One of the most difficult conversations I had in China happened at the first party I went to, one week in. A Canadian man introduced me to his Chinese girlfriend, whose opening gambit was 'you have nice eyes, but I think foreigner is more hard than Chinese.' Like an idiot, I thought she must have meant something like 'tougher' or 'more resilient', and tried to say I thought Chinese women had these qualities in spades, but she quickly cut me off - 'oh no', she said 'I mean, I think Chinese girl is nicer...for men.' Thankfully, I didn't have to come up with a response that didn't consist mainly of splutters, as her boyfriend helpfully stepped in with 'yeah, it's great dating here - it's so much easier because they don't have feminism.' (Really. Genuinely. Those were his actual words - an not-uneducated, Canadian born-and-raised man of 27. Terrifying - but that's a whole other post).

As someone who is really quite happy about the existence of feminism, much of my time in China was spent trying to understand and pick my way through the minefield that is contemporary Chinese gender politics. It's an incredibly difficult issue to unpack, and a really thorough exploration could fill a book. I'm also aware that as a foreigner I'm on tetchy ground, so much so that this post has been in the making since the event above, now over a year ago. What follows are some of the observations, thoughts and possible conclusions I drew over the year - I welcome any kind of comments and/or corrections!

Contradictions

Reading the Little Red Book as a shell-shocked new arrival, one of the things that struck me the most was the chapter on women. In the 1920s, after millenia of institutionalised female oppression (thanks Confucius), Mao Zedong - perpetrator of some of the most horrific crimes against humanity the world has ever seen - was waging war on foot-binding, proclaiming that 'Women hold up half the sky', denouncing the 'feudal-patriarchal ideology and system' and demanding equal pay. To put this in context, at this point Britain had just about got around to granting women the vote (if rich and over 30), and was getting all hot under the collar over whether or not to allow women the right to divorce their husbands (in cases of adultery only, obviously). My foreign eyes saw the road and construction crews swarming the city , 50/50 male and female, and the droves of women returning to work to continue careers more or less straight after childbirth, with the full support of society and zero perceptible guilt.

Meanwhile, however, sexism both implicit and freely articulated made my head spin. Female strength and autonomy in any form was widely considered unattractive: the mother of one student, a brilliant swimmer who loved the sport, forced her to stop because she was worried her daughter was developing muscles. This, she feared, would put boys off her in the future. A colleague cited one of the reasons for leaving her job as our hours: finishing at 9pm meant that there was no-one at home to cook for her new husband, so he would arrive at our office looking forlorn and unfed, and wait while she finished up. One of the most attractive things a girl can do is to sah jiao - throw a full-blown, toddler-style tantrum including beating her boyfriend's chest with her fists or hitting him with her handbag - when she doesn't get her own way. Sah jiao is widely considered to be 'cute', and is a socially acceptable response in mainstream Chinese culture to any and every lapse in male behaviour, including but not limited to:

Suggesting that you may not need walking to the cashpoint three metres down the road

Buying you the wrong flavour of ice cream,

Not offering to carry your handbag within three seconds.

These are genuine examples. I saw them with my eyes.

Most Chinese women I met would not drink, and would cite for this the reason that 'good girls' don't. The same goes for smoking - many of my female students would smoke in the school toilets rather than let their male colleagues see them, puffing on specially-marketed 'girls' cigarettes'.

These contradictions baffled me and many of my Western friends, and continue to be a source of puzzlement and frustration for laowai the length and breadth of China. To even begin to address them, you have to go right back to the roots of Chinese society and wade through the turgid swamp of its recent history. In doing so, you become forced to confront beliefs so deeply etched into your psyche that you didn't realise they were in fact beliefs and not universal truths. Here are some themes that emerged from conversations with Chinese and Western friends, and from my own observations, that forced me to do just that:

Emancipation, independence and autonomy

There is a misconception of Chinese society being one huge collective. In reality, it functions much as it always has done, as a society of smaller collectives whose smallest denominator is the familiy. The bonds of family tie Chinese people together in ways we see as variously intrusive and oppressive: there is no concept of independence, individual identity or autonomy in the sense Westerners understand these things and consider them sacred. Historically, the concept of collective responsibility would see whole families punished for the misdemeanour of one member, and to the present day families live in multi-generational households sharing all wealth and all responsibility for each member's success.

