May 6, 2024

"China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has diminished the role of women at work and in public office. There are no female members of Mr. Xi’s inner circle..."

"... or the Politburo, the executive policymaking body. He has invoked more traditional roles for women, as caretakers and mothers, in planning a new 'childbearing culture' to address a shrinking population. But groups of women around China are quietly reclaiming their own identities. Many are from a generation that grew up with more freedom than their mothers. Women in Shanghai, profoundly shaken by a two-month Covid lockdown in 2022, are being driven by a need to build community. 'I think everyone living in this city seems to have reached this stage that they want to explore more about the power of women,' said Du Wen, the founder of Her, a bar that hosts salon discussions.... At quietly advertised events, women question misogynistic tropes in Chinese culture. 'Why are lonely ghosts always female?' one woman recently asked, referring to Chinese literature’s depiction of homeless women after death...."

From "In China, Ruled by Men, Women Quietly Find a Powerful Voice/Women in Shanghai gather in bars, salons and bookstores to reclaim their identities as the country’s leader calls for China to adopt a 'childbearing culture'" (NYT).

32 comments:

Dave Begley said...

What’s worse? China’s slavery? China’s fentanyl manufacturing? China’s policy towards women?

Wilbur said...

Hmmm, are there USA bars that host fashion discussions?

Enigma said...

As with Afghanistan regaining home rule after decades of western occupation and the USA after just a few years of letting weak passive-aggressive males dominate female sports, women in every culture routinely comply and return to species-typical female support and caregiving roles.

Some scientist might soon rediscover the biological and evolutionary factors in play. "No equity for you!"

Temujin said...

Well...if Chinese women decide to assert their independence fully, there goes any chance of China emerging from its self-induced population evaporation. Even a nation with a billion people can find itself short of people in a generation or two if they're not careful. China is currently at a replacement rate of 1.2, far below the minimum of 2.1 to keep the thing going.

When you have over a Billion people, and its still not enough, things could get very sideways very quickly when the current generation reaches a certain older age and there are too few below them to keep the machine operating. China is actually in trouble (so are all of the industrialized nations) So...if Xi's attempt to chain women to the bed and kitchen is failing, perhaps some counter-intuitive marketing is needed. Some proper incentivizing is in order.

Maybe insist that they eschew marriage and children, insist that they look only to their professional careers and their needs as strong, independent women. We've done that here and it's worked out...ah....nevermind.

Dave Begley said...

China is building two new coal fired power plants per week and this is the best WaPo can do?

China will be leading the world in short order. China is killing 100k Americans per year. We are de-industrializing thanks to the CAGW scam. The real laugher is how China has bribed Biden and WaPo refuses to report the story. Yeah, we’re fucked. Thanks bunch costal elites!

Kevin said...

I’m so old I remember when communist states were held up as models of gender equality.

Quaestor said...

It certainly wasn't the lone Trumpist staff writer at NYT (easily identifiable as the chocolate-flavored unicorn 9th from the right in the most recent group photo) who has been encouraging a more Red Chinese version of democracy in the Gray Lady's pages.

rhhardin said...

Women are unhappy because they're not interested in theory.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

TFW you live in a place where no one has rights, yet your personal hobby horse is women's rights. What to do what to do. Being a commie is always harder than it should be. But again, because virtually no one has rights, China has at least achieved gender parity of a sort. I wonder if Du Wen thinks the men who are limited by what Xi allows them to do feel any freer than the women in Her Salon.

Humperdink said...

So tells us Xi, are you saying the one child policy was a catastrophic failure? (Central planning at it's finest.)

rehajm said...

Women make good commies. What’s ‘Karen’ in Mandarin?

Tina Trent said...

It looks like the CIA has finally gotten some mission right.

Jamie said...

Quietly this and quietly that. And what does it mean to "reclaim your own Identity"?

