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Village communities seek woman power
Li Xiaoyan is the first woman to chair the Yantouzhai Villagers' Committee in Guzhang County, Central China's Hunan Province. She admitted to feeling butterflies after devouring a book, the first of its kind, that guides rural women in running for village elections. "I wish I had had it before I took to campaigning to run as village head three years ago," says the 32-year-old from the landlocked, poverty-stricken county in the western corner of Hunan.
The "Guidebook on Women's Participation in Villagers' Self-Governance" came off the press in August. Dreamed up by the Ministry of Civil Affairs in 2003, the book, written by a group of experts based on solid studies of rural affairs under the auspices of the ministry, is designed to cultivate rural women's interests in politics and give them the tools to win places in power. After publishing the book, the ministry invited Li and 20 other rural women -- the first rural readers of the guide book and all winners of their community campaigns -- to represent their villages in Beijing at a seminar on rural democracy last month. "It took us a year to complete the book," said Fan Yu, an official at the ministry who masterminded it. "We hope it will serve as a survival guide for women in rural political arenas." In 250 pages the book uses vivid images and colloquial language to offer tips on how to deal with the most common problems these budding rural leaders are likely to face, as women. How should they respond to familial objections, how get on better with their fellow villagers -- how can they draft campaign strategies? "The book comes at the right time as women have obviously become the key to China's rural democracy," says Professor Dong Jiang'ai, at Shanxi University.
The Ministry of Civil Affairs says that since 1998, when the law on village autonomy was formally enacted, the representation of women on villagers' committees has plummeted from 30 to 16 per cent, with only 1 per cent of village chiefs being women. In contrast, however, women can stake a claim to 60 per cent of China's gross agricultural output value as their men migrate to urban areas in a bid for better pay. Many scholars are aware of the imbalance between women's contributions to agricultural production and their involvement in decision-making. But there is research to show that as well as the traditional bias against women in management, many are in any case either not interested in politics or simply do not have the skills. "As women have become the majority of our rural population, their political invisibility, if allowed to last long, will hamper China's rural democracy," says Zhan Chengfu, deputy director of the Department of Construction of Grassroots Government and Community, under the Ministry of Civil Affairs. "So the guidebook is really necessary to warm rural women up." Zhan says the construction of China's rural autonomy system, which features democratic elections, decision-making, management and supervision, is at crossroads. "We used to focus our attention on straightening up election procedure, now it's time to pay attention to the people," he says. To push forward post-election democracy, he says, women must be mobilized. The ministry has also reached out to them with training programmes. Since 2002, it has been co-operating with a variety of domestic and international organizations, including the All-China Women's Federation and the Ford Foundation, from the United States, to run training workshops for rural women. Li Xiaoyan, a capable farmhand, is among the beneficiaries of these training programmes. She says the training has freed her mind and raised her confidence to participate in village affairs. Many local women have followed her lead in reading newspapers or listening to TV news, now more boldly voicing their opinions at villagers' meetings. Some are even taking this into their leisure time, setting up basketball teams. The problems don't stop with learning the theory. When Li started preparing for her first campaign trail in 2001, she had to bear the full fury of her family and village gossips who were stuck in a feudal mindset that says "good women" are submissive housewives and little more. "Why are you humiliating the family?" her husband would growl. "But I was born rebellious and hate to bend to others," she says, and stuck to her guns. She gives a lot of thanks to the guide book. "Its tips are very practical," she says. "Like in seeking support from fellow women villagers, especially from the grassroots women's federation, or striving to become a member of the Communist Party of China to become more visible and reputable." Assistant researcher Tong Zhihui of the NGO Research Institute of Tsinghua University echoes Li's remarks. He explains that the die-hard gender preference in favour of boys in many rural communities has reduced women to subordinate positions. This subordination gets worse when they are married off, often to another community, where they are little known beyond their husbands' homes. Estrangement like this may compromise votes in elections, he says. The book also explains how villagers can use proper channels when facing problems and avoid taking the law into their own hands. A chemical plant near the village of Tuonan in North China's Hebei Province was illegally spilling poisonous waste onto local farmers' orchards, jeopardizing their crops. Negotiations to find a solution failed, with some farmers resorting to force to stop the pollution of their farmland. Li Dongju, deputy secretary of the Party Branch of Tuonan, nipped the force in the bud and encouraged the farmers to instead file a complaint at the county government and local legislature, where an investigation was started and the plant was eventually demolished. "It's essential that potential rural leaders, men or women, learn how to handle disputes within the framework of the law," she says. The book's first print run produced 6,000 copies, far short of the demand from the country's 660,000 village committees, says Fan Yu. "So we'd distribute the book among the promising rural women leaders first and see the impact grow through them," he says. Although the dissatisfactory representation of women in decision-making is associated with the deep-rooted patriarchal culture in many rural communities, which puts men at the centre of authority, Zhan Chengfu also finds loopholes in the system. For one thing, he says, while China's Constitution provides gender equality in all aspects, the 1998 Organic Law of the Villagers' Committee only vaguely stipulates that a proportion of women members should be guaranteed." "Without clear-cut figures and punitive articles for neglect, such a stipulation has no teeth," says Dong Jiang'ai. Dong was authorized by the Ministry of Civil Affairs last year to head an expert group in drafting an amendment to the 1998 law. At the August seminar in Beijing, Dong expressed the opinions of rural women participants like Li Xiaoyan and Li Dongju about the draft, which proposed that there should be a minimum one-third quota of women on the committees. The proposal was met with positive responses from the participants, although a few had some reservations. Lang Youxing, associate professor of Zhejiang University, doubts if there are enough qualified women in villages to fill the quota, and fears a rigid figure might prolong the election process. But Li Xiaoyan is confident. "As long as women are given the opportunity, their qualification is out of the question," she says. "The issue of women's representation in village autonomy is not their qualification but their access to power," Dong says. Hunan, Henan, Gansu provinces and the Tibet Autonomous Region have already amended their local decrees to guarantee there is at least one woman member on their village committees. In Tanggu District, Tianjin, where a quota system was introduced to village elections in June on a trial basis, women's representation has increased from less than 5 per cent in previous years to 28.6 per cent. "We mean to use a rigid quota to secure women's empowerment," says Zhan, but gave no timetable as to when the draft amendment would be submitted to China's legislature. "We are not dealing with a gender issue, as many assume," he says. "We are actually introducing a new perspective to push forward rural democracy. In the future, if necessary, we may take up more issues such as wealth gaps and ethnicity." Sarah Cook, programme officer of the Ford Foundation, hails the quota system as a very crucial first step in guaranteeing Chinese women's access to rural autonomy, but warns that this minimum "should not become a maximum and stay there forever." "We must guard against that," Zhan says. |
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