north-south co-operation || breaking down the barriers: european and chinese women linking

Oxfam GB

Breaking down the Barriers: European and Chinese Women LinkingAuthor(s): Nicola MacbeanSource: Focus on Gender, Vol. 2, No. 3, North-South Co-operation (Oct., 1994), pp. 58-61Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Oxfam GBStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4030249 .

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58

Breaking down the barriers European and Chinese women linking

Nicola Macbean

T he experience of Chinese women this century attracted the early attention of the women's movement world-

wide. The Communist Revolution of 1949 transformed the status of women in China, supporting those who argued that radical social change and socialism could do the same for women in the West. Subsequent developments have undermined China's early image of a progressive feminist state: these include China's one-child policy, and the disillusionment with state socialism, which came to a head with the dramatic and tragic events of 1989 when the democracy movement was forcibly put down.

In the post-Cold War world, human rights are high on the agenda for agencies and countries who conduct relations with China, and the abuse of Chinese women's reproductive rights is now a major issue. Lack of international respect for China -

though this is arguably modified by world envy of the pace of its economic growth has helped to leave Chinese women largely outside the international women's movement, and has undermined prepar- ations for the 1995 Fourth World Con- ference on Women. However, the North lacks information about the complexity of the situation of women in China, and there is a danger of neglecting many of the positive achievements in our haste to condemn abuses of women's rights by the Chinese state.

In an effort to bring women in China and Europe closer together, while simultaneously addressing some of the training needs for the Fourth World Conference, the Great Britain-China Centre organised a ten-day summer school in July 1994 in Beijing, for young Chinese women. The training objectives for the summer school were to improve their spoken English, develop communication skills, promote participatory learning in workshops, and provide an introduction to the position of women, their organisations and activities, in Europe and the South. The summer school was also intended to give our seven European facilitators an opportunity to leam at first hand about the activities of women's organisations in China, both within the mainstream All China Women's Federation (ACWF) and in the burgeoning women's studies centres, hotlines, and social-service-oriented groups which are currently being established across the country.

In order to facilitate contacts between the official women's federation and the emerging non-governmental sector, it was agreed that half of the participants should be nominated by the ACWF, to include representatives of the headquarters and provincial branches, as well as the quasi- NGOs who have been given the responsibility of running workshops at next year's NGO Forum. The other half

Focus on Gender Vol 2, No. 3, October 1994



Breaking down the barriers 59

were nominated by 'mentors' actively involved in women's issues, who selected participants from the universities and other women's groups. The Women's Federation, who will control Chinese attendance at the 1995 NGO Forum associated with the 1995 World Conference, agreed that all the participants at the summer school would be able to take part in the Forum.

The Chinese NGO sector Some of the international unease about China hosting next year's World Conference and the associated NGO Forum is due to the ambivalent status of non- governmental organisations in China.

The government-sponsored ACWF was established in 1949 to 'represent and uphold women's rights and interests and promote equality between men and women'. It is a large bureaucratic organisation, determined to dominate the women's movement in China, and closely involved with the implementation of the one-child policy, but it has also lobbied hard for the 1992 Law to Protect the Rights and Interests of Women, and has been instrumental in raising the issue of female infanticide and its links to restrictive population policy.

In seeking to present the ACWF as an NGO, China has been embarrassed internationally. This has obscured global recognition of the emergence of a more genuine, if small, NGO sector in China. In recent years, a number of social-service- oriented organisations have been established, largely by and for women, and most of these organisations were represented at the summer school. One of the better-known is the Beijing Women's Hotline, which provides telephone advice and counselling to women and men. It was set up by the Women's Research Institute, a non-governmental organisation under the sponsorship of the Chinese Academy of Management Science.

All Chinese NGOs must be affiliated to a legal counterpart which may provide administrative and financial support, but also approves the organisation's leaders and activities. The registration procedure is approved by the Ministry of Civil Affairs. The challenge for new organisations is to identify a sponsor willing to adopt a suitably 'arm's-length' approach to supervision. One of the main problems facing such organisations is securing long- term financial support. In the absence of local funding, the hotline has relied on international sources, including The Global Fund for Women and the Ford Foundation.

