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CRACY BUILDING
OCIETY/
CHINA
/
:
/
PHOTOCOPY
PRESERVATION
PAGE
7
1ST STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright 1998 The Washington Post
The Washington Post
June 14, 1998, Sunday, Final Edition
NAME: WANG ZHENYAO
SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A01
LENGTH: 3278 words
HEADLINE: A Quiet Bureaucrat, Promoting The Vote One Village at a Time
SERIES: CHINA: The Next Generation; Pg. 1/5
BYLINE: Steven Mufson, Washington Post Foreign Service
DATELINE: BEIJING
BODY:
In July 1989, about a month after Chinese troops killed hundreds of civilians
in a crackdown on student-led protests in Tiananmen Square, a little-known
official named Wang Zhenyao from China's Ministry of Civil Affairs traveled to a
village in the northeastern province of Liaoning to oversee a democratic
election.
Wang traveled with one of the vice ministers, who nervously wondered aloud
whether it wasn't an inopportune time to be promoting grass-roots democracy.
"The word democracy had become unmentionable," Wang recalls.
Not to worry, Wang reassured the vice minister. If the local officials were
supportive, there would be no problem, he said. The balloting went off without
any serious hitches.
Nearly a decade later, genuine elections have become commonplace in roughly
half of China's 928,000 villages, thanks in large part to the self-effacing
Wang, who has crisscrossed China's vast countryside training local officials in
the most elementary principles of democracy and democratic procedures.
That may seem like an uncommon achievement for a bureaucrat in what is still
a Communist state. But Wang is just part of a remarkable new elite in and
outside China's government that is beginning to transform the country at the
turn of a new century.
They are the most talented portion of the Cultural Revolution generation, a
group comparable to the baby boomers of the West that for the most part lost its
way amid the political and economic upheaval that racked China from 1966 through
1976. The few who, like Wang, managed to claw their way back into universities
and get their careers back on track are self-starters who learned hard lessons
about their society and its political system.
Now, they're hitting the peaks of their careers, carrying with them the
indelible marks of that earlier time. Though less well-known internationally
than the country's senior leaders, these people in their late thirties and
forties are reshaping China's one-party politics, its booming businesses and
PAGE
8
The Washington Post, June 14, 1998
its culture. Many of them believe that in the next century, they are likely to
make China a more stable country with greater democracy, a more open and
capitalist economy, and far greater personal freedom.
In the case of the village democracy program that Wang has championed, the
changes are in some ways subtle so far. The experiment has been confined to
communities averaging about 1,000 residents, and political parties other than
the Communists are not allowed. In many places vote-buying and ballot-rigging
are problems. Still, any resident may be a candidate for the freely elected
village council, which has the power to levy taxes and manages local services
and schools.
Wang estimates that he has visited about 1,000 villages, from Gansu province,
the gateway to China's far west, to Shaoshan in Hunan province, where villagers
gave him a small copper statue of their famous native son, the late Chinese
Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong, who ruled China like a latter-day emperor.
The statue stands on his bookshelves at home, near an encyclopedic series on
Chinese history and a Chinese translation of the 19th-century classic by Alexis
de Tocqueville, "Democracy in America."
In every place he has visited, Wang has approached local officials with a
disarming, "aw shucks" air about him, prodding them to adopt more open primaries
and procedures to ensure voter privacy. At the same time, he has deftly worked
China's bureaucracy, tapped into different personal networks, and at times
called on old friends in provincial governments or in the national media to
pressure recalcitrant local officials.
Building democracy, Wang said, "is like rolling snowballs. At first you have
just a little bit. Then more and more."
In early 1995, the weather in Jilin province was certainly cold enough for
snowballs. Wang trekked there to observe elections in Lishu, a county Wang was
cultivating as a model of rural democracy. Though it seemed as though the cold
would lower voter turnout, Wang had learned that during good weather peasants
are too busy in the fields to vote.
In Dongbaishan, population 1,300, people braved subfreezing temperatures to
listen to candidates in a decrepit schoolroom with faded pictures of Albert
Einstein, Madame Curie and other scientists staring down from the walls. Smoke
seeped from a coal stove and mixed with cigarette smoke billowing from peasants.
Soon it was barely possible to see across the crowded room.
The three candidates delivered campaign speeches. One spoke with a folksy,
unprepossessing style, and one sounded as though he was giving a Mao-era
harangue. All obliquely criticized the financial expertise of the outgoing
village party chief, who had frittered away $ 1,200 on an ill-conceived
pig-raising venture. It was a prodigious sum in a poor area where per capita
income averages only $ 120 a year. The incumbent party chief, the local leader
for 20 years, dropped out after a disappointing showing in the primary.
"My thinking can't keep up with the current thinking, he said.
"We need to build a democratic culture,' said Wang. "Our tradition is that
you don't speak out loud, you wait some years, have a revolution and overthrow
the government. We're saying that in three years you can throw out the
PAGE
9
The Washington Post, June 14, 1998
government."
It is one of the ironies of communist China that a government that proclaimed
the wisdom of peasants during the Cultural Revolution, which took refuge among
the peasants during the civil war with the Nationalists, in fact places little
faith in peasants and frequently cites the rural dwellers' lack of education as
a reason that Western style democracy can't be introduced here. Chinese leaders
fear that open elections would lead to irresponsible populism or, worse yet,
chaos.
Wang, however, has never doubted the common sense of people from the
countryside. He's one of them. During his life, chaos has come from above.
Born in 1954 in a village in Henan province, Wang's first political memory is
hunger. Mao's economic program, the Great Leap Forward initiated in 1958, had
failed spectacularly. Though Mao wouldn't admit that the economy was collapsing,
in villages like the one where Wang grew up it was no secret. Fuel and cooking
oil were in short supply. The cooking pots had been melted down to meet Mao's
unrealistic steel production targets.
To survive, Wang ate raw tree bark. "We ate it raw, right off the tree,' he
said. "For my generation, the first deep impression is hunger. We were very,
very hungry."
His area barely had time to recover from the Great Leap Forward when the
Cultural Revolution began. In November 1966, at age 12, Wang spent two weeks in
distant Beijing with his classmates to catch a glimpse of the revered Mao in
Tiananmen Square. When Mao appeared in the square, he was greeted by Wang and
half a million other screaming youths waving their little red books of Mao's
quotations and chanting "Long live Chairman Mao."
"My generation really believed we were red, Wang recalls. "We believed in
Chairman Mao and that we should devote ourselves to Chairman Mao."
Wang went back to his village. Each Sunday he would walk 15 miles to school,
stay there for the week, and walk back on Saturdays. Soon classes stopped, and
the students planted crops instead. He was essentially self-educated, having
borrowed the few books permitted at the time, mostly classic Chinese novels or
books about Marxism or Maoism.
In 1972, Wang joined the army. He stood guard in four-hour shifts at an
airport near Guilin, in Guanxi province. To keep his mind alive, he studied at
night and on Sundays, reading the only books available. One was an official
diatribe against Confucius. In 1976, he was promoted to platoon leader and sent
to work in a factory.
Mao died the same year. Youths like Wang, who worshiped him at the outset of
the Cultural Revolution, had started to question Mao's godlike stature as the
infighting of the Cultural Revolution dragged on and the proletarian utopia Mao
promised failed to materialize.
When senior Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping was rehabilitated the next year, he
reintroduced an examination system for university admissions. Wang was one of a
half-dozen selected from a group of 100 soldiers. In 1978, he enrolled in the
prestigious Nankai University, with its impressive Soviet-built facade, in
PAGE
10
The Washington Post, June 14, 1998
Tianjin.
"The older generation remembers the 1950s when life was going well, and they
can compare before and after liberation, Wang said. "But for my generation, it
is very, very different. We felt emancipation in 1979,' when Deng introduced his
economic reform program.
After graduate school, Wang went to work for the rural policy institute of
the State Council, China's cabinet, and was put to work doing rural political
reform. Economically, Mao's communes were finished by the mid-1980s. Land once
managed collectively was contracted to individual households. Communes were
renamed townships, and production brigades rechristened villages. But
politically, the old, appointed cadre structures were still in place.
The real impetus for village elections wasn't a liberal reformist impulse,
but rather the desire among Chinese leaders to regain greater control of the
countryside. In the 1980s, discontent was spreading like a prairie fire.
Peasants were ignoring family planning guidelines, physically assaulting tax
collectors and refusing to hand in to state depots the minimum quantities of
grain required under government-set quotas.
"In the rural areas, democracy may have originated in a dispute about taxes,
Wang said, not unlike the Boston Tea Party.
Wang researched local elections and wrote reports to rally support within the
party for change. In the winter before the Tiananmen uprising, Wang studied two
unruly villages in Heilongjiang province. In one village, the party appointed a
leader to reimpose order. But the peasants continued to boycott tax payments,
burned the village cadre's house and cut down his trees. In the other village,
order was restored after a competitive election.
In a report to the party's central committee, Wang concluded that "by
introducing competitive elections, we can gain the peasants' support and avoid
the danger of loss of control in the countryside.' A key party elder, Bo Yibo,
endorsed the report.
"This was not going against the Chinese Communist Party line," Wang said.
"These were the facts.
Over time, the idea of rural elections attracted an odd alliance. Peng Zhen,
a conservative who was then chairman of the National People's Congress, rammed a
village election law through the reluctant parliament. Wang said party elders
like Peng "believed that the Chinese Communist Party would rule forever, but
that they needed democracy to protect themselves.' To win over waverers, Peng
dubbed the law "experimental." Eleven years later, it still is.
Some election supporters were true democrats who hoped the elections would
spread to the more populous townships and cities, and ultimately include
national offices like the presidency. Other supporters, like Bo, were party
faithful who saw the elections as techniques for ridding the party of corrupt
and unpopular officials and spotting new talent. Roughly 40 percent of the
candidates elected in village balloting aren't party members, Wang said. But
half of those people are successfully recruited by the party within a year. Wang
calls the process "mutual and spontaneous.'
PAGE
11
The Washington Post, June 14, 1998
Despite broad support at the top, many local officials feel threatened by
elections or loathe sharing power with the electorate. Wang needed broad support
because he couldn't do it alone. His 1995 visit to Lishu county was part of a
calculated gamble. Wang wanted to drum up more support by getting publicity from
Chinese media about the elections, but Chinese reporters balked for fear of
offending Marxist ideologues.
So Wang took along three American reporters whose articles were later
reprinted in a Chinese party newspaper, Reference News, devoted to reprinting
foreign dispatches. The Foreign Ministry, realizing the elections could be good
publicity for China overseas, then wrote a report to the party's central
committee. Chinese journalists soon followed up with articles of their own.
China's Communist Party central committee now seems more committed to the
process. Last Thursday, the front pages of the leading state-run newspapers led
with news of a new central committee circular ordering all villages to comply
with the election law, and saying that the party would "make active efforts" to
introduce elections at the township level, the next highest rung of government.
No one in China believes that the world's most populous nation is on the
verge of democracy as the West knows it. The most prominent democracy dissidents
remain in jail, under surveillance or in exile. Asked at his maiden news
conference as premier about the possibility of holding elections at higher
levels of government, Zhu Rongji said that the government would study and
consider it. But he didn't suggest it would happen any time soon.
Wang said that if far-reaching political change ever comes to China, it needs
a foundation. "If there is no foundation, there will be no pluralism," he said.
The experience of the former Soviet Union, viewed by the Chinese as a
combination of political instability and economic collapse, serves as a
cautionary tale. [Former Soviet leader Mikhail] Gorbachev's biggest problem was
at the grass roots. He didn't build any political culture for pluralism at the
grass roots. He tried to impose it from above," Wang said.
"This [holding elections] is worth doing whether it results in a more
democratic [Communist] party or a democracy with many parties," Wang said
philosophically. When, how or if multiparty democracy might come about is out of
Wang's hands. "Who can predict?" he said.
China's experiment with village democracy has become a favorite cause among
Americans looking for a reason to hope that China is becoming more democratic.
For a time, Wang became a common name on American guest lists. On his bookshelf,
he has photos of himself meeting Vice President Gore and former national
security adviser Brent Scowcroft.
But last year, Wang was suddenly reassigned to a job running disaster relief.
Some people who know him say it was a normal job rotation. Others say he fell
victim to jealous colleagues at the civil affairs ministry. Now he does
everything from coordinating aid to flood areas to building a social safety net
for the poor and unemployed in the cities. On the side, he still consults with
local election officials and researches local elections.
"Disasters are no problem,' he said. "They're not like democracy. They're not
as dangerous."
PAGE
12
The Washington Post, June 14, 1998
China's Brain Trust
About one-quarter of China's population experienced the 1966-76 Cultural
Revolution as children or teenagers
As many of their parents were sent to the country, these young people
were displaced, universities were closed and their education was derailed.
After the Cultural Revolution, the number of people who received higher
education rose sharply.
SOURCE: World Bank: "China 2020,' based on China Population Yearbook 1995
BACKGROUND
The Cultural Revolution in Brief
1966
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution begins. The movement was party
Chairman Mao Zedong's effort to instill new radicalism into workers and students
and to challenge the entrenched party bureaucracy. The movement unleashed a
decade of civil strife that took the lives of millions.
May 16: The Communist Party's Politburo sets up a Cultural Revolution group,
including Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, which becomes power center. Mao activates
student Red Guards to attack the party bureaucracy.
June 1: People's Daily publishes article saying the people should "sweep away
all demons and monsters.' Beijing Mayor Peng Zhen ousted along with other
leading party officials.
Aug. 1-12: Deng Xiaoping and President Liu Shaoqi, the two most prominent
figures after Mao, denounced as "capitalist roaders."
Aug. 18: Mao reviews crowd of a million student Red Guards in Tiananmen
Square, the first of several such rallies.
1967
January: Red Guard groups seize power in Shanghai and oust municipal party
committee, setting off similar battles around the country.
1968
November: President Liu branded a "traitor" and stripped of party membership.
December: Mao calls on urban educated youth to "go to the countryside to be
reeducated by the poor and middle-level peasants." More than 16 million students
are sent to the countryside.
1969
Former president Liu dies after being tortured.
PAGE
13
The Washington Post, June 14, 1998
September: Defense Minister Lin Biao dies in plane crash while allegedly
trying to escape to the Soviet Union after an assassination plot against Mao
fails.
1972
February: Nixon visits China.
March: Deng rehabilitated and renamed vice premier, but his struggles with
Jiang Qing continue.
1976
January: Premier Zhou Enlai dies of cancer.
April: Deng again sidelined by Cultural Revolution group.
September: Mao dies.
October: Gang of Four arrested and Cultural Revolution ends.
1978
December: Communist Party officially adopts a policy of economic reform and
opening up to the outside world.
1989
April and May: Student-led protests in Tiananmen Square attract up to a
million people. Deng orders army troops to break up the demonstrations. At least
several hundred people are killed the night of June 3 and the morning of June 4.
China's Villages
Number of villages:
In 1996, China had 928,000 villages, with an average of 916 people each.
Elected committees:
60 percent of these villages had held free village committee elections at
least once.
More of China's 1.2 billion people live in rural areas than in urban ones.
SOURCE: People's Republic of China Yearbook, 1997/98
Children of the Cultural Revolution: Shaping the China of Tomorrow
This is a series about the people shaping tomorrow's China. Born after the
Chinese Communist Party took power, the new elite is a product of the Chinese
revolution - - although its members haven't turned out exactly as the late
Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong expected them to.
PAGE
14
The Washington Post, June 14, 1998
The core of this generation -- men and women from their late thirties to
fifty or so in age was in elementary or secondary school in 1966 when the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution broke out. A decade of upheaval followed.
The people who were children then learned chaos, fear, betrayal and
disillusionment at an early age. But the best and brightest managed to get back
on track.
Many won spots in universities in 1977 and 1978, the first two years
universities reopened with competitive examinations. Those who managed to get in
had been self-motivated and smart enough to have kept learning on their own
while schools were closed. And because they felt they had lost important years
of their lives, most were determined to make up for lost time.
Now that they are reaching the peak of their careers, they are the most
free-thinking group of people in China. For the most part, they occupy roles
well within China's mainstream. Though their names usually don't make headlines
overseas, they are extremely influential. In their own way, they are making
revolution, though not by taking to the streets.
This series will profile five members of this generation. Each inhabits a
different part of modern Chinese society. What they have in common is that they
are all changing the country in some way that goes beyond day-to-day events.
