive divide between urban development and rural poverty. “I can’t tell you how big the change is – particularly in the big cities. But not very much in the countryside.”
Last year, she says, she spent 10 weeks travelling all over China, and “I was still so shocked. The people are so poor. In the east part of China, in the big cities, it’s like 100 or 200 years’, or maybe even more, difference – they’re living such modern lives.”
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