Empowerment through action

A sense of individual empowerment was one of the more rewarding outcomes of the summer school. In an article to the school's newspaper, one of the participants suggested that since 1949 the majority of women in China were politically passive, trusting to the government for the introduction of policies promoting women's interests. The vast majority came away

'Summer School News' the participants' newspaper was a great success



60 Focus on Gender

from the summer school believing in the possibility of change and seeing a role for themselves in defending women's interests, and feeling that the summer school helped them to identify issues for further action. Many also came to see the benefit to their causes of mastering the techniques of the media, and all felt that the summer school boosted their confidence in speaking in public.

The impact of economic reform on women in China has been varied, but one issue has dominated the agenda: discrim- ination against women in employment. Companies have been made responsible for their own profit and loss, but a compre- hensive maternity benefits system has still to be established. Although the Women's Federation recognises the problem in its report on the implementation of the Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies, the issue has been taken up with much more vigour by the National Committee for Chinese Women Workers of the All China Federation of Trade Unions. Participants at the summer school echoed other women's organisations in calling for the establish- ment of a national system of maternity insurance, to be funded by all employers regardless of the number of their women workers.

The issue of domestic violence has only recently been discussed publicly in China, partly thanks to the work of organisations such as the Beijing Women's Hot Line and the Women's Legal Centre at Wuhan University, which has revealed the extent of violence in the home through surveys and case work.

On the other hand, reproductive health issues are still highly sensitive, and the workshop on health approached the issue obliquely through the documented experiences of women in India. Most urban women in China have accepted the arguments for a one-child policy, no doubt in part because of cramped living conditions, the prospect of economic

incentives, and the availability of pensions. They accept that this does not apply in rural areas, and recognise that the large number of migrant women seeking opportunities in the cities fall outside the control of the family-planning authorities.

It is also widely recognised that, in a country with strong son preference, the one-child policy is contributing to a problem of 'missing girls' in the country- side, as a result of selective abortion due to the ready availability of ultrasound, failure to register the birth, infant mortality through neglect, or, more rarely, through infanticide. Although a de facto two-child policy, if a first child is a girl, has emerged in many provinces, the government remains publicly committed to the one- child policy. Chinese academics working in the field of population studies, and themselves critical of the use of coercion in family planning, call for more international involvement in China.

Networking Although personalised networks of guanxi (contacts) are essential to success in Chinese society, there is little experience of the less personal and more professional networking at both the national and the international level. Most of the service- oriented women's groups that have recently emerged in China are unfamiliar with the experience of similar groups in the West and in the South, and are often equally cut off from each other. The Open Door policy has encouraged international contacts, but lack of funds and the difficulty of international travel have continued to isolate the non-governrnental sector from the international arena. Women's groups in China are hoping that next year's Forum will provide the opportunity for establishing a thriving domestic and international network, and the summer school helped to lay the groundwork for future exchanges.



Breaking down the barriers 61

Participants from Hong Kong and the Mainland deep in discussion over gender aware development policies

Reaching grassroots women

The requirement that participants were fluent English-speakers unfortunately restricted the opportunity to attend the summer school to women from the urban areas. Both the ACWF and women's studies centres, such as the Rural Women's Studies Group at Beijing Agricultural Engineering University, have recently tried to address the needs of rural women through training programmes offering literacy training and upgrading of income- generating skills. The long-term success of such initiatives in addressing the problems facing rural women will, to an extent, depend on how far such programmes are able to respond to the demands of rural women themselves in a situation where rural women's participation in decision making is still very limited.

In conclusion, as China prepares for next year's World Conference on Women,

Chinese women are being given an opportunity to organise and discuss a range of issues that might otherwise have long remained off the public agenda. They have also been given a unique opportunity to meet their counterparts from around the world. Next years conference promises to be a catalyst for an empowerment of women in China that may, in the long run, challenge many aspects of the government's economic and social programme.

Nicola Macbean is Director of the Great Britain-China Centre. The Summer School was organised by the Centre in conjunction with the Women's Studies Forum, Beijing Foreign Studies University, and the All China Women's Federation. It was sponsored by the Overseas Development Administration with the help of John Swire & Sons, the Ford Foundation and the Great Britain-China Centre.



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