Women in China

Ancient and Imperial China (8th century, Tang Dynasty). . . Pre-modern Chinese society was predominantly patriarchal and patrilineal from the 11th century B.C. onward. The freedoms and opportunities available to women varied depending on the time period and regional situation. Women's status, like men's, was closely tied to the Chinese kinship system. From the ancient Chinese views, the family structure is the micro-system of the political system. Therefore, loyalty towards the Emperor is the same as the women inside the family who should obey their husbands to fulfilled the rule that had been set up for a long tradition. A prejudiced preference for sons has long existed in China, leading to high rates of female infanticide. There was also a strong tradition of restricting women's freedom of movement, particularly that of upper-class women, which manifested through the practice of foot binding. However, the legal and social status of women has greatly changed in the 20th century, especially in the 1970s, after the one-child and reform and opening up policies were enacted. Older Chinese traditions surrounding marriage included many ritualistic steps. During the Han dynasty, a marriage lacking a dowry or betrothal gift was seen as dishonorable. Only after gifts were exchanged would a marriage proceed; and the bride would be taken to live in the ancestral home of the new husband. Here, a wife was expected to live with the entirety of her husband's family and to follow all of their rules and beliefs. Many families followed the Confucian teachings regarding honoring their elders. These rituals were passed down from father to son. Official family lists were compiled, containing the names of all the sons and wives. Brides who did not produce a son were written out of family lists. When a husband died, the bride was seen as the property of her spouse's family. Ransoms were set by some brides' families to get their daughters back, though never with her children, who remained with her husband's family. According to classical patriarchal social mores, women should be quiet in public and not participate in public affairs. In the 1880s and 1890s, both male and female Chinese reformist intellectuals, concerned with the development of China to a modern country, raised feminist issues and gender equality in public debate; schools for girls were founded, a feminist press emerged, and the Foot Emancipation Society and Tian Zu Hui, promoting the abolition of foot binding. In the late Qing dynasty period, extramarital sex by women and fornication (a label typically used to refer to pre-marital sex) by women were criminalized. Early Reformers, including Liang Qichao, a scholar, journalist, and political reformer in the last years of the Qing dynasty, were one of the first in late imperial China to consider "the woman question". Women increasingly participated in public affairs after the 1911 Revolution. May Fourth Movement discourses contrasted the idea of the "new woman" with that of the "traditional woman". The "new woman" reflected a secular world view, opposition to arranged marriage, and opposition to patriarchy. A woman forced into an arranged marriage by her family, Miss Zhao, committed suicide by cutting her throat while being transported to the house of her would-be husband. Simultaneously, Henrik Ibsen's play ''A Doll's House'' was newly translated and being performed in Shanghai. The example of the play's Nora further fueled radical intellectuals and the discussion of women's roles in China. No nationally unified women's movement organized until China was unified under the Kuomintang Government in Nanjing in 1928; women's suffrage was included in the new Constitution of 1936, although the constitution was not implemented until 1947. Professor Lin Chun writes that "Women's liberation had been highlighted in the communist agenda from the outset, and, in that sense, the Chinese revolution was simultaneously a women's revolution, and Chinese socialism a women's cause." By the 1920s, the Communist movement in China used a labor and peasant organizing strategy that combined workplace advocacy with women's rights advocacy. The Communists would lead union organizing efforts among male workers while simultaneously working in nearby peasant communities on women's rights issues, including literacy for women. Poor peasant women were generally strong supporters of Communist Party programs. During the White Terror that began with the 1927 Shanghai Massacre by the Kuomintang against the Communists, the Kuomintang specifically targeted women perceived as non-traditional. Kuomintang forces presumed that women who had short hair and whom had not been subjected to the practice of foot binding were radicals. Orders issued by the Red Army's soviet governments advanced the freedom to divorce and marry, liberating women from feudal marriages and resulting in women's strong support for the revolution. In the revolutionary base area of Jiangxi, the CCP-led authorities enacted the Marriage Regulations of 1931 and the Marriage Laws of 1941, which were modeled after Soviet Union statutes. These statutes declared marriage as a free association between a woman and a man without the interference of other parties and permitted divorce on mutual agreement. Also during the Civil War, rural women were at the forefront of providing care to the dependents of men who fought in the Red Army, particularly through Women's Associations. The Party urged rural women to reject traditional Chinese assumptions about their role in society. In conjunction with land reform, the movement promoted women's issues such as the elimination