In Xian in 1994, I conducted a workshop on legislative drafting with more than a hundred women from various levels of women’s federations, known as “fulians.” To ground the discussion, we brainstormed a list of top problems facing women in their communities. Most participants reported that violence against women and domestic violence were leading concerns. But when we turned to examine draft legislation aimed at providing greater protections for women, the group also quickly identified the shortcomings of these draft laws: they lacked clear definitions, lack of specificity about implementation mechanisms and remedies, and no provisions for financing needed solutions. In a follow-up exercise that identified common Chinese expression or sayings about women, it became painfully clear that negative images and gender stereotypes are embedded in the language, reinforcing cultural biases.
Although China has signed and ratified dozens of international human rights treaties and passed many domestic laws to protect women, the realization of rights for hundreds of millions of women and girls remains an ongoing challenge that has domestic and international dimensions. In the fall of 1995, the United Nations convened the Fourth World Conference on Women. A parallel NGO event, Forum 95, was held along the same themes—equality, development, and peace—and attracted over 30,000 people. Slogans emerging from the conference included the now well-known “Women’s rights are human rights,” but also the Chinese slogan, “Connect the rails,” calling for connecting (jiegui, to merge) with international women’s movements, and promoting more women’s activism in China. Anticipated or not, hosting a prominent international event such as the 1995 Women’s Conference had positive spillover benefits for Chinese women and domestic women’s groups. Through support and funding for numerous publications and new women’s centers and programs, greater domestic awareness of women’s issues and problems, as well as the role of NGOs in other countries, was advanced at different levels of government and among ordinary Chinese, the laobaixing.
Nearly two decades have passed since the 1995 Women’s Conference and the adoption of the Beijing Declaration and the Platform of Action that called on all governments to take action on areas including education, health care, violence against women, media stereotypes, and the rights of girls. Then, as now, the future of women’s rights in China is connected to overall progress in human rights, sustainable and equitable development, responsible stewardship of the environment, transparent and accountable governance, and greater openness and democratic reforms as called for by China’s own citizens.
Since the early 1980s, China has engaged in extensive efforts to rebuild a legal system, including passing numerous laws, policies, and programs aimed at eliminating discrimination against women and promoting gender equality. However, this domestic framework must be understood and implemented within the context of international human rights obligations that China has committed to, including the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and more than twenty other major rights conventions.2 In addition to treaties and domestic legislative reforms, the PRC government also adopted the Program for the Development of Chinese Women (2001-10), which makes gender equality a basic state policy for the enhancement of national social progress.
As China has become increasingly active in the international human rights system over the past two decades, there have been challenges and opportunities presented by domestic efforts to implement these international obligations. As a state party to international human rights treaties on racial discrimination, torture, economic, social, and cultural rights, and rights of women and children, China has committed itself to their implementation, including participating in the international review and oversight of its implementation record, based upon international standards, principles, norms, and processes.
Over the past two decades, China has seen an unprecedented level of rapid economic growth, but the benefits and the costs of that growth have not been equally shared. Although the Chinese government calls for a “harmonious society,” it continues to grapple with pervasive corruption; growing social inequalities; popular protests and unrest; and serious environmental, public health, and social welfare challenges.
Behind the glittery façades of Shanghai, Beijing, and the urban coastal areas, the vast majority of China’s people are struggling to survive in the face of major social and economic dislocations; the collapse of social welfare safety nets; and lack of access to affordable and decent health care, housing, and education. Women—especially rural poor, migrant, or ethnic minority women and children—are disproportionately affected by these changes.3 And rights defenders and activists investigating or reporting on these problems often find themselves the targets of harassment, surveillance, monitoring, or criminal prosecution.
Effective implementation of rights of women protected under Chinese and international law requires accurate, comprehensive and reliable data as the foundation for assessment of the issues and possible solutions. Yet, information such as statistics on kidnapping and trafficking of women and girls, forced abortions, infanticide are state secrets under Chinese law.
Thus, any assessment of the current human rights situation, including the status of women, presents a minefield. Accurate, reliable, and transparent information is the lifeblood of an independent media, health policy debates, responsible political participation, and human rights monitoring. The most serious obstacle to open access and distribution of information is the ongoing censorship and information control system in China. Information control is maintained by a comprehensive system of criminal, state security and state secrets laws, Internet and media laws, state-of-the-art technology, and a highly effective police and security apparatus.
In our report, The State Secrets System: China’s Legal Labyrinth (2007), Human Rights in China provides a detailed examination of this system of information control, and its chilling effect on efforts to develop the rule of law and independent civil society inside China. A revised State Secrets Law went into effect October 1, 2010.4 Its expanded scope addresses the rapid technological advances since the 1989 State Secrets Law was enacted, and places broader, tighter, and more rigorous control over information flow on the Internet and public information networks, in addition to traditional forms of communication.
This state secrets system controls the public dissemination of an all-encompassing universe of information as diverse as the total number of laid-off workers in state-owned enterprises, national statistics on the death penalty, statistics on unusual deaths in prisons; statistics on trafficking of women and children, and data on water and solid waste pollution in large and medium-size cities. The comprehensiveness of the information control system undermines review of China’s human rights record by international expert bodies. It also undermines the development of an informed citizenry as well as the state and society’s capacity to address complex social, legal, and environment issues
In order for women’s rights in China to advance, there must be a functioning legal system that respects and protects rights, and a rule of law that is transparent, fair, and independent of the Communist Party of China. Although there has been significant progress since the 1980s toward rebuilding the legal system in China, including impressive legislative activity, training of legal personnel (lawyers, judges, law teachers), and development of legal and administrative institutions and processes, difficult challenges remain. Even China’s own “White Paper on Human Rights” acknowledges that the development of the rule of law and democracy still falls short of the needs of economic and social growth. It specifically identifies the need for improvement of the legal framework; the lack of enforcement; the problems of bribery, corruption, and abuse of authority and power; and the need to educate the public about rule of law.5
Within a framework that maintains the supremacy of the Communist Party of China, the legal system being built continues to be plagued both by endemic corruption and influence of guanxi (relationships), as well as lack of independence from Party control. It remains essentially a rule “by” law rather than “of” law. The use of state security and state secrets law to restrict procedural due process protections exacerbates a politicized and secret decision-making process, especially in sensitive cases.