GRAPHIC: Illustration, dita smith and robert dorrell; Chart, The Washington
Post; Map, robert dorrell; Photo ; Photo, upi; Photo, ap; Photo, afp; Photo,
reuters; Photo, courtesy of wang zhenyao; Photo, hilary smith for The
Washington Post; Photo, international republican institute, Wang Zhenyao, at
right, spoke to villagers in Sichuan province as they waited to cast votes in
1995. Wang spent nearly 10 years crisscrossing China to promote democracy and
encourage village elections. Mao in 1967. A Red Guard helps lead 3 million
peasants from outside Shanghai in a Feb. 24, 1967, rally to celebrate Mao's
leadership. The Gang of Four shown as their trial began, from left: Zhang
Chunqiao; Jiang Qing, widow of Mao Zedong; Yao Wenyuan; and Wang Hongwen. Deng
Xiaoping in 1985. President Nixon and his wife, Pat, share a laugh with Chinese
officials during a walk atop the Great Wall in February 1972. A Tiananmen
Square protester, bloodied in a clash with troops, holds aloft a helmet that
fell off a soldier during the fighting on June 3, 1989. Thanks in large part to
Wang Zhenyao, about half of all Chinese villages have held elections in the past
decade. Fujian province villagers lined up to vote in 1997, right. Election
officials in Fujian province separated ballots in 1997 as villagers and
observers looked on. Holding elections "is worth doing whether it results in a
more democratic [Communist] party or a democracy with many parties," Wang
Zhenyao says.
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: June 14, 1998
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PRESIDENT CLINTON:
BUILDING THE AMERICAN DREAM, TOGETHER
March 18, 1998
"Now is not a time of rest.. We must use this time of prosperity to make sure
every single family in America has the ability to meet the challenges of the new economy.
At this time of change, we cannot leave behind the working families.. We must take new
steps to provide health and retirement security, honor the value of work, and expand
access to quality education and training for all Americans."
President Bill Clinton
March 18, 1998
Today, President Clinton speaks at an apprentice training facility in Las Vegas, Nevada,
highlighting the Administration's work to keep the American Dream alive for working families.
The President's remarks address the concerns families wrestle with every day: preparing for
retirement, educating their children, raising families in safe neighborhoods, and having access to
quality health care.
A Moment Of Great Opportunity. Our nation has never had a better chance to help
more working families achieve the American Dream. Under the President's
leadership: unemployment has fallen to its lowest levels in 24 years; more than 15
million new jobs have been created; welfare rolls have fallen to their lowest point in
27 years; typical family income is up $2,169; home ownership levels are at their
highest in history; housing starts are at their highest level in more than a decade;
crime rates are lower than any time in 24 years; and the budget deficit is on its
way to zero. The President is working to make sure all Americans share in these
successes by:
Balancing The budget And Saving Social Security First. By passing a balanced budget
three years ahead of schedule, we will be able to eliminate the deficit and pay for every
proposal in the President's budget while reserving the surplus until we strengthen Social
Security.
Extending Medicare. The President is working to give one of America's
most vulnerable and difficult to insure populations new options for obtaining
adequate, affordable health care coverage. The President's targeted
Medicare proposal extends new security to millions of people by enabling
Americans ages 62 to 65 and displaced workers ages 55 to 65 to purchase
Medicare health coverage and enabling retired workers ages 55 to 65 to buy
coverage if their former employer drops their coverage.
Raising The Minimum Wage. Recognizing the value of work, the President is calling
for an increase in the minimum wage to give millions of hardworking Americans a pay
raise.
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Providing A World Class Education. Education is the surest ladder of opportunity in
our society. The President's balanced budget plan reduces average class size to 18
students per classroom for grades 1-3 by helping local communities hire 100,000 new
teachers with certified skills to teach basic reading and math. It also expands funding
for training dislocated workers to 3 times the 1993 level.
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PRESIDENT CLINTON:
STANDING FOR PEACE, SECURITY AND FREEDOM
February 16, 1998
"In this century, we found out through harsh experience that the only answer to aggression and
outlaw behavior is firmness, determination and, if necessary, action If we act as one, we can safeguard our
immediate interests -- and send a clear message to every would-be tyrant and terrorist that the international
community has the wisdom, the will and the way to protect peace and security in a new era.
President Bill Clinton
February 16, 1998
Today, President Clinton meets with Defense Secretary Bill Cohen and the Joint Chiefs to be briefed on
the status of American forces in the Persian Gulf. Following the meeting, the President speaks to
the American people to discuss the issues at stake in the current crisis and the steps the
U.S. is taking in the region to protect peace, security and freedom.
New Security Challenges In The 21st Century. As we prepare to enter a new millennium, we must
also prepare to face new threats to our peace, security and freedom; these include: the spread of weapons
of mass destruction, reckless acts by outlaw states, and terrorists, international criminals and drug
traffickers.
Threatening Peace And Stability. There is no more immediate example of these new threats than
Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Saddam has built up an arsenal, including chemical and biological weapons and
the missiles to deliver them. More important, Saddam has used these against combatants and civilians,
against a foreign adversary and against his own people. His regime endangers the safety of Iraq's people,
the stability of the region, and the security of the world. It also challenges much of what we are working
for:
promotion of a just and lasting peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors;
protection of the free flow of vital resources;
preservation of the stability and security of our friends in the region;
prevention of terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction;
spread of prosperity and opportunity.
A Peaceful, Diplomatic Solution To The Current Crisis. The United States has repeatedly and
unambiguously made clear that its preference is for a peaceful, diplomatic solution to the current crisis.
At the end of the Gulf War, as a condition for the cease-fire, the United Nations demanded -- and Saddam
agreed to declare in 15 days his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and missiles. The U.N. set
up a special commission of highly trained international weapons experts, called UNSCOM, to monitor
Iraq's commitment. Over the last several years, these inspectors have uncovered and destroyed in Iraq
more weapons of mass destruction capacity than were destroyed during the entire Gulf War. Now
Saddam is trying again to thwart their mission.
To reach a genuine, diplomatic outcome, Iraq must agree, ver y soon, to free, full and
unfettered inspection of all sites, everywhere in Iraq, with no dilution or diminishment of
UNSCOM.
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A Coalition Strategy. The United States is not acting alone. Our force posture in the region is possible
only through the support of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, the GCC states and Turkey. Many other
friends and allies have agreed to provide forces, bases or logistical support, including: the United
Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Argentina,
Iceland, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
Page 2
LEVEL 2 - 1 OF 1 STORY
Copyright 1996 UMI, Inc.; ABI/INFORM
Copyright Columbia University 1996
Journal of International Affairs
Winter 1996
SECTION: Vol. 49, No. 2 Pg. 493-524; ISSN: 0022-197X; CODEN: POENAI
LENGTH: 14065 words
HEADLINE: Women and the state in post-1949 rural China
BYLINE: Tsai, Kellee S
BODY:
The irony of Beijing's recent hosting of the United Nations' Fourth World
Conference on Women was apparent to many observers, but not to the Chinese
government and perhaps a few ideological holdovers in former socialist
countries.3 Revolutionary regimes inspired by Marxist theory during the first
half of the twentieth century recognized the liberation of women as a key
component of transition to socialism.4 Upon the Communist political victory,
women were granted full legal rights and mobilized to participate in production.
Meanwhile, the authoritarian nature of the socialist state demonstrated command
capacity to transform the structure of economic and social relations. Yet after
several decades of Communist governance, gender gaps in political and
socioeconomic indicators remain salient.
By focusing on the position of women in post-1949 rural China, this study
seeks to shed light on the persistence of gender inequalities in socialist
countries despite their ideological commitment to the emancipation of women.
Analysis of this paradox raises two broader issues concerning the relationship
between the state and women: i) state capacity to implement its developmental
strategy; and ii) the sources of gender biases. Accordingly, the first section
of this analysis proposes a synthesis of state-centered and women-in-development
(WID) theories for explaining gender inequalities under socialism. While a
state's ideology and mode of production may have a substantial impact on the
definition of gender, I will argue that the endurance of gender inequalities
suggests the centrality of patriarchy as a socially-constructed system; and that
the institutional dynamics of patriarchy may survive changes in particular
political orientations or economic modes precisely because they are deeply
embedded in the very efforts themselves. The bulk of this paper therefore
examines the position of women in rural China in both the Mao and post-Mao
reform periods. The third part analyzes the relative impact of the state and the
household in reinforcing gender biases; and the final section offers theoretical
implications.
Theoretical Context
Despite their efforts to conceptualize gendered distributional asymmetries,
individually, neither standard political science nor WID frameworks can explain
the persistence of gender inequalities in socialist countries. Conventional
theories of the state may be employed to demonstrate the limits of state
TM
LEXIS:NEXIS
LEXIS:NEXIS®
LEXIS:NEXIS®
A member of the Reed Elsevier pk group
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A member of the Reed Elsevier pk group
Page 3
Journal of International Affairs Winter 1996
capacity for implementing policies beneficial to women, but they are not
concerned with the sources of gender biases. WID theories in the liberal
tradition generally focus on the effects of capitalist development on women. 5
Similarly, Marxist and neo-Marxist explanations of gender inequality point to
the oppressive structures of capitalism. 6 Nonetheless, valuable concepts may be
extracted from them for framing the present analysis.
First, the state is a significant actor. In socialist countries, the
Communist party-dominated state formulates developmental policies that affect
the structure of economic and social relations. However, the Party-state's
institutional capacity for policy implementation should not be assumed despite
its apparent strength. 7 As more contemporary theorists of the state point out,
state autonomy is neither a zero-sum function of power relative to society nor
is it an isolated determinant of capacity. 8 To elucidate the state's relative
effectiveness, the relationship between state and society may thus be analyzed
as a series of linkages between policy elites, central and local authorities,
local and village cadres, and cadres and households, which in turn are
influenced by the interactions within each level. 9 It is also important to
consider the role of informal actors and organizational structures relative to
that of formal institutions and ideology in policy implementation. The
operational tasks at this level are to examine the following: i) state
developmental policies relating to women; ii) the relationship between the
state and societal institutions that directly involve women, particularly, the
household unit and; as a result, iii) the relative impact of state policy on
society in general and women in particular. Most state-society and WID theorists
confine their debate to these considerations. They offer varying interpretations
of the extent to which state policy reflects or shapes the interests of society,
and evaluate the effectiveness of state action.
Acknowledging that the state has an impact on the household as a component of
society provides a base for explaining gender inequalities. To the extent that
the household or family represents the most fundamental sphere of interaction
between women and men, and hence, the most fundamental unit of society,' it is
relevant to bridge the gap between state policies and the household.
Furthermore, the liberal and Marxist feminist approaches offer insight on the
specific consequences of economic development on the sexual division of labor
and other gender-differentiated indicators. 11 They do not, however, explain the
discrepancy between the relative success of socialist countries in transforming
other social relations and their failure to eradicate biases against women.
These theories generally assume capitalist development. 12 Still, these
frameworks can be tested by the experience of socialist countries that have
embarked on market-oriented reforms. With the decreased reliance on Marx-Engels
ideology, are gender inequalities exacerbated as Marxists would expect? Do they
take on a different character? Or does the position of women improve as a
by-product of reform, thereby broadly confirming liberal hypotheses?13 Given
that the latter situation has yet to be evidenced, additional analysis is
warranted.
In order to explicate the endurance of gender inequalities, it is necessary
to go beyond fundamentally state-centered perspectives. State and economic
policies alone cannot account for gender differentiation. An additional
structural variable, as socialist feminists point out, is the
institutionalization of patriarchal norms. 14 Although the state represents the
most salient patriarchal institution within national boundaries, the definition
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of gender as a social construction implicates a broader range of sources in
perpetuating biases. In other words, accepting that gender identities are not
innate, but learned through social and cultural interactions, 15 means that the
household plays an equally powerful if not greater role in this context. Marx
and Engels viewed the state and the household as the primary institutions that
embody class antagonisms in society. The socialist feminist formulation of class
and gender struggle derives from this argument. But recognizing the household as
an oppressive institution and gender norms as a social construction does not
require embracing the historical materialism of Marxist paradigms. Arguably, the
class element of socialist feminist theory obscures its most important
contribution: patriarchy as an institution. The reductionism of class analysis
restricts its ability to delineate the expression of patriarchy in other terms
that may be more appropriate for gender analysis. As Catharine MacKinnon, a
feminist legal scholar observes, "Method shapes each theory's vision of social
reality. It identifies its central problem, group and process, and creates as a
consequence its distinctive conception of politics as such. "16 The challenge for
feminist theory, therefore, is "to demonstrate that feminism systematically
converges upon a central explanation of sex inequality through an approach
distinctive to its subject yet applicable to the whole of social life, including
class. "17 A fundamental premise is the recognition of patriarchy as a
socially-determined system that exists within and beyond state, economic and
societal structures. This assumption does not preclude materialist approaches.
Rather, it adds depth to the analysis by identifying the sources of gender norms
and exploring their interaction.
The persistence of gender inequalities in socialist countries may thus be
seen as deriving from the relationship between the primary instruments of
patriarchy: the state and the household. That is, gender norms are constructed
and realized at both levels in a mutually reinforcing manner. Operationally,
this entails examination of the state and the household as interactive, rather
than parallel institutions in generating, perpetuating and actualizing gender
biases. This approach seeks to expand the definitional boundaries of state and
society in mainstream discourse by focusing on the structural oppression of
actors whose "interests" remain unarticulated by class, civil society18 or the
state. The dynamics and consequences of patriarchy in post-1949 rural China are
presented in next section.
The State and Women in Post-1949 Rural China
Ideology and Post-Revolutionary Strategy
The Russian experience in implementing a communist revolution in general, and
the liberation of women as a component of the process, served as a model for the
Chinese Communists throughout the revolutionary period. Both the Bolsheviks and
the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Mobilized the most oppressed groups in
society, namely peasants and women, to serve as the revolutionary base. While
women were not considered a distinct class, their oppression symbolized the
dynamics of class struggle. Under Lenin, the Soviet Union enacted significant
legislation to liberate women from "bourgeois feudalism" and integrate them into
the continuing revolutionary process. Following victory in 1949, the CCP
similarly launched a number of policies and programs to promote gender
equality. 19
First, the CCP legally stipulated the equality of women as full citizens in
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the 1949 People's Republic of China (PRC) Constitution. The 1950 Marriage Law
legalized marriage, denounced patriarchal authority in the household and granted
both sexes equal rights to file for divorce. 20 The second and most prominent
element of the strategy was integrating women into economic development.
Women's employment was viewed as a prerequisite for emancipation from
bourgeois structures as embodied in the patriarchal family. 21 Furthermore, at
the core of the CCP's strategy for political consolidation was economic
reconstruction and rural development. The full participation of women was not
only an ideological imperative but a pragmatic one. Third, the All-China
Women's Federation (W.F.) was established by the CCP to mobilize women for
economic development and social reform. The First Congress of the W.F. in 1949
highlighted the following areas for the active participation of women: land
reform, marriage law campaigns, political study and agricultural development.
The fourth objective ideological redefinition of gender relations quickly
proved to be the area most resistant to the influence of mass campaigns.
Although stories of revolutionary heroines and slogans proclaiming the equality
of women were well-known, traditional Confucian beliefs about gender roles
retained a stronghold, particularly in rural China.
The above strategy for achieving gender equality was pursued broadly
throughout Mao's tenure, though official policy on women has varied with the
direction of general political and economic priorities. In addition, initiatives
that would appear to benefit women encountered obstacles in implementation; and
as suggested by WID theorists, broader developmental efforts have yielded mixed
results for the overall position of women. As discussed next, state policies
that have had direct impact on the household include the following: i) land
reform and marriage laws; ii) collectivization and communization; and iii)
post-Mao reform, including the household responsibility system and family
planning policies.