of bride prices and reversing the stigma against widows remarrying. Mao's statement that "women hold up half the sky" became a major slogan symbolizing the PRC's support for women's social and political equality with men. Chinese grandmothers increased their roles as caregivers for their grandchildren, facilitating younger women's opportunities for paid work. In a weakening of traditional Chinese patrilineality, grandmothers on the mother's side gained equal status to grandmothers on the father's side allowing them to fill gaps in childcare. Soon after its founding, the PRC passed the Marriage Law of 1950. The law abolished arranged marriages, paying money or goods for a wife, and outlawed polygamy and child marriage. John Engel, a professor of Family Resources at the University of Hawaii, argues that the PRC established the Marriage Law of 1950 to redistribute wealth and achieve a classless society. The law "was intended to cause ... fundamental changes ... aimed at family revolution by destroying all former patterns ... and building up new relationships on the basis of the new law and new ethics." Several decades after the implementation of the 1950 Marriage Law, China still faced serious issues, particularly in population control. From the 1950s onwards, China sought to pursue gender equality by including women in the formal labor force. Increasing collectivization of labor brought more opportunities for women to "leave the home", thereby increasing their economic and personal independence. Mao Zedong contended that if people's communes were run well, "there is a thorough road for women's liberation. The People's communes are carrying out a wage system and a supply system under which wages are paid to each individual, not to the family head. This makes women and young people happy, and it's a way of smashing the patriarchal system, and the ideology of bourgeois right." As women became increasingly needed to work in agriculture and industry, and encouraged by policy to do so, the phenomenon of Iron Women arose. Women did traditionally male work in both fields and factories, including major movements of women into management positions. Women competed for high productivity, and those who distinguished themselves came to be called Iron Women. Slogans such as "There is no difference between men and women in this new age," and "We can do anything, and anything we do, we can do it well," became popular. During the Cultural Revolution, one way China promoted its policy of state feminism was through revolutionary opera. Most of the eight model dramas in this period featured women as their main characters. To fight the tenacity of tradition, Article 3 of the 1980 Marriage Law continued to ban concubinage, polygamy, and bigamy. In urban areas the dowry custom has nearly disappeared. The bride price custom has since transformed into providing gifts for the bride or her family. The law was deliberated via an open revision process which included input from feminist academics and women lawyers. In 2019, a government directive was released banning employers in China from posting "men preferred" or "men only" job advertising, and banning companies from asking women seeking jobs about their childbearing and marriage plans or requiring applicants to take pregnancy tests. ==Women and family==

Marriage and family planning Traditional marriage in pre-revolutionary China was a contract between families rather than between individuals. Arranged marriages were accomplished by a matchmaker, who acted as a link between the two families. The arrangement of a marriage involved the negotiation of a bride price, gifts to be bestowed to the bride's family, and occasionally a dowry of clothing, furniture, or jewelry from the bride's family for use in her new home. It resulted in mass separations of the old from the young, particularly as the young fled into areas not under Japanese occupation or became soldiers. In 2013, Xi Jinping stated that it was necessary for women to be "good wives and mothers" to ensure the "healthy growth of the next generation". During the 2020 National People's Congress, a civil code was adopted which contained a number of significant changes for China's laws on marriage and family. A 30-day "cooling off period" was added to divorce proceedings. Before then, some divorces were finalized within hours of application, leading to concerns about impulsive divorces. In addition the new civil code continues to define marriage as only between a man and a woman. Policies on divorce The Marriage Law of 1950 empowered women to initiate divorce proceedings. According to Elaine Jeffreys, an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and associate professor in China studies, divorce requests were only granted if they were justified by politically proper reasons. These requests were mediated by party-affiliated organizations, rather than accredited legal systems. Professors Ralph Haughwout Folsom and John H. Minan write that the Marriage Law of 1950 allowed for much flexibility in the refusal of divorce when only one party sought it. During the market-based economic reforms, China re-instituted a formal legal system and implemented provisions for divorce on a more individualized basis. As women began divorcing their husbands tensions increased and men resisted, especially in rural areas. Although divorce was now legally recognized, thousands of women lost their lives for attempting to divorce their husbands and some committed suicide when the right to divorce was withheld. Along with this increase in divorce, it became evident that divorced women were often given an unfair share or housing and