Women in China finally making a great leap forward

Yet like many family matters in China, this wedding ritual represents an enormous change - mainly for the bride. Not long ago, less than 20 years, the bride's family did not attend her wedding, let alone speak at the ceremony. Brides were sent out the door by parents to the groom's family, where they were obliged to serve with duty and alacrity.

Flush with cash and opportunities from the country's economic boom, young people and their elders are bucking tradition and redesigning that cornerstone of Chinese society - the family. Part 1 -12/15/04 Changes in courtship Love and money reshape family in China Part 2 - 12/16/04 New family types Family ties take new shapes in a prosperous China Part 3 - 12/17/04 A stronger role for women Women in China finally making a great leap forward
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"Only in the past few years has a bride's family participated in the wedding ceremony [by speaking or toasting]," says Zhao, the host for Purple House, a Beijing wedding planner. "Before, no bride dared to include her parents. Now more care and value is placed on daughters and daughters-in-law."

In growing pockets of educated urban China, wives and daughters are claiming new status and power in the family. Their earning power is rising, there is new talk of mutual care and love, and there are simply fewer women than men, giving women leverage. At the same time, however, louder complaints are heard about a macho male culture in business, and of greater marital infidelity. Some scholars say women are in a pitched battle to ensure their gains over the past 50 years.

Holding up 'half the sky'

Since 1949 China has promised women's equality. "Women hold up half the sky," Mao said. His revolution turned society and family upside down: It abolished family property, and replaced family-jobs patronage with a state bureaucracy. Mao put a final, nationwide end to the centuries-old practice of "foot binding." For a time, communism was a girl's best friend.

China's 1950 marriage laws, for example, made men and women, at least theoretically, equal. They banned bride sales and concubines, and legalized divorce. For centuries men were allowed three or four wives, and women had no rights. It was a feudal world with brutally stark winners and losers. The film "Raise the Red Lantern," with its bitter, subtle infighting among concubines vying for the attentions of a patriarch, captures something of those family dynamics.

"Changes in the Chinese family were imposed quickly and radically," says Harvard University's Martin Whyte. "In most societies these changes would take generations. In Mao's China they were compressed into a time period, really, of two or three years. Changes [involving women] are probably more important than the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. By 1960, China had a 'modern society' in cities."

China is a developed country inside a developing country. Progress for women is found in cosmopolitan centers where law and culture are emphasized. Shanghai has always been a mecca for females. The mid-20th-century novels of Eileen Chang set in Shanghai that illustrate an independent voice for women are now extremely popular among college students.

In the metropolis, the family is undergoing a "permanent revolution." The phrase is actually Mao's. Courtship and choice between young people is more open - made possible by new wealth - new attitudes, and cellphones, and it is giving rise to new family types, the diminishing of patriarchy, and an often more confident and assertive female.

China's patriarchy is a feudal holdover, scholars say, where land equals power. Male children inherited land. In an urban culture, where mobility is valued, and land is not an issue, female talents are more emphasized.

"Daughters are an economic benefit in the city, where mental work is greater than physical work," says Dong Zhiying, a scholar at the China Academy of Social Science (CASS). "Women do better in this area. One thing is sure today - men feel women have more power than before."

Qu Man, the bride with the Western-style wedding, is an example of greater status among urban women. Both she and Yang Jie work in a state accounting office. Yang says he chose Qu. But Qu chose just about everything else: She chose the wedding site. She also brought her parents to the wedding.

And that was not for show. It signals she will not be an old-style daughter-in-law, subservient, powerless, dependent. She will negotiate when to leave her career and have a child. If she is like many brides today, she will have told her husband already that if he expects her to live with his family, he must find a different wife.

"People's minds have changed," says Li Xiaowang, a 28-year-old clothes-shop manager in downtown Beijing. "The older generation has very old ideas. They want the woman to get married and have offspring, that's it. None of my friends thinks like that."

Yet family dynamics remain tremendously complicated. An urban culture of mistresses has been growing in China. Mistresses are so pervasive that in 2000, during a major revamping of marriage laws, a tightly knit coalition of women created a national furor by demanding that the use of concubines be made a crime. (The law did not pass.)

Macho culture also prevalent

Feminists in China complain that women are often freer - freer to be exploited. The female body is on display as never before in a society that used to be publicly modest. A huge, shadowy industry exists of young women, "hostesses," whose job is to please men. Business culture emphasizes macho guys who need to be seen sitting with several ornamental women in order to show power. Husbands have had an upper hand for years, since they have been able to divorce their wives and keep the perks of their jobs, while leaving wives to fend for themselves.

The 1980 law established a divorce process that takes six months; previously, divorce took two years and was frowned on. The new law made divorce acceptable. The law was introduced to help couples forced into arranged loveless marriages to separate. It was a safety-valve for many women with abusive husbands. But mainly it served city men returning from the Cultural Revolution. They had been "sent down" to the countryside by Mao to learn about earthy Chinese peasant wisdom, and while on the farm had picked up peasant wives; the woman in these relationships often was unwelcome in the urban home of the husband's family.

As China became a market economy, the 1980 laws were used by husbands to divorce wives quickly, and make off with earnings. Family laws were in no way keeping pace with marriage laws. A new 2001 marriage law, for example, makes a man's having a concubine one of several explicit grounds for divorce, and improved terms of financial settlements. But wives without means remain at risk. Feminists in China are also starting to argue that while women and men were made equal by the 1950 marriage law, women were not free to be fully female, but were simply made equally soulless "objects ... equal robots," as one puts it.

"As a concept, women's equality in China is quite advanced," says a senior Chinese scholar. "But the practice lags far behind. Laws change not to help women, but because the problems flood out of control."

Urban China's divorce rate is climbing; at various times this has been considered a natural adjustment of marriage conditions that were artificial or intolerable. Educated women, for example, are often less likely to tolerate philandering, crudity, and unregenerate attitudes of Chinese husbands, they point out. Many women have worked hard to secure their jobs, and their identity is less tied to old cultural assumptions of lower self-worth.

In fact, women are bringing greater demonstrable benefits to the family table, points out Li Yinhe of CASS. In 1950 women's earnings accounted for 20 percent of family income. The figure today is 40 percent. Increasingly, as in most of Asia, girls in China are leading their school classes in grades. More and more go to college and take white-collar jobs.

"Men in China have trouble marrying up; they usually want to marry down," says Martin Whyte of Harvard. "But the desirable women are moving up."

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