Page 22 - Chinese Woman Living and Working

INTRODUCTION 9
in politics is now said to enhance women’s self-respect, self-confidence, self-reliance and
self-improvement.
Nonetheless, Edwards argues, women’s participation in Chinese politics and the cause
of women’s emancipation generally is still constrained by the historical burden of ‘women’s
work’. It is still very difficult to set up a feminist movement independent of the Party
bureaucracy ‘Women’s work’ still remains the type of work accorded low status and
remuneration. The result is that women politicians are ‘overwhelmingly concentrated’ in
areas such as culture, education and health, not in the ‘masculine’ areas of finance,
economics and industry. With regard to the number of women representatives to the
National People’s Congress (NPC), these have remained relatively stable during the
reform period at around 21 per cent. However, the representation of women at the State
Council and Standing Committee of the NPC has not advanced.
In China it is the Party central organisations that possess the greatest power. Very few
women have been elected to the Party’s Politburo and none has ever been elected to its
innermost sanctum, the standing committee of the Politburo. A hopeful sign, however, is
the election in 2002 of female industrialist, Wu Yi, to the Politburo, the first woman to
hold this position who is not married to a Party leader. With regard to the general
membership of the Chinese Communist Party, only 17 per cent of the band of 66.3
million Party members are female. Internal female commentators argue that these woeful
numbers are due to a residue of ‘sexual inequality’ and the tenacity of traditional notions
about women’s roles in societies. Rural women are particularly disadvantaged. Women’s
political participation is also suffering from a backlash against the pro-women policies of
the Cultural Revolution, which was perceived to have led to an influx of poorly prepared
women to leadership positions.
The teaching profession is another area that is subject to increasing reinvention in the
reform period. The ability to use new media technology has become one of the
touchstones for assessing the new ‘modern’ teacher. In the Chinese tradition, the teacher
represents not just academic expertise and competence but also ‘traditional’ virtues and
personal integrity. Most importantly, he or she should be able to convey ‘a sense of
continuity in culture and social behaviours’. It is exactly this cultural transmission, from
the revolutionary past to the modernised, reformist present, that is one of the hardest
duties of the contemporary teacher. As Stephanie Donald, an expert in Chinese media
education points out: ‘Teachers say (off the record) that the history of revolution…has
less and less currency with the young.’
Women comprise almost half of China’s primary schoolteachers and over a third of its
secondary schoolteachers. Entry to the profession of teaching for women was a major step
forward in the revolutionary and socialist periods, because teaching had been traditionally
regarded as a leadership role more suitable for men than women. Chinese films of the
earlier decades of socialist China tended to stress the role of male models in inspiring
young women. The exception to the generally male models promoted by these films were
teachers, who were typically female and served as role models of professional virtue.
During the Cultural Revolution teachers, many of them female, were attacked as ‘bad
class elements’. This was the ‘nadir’ of the status of the teaching profession in China.
Subsequently, Donalds argues, the importance of teachers in China’s modernisation