Chinese college teaches female students to be ‘perfect’
ZHENJIANG, China: At a college in southern China, Duan Fengyan is studying to be an accountant. She is also getting lessons in how to be a woman in the time of President Xi Jinping.
In a course launched in March, not long after China abolished presidential term limits, Zhenjiang College and the AllChina Women’s Federation have been teaching female students how to dress, pour tea and sit just so - all in the name of Xi’s “new era.”
“You must sit on the front twothirds of the chair - you cannot occupy the whole chair,” said Duan, 21, demonstrating. “Now, hold in your belly, relax your shoulders, legs together, shoulders up.”
The class, offered only to female students, aims to develop “wise,” “sunny” and “perfect” women, where wisdom comes from studying Chinese history and culture, sunniness from oil painting and etiquette classes, and perfection from the application of (never too much) make-up.
The Communist Party wants women educated, yes, but with economic growth slowing and the population shrinking, it is bringing back the idea that men are breadwinners and women are, first and foremost, wives and mothers. It is teaching young women that this is the norm.
The college launched the New Era Women’s School to heed Xi’s call for education in traditional Chinese culture, to help women compete in the job market, said Sheng Jie, who runs the programme - but also to prepare them for domestic roles. “Women’s family role is more important now,” she said.
Forty years into China’s great economic transformation, Chinese women are, on average, healthier, wealthier and better educated than ever before, but they are losing ground relative to men.
Since the start of Xi’s tenure, China’s ranking in the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index has dropped significantly - from 69 out of 144 countries in 2013 to a 100th-place finish in 2017.
The country’s top cadres do not seem concerned. The party wants women educated, but it is worried that educated women will decide not to marry men and have kids, compounding the surplus of males caused by the one-child policy and potentially destabilising the country.
“The direction of the future is that women are supposed to play the role of wife and mother in the home,” said Leta Hong Fincher, author of “Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China.”
Though this thinking has been around for at least a decade - most notably in sexist messaging about marriage - the Zhenjiang programme appears to be the first college course in feminine virtue under Xi. The Washington Post was the first foreign media outlet granted access to the campus and was allowed to interview students - while their teachers listened in.
“According to traditional culture, women should be modest and tender, and men’s role is working outside and providing for the family,” said Duan, 21, before a class on tea ceremonies.
“I want to be a model for my children.”
In his first five years in power, Xi cast himself as a champion of women’s rights, declaring, in a speech at a United Nations summit on women, that women’s equality is a “great cause.”
But his words were undercut by actual policy. China has detained five young feminists and thwarted some LGBT activism. Xi has not made significant progress on getting more women into the highest levels of leadership, nor has he focused on fixing the gender pay gap.
His tenure has been less about pushing for equality than promoting a vision of “harmonious” male-female households with a working father and a virtuous mother who cares for children and the elderly.
The party insists that this reflects the Confucian values at the core of Chinese culture. Critics counter that culture changes and that China should look forward, not back.
“Our traditional culture is filled with restrictions on - and the oppression of - women,” said Lu Ping, a prominent Chinese feminist who ran a website that was recently censored. “Can we push women back into the traditional roles?” People are trying. Last year, news broke that a company in northern China was operating a “traditional culture school” where women were told to “shut your mouths and do more housework” and practised bowing to their husbands.
“Don’t fight back when beaten. Don’t talk back when scolded. And, no matter what, don’t get divorced,” a female teacher there said, according to footage published by Beijing’s Pear Video.
“Women should just stay at the bottom level of the society and not aspire for more,” another instructor said. — Washington Post.