One woman kills herself every four minutes in China and, according to the World Health Organization, it is the only country in the world where more women commit suicide than men (Allen, 2006). Two of the main reasons cited for this finding are the profound discrepancy in social status as well as the relatively high rate of domestic violence that women in China endure. Surveys conducted by the United Nations Development Fund for Women found that 35% of all women in China had been the victims of domestic violence and that China ranks 81 out of 177 listed countries in the Gender Development Index (2007). As a matter of social policy, domestic violence is primarily regarded in China as a private family affair and the authorities are reluctant, at best, to intervene. Particularly for poor and uneducated women in China, suicide is perceived as the only way to extricate themselves from a miserable existence.
Confucian philosophy and doctrine still very much influence values and beliefs in current day China. According to Confucius, relationships among family members must follow a hierarchy of status according to generation, age, and gender. The elder family members hold a higher position than do younger members and men are absolutely superior to women (Baker, 1979). The enormous social importance of the relative status of each family member by age, gender, and generation is reflected in the Chinese language itself: There are no less than 52 different words in Mandarin used to describe family kinship as opposed to just 17 in English (Huang and Jia, 2008).
Historically in China, only the number of a man’s sons would be used to refer to the size of his family. When a woman married, she was expected to leave her family to live with her husband in his hometown, where the wife was subordinate to the whims of her mother-in-law. In many non-urban regions of China, not much has changed.
It wasn’t until the year 1912, after the revolution of Sun Yat-Sen, that the binding of women’s feet was banned but that practice continued unofficially throughout the countryside well into the 50s, until Chairman Mao eradicated it for good. One scholar estimates that 40 to 50% of Chinese women during the 19th century had their feet bound and, for the upper classes, that figure was as high as 100% (Lim, 2007). Certainly, one can still find women alive in China today whose feet were bound some 60 to 90 years ago.
It is undoubtedly true that many Chinese women today enjoy new personal freedoms that were previously, up until very recently, denied to them. But in mainland China, what is a matter of law does not necessarily equate to what is experienced as a matter of practice in day-to-day life. A country’s four-thousand-year-old culturally-ingrained regard for its women cannot be eradicated overnight no matter how many changes and improvements in law are promulgated by its government.
One of the many latent effects of China’s 1979 single child policy has been the ongoing selective abortion of female fetuses and, at best, the withholding of medical treatment from sick female infants in the countryside. It has been estimated that there are 120 men for every 100 women in China (Fragoso, 2007) and that ratio is even steeper in the more rural regions of China. In the absence of a significant social welfare infrastructure, a son is a parents’ best—if not only—assurance for security in their old age.