Early Mao: Land Reform and Marriage Laws
Women's participation was considered integral to the success of the land
reform and marriage law campaigns during the early 1950s.23 The party actively
recruited rural female cadres and encouraged the proliferation of women's
organizations. Both campaigns intended to destroy feudalistic institutions and
practices, which included, respectively, the traditional extended family and the
most blatant abuses against women (footbinding, polygamy, concubinage, child
brides and dowry payments)
Land reform succeeded in eliminating the extended family's material basis and
hence, its potential for posing as a political threat to the regime. Small-plots
were redistributed to each family member regardless of age or sex; and land
reform provisions stipulated that property would be equally divided in the case
of divorce. Nonetheless, land allotted to women was effectively controlled by
their husbands. Patriarchal familial relationships in the Confucian tradition
seemed to remain intact 24
At the same time, the new marriage laws generated much controversy. During
the first five years, over 500,000 women filed for divorces annually 25 Male
peasants threatened female cadres attempting to enforce the divorce provisions,
while mothers-in-law sought to preserve their status over daughters-in-law in
the traditional, extended family structure. Some women even committed suicide to
protest the refusal of their husbands and male cadres to comply with the new
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law. In 1953, the National Committee for Thorough Implementation reported that
over 75,000 deaths or suicides annually could be attributed to marriage
differences and unsuccessful implementation.26 The difficulties encountered in
enforcement revealed not only the depth of tradition, 27 but also the
institutional deficiencies in rural China for their acceptance. The traditional
family system served important functions for which the Party-state did not
offer alternatives. Families ensured the provision of old-age security, child
care and medical facilities.
Collectivization and Communization
After only two years of agricultural production based on small family-owned
plots, the Central Committee decided that accelerated agricultural growth was
necessary to fuel industrialization. The resulting nationwide collectivization
drive from 1955 to 1956 aimed to abolish private land ownership. Ninety percent
of rural society was restructured into cooperative farms (or collectives) where
members received compensation according to the socialist principle of "each
according to his labor. "28 Legislation relating to collectivization contained
provisions emphasizing the importance of female employment in rural
cooperatives 29 In addition, propaganda went beyond encouragement of women's
economic participation and explicitly linked their liberation with the
structural implications of collectivization. Shortly after CCP approval of the
shift to collectivization, Remin Ribao (People's Daily) quoted Engels'
contention that the emancipation of women requires participation in social labor
and "to achieve this, individual families are no longer required to be units of
the social economy "30 The establishment of cooperatives effectively separated
production from the household and provided women with a wider range of
employment opportunities.
However, the employment of women in rural cooperatives posed a strain on
their provision of domestic services. To a limited degree, older women were
mobilized to handle childcare and other household responsibilities. But domestic
services were not fully collectivized. 31 Continued responsibility for housework
and official employment meant that women were not able to earn as many work
points as their male counterparts. The resulting dual burden was not only
recognized, but justified by the Remin Ribao: "Participation in agricultural
production is the inherent right and duty of rural women. Giving birth to
children and raising them, as well as preoccupation with household chores are
also the obligations of rural women. These things set women apart from men. "32
In rural China, as in other rural societies, the dual burden itself was
certainly not a new phenomenon for peasant women. But the specific socialist
ideology of "each according to his labor" drew attention to the gender gap in
wages; and the state ultimately sanctioned traditional norms regarding the
sexual division of labor in the household.
By 1958, Mao declared that China had completed the transition to socialism
and was prepared to make a great leap forward in the "transition from socialism
to communism." " The people's commune was identified as a new form of social
organization to complete the revolution. Communization proceeded rapidly: Within
one year over ninety percent of peasant households briefly organized in
cooperatives were amalgamated into communes 33 At the same time, peasants,
including over 300 million women, were mobilized into production brigades. The
demand for full-time female labor in the agricultural sector led to the creation
of communal mess halls and nurseries, which were primarily staffed by older
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women. One source estimates that by 1959 there were nearly 5 million nurseries
and 3.6 million public dining rooms in rural areas. 34
Despite increased communization of domestic services, women continued to earn
approximately one-half to one-third fewer workpoints than men. The gender gap in
compensation was excused as reflecting the amount of physical energy expended.
Hence, activities performed by men were considered "heavy" while women's work
was "light. "35 As illustrated in Table 1, the "lighter" work was not
necessarily
less physically demanding. (Table 1 omitted)
Furthermore, in regions where non-agricultural employment opportunities were
available, women performed a wider range of agricultural tasks as men pursued
other forms of work. 36 A government document in 1958 indicated that women would
be expected to compensate for the shortage of labor in agriculture caused by
male employment in newer industries:
Women should shoulder agricultural production. Men's labor power is needed to
open mines, expand machine building industry, power plants, cement plants.
Generally speaking, these departments of industry employ mainly men laborers and
provide only a few types of work that can be undertaken by women workers. Thus,
up to a certain stage in the development of socialist construction, agricultural
production will have to be undertaken mainly by women. 37
As such, the percentage of peasant women engaged in non-domestic production
increased rapidly from 50 to nearly 90 percent during the first decade of
socialist rule 38 Nonetheless, large-scale employment in agricultural production
did not indicate equality. It increased the demands on rural women without
commensurate wage compensation. While the policy of "equal pay for equal work"
was actively promoted, as shown above, the household and agricultural tasks
performed by women were valued less than those performed by men. In villages
where women performed the same work alongside men, or replaced the work of men,
male peasants protested and prevented the equal allocation of work points. 39
They demanded greater compensation as a structural requirement: As heads of
households they needed to contribute more than women to the family budget. 40 The
relative decrease in the sexual division of labor in agriculture did not
restructure the sexual division of authority or labor in the patriarchal
household. Furthermore, by the 1960s, the financial cost of maintaining the
communal facilities was considered too high when the services could be performed
within the household by women for "free. "41
As in other socialist countries, 42 the incorporation of women into the public
production was not matched by comparable levels of political participation. This
asymmetry was not a calculated outcome of state policy. Numerous campaigns
encouraged women to join decision-making bodies, particularly during the 1970s.
Special education courses were established to train female party cadres and
educate women in the Thought of Mao Zedong; and women's guidance teams were
formed in each brigade, down to the smallest village unit. 43 While there was
incremental growth in the political participation of women, they were better
represented among production cadres than in higher levels of the Party-state
apparatus. For example, between 1965 and 1973 the percentage of women in the
Central Committee increased from eight to thirteen percent, 44 while women
generally accounted for twenty to thirty percent of rural cadres during the same
period, with slight provincial variations. 45 But ultimately, the dual-burden of
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women's work played a key role in limiting their incentive to participate in
political activity. This was particularly evident during the Cultural Revolution
when political study sessions were held each evening. 46 Most women were simply
too busy with farm work, housework and two hours of Mao Zedong Thought to
contemplate additional political responsibilities.
Post-Mao Reform: Household Responsibility System and Family Planning Policy
Following Mao's death in 1976, the rural sector was targeted as one of the
Four Modernizations in the developmental strategy promoted by the Hua
Guofeng-Deng Xiaoping coalition. By the early 1980s, the reforms had effectively
transformed the political economic structure of rural China, with contradictory
implications for the relationships between the party-state and villages, rural
cadres and the household, and women and men. On the one hand, central
bureaucracies relinquished their control over the agricultural sector. Under the
household responsibility system (HRS), communal arrangements were replaced by
the household as the primary unit of production to increase incentives for
output 47 On the other hand, the state asserted control over the reproductive
process to ensure sustainable growth. Both of these developments have directly
affected the nature of gender relations within and beyond the peasant household.
The HRS decentralized rural production by transferring decision-making power
over the allocation of land and labor resources to the household. Whereas
production teams formerly determined the distribution of agricultural tasks and
the means to fulfill output quotas, now the head of the household possesses that
authority. In rural areas with fewer men and more female-headed households,
women have significantly higher rates of labor force participation than in areas
with more male-headed households. 48 This is consistent with the observation that
decommunization has increased the "dual burden" and reduced the visibility of
women's work. 49 Instead of working in the fields with the rest of the production
team, women are more likely to engage in domestic work and cultivate household
plots, while men seek employment in rural industry. 50
Furthermore, just as official statements during the Great Leap Forward
advocated a greater role for women in agricultural production to increase the
pool of manpower for industrialization, the post-Mao regime has encouraged
women's activity in domestic sideline production. Unlike small-scale commodity
production, domestic sidelines "serve the public interest by using only spare
household time and labor," that is, the work of women 51 Domestic sideline
production includes household production of food, handicraft goods, plastic or
silk flowers, embroidery and knitting. More importantly, they represent
income-generating opportunities for women. Initially, the products were
primarily sold in local peasant markets, but it quickly became apparent that the
quality and aggregate volume of output would be suitable for exports as well. 52
The government has thus instituted many incentives for domestic sideline
production, which has increased the portion of peasant household incomes
generated from such work. For example, one survey of 15,914 rural households
revealed that total income from domestic sidelines in 1980 had increased by over
one-third since 1979.53 In some areas, nearly 75 percent of peasant women are
involved in weaving, embroidery and other handicraft activities alongside farm
work. 54 of particular interest, a 1987 survey of the 34 million specialized
rural households in the Sichuan province found that female-headed households had
a higher annual income than male-headed households: 882 yuan as compared to 712
yuan. 55
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With the increased economic contribution of women to household income through
domestic sideline production, liberal and Marxist feminists would expect
corresponding increases in decision-making authority. A 1990 survey conducted by
the E reveals that 53 percent of the women respondents believe that household
decision-making is jointly shared with their husbands. 56 But there is no basis
for comparison over time since this was the first survey of its kind (not to
mention the validity of official surveys in general) 57 An analytical attempt at
deducing the impact of the household responsibility system and increased
household income on women's relative "bargaining power" predicts adverse
effects. 58 That is, women's control over household "entitlements" is expected to
decline as they engage in productive activities in the private, domestic sphere.
Elisabeth Croll (1983) similarly expresses skepticism about the degree to which
women's increased income will affect intra-household relations of exchange. 59 It
is less disputable, however, that community welfare services such as child care
and primary health care have returned to the realm of individual households --
adding to the responsibilities of women 60
Although rural reform has increased the autonomy of the household in economic
production, the One-Family, One-Child policy launched in 1979 has turned
reproduction into an area of direct state intervention.61 The new regime under
Deng made the neo-Malthusian observation that the economic gains from reform
were barely sufficient to accommodate a population of one billion, given the
natural population growth rate of 1.26 percent, much less provide a base for
advanced industrial development. The One-Family, One-Child campaigns have
therefore targeted women to limit their childbearing as a "patriotic duty. "62
The family planning policy is implemented by local units of the W.F.,
barefoot doctors and health workers who are mainly women. Each family is visited
individually by members of the local family planning committee. After the first
child, women are awarded a one-child certificate that entitles them to a number
of privileges. Standard regulations concerning the type of birth control method
employed require IUDS after one child, sterilization after the second one and
abortion for unapproved pregnancies.
The policy rests on a coercive system of sanctions and rewards. Economic
sanctions include: payment of an "excess child levy" as compensation to the
state for the cost of another child to the country; 63 reduction in the family's
grain ration (or higher prices) for producing a "surplus" child; limitations on
additional land for private plots and the right to collective grain in times of
flood and drought; and ineligibility for promotion for four years, demotion, or
reduction in wages 64 Moreover, the offending couple has to bear all expenses
for medical care and education of excess children, and "extra' children have the
lowest priority in admission to kindergarten, school and medical institutions.
In contrast, one-child families are entitled to many privileges including
monthly or annual cash subsidies for health or welfare until the child reaches
fourteen years of age; and additional private plots from the commune. Single
children are entitled to free education, health services, priority in admission
to nurseries, schools and hospitals. Parents receive an additional subsidy to
their old age pension. 65
The most serious consequence of the family planning drive has been the rise
in abortions and female infanticide. The Ministry of Public Health reported that
during the five-year period ending in 1984, there were 53 million abortions
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(equivalent to the population of France) 66 The current figure estimates that
one in three pregnancies are terminated by abortions. While official statistics
are not available to specify the prevalence of female infanticide, the sex ratio
of reported births reveals significant differences in the number of males and
females. 67 In five of China's thirty provinces, the sex ratio exceeds 1.20 (120
males to 100 females) and the national average is 1.185.68 As shown in Table 2,
the "official" number of male births per 100 female births has increased since
the family planning campaigns were instituted. 69 (Table 2 omitted) The distorted
sex ratios are attributed to abortions, (ultrasounds are used to identify the
gender of the fetus) i female infanticide through drowning, poisoning or
desertion; as well as underregistration of female infants since the PRC birth
registration system excludes infants who die within three days of birth.
A less publicized aspect of the family planning policy is its impact on
mothers. Delia Davin points out that "Women were traditionally held to be
responsible for the sex of their infants and, despite attempts at scientific
education, this notion persists. "70 The limited number of opportunities to
conceive a son thus increases the pressure on women. There are reports that
women who bear girls, or are suspected to be pregnant with girls, have been
abused by their husbands and in-laws, and even murdered. 71 However, short of
suicide, the emotional and psychological effects of the policy on mothers and
their unwanted daughters has yet to be acknowledged.
From its inception the family planning policy has faced particular resistance
in the rural areas since it contradicts the economic and cultural incentives of
the peasant household to have more than one child.72 First, under the HRS,
peasant incomes rely on the number of workers in the family. Second, a growing
proportion of peasant households sell their production on the free market and
therefore possess the economic means to finance unauthorized births. Third, for
similar motivations, rural women cadres the key link in enforcing family
planning are finding it more rewarding to cultivate their private plots and
increase their earnings than to antagonize neighboring peasant families. 73
Fourth, peasant families choose to keep bearing children until they have at
least one son. Due to Confucian, patrilineal practices, sons are assigned more
economic value. They remain with the family after marriage and are expected to
care for their parents in old age; whereas daughters leave the family and incur
dowry expenses upon marriage. Although the policy has been more relaxed in rural
areas since 1984 by permitting peasant families to have more than one child
if the first-born is a daughter resistance continues. Couples with one son or
two daughters often bear more children; and "village leaders conspire with
relatives and friends to conceal 'excess' births from higher authorities. "74 At
the same time, the coercive presence of the state in regulating reproduction
remains apparent as evidenced by the increasing distortion in sex ratios shown
above.
While rural households have responded to pressure under the One-Family,
One-Child policy by aborting, underreporting, or abandoning their female
off-spring, economic reform has revived the commoditization of women and
children. There has been a resurgence of abduction and trafficking of peasant
women, particularly those between the ages of 16 and 25.75 They are generally
sold into marriage in destitute mountain villages where families cannot afford
betrothal gifts and banquets, or kidnapped by gangs and sold into prostitution
in urban areas such as the coastal cities and special economic zones where there
are fewer men. If the gap in sex ratios continues to expand, or even if they
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level off at 118 males to 100 females, within one generation the demand for
women will probably exacerbate such practices.
Impact and Analysis
The Impact of the State on Women
The socialist state has clearly played a significant role in defining gender
roles in the economy and society in general. On the basis of standard
socio-economic indicators, the gender gap has decreased substantially under
communist rule. Even political representation has improved: The percentage of
women deputies in the National People's Congress (NPC) has increased from 12
percent in 1954 to 21 percent in 1992, and the proportion of women members of
the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) has grown from 7
to 13 percent during the same period. This is credited to the decline in
female illiteracy from over 90 percent in 1949 to 38 percent in 1990.77 On
balance, however, striking gender inequalities remain. Women constitute 70
percent of the 220 million illiterates in China. 78 And political participation
at the highest levels is minimal: No women currently sit on the fourteen-member
Politburo and the Central Committee is only 5.7 percent women. 79
Despite periodic exaggeration to the contrary, the central government
acknowledges that the PRC still faces obstacles before gender equality as
envisioned in the socialist ideal can be achieved. 80 Since the United Nations
named Beijing as the site of the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, apparent
efforts to comply with international standards for improving the condition of
women have increased 81 In 1992 the Fifth Session of the Seventh NPC passed the
Law on the Protection of Women's Rights and Interests of the PRC, which was
drafted with the assistance of W.F. branches throughout the country. The new law
stipulates the protection of women's rights in the areas of political
representation, education, employment, property rights, personal protection and
marriage.82 And shortly before the conference itself, Beijing announced a
five-year plan to improve the status of Chinese women by increasing their access
to top government positions, protection from kidnapping and elimination of
female infanticide.83 However, if the results of the first two decades of
socialist rule are any indication, gender equality cannot simply be legislated
from above 84
The state's limited success in liberating women resonates in part with the
paradoxical effects of state policy in other areas. The mass mobilization
strategy for agricultural development, for example, relied on cultivating strong
provincial-local and cadre village linkages. These ties have evolved into local
clientelistic networks which circumscribe the central government's relative
power over rural society, and reform has reinforced this decentralization. 85
Similarly, much of the continuing gender inequality may be traced to the
combination of direct state intervention into the household and the
contradictions embedded in state policy. But it is important to distinguish
between the sources of contradictions in general developmental policies and
those that target gender issues. The socialist state placed higher priority on
class struggle over gender struggle during the revolutionary phase, and
modernization over continued women's liberation during the post-revolutionary
and reform periods. Therefore, the emergence and reinforcement of structural
anomalies that inhibit gender equality also reflects the fact that it has not
been a central concern. This is apparent in each of the policies that have
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altered the economic organization of rural society. For comparative purposes,
two policies that exemplify this dynamic are discussed from the Maoist and
reform periods, respectively.