property. During Xi Jinping's general secretaryship, the resurgent propaganda of traditional family values in Chinese discourse with the aim to increase birth rate created more obstacles more divorce. In 2020, the "民法典" [minfadian; Civil Code] adopted at the Third Session of the Thirteenth National People's Congress on May 28 introduced a 30-day "cool-off period" for divorce. Article 2077 in Book Five Chapter IV states "Where either party is unwilling to divorce, he may withdraw the divorce registration application within thirty days after such an application is received by the marriage registration authority. Within thirty days after expiration of the period provided in the preceding paragraph, both parties shall personally visit the marriage registration authority to apply for issuance of a divorce certificate, and failing to do so will cause the divorce registration application to be deemed as withdrawn." Regarding the worries of the general public, the Legislative Affairs Commission with the NPC Standing Committee claims that extreme situations including domestic violence and drug abuse do not need a "cool-off period" which only concerns with consensual divorce and those cases would be solved by lawsuit. Second wives In traditional China, polygamy was legal and having a concubine was considered a luxury for aristocratic families. Dynastic ambitions were the formal justification for polygamy in that era, as important families sought to increase the number of sons and cement their social and economic ambitions through arranged marriage. Male sexual gratification was also an underlying motivation for polygamy, and concubines were typically younger than wives and chosen for looks rather than social status. During the nationalist period, other forms of polygamy emerged. One form included two wives but not polygamous cohabitation - for example, if a young man had an arranged marriage in his village and then married a second time while at university. When polygamy was legal, women were more tolerant of their husband's extramarital affairs. Today, women who discover that their husband has a "second wife" are less tolerant, and since the New Marriage Law of 1950 can ask for a divorce. The sudden industrialization in China brought two types of people together: young female workers and rich businessmen from cities like Hong Kong. In British-ruled Hong Kong, polygamy was legal until 1971 pursuant to the British colonial practice of not interfering in local customs that Britain viewed as relatively harmless to the public order. A number of rich businessmen are attracted to these economically dependent women and started relationships known as "keeping a second wife" (bao yinai) in Cantonese. There are many villages in the southern part of China where predominantly these "second wives" live. The relationships can range from just being casual paid sexual transactions to long-term relationships. If a relationship does develop more, some of the Chinese women quit their job and become 'live-in lovers' whose main job is to please the working man. Many first wives downplay the father's role to try to address the children's questions about a father that is often absent. Other women fear for their financial situations and protect their rights by putting the house and other major assets in their own names. This situation has created many social and legal issues. Unlike previous generations of arranged marriages, the modern polygamy is more often voluntary. Women in China face serious pressures to be married, by family and friends. There is a derogatory term for women who are not married by the time they are in their late twenties, sheng nu. == Education ==

Female primary and secondary school enrollment suffered more than male enrollment during the Great Chinese Famine (1958–1961), and in 1961 there was a further sudden decrease. As of 2023, Chinese girls receive more schooling on average than boys. A number of studies attribute the improvement in girls' schooling to the effects of the one-child policy. Gender disparity persisted into the 1990s for tertiary institutions. By 2009, however, half of all college students were women. China's rate of increase in women's higher education levels has been substantially greater than countries with similar, and some countries with higher, per capita income levels. Studies for the years 2000-2009 found that Chinese women had higher financial returns on education than men did, with an 11-12% return per year of schooling compared with 6-7% for men. == Health care ==

In traditional Chinese culture, which was a patriarchal society based on Confucian ideology, the healthcare system was tailored for men, and women were not prioritized. Traditional culture emphasized the role of grandmothers in the management of childbirth. Chinese health care has since undergone much reform and has tried to provide men and women with equal health care. The People's Republic of China has enacted various laws to protect the health care rights of women, including the Maternal and Child Care law. This law and numerous others focus on protecting the rights of all women in the People's Republic of China. In the PRC's early years, traditional midwives came to be viewed as dirty and unscientific. With China's program of barefoot doctors, perinatal practitioners were often older women. Their work was effective, with much of the 1950s and 1960s population boom resulting from the decline in infant mortality. Abortion in China is legal and generally accessible. Abortions are widely accepted and available to all women through China's family planning programme, public hospitals, private hospitals, and clinics nationwide. In August 2022, the National Health Commission announced that it would direct measures toward "preventing unintended pregnancy and reducing abortions that are not medically necessary" in an effort to boost population growth. The announced support measures include improvements with regard to insurance and taxation, improvements for education and housing, and encouraging local governments to boost infant care services and family friendly workplaces. == Ethnic and religious minorities ==

