Responses to Chinese Government propaganda "Leftover Women"

Chinese women—including highly educated, upper-middle-class women—largely missed out on the biggest accumulation of residential real-estate wealth in history (worth over $30 trillion according to an analysis of figures provided by HSBC Bank) because of gendered factors, such as intense pressure on women to leave their names off property deeds and new regulatory barriers to women’s property ownership. In the 1990s, gender inequalities deepened as China accelerated economic reforms, dismantling the Party-mandated system of equal employment for women and men. In 1990, for example, the average annual salary of an urban woman was 77.5 percent that of men, but by 2010, urban women’s average income fell to just 67.3 percent that of men, according to government data. The reform-era media has aggressively promoted traditional gender norms. In 2007 the Chinese government began a crass campaign to stigmatize single, professional women in their late twenties, mocking them as “leftover” women in order to pressure them into marrying. But as record numbers of Chinese women attend university, both at home and abroad, they are beginning to challenge widespread sexism and unequal treatment, and more and more are identifying as feminists. By 2012 around 100 university-educated feminists were regularly participating in performance art and activism across the country to denounce growing gender inequality driven by market reforms. They took up domestic violence (China had no specific domestic violence law in effect until 2016), sexual harassment, sex discrimination in employment and university admissions, and insufficient toilets for women—issues chosen because they were not overly politically sensitive, but relevant enough to spark public debate. Unlike the state-sanctioned All-China Women’s Federation, which urges women to be loyal to the government, China’s younger generation of feminist activists is outside the control of the Communist Party.