This social structure necessarily means that individual identity and autonomy hold next to no meaning in Chinese culture - no one can be socially or financially independent within it, with their 'own' money, assets or living space. Far from being oppressive, the independent model we champion is downright scary to most: my students thought the idea of me paying back a loan from my parents was barbaric - I was younger and in need, why would they not simply give me the money? I would more than pay this back in kind when I was providing them with grandchildren and caring for them in their dotage. Equally, they could not understand why an irreperable rift had not been caused between my sister and I when she told me she wouldn't be able to put me up for a few nights - the idea that she would have her own space and needs was not something that featured in their cultural landscape.

Neither does the political sphere offer 'emancipation' in the Western sense. Whereas the Women's Liberation Movement championed the rights of women as individuals and fought for our right to pursue identities of our own, the Chinese conception of women's emancipation as espoused by Mao was inseparable from the Communist movement: ultimately, it freed women insofar as it enslaved them to the State on an equal footing with men. The passage from the Little Red Book quoted at the start of this post goes on to explain how the full weight of women's force is crucial to the success of the Revolution: he is not concerned with their rights as people, but with their use to the State.

Birth control

The ability to control when and how often we have children is one of the single most important factors cited in Western womens' emancipation. It helps to understand female identitu when we think that no Chinese woman has access to this choice. Before the one-child policy, the population was driven up by the order from Mao to have as many children as possible; prior to this, large families and in particular numerous sons lent a great deal of face to heads of household. For this reason, women were - as in the West and all over the world - compelled to spend much of their lives either pregnant or giving birth.

At present, births are controlled by the State: without obtaining official permission to give birth, your child has no access to social security of any kind. Fines for giving birth to second (and in extremely rare cases, third) children are astronomical and late-term forced abortions are not unheard of in cases where parents cannot pay. The preference for boys - seen as higher-earning and more of a status symbol - means that there is a fairly open acceptence of the practice of aborting female foetuses under familial pressure - my students would openly joke about this.

Dating and marriage

It is unsurprising that dating and the free choice of one's own partner is a relatively new phenomenon: in the past marriages were made for the good - and profit - of all family members, and in the Communist era personal relationships came entirely secondarily to the service of the State. As Chinese people begin exploring the world of dating, it is still basically unthinkable to take any path other than heterosexual marriage and children, and families still have a far larger say in the matter than in the West. A pretty terrifying number of people told me that being gay was 'a Western problem' and the idea of choosing not to have children was entirely alien to most people I spoke to. For parents, it is of utmost importance that children are married and reproducing in their early 20s for the benefit and face of the family: I am considered at 28 far too old to be unmarried, and was frequently asked why neither I nor my parents were worried.

The one-child policy having caused a sizeable imbalance in the male:female birth ratio, Chinese wives are now relatively hard to come by for men of a certain age. This competition factor means that Chinese men are under a huge amount of pressure to enter high-earning professions and own a flat and car, as without these no family will allow their daughter to marry him. In this way, male gender roles become entrenched: men cannot simply decide they do not want to choose this path, as they are both responsible for and to their parents.

New China

Against this background, young Chinese women are having the world opened to them at a terrific rate. As the economy booms and foreign influence pours in, women are beginning to build businesses and climb the career ladder; it is becoming gradually more acceptable (though by no means common) for couples to live together, apart from their families. Recent years have also seen a more relaxed attitude to religion and tradition: the 'old ways' upon which Mao waged war in the Cultural Revolution. The whole of China can be seen to be looking both backward - finally, tentatively engaging again with a culture whose traces were all but wiped out in the space of a decade - and forward - towards amongst other things a more diversified social structure. Through this, Chinese women must somehow find their way: their models to date having been subjugation to either family or State; their ideals the foot-bound, house-bound, submissive wife or the self-sacrificing Revolutionary, it is possible that this is the first time another option has presented itself.

Whatever that other option is, it is not possible to articulate in the language of Western feminism and I do not envy Chinese women their task, any more than I envy Chinese men stuck in the feverish race to secure the necessary marriage credentials.

This post is in no way seeking to offer unwanted answers or to criticise - it exists to present wanderings and musings which took a while to process, and which I hope you find interesting. Thank you for reading and please let me know what you think!