Xinran’s new book has been released and it is apparently another harrowing read. Entitled “Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother: Stories of Loss and Love“, it chronicles a number of true stories of women who have lost daughters as a result of China’s cultural preference for sons. The preference has of course been exacerbated by China’s one-child policy. I have read her previous “The Good Women of China” about some extraordinary experiences of women in modern China and thought it was a very good read. She has a journalist’s instinct for a story and it is hard not to be touched by the experiences she relates.
The Economist, picking up the thread of Xinran’s latest book, does its usual detailed yet wide-ranging job of picking apart the socio-economic consequences of the issue. It cites sex-determination methods and falling fertility rates as additional contributing factors to the skew towards male babies. According to sources cited in the article, the male to female birth ratio in China today is 123:100 (compared to between 103 or 106 boys to 100 girls, which is normal).
Examining the future effects of the problem on Chinese society is not my intention here.
I was wondering more about whether, as a woman, I had ever noticed any difference in doing business in China because of this so-called entrenched bias against women. After all, if the bias is strong enough to move a father to call his daughter a “useless thing”, did I ever feel regarded as useless or less in my dealings with anyone in China?
Actually not. I had some inquisitiveness pointed my way as to my age, marital status, personal life etc., but nothing that I ever considered offensive. It didn’t prevent me from getting on with the job I had to do. I was on two separate occasions told — by Chinese men, both business associates — that my situation as a career woman (as opposed to a “career man”) was not deemed out of the ordinary because I was a foreigner; if I was Chinese, apparently, I would have been judged an oddity.
My favourite analysis on this subject is an insightful blog post written last year by a former Peace Corps volunteer Gina Anne Russo whose experiences largely jibed with mine.
I did not get as miffed as Ms Russo did about the assumptions she felt applied to her “personal life and moral compass” as a foreign woman, since my response to anyone who makes assumptions about such things is a resounding “meh“, to the extent that a “meh” can be resounding.
But where I do start to care, as Ms Russo did, is where I see other people being treated differently because of circumstances such as age, gender, race, disability, religious belief, sexual preference and so on.
And I do care about prejudice against Chinese women, of which I have seen evidence.
I have a Chinese (female) friend whose theory about Chinese women in society today is that, because they have had to confront a deep and fundamental objection to their existence from the time they were born, those who survive and thrive need to be made of extra-strong stuff. She says this as someone who suffered quite a lot of discrimination based on her gender in her career. It’s an interesting theory, although one with virtually no way of being tested objectively, I’d venture.
Another friend of mine relates a revealing little story. He lives in Shanghai and has two children – a daughter and a son, in that order of age. My friend took his two children out for a walk and a stranger said to the girl, in Chinese, ”your Dad doesn’t love you anymore, now he has your younger brother”.
Hmm.
My conclusion is that doing business in China is no different for a woman than for a man, if you firmly decide it’s not going to make a difference. It’s the same in many other places. No obvious laws or rules apply in China, for example, that dictate the interaction that both sexes can have with each other, which might, say, prevent business meetings from taking place between a man and a woman.
But, as in any setting, it might be a handy thing to employ every now and again an element of awareness about the dynamics between others and what certain individuals may believe or have experienced as a result of their gender and social conditioning towards gender. They may have been on the receiving end of gender prejudice or been encouraged to apply gender prejudice.
It might give you some fresh insights into the people with whom you work or come across in a work environment, particularly in China, where the conditioning might have been quite different from what you are used to, if you are not Chinese.
2 Comments
It would be interesting to know how women treat other women in business. Is there solidarity, do they prefer to deal with men, or do they deal with the situation objectively and on its merits?
In a wider cultural sense, I found it interesting that it was my aunts who strongly pushed the idea that my partner and I should have a third child so that we could have a boy. The uncles didn’t seem to be that bothered, although they probably thought we were “unlucky” to have two daughters. Still, it’s interesting to see their shocked looks when we say that if we were to have third child, we’d want another girl.
In my experience, in China and in business, women treat women the same as they do the world over, and not very differently from the way men do. Demonstrate you have the ability. Solidarity as a result of gender is, in my view, a form of discrimination. To some degree, women have fought it, and should therefore reject it.