A man's world in China - Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia

When the official China Daily reported that a scandal like Harvey Weinstein's sexual escapades could not happen in China, many raised their eyebrows.  Author Zhang Lijia, of Lotus: A Novel on prostitution in China, sets the record straight for AFP.

AFP:

The litany of alleged crimes in corruption cases can sometimes be cover for factional score-settling. But official data shows that men in power hand ample ammunition to their critics. 

A 2013 study from Renmin University in Beijing found that 95 percent of corrupt officials had extramarital affairs, and at least 60 percent had kept a mistress, which typically involves providing an apartment and an allowance. 

"It's definitely still prevalent," said Beijing-based writer Zhang Lijia, who conducted research on China's sex industry for her novel, "Lotus". "The traditional practice of men showing their social standing with numerous concubines has returned in the form of mistress culture."

More in AFP.

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How change damaged the position of Chinese women - Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia

China's shift from a planned to a market has lifted millions out of poverty, but for many women the deal has been a bad one, says Beijing-based journalist Zhang Lijia, author of Lotus: A Novel on prostitution in China at Sea Globe.

Sea Globe:

Zhang pointed to figures released by the UN in 2015 that reveal a growing income gap between men and women in post-Mao China. The report found that between 1990 and 2010, average urban income for women as a percentage of that of men had dropped from 77.5% to 67.3%. For women outside the major cities, the figure was as low as 56%. 

“When China shifted from the planned economy to the market economy, women shouldered too much of the burden and cost,” Zhang said. “When the state-owned enterprises laid off workers, women were always the first to be let off. And it is much harder for middle-aged women to find re-employment. 

Zhang also pointed to a resurgence in pre-Maoist values that ascribed strict limits to the role – and value – of women in Chinese society. 

“I think some of the old attitudes towards women, which place women as inferior to men, resurfaced,” she said. “At workplaces, Mao-style gender equality has been replaced by open sexism… Sometimes they refuse to hire women of a child-bearing age or sack them after they become pregnant.”

More at Sea Globe.

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Women: key spenders on China's Single's Day: Shaun Rein

China single's day (28 August) triggered off a range of commercial activities. Business analyst Shaun Rein looks on AFP at the industries focusing on this attractive target group. Women play a key role in consumer spending, he says.

AFP:

A range of businesses are targeting singles, including travel, dining, online video games, online video streaming, sports apparels and cosmetics, according to Shaun Rein, founder of China Market Research Group and author of the book The War for China's Wallet... 

The high-earning urban female population is a major economic player. 

Online flower retailer Reflower says almost 80 per cent of weekly orders come from female customers, with more than half buying flowers to "comfort themselves". 

"Females who are single especially spend most of their paycheck. Males tend to save more because they want to buy a house later on," Rein told AFP. 

"It's really being empowered by women, because they are the most optimistic consumers, they tend to have higher paying jobs than men, and they tend to spend more."... 

"In urban areas especially, parents are saying to their girls 'don't settle'. Only marry if you want to marry, only have kids if you want to have kids," Rein said, adding that the phenomenon is signalling social progress. 

"I view that as showing female empowerment... I think it's a very healthy shift, showing more male-female gender equality than ever before."

More at AFP.

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Women in China's market economy - Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia at the BBC

The Times Literary Supplement reports on an evening with author Zhang Lijia of Lotus: A Novel on prostitution in China recently in London. One of the subjects: how did Chinese women fare under the market economy, introduce by Deng Xiaoping. About the government as a big boys' club.

TLS:

Zhang commented that since the Cultural Revolution, changes may have enabled corporate growth, but haven’t done much for social welfare or social equality: “Deng Xiaoping’s reforms afforded some opportunities for educated, urban women. But the market economy has undermined gender equality. The government retreated from its role and let the market take over, but the market doesn’t always treat women kindly. Women are bearing the brunt of the shift from the planned economy to the free-market economy: women have to attain higher grades to be admitted to universities, women are the ones who are laid off first, women over forty-five are sacked from companies, companies can stipulate that they want only young and pretty women”. 

