Women continue to play a peripheral role in male-dominated China, which cannot tolerate women’s rights in the country even as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) celebrates 100 years of its founding.
In January this year, disturbing footage showing a Chinese woman, a mother of eight, chained by the neck to an outdoor shed, sparked backlash about the country’s treatment of women, The New York Post reported.
After the woman’s story was made public, the local Chinese government issued five contradictory statements, quickly sealed off the village, silenced comments and arrested netizens who tried to pursue the truth.
However, there was no information yet, on whether the chained woman is free or not.
The recent attack on a group of women outside a restaurant in the Chinese city of Tangshan last month has yet again highlighted the pathetic state of women in a country, a media report said.
Footage from the barbecue restaurant’s cameras on June 10 showed a man approaching a few women sitting at a table and placing his hand on one’s back. When she objected, he started slapping and dragging her to the street by her hair. Other men then joined in, assaulting her female companions and leaving two women sprawled on the side of the street.
Even though the onlookers had reported the incident to the police immediately but it took them 15 hours to announce that they were going to arrest the suspects after the video went viral, The Geneva Daily reported.
This incident had sparked strong criticism on social media, where users accused the police of not deploying enough resources to protect the women of the country. They also decried the general, deep-rooted sexist attitudes in Chinese society, where things are getting dismal for women day by day.
It is worth noting that the women involved in this incident were out in a group in a well-lit public place and yet became victims of this horrific assault.
Last year Al Jazeera, on the occasion of CCP’s centenary celebrations had taken a survey about the current state of women’s representation in Chinese politics. The findings were pretty grim.
Of the nearly 92 million members of the CCP, just under 28 million are women — that’s less than 30 per cent.
Among all the delegates to the 13th National People’s Congress, China’s top legislature, and members of the 13th Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the country’s “top political advisory body,” only about a fifth are women.
Not once since the Party took power in 1949 has a woman been appointed to China’s top political body, the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee, let alone become the country’s top leader, reported the findings of Al Jazeera.
Vice-Premier Sun Chunlan, 71, is the only woman on the Politburo, a 25-person panel that reports to the Standing Committee.
In local governments, this gender gap isn’t any narrower. According to Valarie Tan, an analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Germany, while 10 per cent of provincial, municipal, and county-level leadership positions are supposed to be reserved for women, quotas are rarely met due to a deep-seated preference for men, reported SupChina.
Women occupy a mere 9.33 per cent of county-level posts as head of government or party secretary, falling to 5.29 per cent in cities and 3.23 per cent at the provincial level.