All I'm getting from the pull quotes and headline is that China, which has never been a bastion of human rights, much less women's rights, continues to be bad at these things, and Chinese women, apparently afraid of forcefully "reclaiming their identities," are getting together to kvetch like American women on the fringes of second wave feminism in the 1950s. Is that what the article actually says?

mikee said...

Why doesn't Xi just get it over with and mandate a number of offspring each Chinese biological female must produce, the age at which the first pregnancy is to start, and the rate at which the children are to be produced? Stop with this namby-pamby stuff about the "role of women" in China. The One Child Rule wasn't a suggestion, it was run with forced abortions for rule violators. Why should this reversal of that program be soft-sold to the people? Forced impregnation should be the rule if the populace can't take a hint. If Xi's gonna be the ruler of China, then he's gotta rule, dammit!

Sebastian said...

"quietly advertised events . . . Women Quietly Find a Powerful Voice"

That's how you raise your powerful voice in China, quietly. Smart though.

Anyway, Xi does face the Asymmetry Dilemma in Population Growth: it's easier to kill babies than to make them.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Hmmm. First they pimped the Glorious Revolution and women had equality (in theory). Then they enforced a One Child policy which virtually wiped out a generation or two of females. Now the few females who survived that multidecade gendercide are being asked to assume traditional child-bearing roles in support of the Glorious Revolution to the few lucky guys who are of marriageable station (the rest are unsuitable mama's boys, mostly preparing for war and/or turning gay).

So China is at the rinse and repeat stage of late-20th Century Communism and only one's duty to the State has changed definition. Again.

Iman said...

Go granny Go granny Go granny Go!!!

BudBrown said...

Could be reverberations from Hilary's speech at the 1995 4th UN Conference on Women in Biejing. My sidekick or copilot or whatever the thing is that chimes in when I bing a question
had this to say:
More than two decades later, that 21-minute speech continues to inspire and serves as a testament to the enduring impact of advocating for women’s rights. Clinton’s commitment to this cause has left an indelible mark on history, and her words remain relevant today3.

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Mikee at 8:05 gets it. Nice!

Christopher B said...

Per Peter Zeihan, Xi doesn't have an inner circle of any gender.

Ampersand said...

It's that right wing conspiracy to explode the population that Atlantic Magazine warned us against.

China is missing two generations that they need to have in order to finance their totalitarian state, and to have money to pay for their vast capacity to produce stuff. Having a crash program to re-populate through childbirth is like having a crash program to read all of Proust by lunchtime today. Children take lots of time.

William said...

I read a couple of books by Jung Chang. In one of them she details how Mao gathered up all the prostitutes in Shanghai and sent them off to a re-education camp. Upon their release, they went back to their old trade. Mao then gathered them up again and had them killed. Western journalists who visited Shanghai marveled at how Mao was able to infuse the Chinese populace with a sense of morality. Those journalists were not able to discover that Mao had murdered thousands of women for the crime of being prostitutes.....China's One Child Policy was also a crime against women. Mostly against babies, but also against women. It never attracted the kind of attention and hostility from militant feminists that efforts to ban late term abortions here did.....I would say that in the fullness of time the Nationalists on Taiwan have produced a more hospitable place for women to live than did their opponents in Red China.

tommyesq said...

Women in Shanghai, profoundly shaken by a two-month Covid lockdown in 2022...

Two Months?? We went through 14 months here in Massachusetts!

Joe Smith said...

Is Xi Muslim?

Keep 'em barefoot, burqua'd, and cooking delicious orange chicken.

That's how you run a country : )

Leland said...

I never thought it a powerful message to gather in a bar or bookstore. Salon, do they mean women gather at hair salons or did they purchase a bankrupt internet website? Or do they just mean the definition of the word "salon", which is to gather in a social setting?

I saw larger gatherings in Hong Kong. How did that work out for anyone?

Xi will send an Uber.

Leland said...

Blogger tommyesq said...
Women in Shanghai, profoundly shaken by a two-month Covid lockdown in 2022...