First, communization of domestic services was only partially implemented
during the collective period and then abandoned. Although the sexual division of
labor was maintained that is, the communal halls were staffed primarily by
older women it represented public recognition of their value-added. In
addition, communization enabled working age women to increase their contribution
to agricultural output and participate in political activities. It is worth
considering the potential long-term impact of domestic service communization if
the state had pursued it as rigorously as collectivization.86 In terms of
agricultural output, the communal form of production was an undeniable failure.
Peasants lacked the incentive to maximize their efforts due to ceilings on
compensation (grain and work points) and unrealistic quotas imposed from
above. 87 Communal domestic facilities were also deemed to be too expensive. But
the methodology for calculating their cost is not clear. 88 If economic value
were assigned to the "domestic" services rendered, the dual burden might have
been alleviated. Perhaps male peasants would be fighting for work point-earning
opportunities. The state sanctioned the sexual division of labor in the
household and excluded household labor from "each according to his labor."
Second, rural reform transferred the collective's authority over production
to the household. A regressive consequence of this reform is the strengthening
of patriarchal relations in the household. In other words, with increased
decision-making power, the household continues to define gender in traditional
terms and value their roles asymmetrically. Moreover, the concentration of
economic authority in the family reinforces the material basis of patrilineal
culture. The communal structure had weakened practices of village exogamy
whereby women are only temporary members of their natal village and upon
marriage, join their husbands' villages as outsiders. This tradition limits the
incentives for developing women's non-domestic production skills since they are
viewed as short-term assets.89 The payment of bride prices represents the
transfer of control over a woman's economic productivity from her parents to her
husband's family, with no establishment of independent rights to property in
either household by the individual woman 90
Both decommunization of domestic services and the HRS call into question the
state's official commitment to liberating women through mass employment. Peasant
women were ideologically mobilized to participate in social production, but then
relegated to the sphere of the privatized household and informal sector. The
state's actual path of development has not only reinforced traditional biases
against women, but also obstructed the ability of women to influence their own
fates through political participation.91
The Patriarchal State and Household
In the broadest terms, the impediments to gender equality in China may be
attributed to political and economic inconsistencies and feudalistic tradition.
But that diagnosis does not identify its etiology. The relationship is not
conceptualized fully. It is not clear whether Chinese tradition fuels
counterintuitive policies or the other way around, and indeed, whether one
exists without the other. Moreover, the interaction between policy and culture
requires specification. As proposed previously, the underlying structure that
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fuels the endurance of gender inequalities may be traced to patriarchy. The
primary institutional expressions of patriarchy are the state and the household.
Both embody a male-dominated hierarchy that exercises its authority over women
through maintaining the sexual division of labor in productive and reproductive
relations. In China, patriarchy has demonstrated resilience to changes in
economic structure because the processes of gender norm construction and
actualization at the state and the household levels are ultimately mutually
reinforcing. The patriarchal family defines and values the productive roles
within the household in gender-differentiated terms and reproduces members
(assuming non-compliance with the one-child policy) in its likeness. The
patriarchal state provides incentives for specific relations of production,
including the terms of reproduction, and produces a web of party officials and
cadres that reproduce the demands of dominant. ideology. As in the process of
human reproduction, gender is defined, produced and reproduced by both men and
women. But the analogy is misleading. Gender norms are not
biologically-determined, but rather socially-constructed and institutionalized
through power relations between and within the state and the household.
This is not meant to imply that the state and the household are monolithic
agents in an overdetermined system of patriarchy. Although male-domination
persists, socialist ideology raised the consciousness of women to the existence
of their subordinate social valuation. Women did not receive as many work points
as men for comparable labor in the agricultural commune. Women were encouraged
to contribute more to farm work SO that men could pursue more important forms of
production. Women were recruited for political activities but then expected to
fulfill their domestic responsibilities and serve the patriarchal interests of
the state. In each case there were women who attempted to challenge the
privileged status of men. But then there were also women enlisted by the
party-state to reorient the terms of equality under socialism. In an ironic
recognition of the intersubjective synergy between the patriarchal state and
household, Zhongguo Funu (Women of China) wrote the following in response to the
resistance of rural women cadres to housework:
Family and state are interdependent and interrelated. For this reason, in
China home work and social labor are mutually geared together, and home work is
just a part of social labor and plays an important part in socialist
construction
If a woman can integrate what little she can do into the great
cause of socialist construction and if she has the ideal of working for the
happiness of future generations, she would be a noble person, a woman of benefit
to the masses, a woman of communist morality. 92
While the articulated interests of women were never a priority, their
productive capacity was recognized and molded according to the prevailing
patriarchal requirements. The succession of intraelite power struggles and
consequent policy shifts have all produced ideological reverberations that
affect gender norms and their institutional reproduction.91
Conclusion: Theoretical Implications
Conceptually, reform marked the state's shift from a Marxist feminist to a
liberal feminist approach towards women. While the preferred economic systems
differ, both frameworks rest on the premise that sexual division of labor will
dissipate with the integration of women into the waged labor force and
supporting legislation. Under both socialism and market-oriented reform,
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however, the participation of women in economic production has not eradicated
gender inequalities in rural China. As discussed above, constraints exist on the
state's ability to command equality and the commitment to gender equality itself
is dubitable in t of the contradictions generated by its developmental
priorities. Although the theories are ideal types, China's experience suggests
the presence of a deeper source O gender biases than state policies or mode of
production ; namely, institutionalized patriarchy.
Socialist feminists would expect reform to fortify patriarchy due to its
capitalist orientation. A patriarchal sexual division of labor facilitates
capital accumulation since women are responsible for domestic and
subsistence-level production. 94 predicted, post-Mao reform has strengthened
patriarchal relations. The peasant household has regained control over the
sexual division of labor in domestic and non-domestic production. The state
exercises patriarchal authority over the productive as well as reproductive
capacity of women. But it is ahistorical to associate the institutionalization
of patriarchal norms solely with capitalist development. Patriarchy predated
socialism, endured under socialism, and reconfigured itself under reform. The
socialist state's failure to liberate women reflects the inadequacy of
Marx-Engels ideology as a model for feminism. 95 The "first class antagonism" may
be between men and women, but the socialist solution is fundamentally
class-based and women are not a distinct class. If they were, then capitalism
would only be one manifestation of patriarchy instead of the justification for
patriarchy. The prescription would be broader yet focused on the interests of
women. Ultimately, the particular expressions of patriarchy have changed
alongside changes in the relations of production, but the foundation of a
male-dominated hierarchy has been preserved. The post-Deng regime may introduce
yet another pattern of patriarchy.
This analysis has attempted to highlight the interdependence of the primary
patriarchal institutions in society the state and the household in
perpetuating gender inequalities. Further research is required to elucidate the
prospects for institutional change; that is, social reconstruction or
transformation of patriarchal norms. For example, patriarchy may be bounded by
its contradictradictory effects. Within the next generation the demographic
trend of distorted sex ratios and overindulged single children (sons) will have
significant repercussions on political, social and economic relations.
Meanwhile, a growing proportion of peasant women are engaged in profitable
domestic sideline activities while their male counterparts work in urban
areas. 96 These women entrepreneurs represent a new strata in rural China, and
their relative autonomy has already inspired Women's Federation, and to a lesser
degree, non-governmental initiatives to increase their access to credit,
information and markets. 97 Such efforts undermine patriarchal authority, and
have proven to be powerful means for legitimizing women's work in the informal
sector. 98
A basic challenge facing women-in-development theorists is how to
conceptualize the adaptability of patriarchy to different political and economic
structures. In other words, additional research should build towards a theory of
patriarchy. To avoid the determinism of Marxist and cultural frameworks, a
comparative approach may yield more progressive insights than country-specific
studies. 99 This analysis, for example, starts out by questioning the endurance
of gender inequalities under socialist rule and concludes that patriarchy is not
so much a function of political economic orientation as it is a system itself.
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The inquiry is driven by apparent gaps in theory, namely, the inability of
either state-centered or WID theories alone to explain the persistence of gender
inequalities in socialist countries. I have thus examined some of the concrete
sources and manifestations of partriarchy in post-1949 rural China to
demonstrate its potential for being more than yet another black-box concept.
Without additional empirical corroboration, however, alternative interpretations
could also be drawn. The starting point is recognizing that patriarchy remains
versatile and intransigent. It is embedded in the institutions of state and
society, and is constructed by their interaction.
1 This article is dedicated to the memory of Ann Dunham-Soetoro. I would also
like to thank Mark Blyth, Deborah Brautigam, Laurel Kendall and Andrew J. Nathan
For their comments on earlier versions of this paper; they are, of course,
absolved from its inadequacies.
2 Comments On: The Law on the Protection of Women's Rights and Interests,"
Women of China, in Women's International Network News (WIN), 19, no. 1 (Winter
1993) p. 53. Huang Qizao is a woman.
3 In this paper, "Communist" refers to the political structures, i.e. party
and state, dominated by the Communist Party. "Socialist" refers to the
orientation of the regime in practice since socialism is the stage prior to
communism in Marxist historical materialism.
4 In 1846 Marx and Engels wrote, "The first division of labor is that between
man and woman for child breeding.' Engels later added that the "first class
antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the
antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage." Robert C. Tucker, ed.,
The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978) p.
739. The first quotation is from Marx and Engel's German Ideology (1846) Engels
developed the argument more fully in The Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State (1884), (New York: International Publishers, 1972).
5 The classic articulation of liberal WID theory is Ester Boserup Woman's
Role in Economic Development (New York: St. Martin's Press. 1970) pp. 15-80.
Boserup contends that the introduction of technology has created and exacerbated
gender differences in agricultural production. Subsequent studies that support
Boserup's findings include: Ruth Dixon, Rural Women at Work: Strategies for
Development in South Asia (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978)
Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock, eds., Women and Colonialization (New York:
Praeger, 1980) and Kathleen Staudt, "Agricultural Gaps: A Case Study of Male
Preference in Policy Implementation." Development and Change, 9 (July 1978) pp.
439-58. Similar dynamics of female marginalization have also been evident in the
process of urbanization. For more recent studies, see M.D.R. Evans and Heclo U.
Saraiva, "Women's Labour Force Participation and Socioeconomic Development:
Influences of Local Context and Individual Characteristics in Brazil, The
British Journal of Sociology, 44, no. 1 (March 1993) pp. 25-51; Gay Young,
"Gender Inequality and Industrial Development: The Household Connection,"
Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 24, no. 1 (Spring 1993) pp. 1-20.
6 Marxist and dependency WID theorists view global capitalism as the
structural source of women's exploitation. Examples of this perspective include:
June Nash and Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, eds., Women, Men and the
International Division of Labor (Albany: State University of New York Press,
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1983); and Heleieth Saffioti, Women in Class Society (New York: Monthly Review
Press, 1978). They further develop Marx and Engel's association of male
domination with the emergence of private property, and argue that gender
inequalities are maintained to serve the interests of world capitalist elites.
7 During the Cold War, it was popular to depict Marxist-Leninist regimes as
monolithic entities, typically led by personal dictatorship, which penetrated
every aspect of social and economic life. The extensive structure of the
party-state apparatus and its tyrannical means of social control was equated
with command capacity.
8 Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Reuschemeyer and Theda Skocpol, eds. "On the Road
Toward a More Adequate Understanding of the State, Bringing the State Back In
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985). One of their central insights is
that regardless of a state's original level of autonomy (weakness or strength),
"state interventions in socioeconomic life can, over time, lead to a
diminution of state autonomy and to a reduction of any capacities the state may
have for coherent action," P. 354. For complementary analyses which pay more
attention to societal factors in the context of the Third World, see Joel S.
Migdal, Atul Kohli and Vivienne Shue, eds., State Power and Social Forces (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
9 Vivienne Shue describes this as a "weblike" pattern of relations, as
distinguished from the more rigid "honeycomb," that is, cellularized structure
of the Marxist-Leninist state. Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1988) pp. 125-152.
10 In For insightful critiques of the use of the household as an unit of
analysis in neoclassical developmental economics, see for example, Partha
Dasgupta, An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995 ) pp. 135-268, pp. 305-70; Naila Kaber, Reversed Realities (New York:
Verso, 1994) pp. 95-135; and Caroline O.N. Moser, Gender Planning and
Development (New York: Routeledge, 1993) pp. 15-36. Cf. Daisy Dwyer and Judith
Bruce, eds., A Home Divided: Women and Income in the Third World (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1988).
11 Boserup and other liberal feminists note that development reinforces the
"dual burden" of women's work -- that is, waged labor and continued provision of
unpaid household services -- which also increases gender wage differentials.
Overall. however, liberal minists do not question the economic rationale behind
development; instead, they advocate the integration of women into the
development process by increasing their access to credit, technology and
training. Examples include: Marguerite Berger and Mayra Buvinic, Women's
Ventures: Assistance to the Informal Sector in Latin America (West Hartford:
Kumarian Press, 1989) ; Barbara Rogers, The Domestication of Women:
Discrimination in Developing Societies (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979) ; and
Kate Young, Planning Development with Women (Hong Kong: MacMillan, 1993).
Rogers' book has been particularly influential in identifying the sources of
discrimination against women in development planning.
12 A notable exception is Barbara Wolfe Jancar, Women Under Communism
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978) She posits a "multi-staged
evolution of equality" as a function of regime type (highly authoritarian vs.
pluralistic) and stage of modernization (early vs. late) ; but offers a
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fundamentally liberal modernization conclusion: In pluralistic modernized
societies, "sex-role differentiation gradually disappears," pp. 206-13.
13 For what is considered the origin of liberal feminist theory see John
Stuart Mill, On the Subjection of Women (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1970) pp. 91-3.
Essentially, legal recognition of women's equality is expected to ameliorate
inequality in the household. A more recent discussion is Gay Young, pp. 8-13.
The relationship between modernization and peasant family relationships in
Europe is analyzed in Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family
(New York: Holt. Rinehart, and Winston, 1978). At the early stages of
industrialization, they note that peasant families attempt to retain traditional
roles, but then gradually change with increased exposure to newrexperiences.
14 Socialist feminists extend the Marxist position by highlighting the
patriarchal norms embedded in capitalism. Gita Sen and Maria Mies have pioneered
the global aspect of this approach. See Gita Sen and Caren Grown, Development,
Crises, and Alternative Visions (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1985) i and
Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (London: Zed Books,
1986). Other important contributions include: Lourdes Beneria, ed., Women and
Development: The Sexual Division of Labor in Rural Societies (New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1982); Annette Kuhn and AnnMarie Wolpe, eds., Feminism and
Materialism: Women and Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1978) ; and Jane L. Parpart, ed., Women and Development in Africa: Comparative
Perspectives (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989).
15 Socialist feminists draw this notion from the work of feminist
anthropologists. In particular, see Nancy Chodorow, "Family Structure and
Feminine Personality," and Michelle Rosaldo, "Women, Culture and Society, in
Women, Culture and Society eds. Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1974) pp. 44-66, pp. 14-42.
16 Catharine A. MacKinnon, "Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An
Agenda for Theory," Signs, 7, no. 3 (Spring 1982) p. 527.
17 MacKinnon, p. 328. MacKinnon proposes consciousness raising as the
feminist method. See Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the
State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
18 Although most definitions of "civil society" exclude the household, note
that some would include the "intimate sphere" of the family. For example, see
Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato's Habermasian formulation, Civil Society and
Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
19 For discussions of women in revolutionary China, see Phyllis Andors, The
Unfinished Liberation of Chinese Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1983) pp. 12-28; Elisabeth Croll, Chinese Women Since Mao (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe,
1983) pp. 1-22; Delia Davin, Women-Work, Women and the Party in Revolutionary
China (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) ; Christina Gilmartin, "Gender in the
Formation of a Communist Body Politic," Modern China, 19, no. 3 (July 1993) pp.
299-329; Kay Ann Johnson, Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) ; Marion J. Levy, The Family
Revolution in China (New York: Octagon Press, 1971); Judith Stacey, Patriarchy
and Socialist Revolution in China (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983) ; Roxane Witke and Margery Wolf, eds., Women in Chinese Society (Stanford:
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Stanford University Press, 1975) ; and Marilyn Young, ed., Women in China:
Studies in Social Change and Feminism, Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, no.