Zhang’s research showed that prostitutes are not just vulnerable to violent men, but also to police harassment and abuse. Although prostitution is considered a social evil,  Zhang added, “it’s placed under administrative law, not criminal law, so it’s dealt with through fines and sanctions. The police interpret the laws themselves. They beat up the women and extract ‘confessions’, put them in detention with no legal representation. They have leeway for corruption, abuse and a violation of the women’s rights”. Meanwhile, she argued, measures to curb prostitution “don’t tackle fundamental social problems. The root of the problem is the growing gender gap and a thin social safety net”. 

Will gender equality improve in this fascinating and rapidly transforming country? When it comes to change driven from the top down, Lijia Zhang isn’t hopeful: “Female political participation is low – women make up less than a quarter of the National People’s Congress and well under a fifth of the Standing Committee. And the top level of government is just one big boys’ club”.

More in the TLS.

Zhang Lijia is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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One-child policy helped female billionaires - Rupert Hoogewerf

Add caption

China is leading the ranks of female billionaires. Rupert Hoogewerf, chief researcher of the Hurun China Rich List gives a few reasons why women are doing better on his list. One of them is the one-child policy, he tells Caixin.

Caixin:

Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun Report, said one reason so many women strike it rich on the Chinese mainland is the traditional family structure. "The one-child policy coupled with traditional child care, whereby grandparents often play a much larger role in bringing up children than in developed countries," has given women more space to pursue their ambitions, he said... 

According to Hoogewerf, one challenge in calculating the wealth of female billionaires is the difficulty in distinguishing between the wealth that belongs to a woman and her husband, especially in the case of women who had co-founded a business with a husband. 

An example of this is Zhou Hongwen, 46, who co-founded Tomorrow Group with Xiao Jianhua. The conglomerate has investments in real estate, insurance, banking, coal, cement and rare earth minerals, and the couple is estimated to be worth $5.5 billion. Although Zhou was instrumental in the company’s early decision to invest in the Inner Mongolia region, its stock exchange filings do not differentiate who owns what, making it difficult to split the couple’s wealth, Hoogewerf said. And the recent disappearance of Xiao from the couple’s apartment in Hong Kong, presumably to help Chinese authorities with an ongoing corruption inquiry, has put Zhou in the spotlight and may affect her fortunes.

Much more in Caixin.

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Women get more done, but equality is far away - Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia

Feminism is on the rise in China, and much has changed for the better, tells author and journalist Zhang Lijia of the upcoming novel Lotus: A Novel, in TakePart.Com, in an issue on feminism in China. But too many things have not yet changed, or change too slowly.

Zhang Lijia:

I felt unequal [growing up]. My grandma brought us up, and I loved her to bits, but she was of the older generation of women who very much favored boys. We had very little meat to eat, and she would give my younger brother more meat. So since I was little, [my sister and I] knew we had to excel to go far in life. 

The factory was very much a boys’ club. If you were a woman, they often gave you simple jobs, and the higher you go, there are fewer women. I did quite well on my exam, so I got a good job. I could have gotten an even better job, but there was such a strong perception that women are not very good with technical stuff that they didn’t give us a chance to try. 

There was a lot of pressure [to get married]. If male colleagues visited, [my grandma] would get very curious and suss them out as husband potential. She had pressured my mother to get married, and my mother regretted it; my parents’ marriage was not particularly happy. 

I got divorced 10 years ago, and my mother still hasn’t told her neighbors. For her, [divorce] is a big disgrace to the family. A few years ago I went to Brazil on a book tour and had a very successful trip. I told my mother, and she said, “If only you had a husband.” There is very little I can’t cope with without a husband. I think it makes me strong in many ways. I very much injected the idea of gender equality into my children’s upbringing. Both are strong, independent women, and both are feminists.

More in TakePart.com

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Zhou Qunfei, China´s ambitious richest woman - Rupert Hoogewerf

Rupert Hoogewerf

Zhou Qunfei, owner of Lens Technology, now China´s richest woman, is yet another rags-to-richest story from China. Ambition and success have been on her path, tells Hurun China´s rich list founder Rupert Hoogewerf to the Australian Financial Review. Ambition and taking risk is what most rich women have in common, he says.

