Earlier this month, International Women’s Day created a platform for activism and protests around the world. In Beijing, however, hopes for a progressive dialogue were thwarted when five women’s rights activists with ties to the nonprofit advocacy group Yirenping were detained in a series of coordinated police raids for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” The incident falls around the same time as women’s rights efforts meet resistance in India with the banning of the film India’s Daughter, a documentary that explores the murder and gang rape of a student in 2012. The response to both incidents demonstrates a degree of censorship regarding women’s rights advocacy that is troubling in the 21st century and reveals lasting institutional and cultural gender prejudices in both countries.
Censorship is not uncommon in China, particularly around the time of the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, which this year fell in the middle of March. The authorities “are always hyper-vigilant around the time of the parliamentary session, fearful that citizens might use the occasion to draw attention to their grievances.”
Further evidence of the prevalence of censorship in China comes with the recent news that China’s biggest anti-censorship service, GreatFire.org, is currently under “an unprecedented denial-of-service attack, receiving more than two billion requests per hour.” Should the attack continue, the perpetrators will be successful in wiping the service off the Internet — surely a blow to the protection of anti-censorship in the country. Although not confirmed definitively, GreatFire claims “to have established that the attack was made by hijacking the account of millions of global Internet users, inside and outside China.”
In the context of shaky free speech rights and engrained prejudice against women, women’s rights movements have struggled to gain traction in China, causing a gap between rhetoric and reality. International Women’s Day is an officially observed holiday in China, and one on which women are theoretically allowed to take a half day off from work. A message of gender equality is likewise pushed surrounding International Women’s Day; however, this rhetoric has a perverted effect. International Women’s Day “has now become another commercial opportunity, like Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day.” In 2013, 1.72 million men bought gifts for women in the 10 days preceding International Women’s Day. Gift purchases, however, ironically revealed the deeply-rooted gender biases: “beauty vouchers and kitchen supplies were a dominant theme.”
What’s more, the symbolic emphasis on International Women’s Day falls short of remedying the widespread and crippling discrimination that women face in China. For example, the continuation of sex-selected abortion in China reveals the enduring prejudice against girls and the prioritization of men in Chinese society. Consequently, a highly imbalanced sex ratio could potentially prove “catastrophic;” it is predicted that “approximately 30 million more men than women will reach adulthood and enter China’s mating market by 2020.”
The prioritization of men in Chinese society has later implications for women in the workplace. Data from the Third Chinese Women’s Social Status Investigation revealed that “more than 72 percent of women had a clear perception of ‘not being hired or promoted because of gender’ discrimination.” Over 75 percent of women who had recently been fired “believed they were dismissed due to marriage and childbirth,” a conflict that they feared would be exacerbated by the loosening of China’s one-child policy.
What’s more, when the study was conducted in 2010, women earned 0.67 RMB for every 1 RMB that men earned — notably lower than the 78 cents every American woman earns to a man’s dollar. Competition between women is driven by discriminatory practices like “the prevalence of job ads with detailed appearance and height requirements for women.” In her book Buying Beauty: Cosmetic Surgery in China, anthropologist Wen Hua commented, “They are trying to attract the tallest or the prettiest people, because it makes the government departments look good.” This perversion of women’s rights advocacy recalls the same trends discussed regarding International Women’s Day.
In India, censorship and gender advocacy also seem to go hand in hand. Recently, the documentary India’s Daughter was banned from being shown in India, a move that provoked widespread international backlash. The documentary explores the case of the gang rape and murder of a student in Delhi in 2012. Its honest examination of violence against women – which is widespread in the country – makes it an important tool in promoting awareness of the lack of security for women. This makes its ban all the more troubling.
The response to the Yirenping protest in China and India’s Daughter in India demonstrate a degree of censorship regarding women’s rights advocacy that is troubling in the 21st century, and reveal lasting institutional and cultural gender prejudices in both countries.
As in China, censorship in India is prevalent. It “has been done routinely for so many decades under the pretext of religion or indecency, that the public almost expects it, instead of the honest discussion of a grave issue that ought to ensue.” In fact, India is “taking a leaf out of China’s copybook on internet censorship, and widening its mandate for online censorship.”
Much like we saw in China, in this context women’s rights has a long way to go in India. The film India’s Daughter casts light on the deeply-rooted sexism in the country, exacerbated by laws, tradition, and cultural values. A former Delhi minister quoted in the film “places the blame on a society that puts girls and women second to men from the moment they are born — one where patriarchal practices become ingrained in children from an early age.” One demonstration of these social valuations is the imbalanced sex ratio of India, comparable globally only to that of China.
Furthermore, cultural values undermine progress toward the achievement of women’s security, a connection highlighted in India’s Daughter. As a high emphasis is placed on a woman’s honor and purity, rape often ends up perversely punishing the victim; the woman is labeled dishonorable or shameful, even by her family members. In the film, one of the lawyers who represented the attackers says “he would burn his own daughter alive if she behaved dishonorably.”
Laws, too, reinforce biased cultural values and contribute to the perpetuation of the lack of gender equality. For example, marital rape is not illegal in India, demonstrating the societal conception that a married woman should be subservient to her husband. Child marriages are also not illegal, and the minimum marriageable age for a boy is 21 but 18 for a girl, a demonstration of cultural values. Remaining religious laws additionally serve to perpetuate gender inequality. For example, the Goa Law on polygamy allows a man to marry a second wife given certain provisions, and the Hindu laws of inheritance entitle a husband’s heirs to inherit a woman’s estate in the absence of spouse and children.
Both the recent arrest of activists in China and the banning of the documentary India’s Daughter in India reveal a stalling of women’s rights advocacy in both countries that is troubling in today’s world. The harsh censorship seen in both cases, however, has provoked widespread international backlash. We can hope that in turn, this backlash will generate the awareness and momentum necessary to push back against the repressive government action in both countries.