15 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1973).
20 Mao recognized the oppression of women as a function of other oppressive
systems of authority in Chinese society: "political authority, clan authority,
theocratic authority, and authority of the husband represent the whole ideology
and institution of feudalism and patriarchy, and are the four great cords that
have bound the Chinese people and in particular the peasants. Socialist
transition would destroy these authority systems. Mao Zedong, "Investigation
into the Peasant Movement in Hunan, in Selected Works of Mao Zedong 1, pp.
46-7, cited in Andors, p. 22.
21 Mao echoed Engels' contention that women must participate in public
production to achieve gender equality. Engels wrote, "The emancipation of
women will be possible when women can take part in production on a large social
scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount
of her time." Engels, The Origin, p. 46.
22 As an organization for developing and implementing party policies relating
to women, the W.F. and its local branches never represented the articulated
interests of women in society. Rather, its mandates were and continue to be
defined from the center as a function of broader goals.
23 Mass campaigns to implement the new marriage law usually followed the land
reform campaigns in the countryside.
24 In the ideal patrilineal society, Confucian mores require women to obey
their husbands and sons, expect women to remain "pure and virtuous, and forbid
widows from remarrying." Kam Loui, Critiques of Confucius in Contemporary
China (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980) p. 9. See also Richard W. Guisso,
"Thunder Over the Lake: The Five Classics and the Perception of Woman in Early
China," " Historical Reflection/Reflexions Historiques, 8, no. 3 (Fall 1981) pp.
47-61; Albert Richard, O'Hara, The Position of Women in Early China (Washington
D.C.: The Catholic University of American Press) p. 260; and Margery Woll, Wamm
and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972).
25 Marimus Johan Meijer, Marriage Law and Policy in the Chinese People's
Republic (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1971) pp. 112-4.
26 Andors, p. 35.
27 In traditional Chinese society, men were entitled to file for divorce
based on the following Seven Conditions: failure to bear sons, adultery, lack of
respect for parents-in-laws, excessive gossiping, stealing, jealousy or disease.
Women had no right to divorce and were expected to comply with the demands of
her husband and his family. In practice, divorce was rare and considered
scandalous. See Ta Chen, Zhongguo Funu Shenghuo Shi (History of the Livelihood
of Chinese Women) (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1937).
28 The translation of the singular possessive pronoun in "seine Arbeit" (his
labor) from German into Mandarin was a gender neutral "ta."
29 The directives, however, did not mention the participation of urban
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women. Andors, p. 40.
30 Renmin Ribao (RMRB, People's Daily) editorial, "Mobilize Women to Join the
Cooperativization Movement, 5 November 1955." pp. 14-17. Collectivization was
formally launched in October 1955.
31 In 1955 W.F. Chair Liu Shaoqi led a brief campaign in urban areas that
glorified housework as the proper domain of women. Davin, p. 66.
32 RMRB editorial, "Safeguard the Health of Women and Children in Rural
Areas, 16 May 1956.
33 Maurice Meisner, Mao's China and After:. A History of the People's Republic
(New York: The Free Press, 1986) p. 146., p. 233.
34 Such a broad attempt at collectivizing domestic services has not occurred
in other socialist countries. Croll, p. 25.
35 Davin, pp. 145-46.
36 Elisabeth Croll, "The Sexual Division of Labor in Rural China, in
Beneria, pp. 228-9; hereafter Croll (1982).
37 New China News Analysis (NCNA), 1 January 1959, cited in Croll (1982) p.
230.
38 People's China 16 March 1950; NCNA, 22 September 1959; NCNA, 31 July 1958.
The Great Leap represented the peak demand for women's work in agriculture.
Furthermore, the reliability of these "official" statistics is questionable.
They probably reflect the percentage of women engaged in part-time and full-time
production.
39 In villages with strong women's federations, women were able to call mass
meetings of the commune to discuss the problem. Although parity in work points
was not achieved, the average wages for women's labor were raised by one or two
points, e.g. from 4.5 to 6.5. RMRM, 9 April 1960. See also, Andors, pp. 57-60.
40 For example, see I. Crook and D. Crook, The First Years of Yangi Commune
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966) pp. 126-9; cited in Croll (1982) p. 234.
41 See William L. Parish and Martin K. Whyte, Village and Family in
Contemporary China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978) p. 202.
42 An insightful collection of articles is Sharon L. Wolchik and Alfred G.
Meyer, Women, State, and Party in Eastern Europe (Durham: Duke University Press,
1985)
43 Jancar, p. 108.
44 Beijing Review (30 April 1969) pp. 41-8.
45 RMRB, 6 March 1972; Beijing Review (19-25 July 1993).
46 During the Cultural Revolution, local women's federations continued to
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play an active role in mobilizing women in rural areas. However, women's issues
were relatively peripheral to official ideology until the Anti-Lin Biao and
Confucius Campaign in 1973. Zhongguo Funu (Women of China) limited its
discussion to general development issues; and the W.F. was even disbanded for
seven years (1966 to 1973) during a political struggle to purge it of
"revisionist" elements. See Elisabeth Croll, "The Movement to Criticize
Confucius and Lin Piao: A Comment on The Women of China" Signs, 2.3 (Spring
1977) pp. 721-6; and Fu Wen, "Doctrine of Confucius and Mencius -- the shackle
that keeps women in bondage," Beijing Review (8 March 1974) pp. 16-8.
47 A variety of responsibility systems exist, ranging from those that
"contract" specific production tasks to small work teams or individual laborers,
to those in which output or land is contracted to households. The dominance of
the latter form has undermined the collective structure.
48 For an empirical study, see Richard E. Barrett, William P. Bridges, Moshe
Semyonov, and Xiaoyuan Gao, "Female Labor Force Participation in Urban and Rural
China," Rural Sociology, 56, no. 1 (Spring 1991) pp. 1-21. The government claims
that nearly one-third of the specialized households are headed by women and 42
percent of the 85 million rural work force in township enterprises are women.
Committee on Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), The Status
of Women in China, 11th sess., CEDAW, Vienna, Austria, 23 January 1993, p. 26;
and WIN News, Autumn 1992, p. 56. Surveys conducted in the 1920s and 1930s
indicate that only one to eight percent of all rural households were headed by
women. See Ta Chen and Penwen Sun, "Population," in Chinese Economic Yearbook,
2nd ed. (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1935) pp. 8-12, cited in Parish and Whyte,
nt. 9, p. 135. Based on a small sample (n=131) in the Guangdong province, Parish
and Whyte estimate that in 1973 fifteen percent of rural households were headed
by women.
49 Croll (1983), p. 28; and Judy Polumbaum, "China: Confucian Tradition Meets
the Market Economy," Ms., 3, no. 2 (Sept./Oct. 1992) pp. 12-13.
50 This is consistent with Boserup's findings. For a case of how the
confinement of peasant women to small-scale agriculture may paradoxically
increase their confidence and foster organization into labor gangs, see Gillian
Hart, "Engendering Everyday Resistance: Gender, Patronage and Production
Politics in Rural Malaysia." Journal of Peasant Studies, 19, no. 1 (October
1991) pp. 93-121. Hart finds that men are more subservient to their employers
than women due to their exposure to political patronage relations and inability
to fulfill societal standards of male household responsibilities, p. 114.
51 Croll (1983), pp. 31-2.
52 For sample success stories, see Huang Wei, "Rural Women and Reform,"
Beijing Review (6 December 1992) pp. 21-2; "Rural Women Come Into Their Own,"
Beijing Review (9 March 1987) pp. 24-6; "Rural Women Gain Economic Status,"
Beijing Review ( 15 October 1984) pp. 9-10; Xuan Fenghua and Chen Yao, "Jiangxi
Women Contribute to Rural Economy," Xinhua, 13 August 1990, p. 1; "Status of
Rural Women Improves With Reforms," Xinhua, 6 November 1987, in FBIS-CHI-87-215,
p. 20. In an empirical study, Marshall Johnson, William L. Parish and Elizabeth
Lin conclude that foreign market exposure had a positive effect on women's
wage-earning opportunities before 1949 and does not adversely affect their
position in the post-Mao era. "Chinese Women, Rural Society, and External
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Markets, Economic Development and Cultural Change, 35, no. 2 (January 1987) pp.
257-78. Dependency theorists would disagree.
53 Survey of the World Broadcasts (SWB), "Sideline Production and Rural
Income, 24 June 1981, p. Al, cited in Croll (1983), nt. 20.
54 SWB, 26 September 1980, ibid.
55 "Status of Rural Women Improves With Reforms,' Xinhua, 6 November 1987, in
FBIS-CHI-87-215, P. 20.
56 Wu Naito, "Changes in Chinese Women's Social Status," Beijing Review, 34,
no. 52 (31 December to 5 January 1992) pp. 22.-3.
57 During the collective period, Parish and Whyte note that women's work
point contribution to the household did not necessarily correspond with
increases in decision-making authority.
58 Nahid Aslanbeigui and Gale Summerfield, "Impact of the Responsibility
System on Women in Rural China: An Application of Sen's Theory of Entitlements,"
World Development, 17, no. 3 (1989) pp. 343-50. They employ Amartya Sen's theory
of entitlements to illustrate that a woman's controllable income may differ
from her contribution to production inside and outside the household.
59 Croll (1983), p. 36. In their pre-reform study, Parish and Whyte found
that although Hakka women never bound their feet, were traditionally more active
in agriculture, and play a prominent role in cultivating income-generating
private plots, they are less likely than women in non-Hakka villages to manage
family finances; pp. 26, 207, 238.
60 Ann Scott Tyson and James L,. Tyson, "Long Days, Hard Labor for Women Left
on the Farm," Christian Science Monitor, 5 August 1992, p. 10.
61 Previous initiatives to limit population growth occurred in 1953, 1962 and
1971. John S. Aird, "Coercion in Family Planning: Causes, Methods and
Consequences," in U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, China's Economy Looks
Toward the Year 2000, 1 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1986) pp.
184-221; Judith Banister, "Population Policy and Trends in China, 1978-83," The
China Quarterly, 100 (December 1984) pp. 717-22; United Nations Fund for
Population Activities (UNFPA), "Family Planning Policies in the People's
Republic of China," unpublished manuscript, 1984; Tyrene White, "Implementing
the 'One-Child-per-Couple' Population Program in Rural China: National Goals and
Local Politics," in Policy Implementation in Past-Mao China, ed. David M.
Lampton (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) pp. 284-317.
62 Since China accounts for 22 percent of the world's population with only
7.3 percent of its land, and only 15 percent of the land is arable, Deng's
diagnosis in 1979 was not unreasonable. But the identified solution was too
narrow in focus since the regime failed to address the fact that due to
environmental mismanagement, an additional third of China's farmland would
become unarable over the next generation. See Vaclav Smil, The Bad Earth:
Environmental Degradation in China (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1983).
63 Total family income is reduced by five to ten percent over period of ten
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to sixteen years after birth. For the third or fourth child, the levy can be as
high as fifteen to twenty percent of couple's income.
64 Andors, p. 52; Croll (1983), p. 90.
65 Croll (1983), p. 89.
66 Jeff Somer, "China Denies Reports of Forced Abortions," Newsday, 4 April
1985, p. 15; Sheryl WuDunn, "China, With Ever More to Feed, Pushes Anew for
Small Families," New York Times, 16 June 1991, p. A1.
67 Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, "Infanticide Continues in Rural China,"
Washington Post, 24 October 1991, p. B23. Nicholas Kristof, "A Mystery from
China's Census: Where Have Young Girls Gone?" New York Times, 17 June 1991, p.
A1; "The Lost Girls," The Economist, 328 (18 September 1993) p. 38. For a
dissenting view based on a study of the minorities' fertility patterns, see
Barbara A. Anderson and Brian D. Silver, "Ethnic Differences in Fertility and
Sex Ratios at Birth in China: Evidence from Xinjiang," Population Studies, 49,
no. 2 (July 1995) pp. 221-6.
68 "China: Where are the Girl Babies?" New York Times, 21 July 1993 in
Women's International Network News (WIN News) (Autumn 1993) p. 57. One source
estimates that sex ratios may be as high as 130 or 140 males to 100 females in
rural areas. Anna Maria Gillis, "Sex Selection and Demographics," BioScience,
45, no. 6 (June 1995) pp. 384-5.
69 Sex ratios from the 1953, 1964 and 1982 censuses are 107.0, 106.2 and
107.1. Yi, et. al., p. 283.
70 Davin (1987), p. 118. An example of man who abused his wife after she bore
a daughter, but reformed his ways after learning that he contributed to the sex
of the child, is Wu Jinbo, "Wo cuo guai le ta (I mistakenly blame her),
Zhongguo Funu 10 October 1982, p. 42, cited in Emily Honig and Gail Hershatter,
Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1988) pp. 204-5. Davin (1987), p. 118; Honig and Hershatter, p. 294; and
Wolf (1985), p. 258.
71 Davin (1987), p. 118; Honig and Hershatter, p. 294; and Wolf (1985), P.
258.
72 While overall national birth rates have declined, they have actually
increased in rural areas. For example, in 1981 over 90 percent of the 20.7
million births were from rural areas; and birth rates are generally 50 percent
higher in rural than in urban areas. Burns and Rosen, p. 337 and nt. 1. For a
cross-cultural study of Asian social structure, see Wen-hui Tsai, ed., "Special
Issue: Women, Children and Elderly in Asia," American Asian Review, 11 (Fall
1993) pp. 1-151.
73 In attempting to enforce the family planning policy, some rural women
cadres face threats of abuse or assault. Su Suining, "There Are Many Causes of
Strained Relations Between Cadres and Masses in the Rural Areas," Nongmin Ribao,
26 September 1988, p. 1, cited in White, p. 61.
74 White, p. 63. One case study of Hebei finds that if the daughter-only
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stipulation for second births were lifted, only 20 percent of the couples would
actually have another child. Jiali Li, "China's One-Child Policy: A Case Study
of Hebei Province, 1979-88," Population and Development Review, 21, no. 3
(September 1995) pp. 563-85.
For general discussions of peasant moral economy and resistance,
respectively, see James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1976) and Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant
Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). See also, Eric Hobsbaum,
"Peasants and Politics," Journal of Peasant Studies, 1, no. 1 (1973) p. 12,
cited in Scott, "Resistance Without Protest and Without Organization: Peasant
Opposition to the Islamic Zakal and the Christian Tithe," Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 29. no. 3 (July 1987) p. ,424. The role of culture in
peasant response is given more weight in Edward Friedman, Backward Toward
Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974) part 3, "Rural
Revolution," pp. 115-64, as noted in Friedman, "Maoism and the Liberation of the
Poor (Review Article), World Politics, 39, no. 3 (April 1987) p. 417, nt. 24.
75 Along with the family planning policy, this issue has attracted much
attention in the Western press. Louise Branson, "Sales of Women and Children
Recurring in Chinese Provinces," San Francisco Chronicle, 21 August 1989, P.
A14; Huang Wei, "Crackdown on Abduction of Women and Children" Beijing Review,
34, no. 30 (29 July to 4 August, 1991) pp. 24-7.
76 Huang Wei, "Female Participation in Government," Beijing Review, 36, no.
29 (19-25 July 1993) p. 26.
77 Huang notes that 70 percent of the women cadres at the national level have
at least college degrees; ibid. See also Zhang Zhaowen, "Eliminating Female
Illiteracy in Rural China," Beijing Review, 33, no. 33 (13-19 August 1990) p.
33; and "Women Enjoy 'Ever Higher Positions' in Politics," Xinhua,
FBIS-CHI-93-043, 8 March 1993. For an empirical study of female education
attainment during the 1952 to 1982 period, see William Lavely, Xiao Zhenyu, Li
Bohua, and Ronald Freedman, "The Rise in Female Education in China: National and
Regional Patterns," The China Quarterly, 121 (March 1990) pp. 61-93. One of
their findings is that secondary school attainment in rural areas has declined
by roughly 25 percent during the post-Mao period.
78 Steven Mufson, "For Many Chinese Women Tradition Means Prejudice and
Abuse, Washington Post, 21 August 1995, p. 1. The W.F. holds programs in the
countryside to reduce female illiteracy and increase technical knowledge. See
Huang Wei, "Rural Women and Reform,' " Beijing Review, 35, no. 48 (30 November to
6 December 1992) pp. 21-2; and Zhang, p.33.
79 CEDAW, p. 56.
80 Huang Qizao, Sichuan province NPC deputy, vice president and first member
of the Secretariat of the W.F., notes, "China is still in its initial stage of
socialism and still has a long way to go before realizing the goal of sexual
equality, the securement of women's rights and interests and giving full play to
women's role in society." WIN News (Winter 1993), p. 53.