After the founding of People's Republic of China in 1949, the communist government authorities called traditional Muslim customs on women "backwards or feudal". Hui Muslim women have internalized the concept of gender equality because they view themselves as not just Muslims but Chinese citizens, so they have the right to exercise rights like initiating divorce. A unique feature of Islam in China is the presence of female-only mosques. Women in China can act as prayer leaders and also become imams. Female-only mosques grant women more power over religious affairs. This is rare by global standards. By comparison, the first women's mosque in the United States did not open until January 2015. Among the Hui people (but not other Muslim ethnic minorities such as the Uyghurs) Quranic schools for girls evolved into woman-only mosques and women acted as imams as early as 1820. These imams are known as nü ahong (女阿訇), i.e. "female akhoond", and they guide female Muslims in worship and prayer. Due to Beijing having tight control over religious practices, Chinese Muslims are isolated from trends of radical Islam which emerged after the 1979 Iranian Revolution. According to Dr Khaled Abou El Fadl from the University of California in Los Angeles, this explains the situation whereby female imams, an ancient tradition long ended elsewhere, continue to exist in China. Among Uyghurs, it was believed that God designed women to endure hardship and work. The word for "helpless one", ʿājiza, was used for women who were not married, while women who were married were called mazlūm in Xinjiang; however, divorce and remarriage was facile for the women. The modern Uyghur dialect in Turfan uses the Arabic word for oppressed, maẓlum, to refer to "married old woman" and pronounce it as mäzim. Women were normally referred to as "oppressed person" (mazlum-kishi). 13 or 12 years old was the age of marriage for women in Khotan, Yarkand, and Kashgar. During the last years of imperial China, Swedish Christian missionaries observed the oppressive conditions for Uyghur Muslim women in Xinjiang during their stay between 1892 and 1938. Uyghur Muslim women were oppressed and often held domestic service positions, while Han Chinese women were free and given a choice of profession. When Uyghur Muslim women married Han Chinese men, the women were hated by their families and people. The Uyghur Muslims viewed single unmarried women as prostitutes and held them in extreme disregard. Divorce and marriage was rampant, each being conducted by Mullahs simultaneously, and some men married hundreds of women and could divorce their wives for no given reason. Wives were forced to stay in the household, to be obedient to their husbands, and were judged according to how many children they could bear. Unmarried women were viewed as whores and many children were born with venereal diseases. The birth of a girl was seen as a terrible calamity by the local Uyghur Muslims and boys were worth more to them. The constant stream of marriage and divorces led to children being mistreated by stepparents. A Swedish missionary said "These girls were surely the first girls in Eastern Turkestan who had had a real youth before getting married. The Muslim woman has no youth. Directly from childhood's carefree playing of games, she enters life's bitter everyday toil… She is but a child and a wife." The marriage of 9 year old Aisha to the Prophet Muhammad was cited by Uyghur Muslims to justify marrying girl children, whom they viewed as mere products. The Muslims also attacked the Swedish Christian mission and Hindus resident in the city. Lobbying by Swedish Christian missionaries led to child marriage for under 15-year-old girls to be banned by the Chinese Governor in Urumqi, although the Uyghur Muslims ignored the law. ==Population control==

One-child policy In 1956, the Chinese government publicly announced its goal to control the exponentially increasing population size. The government planned to use education and publicity as their main modes of increasing awareness. Zhou Enlai launched the first program for smaller families under the guidance of Madame Li Teh-chuan, the Minister of Health at the time. During this time, family planning and contraceptive usage were highly publicized and encouraged. The One-child policy, initiated in 1978 and first applied in 1979, mandated that each married couple may bear only one child except in the case of special circumstances. These conditions included, "the birth of a first child who has developed a non-hereditary disability that will make it difficult to perform productive labour later in life, the fact that both husband and wife are themselves single children, a misdiagnosis of barrenness in the wife combined with a passage of more than five years after the adoption of a child, and a remarrying husband and wife who have between them only one child." and then a three-child policy in 2021. On July 26, 2021, all restrictions were lifted, allowing Chinese couples to have any number of children. Sex-selective abortion , 2008) In China, males are traditionally thought to be of greater value to a family because they take on greater responsibilities, have the capacity to earn higher wages, continue the family line, receive an inheritance, and are able to care for their elderly parents. The preference for sons coupled with the one-child-policy have led to a high rate of sex-selective abortion in China. Therefore, mainland China has a highly masculine sex ratio. Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, asserted in 1990 that over 100 million women were missing globally, with 50 million women missing from China alone. Sen attributed the deficit in the number of women to sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, and inadequate nutrition for girls, all of which have were exacerbated by the One-child policy. In 1986, the National Commission for Family Planning and the Ministry of Health prohibited prenatal sex determination except when diagnosing hereditary diseases. The sex ratio between male and female births in mainland China reached 117:100 in the year 2000, substantially more masculine than the natural baseline, which ranges between 103:100 and 107:100. It had risen from 108:100 in 1981—at the boundary of the natural baseline—to 111:100 in 1990. When family planning policies limited the number of children a family could have, immense social pressures are placed upon women. Women are mostly blamed when giving birth to a girl. Women were subjected to forced abortions if they appear to be having a girl. This situation led to higher female infanticide rates and female deaths in China. Other Asian regions also have higher than average ratios, including Taiwan (110:100), which does not have a family planning policy. Many studies have explored the reason for the gender-based birthrate disparity in China as well as other countries. A study in 1990 attributed the high preponderance of reported male births in mainland China to four main causes: diseases which affect females more severely than males; the result of widespread under-reporting of female births; the illegal practice of sex-selective abortion made possible by the widespread availability of ultrasound; and finally, acts of child abandonment and infanticide. Iron Fist Campaign According to reports by Amnesty International, family planning officials in Puning City, Guangdong Province, launched the Iron Fist Campaign in April 2010. This campaign targeted individuals for sterilization in an attempt to control population growth. The targeted individuals were asked to go to governmental clinics where they would be sterilized. If they refused the procedure, then they put their families at risk for detainment. Local government family-planning committees, previously used to enforce the one-child policy, are deployed for pro-natalist policies such as calling women to check on their menstrual cycle. Some cities have resorted to AI-generated robocalls for women. ==Property ownership==

In current-day China, women enjoy legal equal rights to property, but in practice, these rights can be rescinded. Chinese women have historically held little rights to private property, both by societal customs and by law. In imperial China (before 1911 C.E.), family households held property collectively, rather than as individual members of the household. This property customarily belonged to the family ancestral clan, with legal control belonging to the family head, or the eldest male. Ancestry in imperial China was patrilineal, or passed through the male, and women could not share in the family property. Upon the death of the head of the household, the property was passed to the eldest son. In the absence of an eligible son, a family would often adopt a son to continue the family line and property. However, as Kathryn Bernhardt, a scholar of Chinese history points out, nearly one in three women during the Song dynasty (960–1279 C.E.) would either have no brothers or no sons, leaving them with some agency over family property. In these cases, unmarried daughters would receive their fathers' property in the absence of direct male descendants, or an unmarried widow would choose the family heir. Law during the Republican era interpreted this to mean that widows held complete power over sons in control of the family property. The People's Republic of China (PRC), which assumed control in 1949, also promised gender equality. The PRC's approach was different from the Kuomintang. With regards to land, all land was owned by the state and allocated for people to use, so technically no individual, male or female, owned land. In 1978, the Chinese government set up a household farming system that split agricultural land into small plots for villages to allocate to citizens. The land was distributed to households with legal responsibility in the family head or the eldest male. A woman's access to land was then contingent on her being part of a household. Land leases were technically supposed to transfer with marriage to a woman's marital family, meaning women could potentially lose land upon marriage. In some rural areas, women can lose property rights if they marry outside of the village. For property other than land, new Chinese laws allow for the distinction between personal and communal property. Married couples can simultaneously own some things individually while sharing others with their spouse and family. With regard to divorce, Chinese law generally demands a 50/50 split of property. The Marriage Law of 1980 defined different types of divorce that would split the conjugal property differently, such as instances of adultery or domestic violence. Since most divorce disputes are settled at a local level, the law allows courts to review specific situations and make decisions in the best interest of the children. Typically, such a decision would simultaneously favor the mother, especially in disputes over a house where the children would live. In some divorce disputes "ownership" and "use" over property would be distinguished, giving a mother and child "use" of the family house without awarding the mother full ownership of the house. ==Employment==