Two Months?? We went through 14 months here in Massachusetts!


In 2022?

loudogblog said...

"In China, Ruled by Men, Women Quietly Find a Powerful Voice..."

And that voice is 100% male.

Only the NYT could put a positive spin on female oppression like this.

Also, did you notice how they kept inserting the word "quietly" into the story? It's like they're implying that women should be seen, but not heard.

hombre said...

Are our protesting women who tolerate female castration and bullies and cheaters in women's sports but can't abide traditional American values or Israel's effort to survive going to enjoy life under Xi or the mullahs?

n.n said...

China operates under a Pro-Choice religion. State's Choice: diversity, slavery, and abortiom. Women can become friends with "benefits" in order to compensate for one-child doctrine.

Static Ping said...

The communists in China did something incredibly stupid in the "One Child Policy" and now that they have reaped the "benefits" of that, now they go the other extreme. Sure. See how that works out for you. I'm sure you can dictate yourself out of the mess you dictated yourself into. I suppose we should give a cheer that it didn't involve starving millions of people to death.

That said, when you live in a totalitarian regime and are doing things "quietly" and you are not the regime, then "quietly" and "powerful" do not belong in the same sentence. Non-government actors do things "quietly" because they are weak.

Bunkypotatohead said...

China has ghost cities full of apartments with no people. They have also manufactured tens of thousands of electric vehicles with no buyers.
Xi should start offering free apartments and EVs to couples willing to start families. Honey instead of vinegar.

takirks said...

Whether or not you're willing to admit it, modern feminism was and is profoundly anti-woman. Also, anti-society.

You can't play Jenga with a social structure, picking and choosing what you like and don't like; the dependencies are there, and are as of this point in history, immutable. You can get away with pulling out certain specific pieces, for a generation or two, but then the whole stack of blocks comes crashing down. China is learning that, and we are going to. It is not accidental that the fertility rate drops in direct proportion to the amount of "feminism" in a society. The two things are intimately related; you start removing women from the necessary role of creating and raising the next generation, and you will rapidly find (generationally speaking...) that you don't have a "next generation" coming along in the demographic pipeline.

I would submit that the ideas of "feminism" as expressed so far in Western society are essentially non-workable. What those ideas basically did was move women over into the male realm, performing male roles. The alternative approach would have been to actually raise the status of what women's roles and responsibilities were in society, namely creating and raising the next generation. Nobody thought about that, and instead chose to denigrate the traditional female roles, leading to fertility rates far below replacement.

Such distortion cannot last. It won't last, either; society will come crashing down around the ears of those who think they can ignore the realities, but the sad truth is that the lessons of this won't be apparent until all these DINK couples are looking around for caregivers in their seventies and eighties, to discover that there ain't nobody there who either cares or has the time to deal with their geriatric bullshit. Single cat ladies are going to discover that no kids means nobody there to even check to see if the cats have eaten your face off, yet.

We discarded the traditional extended family back during the early half of the 20th Century. We went further, and discarded traditional sex roles, 'cos that looked like such a good idea. Nobody considered the unanticipated second-, third-, and fourth-order effects. Those are going to hit in the latter half of this century, and I suspect that you're going to see a hell of a lot of people looking around and realizing they've been conned by the activists of various stripes.

What I'm really looking forward to is observing all the WEF types realizing that their long march through the system intending to "prevent over-population" is rather likely to result in them not having any peasants to boss around and "manage". Like as not, the Klaus Schwab types are going to find that it's awfully damn hard to playact at Bond supervillian without minions, and that hiring them is gonna be ruinously expensive. The labor market is going to undergo a transformation that we've only ever seen before around the time of the end of the Black Death, and that's almost as inevitable as the sun coming up tomorrow.

I've seen the present, extrapolated to the future, and I'm here to tell you that it don't work, yo... You live long enough, you'll see that, too. My advice to those who've bought into the delusion? Die young, leave a pretty corpse. Your old age is going to be rather ugly.