81 For example, as a signator of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of
All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, the PRC is required to submit
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comprehensive status reports every four years. In 1992 China finally submitted a
report which was five years late. Furthermore, in September 1990, the W.F. and
the State Statistical Bureau jointly surveyed over 40,000 men and women in 21
provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities to determine social attitudes
towards women, Washington Post, 21 June 1942, p. 1; Sheila Tefft, "Abduction of
Women and Children Rises in China," Christian Science Monitor, 24 May 1994, p.
1; Sheryl WuDunn, "China Cracking Down on Sale of Women as Wives, New York
Times, 3 December 1989, p. A21. Following the 1989 Tiananmen Square
demonstrations, a campaign was launched against the "six evils" of prostitution,
pornography, the sale of women and children, narcotics, gambling and
profiteering from superstition. Nicholas D. Kristof, "Beijing Hopes to Stamp Out
the 6 Evils, New York Times, 26 November 1989, p. A9. See Wu, pp. 22-3. The
W.F. has also launched a farming technology training campaign. See Wang Rong,
"Plan to Improve Women's Education, Living Standards," China Daily, 24 August
1991, p. 1.
82 Lisa Stearns, "The New Chinese Women's Law, Women's News Digest, (Hong
Kong: Association for the Advancement of Feminism, 1993); and "The Law on the
Protection of Women's Rights and Interests.," Zhongguo Funu ZGFN) (Women of
China) in WIN News (Winter 1993).
83 Jane McCartney, "As International Meeting Nears, China Unveils Plan on
Women," Boston Globe, 8 August 1995, p. 2.
84 Some feminists disagree. For example, Susan Brownmiller writes, "It seems
to me that a country that wiped out the tsetse fly by fiat can put an equal
number of women on the Central Committee," quoted in Batya Weinbaum, The Curious
Courtship of Women's Liberation and Socialism (Boston: South End Press, 1978) p.
7. For discussion of the conceptual and procedural issues surrounding human
rights legislation in China, see R. Randle Edwards, Louis Henkin, Andrew J.
Nathan, Human Rights in Contemporary China (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986).
85 Many China scholars have made this observation. For example, Cheng Li and
David Bachman, "Localism, Elitism, and Immobilism: Elite Formation and Social
Change in Post-Mao China," World Politics, 42, no. 1 (October 1989) pp. 64-94;
David Lampton, ed. (1987) ; Andrew J. Nathan, "China's Path From Communism,"
Journal of Democracy, 4, no. 2 (April 1993) pp. 30-42; Jean 0i, "Fiscal Reform
and the Economic Foundations of Local State Corporatism in China," World
Politics, 45, no. 1 (October 1992) pp. 99-126; Elizabeth J. Perry and Christine
Wong, eds., The Political Economy of Reform in Post-Mao China, (Cambridge:
Harvard Contemporary China Series, No. 2, 1985), part 1.
86 Laurel Kendall has pointed out to me that attempts in other contexts (such
as the Israeli kibbutz system and utopian communities) have generally been
resisted. Nonetheless, I am still inclined to pose the hypothetical scenario
with perhaps the overly optimistic implication that the full application of
Mao-style mass mobilizational tactics might have yielded different results. For
example, during the Cultural Revolution, the party-state did succeed in
inverting the traditional social hierarchy whereby intellectuals and bureaucrats
were relegated to the lowest tier.
87 Jean Oi, State and Peasant in Contemporary China: The Political Economy of
Village Government (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
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88 Beneria discusses the significance of accounting for "use-value" as well
as "exchange-value" production in the economy. Conventional labor force concepts
only measure production for exchange instead of production that involves the
satisfaction of basic human needs. In statistics, "active labor" should include
all workers engaged in use-value as well as exchange-value production, which
includes all activities such as household production and all types of
subsistence production. See "Accounting for Women's Work," pp. 134-9. Boserup
was one of the first WID theorists to point out that statistics on production
and income usually omit "the subsistence activities which are largely women's
work," p.165. Cf. Dasgupta, An Inquiry.
89 Gates traces the commoditization of women back to the Song Dynasty (960 to
1279). Under the petty capitalist mode of production, the patriarchal family
became the primary unit of production, and the male head of the household sold
their female kin into marriage, adoption, slavery or prostitution. Gates argues
that commodization emerged with the new class of neo-Confucian bureaucrats who
emphasized patrilineal family production over that of individual labor. Hill
Gates, "The Commoditization of Chinese Women," Sins, 14 (Summer 1989) pp.
799-832.
90 Low divorce rates in rural China have been attributed to the endurance of
arranged marriages and the payment of bride prices. One study reveals that men
are reluctant to initiate divorce because they fear the loss of their bride
price "investment." See Cailian Liao and Tim B. Heaton, "Divorce Trends and
Differentials in China," Journal of Comparative Family Studies, 23, no. 3
(Autumn 1992) pp. 413-29.
91 The issue of party recruitment of youths for the Communist Youth League
under the HRS has been raised in general but not for women. For example, in a
letter to the Zhongo Qingnian (China Youth) paper, Wang Baochang et. al. of
Sichuan writes: "With the overall contracting system being implemented, the
young people are confined to the small world of a family or a household,
calculating how to increase the family income and earn a greater bonus for
overfulfillment of production quotas. In this way, how can we examine and
determine whether a youth has a high degree of political awareness and possesses
the collectivist spirit of devoting himself to the interests of the public?" See
"Shixing Zerenzhihou, Zenyang Zhangwo Rutuan Biaozhun?" Zhongguo Qingnian, 16,
26 August 1981, p. 21 in Chinese Education, 18, no. 1 (Spring 1985) pp. 10-12.
92 ZGFN, 1 February 1958, in Andors, p. 46.
93 Jean Lock argues that political ideology in post-1949 China has succeeded
in eliminating disparities in gender role expectations. But she relies solely on
official documents and literary references to support her position. "The Effect
of Ideology in Gender Role Definition: China as a Case Study," Journal of Asian
and African Studies, 24, no. 3 to 4 (1989) pp. 228-38. For an analysis of PRC
legislation which institutionalize discrimination against women, see Ann D.
Jordan, "Women's Rights in the PRC: Patriarchal Wine Poured From a Socialist
Bottle," Journal of Chinese Law, 8 (Spring 1994) pp. 47-104.
94 They reason that costs are suppressed for the "reproduction of labor
power" and for marketable consumer commodities. Mies, p. 184. From an economic
perspective, however, is it debatable whether the long-term interests of
TM
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capitalist development are served by excluding domestic services from
marketization. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore the issue
in detail, a capitalist case could be made for the industrialization of domestic
services which is apparent to a certain degree in advanced industrialized
countries.
95 For feminist critiques of Marx-Engels theory, see Heidi I. Harmann, "The
Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union," in
Women and Revolution, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Allison
M. Jaggar, "Problems for the Marxist Conception of Human Nature," in Feminist
Politics and Human Nature (Sussex: The Harvester Press Ltd., 1983) pp. 69-82;
and Mackinnon, pp. 13-36.
96 Xinhua News Agency reports that there are over one million self-employed
women in the rural areas of Shanxi Province. FBIS-CHI-93-043, 8 March 1993.
97 In September 1992, Nina Nayar (Acting Asia Regional Coordinator of
Women's World Banking, WWB) and I addressed two Chinese delegations at the
United Nations and WWB, respectively, regarding the prospects for establishing
links between women-led microlending institutions in China and the global WWB
network. Local interest in such initiatives was seen in my subsequent field
research visits in 1994 and 1995, and perhaps enhanced by WWB's role in the 1995
U.N. Conference on Women and NGO Forum.
98 At the grassroots level, rural credit programs noted for their reach and
impact on women include Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, Kupedes in Indonesia and
SEWA (Self-Employed Women's Association) Bank in India. Such indigenous,
non-governmental organizations have enabled poor, often illiterate female
entrepreneurs to expand their businesses beyond subsistence levels. For an
overview of leading NGOs in this area, see WWB, "Best Practice in Finanical
Services to Microentreprenuers, What Works, 4, no. 2 (April 1994) pp. 1-27, and
1995 case studies produced jointly by the International Coalition on Women and
Credit and WWB.
99 In this regard, the pairing of China and Taiwan might serve as a
particularly compelling study. Their appartently similar cultural starting
points and contrasting political and economic experiences would be conducive to
a range of synchronic and diachronic comparisons. Moreover, ethnographies from
one of the countries are often employed to shed light on the other.
GRAPHIC: Charts; References
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
JOURNAL-CODE: PJIA
AVAILABILITY: Full text online. Photocopy available from ABI/INFORM
ABI-ACC-NO: 01296820
LOAD-DATE: October 14, 1996
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WORKING
Steven A. Cohen
WOMEN
02/11/97 05:17:56 PM
Record Type:
Record
2/19/97
To:
Alison Muscatine/WHO/EOP
CC:
Subject: Mrs. Clinton's remarks at Working Women Mag. luncheon
Forwarded by Steven A. Cohen/WHO/EOP on 02/11/97 05:15 PM
SUNTUM M @ A1
02/11/97 05:08:00 PM
Record Type:
Record
To:
Steven A. Cohen
cc:
Subject: Mrs. Clinton's remarks at Working Women Mag. luncheon
(Names spelled phonetically.)
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
February 10, 1997
REMARKS BY THE FIRST LADY
AT LUNCHEON FOR WORKING MOTHERS MAGAZINE
The East Room
12:45 P.M. EST
MRS. CLINTON: I want to welcome all of you and tell you
how pleased we are to have you here. There will be a program after
lunch, but for now, just enjoy the lunch and have a chance to talk
with each other. And I'm so grateful for this opportunity to have
you all here. (Applause.)
Well, thank you again for joining us for this luncheon.
I particularly want to thank those who are responsible for us being
able to have this time together. Working Mothers Magazine has been a
very important source of information, support, comfort for many
working mothers, and you'll hear in a little while from the editor in
chief, Judson Colbrath And I wanted to also introduce and thank
Jay McDonald who is the CEO of McDonald Communications which owns
Working Mothers and Working Women and Ms Magazine. And their
deciding to honor women who work both in the home and outside the
home has been a real breakthrough, and we're delighted that so many
of the honorees could join us.
I also want to thank Betsy Myers, of the White House
Office on Women and Women's Affairs, for helping to organize this.
And I also want to thank the magazine for working so closely with
Betsy and others in the administration on a number of issues that are
important, we think, to working parents. Many of those initiatives
have been supported by this magazine, including advocating for family
friendly workplaces, and the Family and Medical Leave Act, and
increased access to affordable and quality child care, and retirement
equity, and breaking the glass ceiling, and issues as were discussing
at our table concerning children's education and development and
health and well-being.
So this is a meeting of minds of many people who have
worked on issues of importance to parents, with particular attention
to the challenges faced by women who work in the home and outside the
home.
I have, in the last four years, had the privilege of
speaking with many working mothers around the country -- in Atlanta,
and Santa Fe, and Boston, and Chicago, and Pittsburgh, and Los Vegas,
and Denver, and many other cities. Their names are not public, as
many of you are because of your success and position in the world of
work, but they often balance gracefully the challenges of their daily
duties. And they have been and have become a driving force in our
country, politically, socially, and economically, as we struggle to
determine how we're going to promote stronger families, encourage
productivity in the workplace, and achieve a greater sense of balance
in our personal and collective lives.
I invited some of the women who I have met around the
country to join us in this luncheon because each of them represents
millions of other women -- women who won't be invited to the White
House, but who I wish could be because I want all women, particularly
working women who feel at the end of the day, as I often used to feel
and still do, that I just can't get anything else done. And yet,
keep going and get up and do it again. And I'd like to just take a
minute to introduce these women whom I've invited.
Tina Garcia is a properties management company owner in
Virginia. I met her at a discussion in Silver Spring. She grew up
on welfare, was a single mother for eight years. She couldn't afford
child care, so she improvised by literally working around the school
schedule and bringing her children to work when school was out. She
also did something that I hope more and more women will be encouraged
to do and that we help them do, and that is she shared duties with
another single mother who didn't drive. She created a village; she
created a mutually supportive network. Tina would leave her children
with that woman and in return run errands and do grocery shopping for
her. Despite all of the obstacles that she faced, she was determined
to succeed, and she has.
And Tina, will you just stand up for a minute and let me
introduce you to our audience. (Applause.)
I have thought a lot about the next woman whom I met
also in Silver Spring. Pamela Kieger* is a single mother of three.
She lives in Maryland. She holds two jobs, one as an administrative
assistant during the day, and the second working as a caterer several
nights a week. She wants her children to have the chance to go to
college, but most of her salary goes to rent and child care costs.
If it were not for her teenage daughter who looks after the two
younger children while Pam works at night, she doesn't know what she
would do.
She also regrets very much that her work schedule
prevents her from attending school functions or even meeting with her
children's teachers. She doesn't get time off to do tasks like that.
And she, I remember, said, you know, parents should have the option
of influencing their children in school, but I don't have that.
I think often about Pam. I saw her today when she came
to this lunch and asked her how her children were doing, particularly
that teenage daughter who does so much to help her. And she told me
they were doing well and she's hoping that they'll be able to scrape
the money together so that her daughter can go to college as she
deserves to do.
Pamela, where are you? Will you stand up? (Applause.)
Beatrice Rudder* broke the glass ceiling when she became
the first woman firefighter in the District of Columbia, and she was
recently promoted to battalion chief. She's also pursuing a master's
degree and she spends every minute that she can with her eight year
old son. She worries, though, as many of us do, about being in the
sandwich generation, and she will soon be facing the costs of college
tuition for her son, as well as helping to care for her aging
parents.
When we talk about working mothers it's important, I
think, for all of us in our mind not just to think about the children
we care for, but also about our older parents as well. And,
Beatrice, will you stand, please? (Applause.)
Now, Lisa Thomas is somebody I met in Pittsburgh, and
she drove all the way to be here today. She got time off from work.
She's a single mother of four children, and she came up with an
innovative way to care for her own children, by working as a teacher
at a child care center that gives her a discount. She earns $6 an
hour, works five days a week, relies on the state of Pennsylvania to
help her cover the costs of her children's health care, dental costs,
and provide food stamps for them. Her health care benefits for her,
personally, are provided through her employer.
And I think it's important for all of us as we change
the way our government works to keep not just the abstract statistics
in mind, but the real people. Lisa is working as hard as she knows
how to work and is doing the best she can for her children and she
needs to know that there are those of us who want her to succeed and
want her children to succeed.
So, Lisa, would you stand, too? (Applause.)
You know, the concerns of Tina and Pam and Beatrice and
Lisa are the same all over our country -- how do we get enough time,
how do we deal with the challenges that we face in the workplace, how
do we make sure that women are paid what they deserve to be paid.
The statistics are still pretty daunting -- that four out of five
Americans women work full-time, many out of economic necessity, and
nearly 75 percent of working women earn less than $25,000 a year.
Women still earn about 72 cents to a man's dollar, and even less as
they age.
Child care can cost between $4,000 and $5,000 a year.
That means, for a single mother working on the minimum wage, nearly
half of her annual income will be taken up by child care. And 10
million children still lack health insurance.
Now, these issues that are talked about in Working
Mothers Magazine and talked about among all of us are real issues on
people's minds and need to be part of our political debate. Some of
you may recall that during the last presidential campaign some of
these issues were described by commentators as the feminization of
politics. Well, that's an unfortunate term, as I have said before,
because after all, I think most fathers also worry about whether
their children are in safe, dependable, affordable child care. Most
men, as well as women, want to be able to take time off when a family
member is gravely ill. And most sons want to ensure that their
elderly parents have health care coverage in the later stages of
their own life.
Instead of the feminization of politics, I prefer to
think of this phenomenon as the humanization of politics. And what
we have seen being played out in the political arena is what we have
seen being played out in our own lives. The gender gap, which we
heard a lot about, is simply a measure of how women who are, after
all, experts on the hazards and vicissitudes of life, vote their
self-interest and their values.
So I think that we should begin to value the concerns
that we bring not only to the public arena, but the marketplace as
well, and start thinking about how to create the balance in our lives
and in our society that will enable working mothers, such as the ones
we honor today and the millions who will never be honored, to feel
that they can succeed both at home and at work.