If female labor force participation is used as the indicator to measure gender equality, China would be one of the most egalitarian countries in the world: female labor force participation in China increased dramatically after the founding of the People's Republic and almost reached a universal level. Women's participation in the work force had been a policy goal since 1949, and increased greatly during the Great Leap Forward, as the need for total workforce mobilization in that period caused women to take on traditionally male roles. As a result of the increased participation in the labor force, women's contribution to family income increased from 20 percent in the 1950s to 40 percent in the 1990s. Rural work In traditional China, the land was passed down from father to son and in the case of no son, the land was then given to a close male relative. Although in the past women in China were not granted ownership of land, today in rural areas of the People's Republic of China, women possess pivotal roles in farming, which allows them control over the area's central sources of production. Population greatly affects the mode of farming that is utilized, which determines the duties women have. According to tishwayan Thomas Rawski, a professor of Economics and History at the University of Pittsburgh, the Shifting cultivation method is utilized in less populated areas and results in women performing more of the agricultural duties, whereas in more populated areas complicated plough cultivation is used. Men typically performs plough cultivation, but during periods of high demand women pitch in with agricultural duties of planting, harvesting and transporting. Women also have key roles in tea cultivation and double-cropping rice. This is a factor contributing to women's high participation in the urban workplace. These economic policies have also encouraged the export industries. Urban industrial areas are staffed with young migrant women workers who leave their rural homes. Since males are more likely than females to attend college, rural females often migrate to urban employment in hopes of supplementing their families' incomes. In 1984 the reform of the Regulations of Permanent Residence Registration marked an increase in the migration of rural Chinese workers. As the restrictions on residence became more lenient, less penalizing, and permitted people to travel to find employment, more women engaged in migrant labor. Chinese law mandates the coverage of maternity leave and costs of childbirth. These maternity laws have led to employers' reluctance to hire women. E-commerce Official data by Alibaba and a study by academic Lizhi Liu. conclude that more than half of Taobao online store owners are women. Liu attributes the substantial presence of female business owners in Chinese e-commerce to their tendency to have extensive knowledge on product categories that are frequently sold online, the anonymity of online platforms reduction in gender bias, and the existence of flexible hours and remote work. Chinese women nowadays also dominate other domains of professional training such as psychotherapy. Courses and workshops in psychotherapy attract women of different ages who feel the burden of sensitively mastering social relations in and outside their households and at the same time as a channel to realize themselves as individuals not reduced to their familial roles as mothers or wives. Women executives Women are substantially less represented in senior management than men. ==Women in politics==

The Chinese Women's University was inaugurated on 20 July 1939 in Yan'an to develop female cadres; Mao Zedong's inauguration speech emphasized the role of women in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Mao established a quota for the inclusion of women within CCP leadership, although few women have reached the highest positions within the Party. Rural women had a significant impact on China's land reform movement, with the Communist Party making specific efforts to mobilize them for agrarian revolution. Party activists observed that because peasant women were less tied to old power structures, they more readily opposed those identified as class enemies. Beginning in 1943, the Communist Party publicized the efforts of female model workers in agriculture. In 1947, Deng Yingchao emphasized at a land reform policy meeting that "women function as great mobilizers when they speak bitterness." CCP leaders such as Zhao Ziyang have vigorously opposed the participation of women in the political process. Within the CCP, women face a glass ceiling. Since the early 2000s, China's civil service has institutionalized recruitment quotas for women (along with other quotas for non-Communist Party members and ethnic groups), to increase representation in the civil service. Chinese women in politics generally have higher levels of educational attainment than men, with 75% of them having graduate-level degrees compared with 56% of men. Neighborhood committees of the CCP are often led by older women. ==Crimes against women==

