Rights activists denounce ‘female morality schools’
HONG KONG — The video shows students at the “female morality school” in northeastern China getting up at 4:30 a.m. to scrub floors and being taught not to resist if their husbands beat them.
Shot with a hidden camera and posted on a popular Chinese video website, it sparked a storm of criticism of the school and highlighted complaints that the status of women is deteriorating under the rule of a Communist Party that promised them equality.
In the recording, students at the Fushun Traditional Culture School were shown being told to put aside career aspirations and, in one instructor’s words, “shut your mouths and do more housework.” One group of students was shown practicing bowing to apologize 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 says in the post on Pear Video, a Beijing online platform for short videos.
“Women should just stay at the bottom level of the society and not aspire for more,” another teacher says.
Such schools appear to be growing in popularity, though it is unclear how many China has, according to researchers and women’s rights activists.
Their emergence reflects the erosion in the status of women since the launch of economic reforms in the 1980s that reduced the ruling party’s focus on social equality, said Feng Yuan, a prominent women’s rights activist. “Archaic ideas about gender equality still have a market in today’s society,” she said.
Deng Xichan, a 21-year-old nurse, said she and her mother attended a female morality institute in the southern city of Changsha, enticed by its offer of free classes and lodging.
Students were taught to obey men because it would bring their children good fortune and that sex before marriage would bring bad luck, Deng said. Every evening, she was required to bow in front of a statue of Confucius and participate in group confessions, she said.
“Many of the students truly believed that their life was hard because they had premarital sex, or because they cheated on someone, so they would kowtow and confess,” Deng said.
At many of the programs, students are closed off from the outside world — and from each other.
“The front door was locked, and our phones and cash were taken away from us,” said a woman in her 20s who attended a seven-day course in the northwestern city of Yinchuan. “We were also not allowed to chat with each other, so all you can do is bear with it.”
The Fushun school was founded in 2011 by an exconvict who had served time for murder and was approved by local authorities as a “public welfare organization,” according to Chinese news reports. It charged no tuition and was supported by students’ donations. The school had more than 200 volunteer workers and took in as many as 40 students for each 20-day “female virtue” course, according to an online report by the Yangcheng Evening News, a major local newspaper.
After the video came out in November, hundreds of people criticized the school on Internet message boards and blogs, prompting an investigation. The school was shut down in December, according to the official Xinhua News Agency. The local education bureau concluded it violated “socialist core values” and called for similar programs to be investigated.
The Fushun school and several others across China contacted by the Associated Press refused requests for comment.
The Communist Party came to power in 1949 promising to improve the status of women, who then-leader, Mao Zedong, famously declared “hold up half the sky.”
By many measures, the status of women improved after the revolution. They gained access to jobs and education and, on paper at least, were legal equals in many ways.
Activists say the decline in women’s status that began with the economic reforms of the 1980s accelerated as the party set aside leftist politics as a unifying message for the country and instead promoted more traditional, male-dominated Confucian beliefs.
The gulf between the sexes is especially pronounced at the highest levels of politics: The ruling party’s Standing Committee, the inner circle of power, has never had a female member. In the next tier, a single woman sits in the larger 25-member Politburo.
The state-run All-China Women’s Federation rejected the activists’ assertions that the party has promoted maledominated beliefs.
“We deplore and are dissatisfied by such a view that misrepresents reality,” the group said in a faxed response to questions. It said 551 women delegates attended the party’s twice-a-decade national congress last year, an increase of 30 places, making up nearly a quarter of the total.
Still, in a 2011 survey the federation also found women’s wages were on average twothirds lower than men’s. And the share of women in the labor force dropped to 61 percent last year from 72 percent 20 years ago, according to the World Bank.
Party leaders are worried China is producing too few children to support its aging population, said Leta Hong-Fincher, a sociologist and author of “Betraying Big Brother: The Rise of China’s Feminist Resistance,” due out this year. “The government launched a propaganda campaign referring to single, overeducated women over 30 as ‘leftover’ to stigmatize women into returning home, getting married and having babies,” Hong-Fincher said.
The easing in 2016 of China’s “one-child” policy, which now allows couples to have two children, has only put more pressure on women to raise families instead of working, Hong-Fincher said.