The Financial Review:

Rupert Hoogewerf, founder of Hurun, who has spent most of the past 18 years in China researching the country's wealthy, says driven, ambitious risk-takers such as Zhou, regardless of their gender, thrived as China opened up its economy to the world in the 1980s and 1990s, and all of a sudden people were allowed and even encouraged to make money. 

"Women here have a lot of ambition," says the 45-year-old, who studied Chinese language and history in Britain before moving to Shanghai and setting up Hurun, which has become the definitive source of fortune rankings in the country. 

"This group of women at the top is representative of a much larger base of women entrepreneurs underneath, and that's where the real story is. I don't feel that same sense of entrepreneurship among my female friends in Britain or even, in some cases, in the US. There is this sense that there is an opportunity to be seized here. Let's just go for it."... 

"It turned out that [she is] probably the most successful self-made woman in the world," Hoogewerf  says. "This is somebody that nobody in the world knew about this time last year. It's a phenomenal story."

More in the Australian Financial Review.

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How China´s women´s movement is getting together - Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia

Traditionally, between the active women in China, there was not much coherence. But since this Spring, partly caused by the government crackdown on feminists, things are changing, Beijing-based author Zhang Lijia tells the BBC.

The BBC:

The detentions and subsequent release of the Feminist Five have also resulted in positive changes for the women's movement in China. 

According to Beijing based writer and commentator Zhang Lijia, the movement has become more cohesive since the Spring. 

"Before there were different pockets of women activists. For example, those working on LGBT issues, or promoting gender equality. 

There were some connections among the associations, of course, but that hadn't worked together. Now they have a common enemy in some sense," she explains. 

"One thing I know for certain is that those detentions may have deterred some people, but more likely that most people just become more careful and more aware of the dangers they are facing," Ms Zhang continues.

More at the BBC.

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Women execs in China, UK and US beat inequality - Rupert Hoogewerf

Rupert Hoogewerf

The number of leading women executives rises, says Rupert Hoogewerf, founder of the China Rich list, especially in China, the UK and the US, where inequality between men and women has been dropping, he tells in the Shanghai Daily.

The Shanghai Daily:

A number of businesswomen on the list excel in areas where men have held sway. 

When it comes to property development, there is Zhang Xin, co-founder and CEO of Soho China, and Sonia Cheng, CEO fo Hong Kong's Rosewood Hotel Group and executive director of New World Development. In venture capital, there is Xu Xin, founder of Capital Today. 

Women also maintain their edge in the food industry. Foshan Haitian Flavouring & Food, China's equivalent of Heinz, is headed by Cheng Xue, a newcomer on the list. 

"China, the US and the UK are leading the world when it comes to gender equality in business," said Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun Report, which specializes in wealth rankings. 

A Hurun Research Institute study last year found that 19 Chinese women were members of the world's 45-strong self-made female dollar billionaire club, with three of them holding the top three spots.

More in the Shanghai Daily.

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The improving position of women - Zhang Lijia

+Lijia Zhang 

Three generations of Chinese women, her grandmother, mother and herself used author Zhang Lijia to illustrate the changing position of women in China. "We benefited from the revolution led by Mao," she said in a speech, published at her weblog. 

Zhang Lijia:

My grandmother was a prostitute-turned concubine, my mother a frustrated factory worker and myself a rocket factory girl turned-international writer. Today I am going to tell you the stories of these three women in my family, to illustrate the changing role of women in Chinese society. I am always hugely interested in women’s issues and have written many stories on the subject because I believe women’s position and the attitude towards them, tell you a lot about a society. 

As in many parts of the world, Chinese women have not reached the same status as men, even though Chairman Mao famously declared that “Chinese women can hold up half of the sky.” I think the statement is as elusive as the sky itself. But I have to point out that the Chinese Communist Party has done a great deal for women, probably more than what has been acknowledged. I believe all three women in my family have, to a greater or lesser degree, benefited from the revolution led by Mao.... 

