RELATIVE LIBERATION CHINA MAKES ONLY SHORT STEPS FORWARD FOR WOMEN

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34123, 8 April 1976, Page 16

RELATIVE LIBERATION CHINA MAKES ONLY SHORT STEPS FORWARD FOR WOMEN

(By

YVONNE PRESTON

staff correspondent of the "Sydney Morning Herald" in Peking/

(Reprinted by arrangement)

International Women’s Day was marked in China this year by the appearance of the tiny grey-haired figure of Teng A ing-chao at a special celebration in Peking. Madame Teng is better known outside China as the widow of Chou En-lai. But she has always been more than simply “Mrs Chou”. In 1949 the year the People’s Republic of China was founded, she became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. And she has been there ever since.

Madame Teng s revolutionary credentials are impeccable. She survived the Long .March in spite of being ' afflicted with tuberculosis. More recently she is remembered and widely respected for the dignity with which she bore herself during the memorial ceremonies for her husband who died in January.

For 27 years Madame Teng has led the Chinese Women’s Confederation and still heads it today at the age of 72. It has been said of her that she introduced “womens lib” to China. She and her husband, in a tradition-bound society, were among the first couples to go through a no-ceremony marriage. Before a handful of frifends, they pledged "‘to love, to respect, to help, to encourage and to console each other; to have consideration for each other; to have confidence and mutual understanding.” But what does women’s lib mean in China? The Chinese Constitution guarantees women equal I rights with men in all respects. But the Constitution also guarantees other citizen rights which are stronger in print than in practice. And for many Chinese women, equal pay is an unrealised dream; leisure an impossible luxury; and life an unremitting two-job struggle. Chinese women are not encouraged to indulge in a choice between working and staying at home to be motherly and houseproud, a right of choice at the heart of the Western women’s movement. The Government has made it clear that production comes first. Simply being a housewife is an unproductive pastime.

International Women's Day was described here unambiguously as International Working Women’s Day. Though freed from the burden of excessive childbearing — in Peking the birthrate is now less than one per 1000 per year — women are not free to choose whether to work or

not. nor even to choose the work they will do. Many of them spend months or years separated from their husbands because work and production demand such a separation. Many of them raise children only to see them whisked away to toil in the isolation of barren frontiers, perhaps never to return. Vast numbers of women do very heavy work in the cities and in the countryside. In Nanking I watched five women tied by’ ropes to a cart laden with metal girders straining to draw it up a steep hill. Yet on the communes in the countryside where the majority of men and women live and work, women earn I less than men because they are said to be weaker. Married women earn less than single women because their family’ responsibilities! use up their energy- and these are considered individual chores not the responsibility of the collective. In the factories, al! jobs are said to be open to men and women equally. But women are still to be found in the boring less well-paid areas of “women’s work”. An eight-hour shift and a home to run is a burden in an affluent society; in China, still a desperately poor country, it is a backbreaking combination. A few weeks’ ago I visited a worker’s flat on a new housing estate outside | Shanghai. It consisted of three small I rooms, one of them little! more than a box-room, ai small kitchen and a bath-! room. The flat housed two faini-I lies totalling nine people, > four of them growing child-) ren. In the largest room lived j a family of four. In the two; smaller rooms a family of;

I four plus grandad. The bath was of rough ceiment and there was no hot water. The kitchen was Ishared and had a cooking I stove heated by coal. I There was of course no ■ refrigerator, no washing machine, no electric iron and not even any heating, though the temperature in Shanghai in winter can fall below zero. Peasant reverse It was spotlessly clean, though spartan. Outside the block of flats, children played in the thick mud which spread out from a large hole in the ground looking rather like the foundations for a swimming pool. It proved to be nart of a new air raid shelter.

1 After eight hours at a factory- bench, many women reIturn home at night to battle 'with mudcaked clothes in a Total floor space not half the I size of the dream Australian home kitchen. “Women are propping up half of the sky," said Chair man Mao. It is more like threequarters. There is an immense reserve of peasant conservatism to combat before Chinese women enjoy genuine equality with men. The propaganda machine went into action on March 8 to show what women could do. but it is an uphill battle to ! change the tradition of cenjturies. i There are women pilots in 'the Peoples’ Liberation Army, a Chinese newspaper ■told its readers. i On China’s leading oilfield. ■ women workers comprise 25 per cent of the total. And there are 127 all-female i drilling teams. An all-female ! train crew has punctually ;and safely run the Peking tn Harbin train for the last three years. And a mother of three children scaled Everest last Chinese women are now plunged into the antirevisionist debate aimed at beating back the capitalist influences set to undermine the great proletarian cultural revolution. But at the top in China, few women have any real influence. China’s most powerful woman. Chiang Ching, derives her power from her position as the wife of Chairman Mao. It could be said that a whole generation of women in China, or maybe even two, is being harnessed and sacrificed to the cause of the revolution under a harsh and merciless regime. But this ■ could equally be said of Chinese men. [ There may be no other [path for a country so recently haunted by hunger ■ flood, famine, exploitation and poverty. Chinese-style women's liberation is not Western-style liberation, but it ought to be seen in the context of that very recent past, when mar-

riages were arranged, jwomen sold their children to I buy food, girl babies were considered worthless and often left to die and women had few, if anv, rights at all. There are still many old women in China who bear the marks of that recent past. As young babies, their feet were tightly and cruelly bound to become a deformed travesty of adult feet. Teetering painfully in shoes that would be too small for a five-year-old, these old women are a symbol of at least some worthwhile advance.

Liberation is a relative thing; for women m China it may simply mean the freedom to allow one’s feet to grow to the size that nature intended.