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Review focus: Women, China, equal rights, cross-cultural, liberation, university, independent-minded
Asian Business Code Words Index NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company Asian Business Strategy & Street Intelligence Ezine
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Women are playing an increasingly important role in China, after long centuries of chauvinistic abuse. Sexual segregation among upper-class families and the general degradation of women into second- or third-class citizens was late in coming to China, however. Historians are uncertain, but it seems to have begun during the Sui Dynasty (A.D. 581-618, picked up momentum during the Tang Dynasty (A.D. 618-906), and become a deeply entrenched feature of society by early decades of the Sung Dynasty, (A.D. 960-1279). In upper-class families, girls were raised separately from boys. Binding the feet of women in the Mandarin class was also a well-established practice by the beginning of the Sung era. Love marriages also seemed to have been totally replaced by arranged marriages during these long dynastic ages. Men of means were legally allowed to have as many concubines as they wanted. A number of China's emperors were notorious for the size of their harems. One had twenty-seven thousand girls between the ages of eight and fourteen during his reign. The government of the People's Republic of China has gone a long way toward remedying this failure but Chinese women are still far from having achieved equal rights with men. Although over a hundred million women work, China's first law protecting women workers dates only from July 21, 1988, and this was passed because previous regulations pertaining to female employees were mostly ignored. Many of China's miners are women, and they have the same work quota as male miners. Yet Chinese women must still take primary responsibility for running the home and raising the children. This puts the familiar double burden on them. Chinese women are caught in the vortex of the cross-cultural winds sweeping the country. Educated women in particular no longer accept age-old idea that they are "the moon reflecting the sunlight" - subordinate to men. Surveys show they are rapidly absorbing the Western concept of individuality, independence, and personal responsibility. The majority say they want to dedicate themselves to their careers, the improvement of their country, world peace, and the development of the human race. Noted one survey of female university students: "They pay more attention to their own moral welfare without thinking of others, and have no interest in school activities, apart from dance parties. Some students are obsessed with making friends." The model woman in China today does not see herself as just tender, virtuous, and obedient according to traditional Chinese values. She believes that she should work hard and have her own professional career without sacrificing her femininity. Western role models often mentioned by young Chinese women today: Britain's Margaret Thatcher and France's Marie Curie. Most young Chinese women who go to university say one of their primary goals is to find a boyfriend whom they will later marry. They add that the relationship they want with men must be based on true love, and that if they later discover they do not really love their partners they will end the relationship without hesitation. Despite the Western veneer coating college-educated women, however, the majority of them still suffer from a deeply rooted inferiority complex in their attitudes toward men. They express concern about how they will be able to juggle a career and the responsibilities of a housewife and mother. As part of their own liberation, many female as well as male students now work part-time in a variety of jobs and take special pride in their ability to help support themselves and in the fact that they are gaining experience that will benefit them after they finish school. One of the biggest worries of female students is how they will integrate what they are learning in school with society at large after they finish their education. Chinese society, they say, is not yet able to accept independent-minded, educated women into its economic and political ranks. Job discrimination on the basis of sex is rampant. Male personnel directors and managers readily admit that they discriminate against female applicants for certain kinds of jobs because they fear the women will get married, become pregnant, and have to leave. Students who major in such things as language, history, political theory (including communism), and literature generally experience special difficulties in finding jobs. When and if they do finally find work, it usually has nothing to do with what they have studied in school. In earlier years, employers had no choice but to accept whomever the state sent to them. Now that this system is being phased out and both employers and potential employees are being given some choice in the matter, problems of a different type are common. Employers sometimes turn down job applicants because they do not like their hairstyle or clothing, or because they think their college major is irrelevant to modern industry. Another problem is caused by students with connections using "the back door" to get desirable jobs, making it impossible for other students to compete with them. Still, most students say they prefer to have some say-so in the matter of job selection. In Shanghai the practice of giving students some options in job-hinting is called "mutual selection" or "free marriage". In the case of "mutual selection" or "free marriage", the graduating students as well as their potential employers are able to exercise a choice, assuring that both parties are pleased.
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Boye Lafayette de Mente is one of our regular monthly columnists at the 
| This month's column is excerpted from Chinese Etiquette & Ethics in Business, by Boye Lafayette De Mente available from NTC/Contemporary Publishing Company |
© Boye Lafayette De Mente & the Asia Pacific Management Forum 1999
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