While the number of lawyers in China grew from about three thousand in the early 1980s to over one hundred thirty thousand in 2007,6 there is only a small number willing to take on cases viewed as sensitive or political by the authorities. These include cases challenging problems such as official corruption, forced relocations, environmental degradation, health, and other pressing social and human rights issues. There has also been a major crackdown on rights defense lawyers, including prosecutions, violent attacks, and threats. These undermine the development of a professional and independent bar, and the integrity and fairness of the criminal justice system while contributing to an overall chilling effect on rights defense work.
When the authorities respond to individuals and grassroots groups that raise health issues—such as HIV/AIDS, sex workers, worker safety, or coercive population policies and practices—with repressive measures such as detentions, violence, and intimidation, they are also violating their rights of freedom of expression, and undermining the capacity of the government and society to address these problems. The economic, cultural, and social rights of women are related to their civil and political rights.
In addition to the court system, there is also a vast administrative detention system that is outside the whole purview of judicial review and oversight, in which unlimited discretion is exercised by police and personnel in these camps. The avenues for citizens to present grievances to the authorities are ineffective at best. Numerous petitioners who travel to Beijing to petition the government for reasons ranging from official corruption, to land seizures, to withholding of payments, are detained and often sentenced to periods of “Reeducation Through Labor.”
Mao Hengfeng is a Chinese woman who petitioned the authorities about abuses and coercive implementation of China’s one-child population policy. In 1988, Mao was dismissed from her job at a soap factory after her refusal to abort a second pregnancy, which was ordered in accordance with the policy. Since that time, she has petitioned the government for redress on that dismissal and other subsequent abuses, including forcible eviction. As a result of her petitioning, she has been detained, forcibly admitted to a psychiatric hospital, sentenced to Reeducation Through Labor, and subjected to humiliating abuses while in prison. She was sentenced to two and a half years for having broken two table lamps and other objects while in detention for petitioning in 2006.
Although the Chinese government has discussed possible reforms to the Reeducation Through Labor system numerous times in recent years, the practice and its abuses, remain largely the same.
Finally, in order for there to be respect and protections of human rights and a rule of law with legitimacy and credibility, there needs to be accountability for past abuses. The past is not another country. Through the opportunities to host both the 1995 Women’s Conference and the 2008 Olympics, China had hoped to create a different international image than the one broadcast live during and after the violent crackdown on democracy and labor activists on June 4, 1989.
The Tiananmen Mothers are a rights defense group that has worked to challenge the official accounts of the crackdown in China in June 1989, to document the deaths and those individuals still imprisoned, and present demands for full investigation, accountability, compensation, and dialogue with the authorities. Members of the group have been persecuted by the government, and their pleas for a reassessment of the 1989 events have been met with silence.
In order for China to make genuine progress toward a rule of law that protects and advances the rights of all of its people, these past abuses, this “forgotten history,” must be addressed.
Several domestic and global drivers for change support a reasonable optimism. Despite the public rhetoric and toeing of the Party line, China’s leadership is not monolithic. There are reform-minded allies in the government, think tanks, and throughout civil society, many of whom recognize the need to improve rights, health, and education prospects for women and girls. There is a growing civil society that is diverse and active, including feminist Chinese scholars and activists, and the development of women’s legal centers and law school based clinics representing women’s cases. However, the dramatic growth in numbers of registered and unregistered civil society organizations is also accompanied by a range of obstacles, including complex and confusing legal classifications and restrictive regulatory schemes.
At the end of the day, efforts to advance women’s human rights in China must center on supporting Chinese women’s voices, rights defense activists and lawyers, journalists, scholars, and grassroots groups, all of whom are working in extremely difficult conditions on the ground. To support these domestic forces more effectively, there need to be nuanced strategies that can exploit the role of new technologies and bridge the gap between international and domestic groups.
Technology is both opening greater civil space and providing increasingly sophisticated tools of censorship and social control. However, the extent to which the potential of the Internet can be exploited as tools for empowering rural, migrant, ethnic minority, or urban poor women and girls will depend on the extent to which the current digital divide will be addressed.
What is needed in China, as in other countries, are multipronged approaches that include domestic and international law, multilateral and national institutions, processes, cultural strategies, and diverse stakeholders.
The international community—foreign governments, rights organizations, corporations and other actors—needs to increasingly engage the Chinese government on issues central to human rights, and women’s rights in particular. What is at stake is the human dignity, the well-being, and human rights of more than 600 million Chinese women, and the impact on the prospects of a sustainable and equitable future for all of China’s almost 1.4 billion people. That future has environmental and human rights consequences for us all.
Sharon Hom is the executive director of Human Rights in China (HRIC), and professor of law emerita, City University of New York School of Law. She is the coeditor of Challenging China: Struggle and Hope in an Era of Change (New Press, 2007), and the editor of Chinese Women Traversing Diaspora: Memoirs, Essays, and Poetry (Routledge, 1999). She contributed a chapter to the anthology China’s Great Leap: The Beijing Games and Olympian Human Rights Challenges (Seven Stories, 2008). This essay draws on her chapter in the anthology Gender Equality, Citizenship and Human Rights: Controversies and Challenges in China and the Nordic Countries (Routledge, 2010).1