Domestic violence In Henan in the 1980s, activist Liang Jun campaigned against domestic violence. In 2004, the All-China Women's Federation compiled survey results to show that thirty percent of families in China experienced domestic violence, with 16 percent of men having beaten their wives. In 2003, the percentage of women domestically abusing men increased, with 10 percent of familial violence involving male victims. The Chinese Marriage Law was amended in 2001 to offer mediation services and compensation to those who were subjected to domestic violence. The 2005 amendment of the Law of Protection of Rights and Interests of Women criminalized domestic violence. The lack of public awareness of the 2005 amendment contributed to the persistence of spousal abuse. that make it easier for domestic violence victims to obtain personal protection orders. The guidelines broadens the definition of domestic violence to include additional conduct such as stalking, harassment, and verbal abuse; it also lowers the threshold for proof. In recent years, with the rise of feminist voices on China's social media platforms, many incidences of violence were able to be reported. One of the incidences that triggered the most outrage and fear was 2022 Tangshan restaurant attack. On June 10, 2022, a group of men brutally assaulted four women at a barbecue restaurant in Lubei District, Tangshan at midnight. A drunken man, after his failed attempt to sexually harass a woman, was irritated and, along with his companions, violently attacked four women at the restaurant. As the report of the incidence and the restaurant's CCTV footage were uploaded online, they were quickly circulated. The government officials, after the attack happened, initially offered self-contradictory accounts on the handling of suspects. Foot binding In 1912, following the fall of the Qing dynasty and the end of imperial rule, the Republican government outlawed foot binding, and popular attitudes toward the practice began to shift by the late nineteenth century. Footbound women became the symbol of a weak Chinese state. Colonialism greatly influenced the shifting attitudes among elite Chinese men surrounding foot binding. As commentators from the West denounced foot binding, "elite Chinese rapidly came to understand foot binding as barbaric, painful, harmful to women's health and childbearing, unscientific..." and more. Although outlawed, it continued to be practiced in many areas. In 1949, the practice of footbinding was successfully banned. According to Dorothy Y. Ko, bound feet can be seen as a footnote of "all that was wrong with traditional China: oppression of women, insularity, despotism, and disregard for human rights". However they can also be seen as female empowerment within a traditional patriarchal society. Trafficking In the 1950s, Mao Zedong, the first chairman of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, launched a campaign to eradicate prostitution throughout China. The campaign made the act of trafficking women severely punishable by law. A major component was the rehabilitation program in which prostitutes and trafficked women were provided "medical treatment, thought reform, job training, and family reintegration". According to United Nations Inter-Agency Project On Human Trafficking (UNIAP), China is both the source and the destination for human trafficking. UNIAP reports shows, with the rise of inter-provincial migration within the country, Chinese women between 16 and 20 years are the main victims of trafficking. The increasing bachelors in China produces a high demand for bride trafficking. Men who purchase the women often do not allow them to leave the house, and take their documentation. Many women become pregnant and have children, and are burdened to provide for their family. In recent years, China passed a number of laws against trafficking including the latest statement "Notice by the General Office of the State Council of Issuing China's Action Plan against Human Abduction and Trafficking (2021-2030)" released in 2021. However, recent trafficking cases such as the widespread Xuzhou chained woman incident have pose doubt on the effective enforcement of anti-trafficking laws in China. On January 28, 2022, a video showing a mentally traumatized woman chained to the wall in Fengxian, Xuzhou by her husband went viral on social platforms. The government initially released a statement claiming the woman was legally married to the husband. As the public's skepticism grew, the statement was overturned by the police investigative team, who verified it was in fact a case of human trafficking. The government later claimed to locate the true identity of the woman, although many were still highly skeptical of the result of official investigation. Wuyi, a volunteer who went to Xuzhou to further investigate by herself, has encountered state obstruction and been imprisoned ever since. Prostitution Shortly after taking power in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party embarked upon a series of campaigns that purportedly eradicated prostitution from mainland China by the early 1960s. Since the loosening of government controls over society in the early 1980s, prostitution in mainland China not only has become more visible, but also can now be found throughout both urban and rural areas. In spite of government efforts, prostitution has now developed to the extent that it comprises an industry involving a large number of people and producing a significant economic output. Prostitution has also become associated with a number of problems, including organized crime, government corruption, and sexually transmitted diseases. Due to China's history of favoring sons over daughters in the family, there has been a disproportionately larger number of marriageable aged men unable to find available women, so some turn to prostitutes instead. ==See also==