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Chinese Women Continue to Make History

Women in China have created history in the past 12 months, but they also continued to be the subjects of sexist tropes and shocking mistreatment.To get more news about woman in ancient china, you can visit shine news official website.

While Wang Yaping became the first female astronaut to be involved in the country’s space station-building mission, and Eileen Gu, the U.S.-born freestyle skier who competed for Team China at the Beijing Winter Olympics, rose to meteoric fame, stories of a mother of eight chained to a wall, anti-feminist online campaigns, and domestic and workplace sexual abuse cases underscored the challenges and injustices women still face.

As the world marks International Women’s Day 2022, Sixth Tone takes a look at key policy changes and social movements involving women in the past months.
In May 2021, China’s central government revised its family planning strategy, allowing married couples to have as many as three children. The announcement came five years after the country scrapped its decades-long one-child policy, paving the way for couples to have two children.

The three-child policy, which was enshrined into law three months later, was introduced at a time when China faced a historic low birth rate and falling fertility. However, the new policy received a lackluster response from Chinese women who have complained of gender discrimination at the workplace during pregnancy and post-childbirth.

While experts believe that the relaxation of family planning policies alone is unlikely to dramatically increase the birth rate, policymakers have proposed better childrearing incentives at this year’s “two sessions” political meeting.
History-making feats

In October 2021, Wang Yaping became the first female astronaut involved in the country’s space station-building mission. The 42-year-old became the second female taikonaut to head to space after Liu Yang completed her mission in 2012, breaking gender barriers in the country’s male-dominated space program.

China’s female athletes also made history during the Tokyo Summer Olympics — two-thirds of the country’s gold medalists were women. Gu’s success at the Winter Olympics, as well as the Chinese women’s soccer team’s win at the 2022 AFC Women’s Asian Cup — their first title in 16 years — have inspired a new generation of young girls and women.

The sporting prowess of Chinese female athletes has also inspired social media campaigns embracing healthy beauty standards and rejecting preconceived notions of appearance and body type. However, the athletes have also faced sexist questions involving marriage and childbearing, and highlighted others challenges they face, such as pay disparity.
Amendment of Women’s Rights Law

China started substantial amendments to the country’s Women’s Rights Law in late 2021 after it was last revised in 2005. Rights activists have called the amendments “quite progressive.”

The draft of the amendments received a high level of public engagement — it amassed over 80,000 suggestions for more than 390,000 changes in just one month.

While feminists demanded the law be more specific to protect women’s rights, anti-feminists argued to abolish the law, saying many provisions could “create gender opposition” and harm the rights of Chinese men.
Trafficking of women

The viral video of a Chinese woman chained to the wall in the eastern Jiangsu province shocked the nation early this year, once again highlighting the abuses women are subject to. The story also raised several questions, including whether the woman was trafficked.

Though local authorities initially dismissed the speculations, a high-level probe last month determined that the woman, identified by police as Xiao Huamei, was a victim of human trafficking. Investigators said she was sold multiple times for as little as 5,000 yuan ($800).

Hu Xinyu’s Body “Found”: When the Cure is Worse than the Disease

Last month, Bitter Winter reported about the national scandal surrounding the disappearance on October 14, 2022, of Hu Xinyu, a 15-year-old boy from the private Zhiyuan Middle School in Shangrao city, Jiangxi province. After three months, he had not been found, and protests by the family escalated to a social media tsunami asking whether the police was really investigating the case and what the authorities had to hide. After the case of the “chained mother of the eight,” another nation-wide scandal, rumors were running wild among human trafficking and senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s officers complicity with it.To get more news about hu xinyu, you can visit shine news official website.

As the scandal continued to grow, seriously embarrassing the CCP, all of a sudden on January 29 the Shangrao city police announced that Hu’s body had been discovered on January 26, in an old warehouse, only a hundred meters away from the school from where the student had disappeared more than three months before. The police claimed that the young boy had committed suicide and that messages he left in a recording pen confirmed he was desperate about his lack of school success.

According to the police, Hu climbed the walls of the warehouse, and once he had entered the building he hanged himself on a branch protruding into the warehouse at an eight of some 4,5 meters from the ground, using the laces of his shoes to create a rudimental noose.
The police believed the story would put the rumors to rest. It did not happen. The local authorities organized a press conference, where no representatives of the school or the family were present, difficult questions were not answered, and it was repeatedly stated that those spreading rumors on social media will be punished.

However, social media literally exploded with criticism of the press conference. The main objections can be summarized as such.
First, if the police had looked for Hu “everywhere,” as it claimed, for more than three months, why was the warehouse, which is at five minutes walking distance from the school, not searched?

Second, the police claimed that in a country where surveillance cameras are everywhere, there were none on the path from the school to the warehouse. Assuming this is true, how could Hu know it and why, once he had decided to commit suicide, did he choose a rare path without cameras?

Third, the suicide seems to have been a quite complicated exercise. Hu had to climb the high wall of the warehouse and find a way to reach the branch on which he allegedly hanged himself. Even more importantly, the police claimed that the branch was not broken after having supported for more than 100 days the weight of the 75-kg boy, which seems almost miraculous.
Fourth, when requested to play the messages it claimed were left on the pen recorder the police refused to do it, claiming it wanted to protect the privacy of the boy (but all the other graphic details of his alleged suicide were released).

Of course, it is still possible that Hu really committed suicide. However, the story as told by the police is full of holes. Once again, it is the CCP’s opacity that fuels distrust and rumors.