The income gap between men and women has been widening in the past three decades. Prostitution has made a spectacular return and the rich and powerful men once again boast to have ernai – the modern version of concubines. Women workers are always among the first to be laid off in the ailing state-owned enterprises. And female graduates have a much harder time in finding employment. 

The government has retreated some of its responsibilities to the market. Yet the market doesn’t always treat women kindly. 

China lags behind the world in terms of female political participation, especially in the grassroots and top governmental level. These days, the head of the village is brought about through direct election. Currently about 2% of the village heads are women. Some still hold the belief that decent women shouldn’t take an interest in public affairs and women are bad decision makers. We have a saying: women have long hair but short wisdom. 

Now look at the senior government level. Women account for about 22% of people’s representatives in National People’s Congress, China’s parliament; only 15% in the standing committee. In the next level, there are only two women in the politburo and no women in the standing committee. 

Unlike in the political field, Chinese women are faring better in the business. Half of the world’s self-made richest women come from the mainland China. Business is the area where women can fully explore their potentials. 

Despite all the problems, I feel hopeful about women’s future in China, because Chinese women have started to take the matter into their own hands and are putting up a fight. They’ve set up NGOs, dealing with the issue of domestic violence, providing legal aid to women and helping sex workers. In recent years, I’ve noticed increased activism. Women have bravely gone to the street, to protest against domestic violence, against discrimination in employment and against lack of female toilets. Early this year, I marched for a week in central China with a young feminist friend. She walked all the way from Beijing to Guangzhou, in protest against child sex abuse. 

There’s still a long way to go before women can truly hold up half of the sky. The good thing is that we are not sitting here, waiting for the miracle to happen. We are taking action.

More at Zhang Lijia´s weblog.

Zhang Lijia is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers´ request form.

Are you interested in more great female speakers at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out our recent list. 

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China has most female billionaires, but it's not enough - Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia

Most seven out of ten self-made female billionaires are Chinese, says the Hurun rich list, and author Zhang Lijia explains in The Guardian why despite that achievement women entrepreneurs still have a long march to go.

Zhang Lijia:

Yet despite the impressive achievements, Chinese female entrepreneurs lag behind their male counterparts. Only 11% of the richest people in China are women; with women representing only about 20% of all entrepreneurs. 

It's true that in 1949, when Mao's Chinese Communists, took power, women were granted equal rights and opportunities. Yet some old habits die hard and the business world remains male-centred. 

Yet for women, the most pressing problems include participation in politics, which seriously lags behind other countries. Only 21.4% of the representatives in our parliament, the National People's Congress, are women, which is short of the 30% of female political participation set in 1995 by the UN, and a woman's promotion in the government too often still depends on her male bosses – who tend to give women subservient roles. 

So sadly, there's still a long march before women can truly hold up half of the sky.

More in The Guardian 

Zhang Lijia is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

 Zhang Lijia on China's moral crisis at Storify
.

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Prostitution in China - Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia

Author Zhang Lijia reviews the novel Paying for It by Canadian comic artist Chester Brown about prostitution on her weblog, but gets nicely sidetracked into her own upcoming novel on prostitution in China.

Zhang Lijia

Who are the prostitutes? The majority of them are country girls from the poor hinterland, unskilled, poorly educated and ill-prepared for life in the city. Many of them work in karaoke bars, sing and dance halls, hair saloons and massage parlors. 

My beloved grandma worked as a prostitute for years after she became an orphan and then she was sold into prostitution. I’ve become fascinated by the subject ever since my mother disclosed this secret to me, shortly before grandma’s death. 

I am working on this novel about prostitution and also considering a non-fiction on the subject. For me, prostitution serves as an interesting window to see China and the tensions brought by the reforms. It deals with gender issues, economic issues (it contributes a lot to the GDP), the changing values and the sexual norms and of course corruption. 