For those of you who are in politics and cover politics,
we've always heard about real politic, which describes the balance of
power among nations. But I think what we're hearing about now is
real life politic, how do we create the right balance in our own
lives and in our larger collective life. And regardless of political
affiliation or economic standing, we all have a stake in making sure
that balance works, so that women are able to make the choices that
are right for them at the various stages of their life.
We honor some women today who have clearly shown that
they know how to strike that balance, but behind every smile you will
see you can imagine there's been a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of
juggling, a lot of challenges that have been balanced as best as any
of us could.
And also, I wanted to be sure to bring the four women
who I highlighted today because those of us in this room, and
particularly those of us being honored, are very lucky, indeed. We
have had supportive families, good educations, being in the right
place at the right time, a lot of hard work, and can afford many of
the aids that enable us to keep some sane balance in our own lives.
That is not the case for millions and millions of other women.
So as we honor those who will be here today, I think if
we really want to do working mothers honor we should think about ways
we can help every woman be successful at home and at work.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
END
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
July 26, 1995
REMARKS BY FIRST LADY HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
AT THE WOMEN'S FOUNDATION OF COLORADO
Denver, Colorado
MRS. CLINTON: Thank you. Thank you all very much. Thank
you for that warm welcome and thank you for filling this hall on
behalf of yourselves and other women throughout Colorado and the
United States who will be inspired and helped because there was a
conference today that talked about the issues confronting women
in our society. I'm pleased to be here with my friend, your
governor. I appreciate greatly the introduction that your
friend, the ambassador, gave me. And I want to thank all who are
associated with this extraordinary foundation that is, I believe,
the only statewide women's foundation in the entire country. And
for that Colorado should be very proud and you should applaud
yourselves. (Applause.)
I started my visit today by going to Mi Casa, an
organization that the Foundation has helped in the past. One
dedicated to providing women with the tools they need to become
self-sufficient, self-respecting. To build a future for
themselves, their families, and their communities. I was, as I
often am, struck by the courage of the women I met. The women
who were running the project, who every day come to work inspired
by the belief that they can help others make a difference. And
the women who came. Women currently on welfare who see a better
future for themselves and their children, but need help and
support in order to realize that. Women who are on the verge of
starting their own businesses or who already have. And proudly
tell you what they have accomplished and admit that they still
have a long way to go.
Success stories that are being shared because women who have
been successful as many in this hall are, have found time to come
share their experience. I had heard about Mi Casa for a long
time, but I had never had the opportunity to visit before. And I
though it was only fitting to visit a project that reflected what
this Foundation and this Conference is all about before I came to
speak with you this afternoon.
This summit, as it is being called, has great potential.
Not only to equip individual women with the tools they need, but
2
to inspire all of us to reach out and provide opportunities for
those who might themselves not even think to ask. I looked at
the program and I've looked at what's ahead for you this
afternoon. And I think there is an extraordinary opportunity for
women this afternoon to participate by sharing their experiences,
by asking what they can do, by asking for help.
That was one of the ideas that came out this morning. How
often women are willing to say to one another if they are given
the chance, I need help. How can you help me? I think in a very
down-to-earth way that's what this summit is about. And I look
forward to reading the report of the summit and am pleased that
it will be shared with decision makers here in Denver and in
Washington.
There are few issues more important than economic security.
And if you are able to provide economic security for women, you
are more likely to insure that families and communities will also
be economically secure. That is something we have learned now
all over the world. During my visit to South Asia, I saw
programs that brought women together, like Mi Casa, gave them the
belief they were able to do for themselves, gave them the
confidence and the opportunity to go out and earn income for
themselves and their families, and watched as those women brought
their entire families economically along with them.
I met a. women in a small dusty village in Bangladesh, who
was a member of a borrowing group called the Grameen Bank, which
lends money to the poorest of the poor in that poor country. The
loans are maybe 10, 25, 50 dollars. But each of those loans
represents a. statement, a value, as to how that women who
receives that loan thinks of herself and what she can do for her
family. And one women whom I met said to me, she had gotten her
first loan and she had bought a milk cow. She got her second
loan and she bought her second milk COW. And she got her third
loan and she bought a rickshaw for her husband so he too could be
independent and no longer work for someone else.
It may look from so far away that those tiny steps are not
related to what happens here in Denver or Colorado. But on a
different scale that is what I saw at Mi Casa and that is what
this foundation is doing and that is what this summit is about.
It may be a milk COW in Bangladesh and it may be a computer to do
desk top publishing in Denver. But each is a means to enable a
women to pursue her own hopes and dreams.
Our economy is strong. Our economy is creating jobs. We
have seen good, positive growth and change. And yet, despite
what has occurred that we can be pleased about, we know that
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there are many men and women in America today who are working
very hard and not feeling and not actually seeing the results of
that hard work in increased income and a higher standard of
living for themselves and their families. That is one of our
biggest problems right now. How do we make sure that the energy,
the entrepreneurialism, the excitement that you find in groups of
women like the ones here can be replicated and spread throughout
our society. How do we make sure that all women who are willing
to work, willing to take responsibility, will be able to share in
the results of that kind of hard work?
We began looking for answers as the foundation here has
about what is happening in womens' lives by commissioning a study
through the labor department called Working Women Count. It was
a survey of two hundred and fifty thousand working women who were
asked questions about their income and what was happening at
their work places and how they were trying to create a life that
included home responsibilities and those outside the home. We
learned as all of us in this room know firsthand about the
challenges facing women who are attempting to create a better
opportunity for themselves and gain a measure of economic
security.
I have met with hundreds and hundreds of the women like
those I met with at Mi Casa and those I met with around the
country to talk about what economic security means to them. I'll
never forget talking with a young woman in Santa Fe, a divorced
mother of five children who has received no child support. Who
did not want to be on welfare, but who could not find a
traditional job that would enable her to pay for all of the
services that she needed for her children. So she sought a
position in an area she'd always dreamed of working. She wanted
to be a fire fighter. It was a long struggle and she became one
of only two women on the fire department's roster. But even with
her salary there, she found it difficult to support her children,
provide health insurance for them and do what is necessary to
keep a family together. So she took another, full-time job. So
there she was, working two full-time jobs, finding it difficult
to keep her children going and wondering what else she was
expected to do.
Wherever I go, I find the same concerns. I hear about the
needs women have. The needs to be respected on their jobs. To
be able to feel that they are taking good care of their children
if they leave them in child care. The need for flexible
schedules. The need for capital to start those small businesses
they dream about. Women are striving for economic security but
too often the tools they need are not readily available. What I
hope will come out of your summit is a realistic depiction of
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both the opportunities and the challenges confronting women.
What does it mean for us as a society that approximately sixty
percent of women with children under six are in the workforce
today. But a recently completed study about available child care
deplored the conditions available in many child care centers.
What does it mean at ninety-nine percent of women in the
United States will work for pay at some point in their lives.
But that time may come at a different point during the life
cycle. Some women may work in their twenties, and not in their
thirties or forties. Some may not work until their children are
grown and gone and want to enter the work force in their forties
or fifties, only to be met by disbelief and discrimination
because of their age.
How do we make the work world understand the full capacity
and potential of women? It is not just young women who have a
lot to contribute and should be given the opportunity. Women at
all ages of our lives should be respected for what we can bring
as well to the world of work. (Applause.) That means we have to
be more respectful of the choices women make. I don't know about
you, but I personally am very tired of seeing women pitted one
against the other. (Applause.) Seeing women who make the choice
to be full-time mothers pitted against women who have a full-time
career and either do not marry or do not have children. And
being pitted against women who are attempting to compose a life
that consists of both family and children and work. We ought to
stop pointing fingers at one another and hold out helping hands
so that every responsible choice a women makes can be supported.
(Applause.)
We have to be honest and realistic about the obstacles women
face when they make certain choices. It is not easy in many
homes in our country for a family with two working parents to
make the choice that one of those parents, usually the mother,
will take time off from work in order to care for young children.
Given the pressures for material possessions. Given some of the
social pressures that exist, that is not an easy choice. We
should do more to support women and men who wish to make that
choice. And we should do more to provide support through
governmental regulations and business policy to support leave
programs and flex time so that women do not have to make a very
difficult choice between their children and their work
responsibilities.
Before I came up here, I was handed a note from a women who
said, I am writing this note to let you know of something very
special that your husband, namely my husband, did for me. Two
months ago my husband died of congestive heart failure after a
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prolonged period of several years of illness. Because your
husband signed into law the Family Medical Leave Act I was able
to transport my husband to doctor appointments and hospital
visits and to keep my job and bring comfort to my husband at the
end of his life. We should do more to enable women to be good
mothers, good wives, and good caretakers if those are the
responsible choices they make. (Applause.) And both business
and government should be partners in that effort.
We also should do more in the work place so that women are
given the opportunities they earn. One of the single biggest
responses we received in the Working Women Count survey was to
hear from women who knew they were still not being paid at the
same level as men doing the same kind of work. They were not
being given the opportunities for promotion and advancement. We
should once and for all begin to treat people in the work place
on the basis of what they can contribute to the business, not on
what gender or what race they happen to be. But that is going to
take some real effort on the part of all of us, beyond
affirmative action. We should start practicing affirmative
thinking and see people as individuals and treat then in
accordance how they behave and how they perform on the job.
And then we come to that very difficult area of how to
support all of these efforts and maintain the kind of economic
security that families deserve to have. We've done a lot in this
country to make sure that older people have economic security at
the end of their work lives. Social security and medicare and
part of a contract that enables older people, particularly older
women, since women, on average, live longer that men, to have
some measure of economic security.
I want to stress how important that is. Because in all of
the talk about Medicare and Social Security it is easy to forget
we are talking about real people. The median annual income for
women sixty-five and over in our country is $8,500. Now stop and
think about that. The average median income. As you walk down
the street, as you leave today and you see women who are over
sixty-five, think to yourself, they are likely living on around
$8,500 a year.
I mention that because it's not only a question of their
economic security. It is also one that affects their children
and their grand-children. This intergenerational compact that we
have entered into have enabled many families to achieve a level
of economic security with the knowledge that their parents and
grandparents would be given the basic needs required towards the
end of their lives.
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We have to view things like health care as an investment in
people that enables them to achieve economic security. As a part
of what we mean when we talk about economic security. This is
the kind of challenge that we are debating now in our country and
there are many good ideas about how to provide the tools that
women and men and girls and boys need. But I think much of what
has to happen must begin inside each of us. As we assume
responsibility for ourselves. It must then expand outward into
the families that we are a part of. In the places where we do
work. In the communities that we live in and help to lead. We
should honestly discuss every one of the challenges confronting
women as they attempt to achieve economic security. Not in an
ideological way because I don't think there are right or left or
conservative or liberal answers for a lot of the challenges we
confront. I believe what is out there waiting for us to discover
are down-to-earth, common-sense, pragmatic solutions to the
problems people face every single day. As they work to keep body
and soul together. To give their families, and particularly
their children, better opportunities. As they work to achieve
their own god-given potential.
All through this country many businesses, many not for
profits, many families and communities have begun to solve a lot
of the problems that are discussed at this summit. We need to
replicate programs like Mi Casa. We need to look at businesses
that have ben creative in providing flex time and emergency child
care. Not just to treat them like their an aberration but to
figure out how we can band together to replicate what they have
provided which enables more people to take advantage of the
opportunities that are out there. For them to achieve economic
security.
This is a movement that is happening throughout the world.
Because we know that if we can only invest more in women, we will
not only lift up families, we will lift up communities and even
countries. I've seen it firsthand. I know that it is an issue
that if we pursue, we can move the agenda forward. Part of the
reason that I am excited about the upcoming Women's Conference
sponsored by the United Nations is because one of its primary
emphases will be on economic security.
We can come from our country and share the success stories,
like the Mi Casa resource center which did receive support from
this Foundation, which has reserved support from our federal
Small Business Administration, has received support from the
state of Colorado. It is one of the many training and counseling
centers that are beginning to make a real impact on the economies
of their communities. And we can learn from others around the
world who are making the same steps to invest in women.
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This upcoming conference in Beijing is an important
opportunity to focus attention on women. It is the chance we
have to come together as you have in this summit. And to share
ideas, to share our successes, to share failures, to learn what
works and what does not. It is important therefore in my opinion
that the United States play a very big leadership role in shaping
the agenda of this conference to focus on the bread and butter
issues. The issues that people get up the morning worrying about
and go to bed still concerned over.
Those who would argue we should boycott the Women's
Conference because the host country has a poor record on human
rights may be well motivated but as Madeline Albright, the chair
of our delegation has suggested, they miss the point. Human
rights cannot be separated from women's rights. Women's rights
to economic opportunity, to fair treatment, to political
participation, should be part of the human rights agenda. Women
do most of the work in the world. They have the responsibility
for raising our children in the world. They are the backbone of
the vast majority of families and communities. Anything we can
do to provide greater economic opportunity for women is a good
investment and the United States should do all that it can to
make sure that barriers to womens' participation are broken down
and that training and credit and political involvement and health
care and education are available to all women.
I hope that this summit's report will be part of what is
considered in Beijing. Certainly many of the issues that are on
the agenda for this summit are exactly what should be looked at
and discussed there. And out of it should come what you are
going to produce: a report in the words of many of the
participants about what is actually going on in the lives of
women today. Not an abstract discussion or an academic treatise.
But what does it mean to try to start a new business. What does
it mean as a women at Mi Casa said today, when your dream for a
new business dies in the parking lot of a bank. What does it
mean if you are a young girl who's dreaming big dreams about your
own future but get no encouragement from anyone close to you?
What does it mean that you have health care needs that you cannot
get met because in our country you have no insurance or in
another country there is no doctor or hospital to access? What
does it mean if you have the right to vote, as we do here, and
are able to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of our
suffrage, but so many women are too busy to exercise their vote?
Too busy to become involved in the basic right of citizenship.
Whereas women in other parts of the world are still denied
suffrage or are so prevented from exercising it, that it's grant
is a farce. What does it mean for all of us to know that
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economic security is not within reach for millions for our fellow
women in America and billions of other women around our globe?
These are questions that don't belong just in the reports
from summits, or just in the platforms from UN conferences.
These are questions that each of us should be asking ourselves --
talking about with our friends -- discussing in our work places,
our churches, everywhere we gather. Because as the Governor
said, economic security is not an end in itself. We all know
more people than we can count that have more economic security
than you or I will see in a lifetime, but don't have a lot of
what else makes life worth living. Yet it is absolutely fair to
say that poverty and stress in the face of economic challenge
render the lives of millions of women difficult, if not
impossible.
So yes, let's work as hard as each of us knows to do what we
can to make it possible for every women in every family to have
enough economic security. That she's able to feel good about her
future and the future she can hold out to her children. Because
it is from that point then, when people at that level of
security, that they can begin worrying about quality of life in
their communities. When they can begin reaching out more to help
each other. And then those of us who are economic secure, let's
stop and ask ourselves what more can we do to make it possible
for more people to feel that they have the choices that we have
taken for granted.
So although the foundation is hosting this summit on
economic security, I see its agenda as going far beyond what is
being discussed today. I see it as a statement about the
potential and promise of women everywhere. And I see it as a
challenge to each of us. That we go forth from this day
determined to do what we can for ourselves. To take
responsibility. To quit, as a friend of mine said, wringing our
hands over our problems so that we can roll up our sleeves and
get to work. And I also see it as part of a great effort to
make, that they we provide those opportunities necessary for
every women willing to seize them. So that all of us can move
towards economic security as a way of moving toward a juster,
more hopeful society for ourselves and our children.
Thank you all very much.
#
FIRST LADY HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
75TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WOMEN'S BUREAU
REMARKS FOR VIDEO
MAY 17, 1995
Welcome and thank you for joining in the 75th anniversary of
the Women's Bureau. I wish I could be there to celebrate with
you in person. I am with you in spirit, as we come together to
recognize the Bureau's long-standing commitment to America's
working women.
In 1920, when the Women's Bureau was created, women did not
yet have the right to vote. They would achieve that a few months
later. Sex discrimination was not only pervasive, it was legal.
There was no minimum wage. There was no Social Security. Many
women worked, literally for pennies, in sweatshops like the
infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where 146 people, most of
them young girls, died in a fire. The concerns of women -- who
constituted less than a fifth of the total workforce -- had no
official place in the federal government.