Pan Suiming, China’s top sexologist, contends that China has a specific type of prostitution that entails a bargain between those who use their power and authority in government to obtain sex and those who use sex to obtain privileges. All exposed corrupt officials have mistress, often more than one. 

... I think in a civilized and democratic country like Canada, the clients are more likely respect the working girls. In China, men often think they can do whatever they like to the girls, for example, refusing to use a condom. The prostitutes are often the victim of robbery and violence. There are quite a few cases of them being murdered. 

Like Brown, I agree that women should have that choice. It’s her body. She should be allowed to do whatever she likes with it. I only hope that there should be more NGOs that can offer the working girls some support. I am very pleased to see that slowly such NGO’s are emerging. I know one former prostitute-turned lady (as robust as her chest) who runs such an organization in Tianjin, offering prostitutes free condoms, knowledge how to protect themselves and how to save money but she doesn’t try to pursue them to quit the profession.

More on Zhang Lijia's weblog.

Zhang Lijia interviewing prostitute

  

Zhang Lijia is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Women holding up half of the sky? - Zhang Lijia

Zhang Lijia

Author Zhang Lijia attended a meeting on the position of women in China at the US embassy in Beijing. At her weblog, she reports about her contribution. Are they holding up half of the sky, as Chairman Mao said?

Zhang Lijia

Chairman Mao famously said that “Women can hold up half of the sky”. That statement may be as illusive as the sky itself but the Chinese Communists have indeed done a great deal for Chinese women, granting them with the equal rights, equal pay and so on. The women in the workforce rose from 7% in 1949 to today’s 70%. One area China hasn’t fared so well is in the participation of women in politics. 

Women only account for 21.4% of deputies in National People’s Congress, China’s parliament, falling short of 30%, a target set by the UN’s Forth Conference on Women held in Beijing back in 1995. The percentage of female representation rose steadily in the early years of PRC. In recent years, the figure has gone down slightly. 

It seems the higher the political ladder, the fewer the percentage of female presence. There are only 15% women in the standing committee of NPC, and there are only one woman (Wu Yi) in the 25-seat politburo and no women at all in the more powerful politburo’s standing committee. A decree introduced in 2007 to guarantee a minimal 22% of female representatives has not made any impact, it seems.

More at Zhang Lijia's weblog.

More links to Zhang Lijia at Storify on China's moral crisis.

Zhang Lijia is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers' request form.

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Breasts: big business in China - Bill Dodson

Image via WikipediaPlastic surgery on women is booming, together with the wealth of the Chinese consumers. On his weblog China watcher Bill Dodson reports about this wife's visit to a clinic, with queues outside the building, together with their parents, paying for the operation.

“They’re paying for their daughters to have surgery on their faces?”

“And breasts,” she added.

“And breasts.” I could feel a rush of testosterone weaken my knees at the prospect. (Men are such simple animals).

“The parents believe if their daughters are more beautiful they can catch a boyfriend with more money.” Of course, “boyfriend” in China nearly always means “fiancee”. Doesn’t take more than a couple dates to seal the deal. I imagine, as well, a pretty face and shapely figure don’t hurt job prospects, either; especially if one looks at job qualifications for airline attendants, bullet train attendants and secretaries.

The Straits Times reported in January this year about the Chinese cosmetic surgery industry, “About 3 million people had plastic surgery on the mainland in 2010 in an industry worth an annual 15 billion yuan (S$2.9 billion), statistics from the MOH [Ministry of Health] showed. There were also 20,000 lawsuits against clinics in China in 2010 for botched jobs and “lopsided” results.

My wife figures that about 90% of young girls in Suzhou have had plastic surgery of one sort or another. I think her estimate is rather high, though I am amazed at the rapid growth rate in pretty girls with busts locally – where there had been very few of both just a few years ago.

Or maybe, it’s just that Chinese women are drinking more milk and wearing more makeup.

Bill Dodson

More on his weblog

Bill Dodson is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch.

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How to treat women, China's super spenders? - Shaun Rein

Women in China have become a major force among the country's super spenders, writes Shaun Rein in CNBC. When you want to tap into China's booming market, that is a group you have to understand.

Women have become a major driving force behind China's economic and political growth - yet they remain little understood by western brand managers as an influence on household budgets. Not only are they exerting influence on decision-making in their own homes; they're also making purchase decisions for their parents and pushing for greater legal protection for women in the workplace.

Many Americans harbor images of Chinese women shaped by movies like The Last Emperor or the Joy Luck Club, where they've tended to be portrayed as concubines with bound feet and treated like chattel by sex-crazed men. Reality thankfully is different.

One of the Chinese government’s great accomplishments has been promoting gender equality.  In the 1950s women accounted for only 20 percent of household income. That rose to 35 percent during the 1990s and has now reached parity. There are now more girls than boys getting a university education. Forbes reported last year half of the world’s 14 self-made billionaire women are Chinese...

Selling to Chinese women is critical for brands trying to offset slowing growth in developed markets. To sell to them, you need to develop their right marketing and sales channel that builds trust with them. As incomes rise, the trend is towards buying more premium, safe products.

More in CNBC.

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. When you need him at your meeting or conference, do get in touch.

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Chinese women, the new spending force

Changing families values

Chinese women are becoming a new force in domestic consumption as they command half of the household budget, writes Newsweek, who tapped into the brains of Tom Doctoroff, Shaun Rein and Paul French, all speakers for the China Speakers Bureau.
Shaun Rein on the figures:

For Western companies, the rise of the female consumer in China is a welcome change. For years, multinationals ignored Chinese women because their contribution to household income was so small—a fact “that’s changed dramatically,” says Shaun Rein, managing director of the China Market Research Group. In the 1950s women contributed just 20 percent of household income. That rose to about 40 percent in the 1990s and then reached 50 percent last year, according to Rein....
Rein’s firm recently found that women younger than 35 are the most optimistic segment in China, with a whopping 80 percent of the 3,500 women surveyed saying they’ll spend more in the second half of 2010 than they did in the first half. With trends like these, Chinese women may bring new meaning to the term “the power of the purse.”

But those women might have other ambitions than the women in the US or Europe today, says Paul French:

At the same time, advertisers are finding that Chinese women crave security, and that portraying women in advertising as fully independent may not work. Paul French, founder of Shanghai market research firm Access Asia, says women want job success, a husband, and 1.0 children with a villa in the suburbs, so advertisements are “similar to cupcake ads in America in 1953,” he says. “Let’s create the perfect family.”

And warns Tom Doctoroff:

“Chinese women are not indulgent consumers,” says Tom Doctoroff, greater China CEO at the advertising agency JWT.

More in Newsweek.
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Tom Doctoroff, Shaun Rein and Paul French all belong to the Chinese Speakers Bureau. Do you need one of them - or all together - at your meeting or conference, do get in touch.

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Your girl's favorite

Chery QQ

Where are the days that Chinese girls were happy with a fake Gucci bag and a pair of shoes? China Car Times comes this weekend with the top-10 girl's cars and fortunately the number one is small and affordable, the Chery QQ:

What else could be Chinese womens ultimate favorite car ever other than a homegrown domestic car that costs peanuts to buy and pennies to run? Its small, its mega cheap, its funky, its everything a chic urban chick needs to get from A to B to C to D to E to F to G, and back to A again to buy the first thing she saw in the best possible way. China Car Times has several friends who have QQ’s, both male and female, and they regard it as the Chinese ‘Peoples Car‘ - a car that anyone can afford regardless of social standing. The QQ (now demoted to mere QQ3 after its ugly bigger sister, the QQ6 appeared) is still selling well despite the QQ6 showing up on the block. The QQ will definitely go down in history as a memorial to Chinas industrial development.

But on a scary 9th place we also see the Audu A4, worth five Chery QQ. "Size must matter, after all," remarks a snarky China Car Times.

My favorite girl is driving an Audi A4, but that is fortunately paid for by her company. That makes deciding easier.

The article has no trace of a source and even does no try to explain how the listing has been done, so the scientific value - unlike that of other listings - might be low.