Today, there are 60 million women in the workforce --
compared with about 8 million in 1920. Today, ninety-nine
percent of women will work for pay at some point in their lives,
in every part of the country and in every job imaginable --
including some jobs that did not even exist seventy-five years
ago.
But some things have not changed. Last year, when this
Administration and the Women's Bureau launched the ground-
breaking Working Women Count! survey, more than a quarter of a
million women responded. They told us that they want the
opportunity and the means to lead full, productive lives. They
want to be treated not as costs to be cut, but as assets to be
developed. And they want to work in an environment that treats
them with dignity, respects the value of their families, and
invests in their skills.
We heard you. Believe me, we heard you! And we know it
isn't always easy for America's working families to stay afloat
in these turbulent times. We also understand that many of the
issues women have shared are problems for working men as well.
Over the years, the Women's Bureau has listened to the
concerns of working women and made it the business of government
to make work better for them. The Bureau was instrumental in the
passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which sets
minimum wage and maximum hours without overtime. It played an
important role in the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963. And
in the process, the Women's Bureau has made work better for all
Americans.
This Administration has a great responsibility to lead
through these times of change. We must continue to work together
to guarantee all working Americans decent pay, support for their
family responsibilities, and fair treatment on the job.
Government cannot do it alone. We must each do our part to
ensure that the work of women -- and of all Americans -- is
valued fully and fairly. It is up to each one of us.
But as the 75th Anniversary celebration of the Women's
Bureau helps remind us, America's working women have a pretty
impressive track record -- and a limitless future.
###
FIRST LADY HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
WORKING WOMEN COUNT!
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
MAY 2, 1995
TALKING POINTS
[Acknowledgements: Karen Nussbaum, Director of Women's Bureau,
DOL; Sharon Campbell, wife of Atlanta mayor Bill Campbell; women
attending discussion]
Thank you. It is an honor to be here, to be able to hear,
first hand, some of the insights you have as you try to
balance the concerns of work and family.
Thanks to the hard work of Secretary Reich, the Department
of Labor and the hundreds of thousands of women who
responded to the "Working Women Count! survey -- we know a
lot more about the experiences of working women. For the
first time, we heard from the real experts -- a quarter of a
million women whose words and opinions about balancing work
and family are being taken seriously at every level of this
Administration.
This survey told us what most of us here already knew, but
others needed to be told: American women accomplish the
close-to-impossible every day, whether it is caring for a
family while running a Fortune 500 company, or holding down
three jobs to make sure children have food on the table and
warm clothes to wear.
This Administration is making every effort to address the
concerns of working women. Already, the President has
appointed more women to government than any previous
President. Forty-four percent of his appointments have been
women, and one-third of those are in senior positions.
This President has made an historic commitment to breast
cancer research and detection, through NIH and the
Department of Defense mammography program. And we are
currently undertaking the largest clinical research study
ever conducted on men or women to explore diseases that so
often afflict older women: heart disease, breast and colon
cancer, and osteoporosis.
This Administration is addressing the problem of domestic
violence on an unprecedented scale.
Under this President, women who own small businesses have
enjoyed greater access to federally guaranteed loans and
technical assistance to start and expand their businesses.
The Working Women Count project, along with all the other
efforts of this Administration on behalf of women, reflects
a profound belief held by this President and this
Administration that women must be viewed as full partners in
the political, economic, and social life of this country.
Some people call issues affecting women "soft" or
tangential. But the reality is that any issue that affects
women also affects children, families, older Americans,
communities, our entire nation.
I hope that we will arrive at a day when there is greater
appreciation of the vital role that women play in every
single facet of our society as they balance the
extraordinary demands they have at home and in their
workplaces.
FIRST LADY HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
WORKING WOMEN COUNT EVENT
THE WHITE HOUSE
APRIL 10, 1995
TRANSCRIPT
Thank you all. I want to welcome you to the White House.
This is a particularly important occasion for this
Administration. I am sorry that the weather did not cooperate
with us staying in the Rose Garden, but the working women of the
White House made a decision and moved us indoors. I am grateful
for that.
This is the room where we've had two previous events about
"Women Count," and I was privileged to participate in both of
those. First, the announcement of the survey and introducing
some of the people who were going to be involved. The second
with the Vice President, receiving the survey results and today,
is an especially important moment because now we're going to be
looking to the future and what kind of recommendations are coming
from this survey.
The survey tells us in no uncertain terms that women are
working more than ever in the home, outside the home - -
balancing two jobs, juggling all of the demands that so many of
us know so well. And, that we, as individuals, as family
members, as citizens, and certainly those in decision-making
positions, have to recognize the challenges and stresses that
women are encountering in the workplace and in the balance
between work and family. It's not only important for women, it's
important for men, children and the larger society.
In a few minutes the President will talk about some of the
initiatives that have been put into place over the last two years
on behalf of all women, but particularly on behalf of working
women. But first let me just mention a few ways in which women
count within this Administration.
We know women count because women have had unprecedented
access to decision-making positions that are important to the
larger society. Appointments of qualified women in the Cabinet
and sub-Cabinet and throughout the government really speak for
itself as the kind of commitment that this Administration has
carried forward on behalf of women.
There has also been a historic commitment to women's health,
something that had not been given the attention that it needed in
the past. And through the efforts we have taken to coordinate
approaches to women's health, we're seeing some breakthroughs in
research that is being done in areas such as breast cancer. And
we are working on a very large women's health initiative that
will make a difference in our lives and in particularly the lives
of our daughters.
The President recently announced the creation of an office
within the Department of Justice to address the problem of
domestic violence. A problem that too often is not given the
attention that it needs and even when it receives attention does
not lead to remedies.
Under this President also, women who own small businesses have
enjoyed greater access to federally guaranteed loans and technical
assistance to start and expand their businesses.
It's very important that, when this President became president,
he felt absolutely committed to carrying through on putting people
first. And putting people first means just that and it certainly
means putting working women first, and paying attention to their
concerns and listening to what we have to say about the challenges we
face.
One last thing that I would like to mention is that the "Working
Women Count" project, along with all the rest of the Administration,
is really just the tip of the iceberg about what our commitment
really needs to be on behalf of women and families in our society.
Some of you may know I recently returned from an extraordinary
trip to South Asia, where I was privileged to meet women of all
different kinds of backgrounds who were working on behalf of
themselves and their families. And I recognized, whether I was
talking to women academics, business leaders, and civic leaders at
the American embassies I visited, or whether I was in villages
talking to women there about their dreams and aspirations.
But there is a common thread that runs through the conversations
I have, whether I am in Washington or Topeka or Sacramento or
Bangladesh or India or Pakistan or Nepal or Sri Lanka. What women
are saying in the "Working Women Count" surveys, of the more than two
hundred and fifty thousand who responded, is that we are all
attempting to make the best possible choices for our own lives, and
the lives of those people we hold dear.
We also want to make a contribution to our larger community.
It's a wonderful opportunity for us to recognize the contributions
that women make every single day, and to stop for a minute, as we
hear these recommendations, and recognize that we can do more to
enable women to make the best possible choices for themselves and
their families.
I hope we will get to a point where we no longer have to do
surveys, or we no longer have to talk about women's issues as a
separate kind of emphasis. That instead we just look at the huge
array of possibilities that human life presents to us and women, and
their role will be accepted as being part of that great effort that
all of us are engaged in to define ourselves, to make identities for
ourselves, to contribute to the next generation.
It's very exciting for us to have a Secretary of Labor that
cares SO deeply about working people, and is so intent upon putting
people first. And anyone who follows the work that Bob Reich does
day in and day out knows that he cares deeply about what happens in
the homes and workplaces of America. And that he is absolutely
committed to doing what he can to make sure working people, and
particularly working women, get the respect they deserve to have for
the contributions they make.
And SO it is my pleasure to introduce Secretary of Labor, Bob
Reich.
###
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
November 30, 1994
NEW YORK WOMENS AGENDA STAR BREAKFAST
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
MRS. CLINTON: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you
and let me add my word of thanks and appreciation to Ellie who
has been an inspiration, a mentor, a role model, and a friend for
a number of years. And I also want to thank her and Randy for
taking me in. I spent the night in that apartment which is
command central for every good cause that crosses the Hudson.
And the two of them together are such a wonderful partnership
and I am so grateful for their friendship and leadership.
I want to thank Gloria Steinem for many things, but
particularly for her fiftieth birthday when she said "this is
what fifty looks like." Although if you were as close to her as
I am you would be wondering "why doesn't forty-seven look like
that. And I am delighted to be here with Matilda and Donna two
women whom I respect greatly who are giving voice and leadership
to important issues. And to Susan and the other leaders from New
York in the business community, this is a remarkable event. And
all of the individual women who both have presented and who have
been the recipients of the Star Award, I want to thank you.
Thank you for what you exemplify. But more than that, you are
here both because of your accomplishments, but also because of
your continuing commitment to other people. And I think that is
one of the real lessons of this agenda and this morning. We need
always to take the time to remember where we came from, where we
are going, and how we will help others along the way. And Ellie
is absolutely right to have spent so many years proving that
women don't bond - another one of those absurd misconceptions
that I think were probably dreamed up in order to prevent us from
bonding, and prevent us from helping each other, and prevent us
from giving hands that will enable others to come along. So I'm
grateful for all of you who have already shown that we not only
bond, but we have the opportunity through that kind of networking
to help other women as well.
I want to say just very briefly, because I know most of you
have to get to work - and being a full time volunteer my schedule
is more flexible than it use to be. I want to say a few words
about the agenda that you are undertaking through this remarkable
coalition. Because after all it is important to recognize
individual women, but it is critical to the futures of all of us,
1
no matter how successful we might be at this moment in time, to
remember the millions and millions of women and men and children
)
who will benefit from the results of your coalescing work around
the issues you have identified.
And I say that in a way to urge you on, and to challenge you
to continue through your own individual efforts, through your own
community and corporate efforts, but through this very exciting
coalition above all.
We recently completed in the administration a remarkable
study that some of you may know about and even have helped with
called "Working Women Count." And what we did was to ask women
what was going on in their lives and what they wanted to see
happen for them and for their futures. We received over two
hundred and fifty thousand questionnaires filled in by women all
over the country. There were very few surprises - but much good
information and reinforcement for what a womens agenda for our
country could truly be.
Women talked about their work lives, their family lives,
what they hoped to see accomplished. They talked in very
specific and almost personal terms about what it was like trying
to get a job, keep a job, go back to work, raise a family. At
the event where we unveiled the final results, three women spoke.
And I sat there listening to them because in a way they
represented all of us at one point or another in our own lives.
The first woman who spoke, spoke about having gone to work mid-
way through her life because her husband had become disabled.
And she needed to go to work in order to get a job that had
health care benefits. And what it meant to her to have her first
job for pay outside the home in many years - and the challenges
she confronted.
The second woman who spoke was in her small company, a
rising star. Anxious to do well, anxious to impress her
superiors, anxious to continue her own pattern of success, but
also beset by guilt about the time away from her family
particularly her child. She talked about what it was like to
come home at the end of a long day knowing that her son needed
her attention for homework, and all of the things that children
require. And having to summon up that extra energy in order to
give to him and her husband what she wanted share with them.
And the third woman who spoke had made her way into a non-
traditional kind of profession. The sort that we still marvel at
when we see women doing. She had been a single parent. She had
raised three daughters alone. And she talked about how all she
really wanted on the job was the respect that she thought she had
earned.
2
As I sat there listening to these three women I thought,
there go all of us at one point or another. And I remembered my
own years of wondering what I would do, wondering how I could do
it, wondering how I could balance. And the words of those women
have stayed with me. And the agenda that you have identified for
1995 is one that is truly an every womans agenda. But it is one
that will take perhaps some redoubled efforts for us to pursue.
The first item, womens health, I cannot say often enough how
important it is that we both recognize the special health needs
of women, which we are finally, finally beginning to do. And
that we assure, we assure means for meeting those needs.
When I first started working on health care reform and was
immersed in reading all that I could, I was stunned to read that
the first clinical trials for breast cancer were carried out on
men. I thought I had misread and I kept reading it thinking, you
know, I'm really loosing it. Finally I picked up the phone and
called some of the people at NIH to find out, yes, indeed it was
true. And that wasn't so very long ago. Well now we do have a
federal commitment to women's health needs and we are pursuing an
aggressive agenda on behalf of those needs. But we also have to
recognize that many women will still go without the care they
deserve to have until we recognize every person should be
entitled to quality health care benefits and that's something
that we should continue to work for.
The second item on the agenda, jobs and the economy, we need
not only to continue as we have done for the last twenty months
to see an increase in jobs, but also to recognize the quality of
jobs, the income that goes with those jobs, the benefits that
those jobs carry -- are particularly important for women because
many women have the responsibility of being the sole breadwinner.
And for many women they are still not able to fulfill their
economic responsibilities to their family because their job
opportunities are either not as available as they need to be or
do not carry the income and benefits that are required. So we
have to continue to think about ways to grow our economy and
provide more incentives for the kind of expansion we have been
experiencing.
And as part of jobs and the economy we need in these next
months to come up with a decent welfare reform proposal that will
move people from welfare to work, but will also recognize that
there are some skills and some training and some child care and
health needs that will also have to be met. Unless we want to
see literally thousand and thousands of people on our streets and
face the unbelievable and absurd idea of putting children into
orphanages because their mothers cannot get a job.
3
The third item on the agenda that you have adopted is the
media. And there are many representatives of the media here -
many in positions of power and importance. And I know how
difficult this issue is to address. I just hope that we begin to
appreciate what we have done to ourselves and what we are doing
to our children with a steady diet of the kind of media images
and information that too often distorts reality - that too often
gives children the idea that their futures are beset by violence
and limitation and dysfunctional images. It is time for those of
us who are adults to go ahead and recognize that television has
become in many ways the most pervasive influence on our families.
And unless we have the personal courage to turn it off and
monitor it - and unless we have some collective will to change
the messages as well as the medium that delivers it, we cannot
ever expect our children to have the kind of understanding of the
world that can come through a more balanced presentation. And I
hope that you will work also for ways of improving the way women
are presented in the media.
The fourth item on the agenda which Susan mentioned is
domestic violence, which we made great progress on with the
passage of the crime bill. Because for the very first time the
federal government recognized domestic violence as a significant
issue that affects women. And there are new ways through the
crime bill, through funding in the crime bill for cities like New
York - and your mayor who has made domestic violence a priority -
to begin to have the tools to address domestic violence. But
this is an issue that we all have to recognize. It goes very
deeply into our culture and our society. And I hope that the
work that you are doing here in New York will serve as an example
so that the rest of the country will organize around this issue
and do what it can to try to address it. And address it in ways
that both men and women can respond positively to. Because it
really is talking about the quality of our relationships
together. It is not merely stopping violence, it is creating a
more open, responsive, respectful, environment in which our most
intimate relationships are played out. And I think this is a
critical issue to continue to address.
Your next issue - city issues. For someone who did not grow
up in New York, who cannot claim all of the wonderful anecdotes
that so many of your speakers who receive Stars can - I love New
York. And I hope that you will take the issues of this city on
and do what you can to work with the administration here and the
private sector here. And I also hope that you will do a little
bit of the kind of missionary work that is needed. We do not
need a split in our country between our urban areas and our
suburban areas. I think that is one of the important problems
that we are going to be facing. Suburbs could not exist without
cities. To often those of us who grew up in suburbs forget that.
4
And I hope those of you who care about and cherish this city will
make it clear to your neighbors that the synergy between the
great centers of culture and business and politics that cities
like New York are, working with the suburbs around it is really
the way to create the kind of opportunity and growth that we need
generally. And that is an issue that I anticipate will become
one that we will have to address. And for those of us who love
your city, I hope you take it on with a great amount of vigor.
And finally, the work you are doing on corporate and non-
profit boards. It is important in both the private and non-
profit sector to have more voices represented and to listen to
those voices. I think that you heard from so many remarkable
women this morning. And knowing that the roles they are playing
will continue to be enhanced in the future but particularly if we
can expand the decision making roles that they and others will be
able to achieve.
These issues on your agenda all for me are related to the
women whom I heard when we heard about the Working Women Count
report. We all are looking for an opportunity to give voice to
the needs and the desires and the aspirations of women. That
voice can be both the individual voice of someone who has already
achieved. But it also needs to be the voice that sometimes isn't
heard, from the women who have the problems and the challenges
that we have either, never faced or we have left behind. And as
we listen to those voices, those voices will begin to make clear
what the choices women have are and what choices they want to
make for themselves. One of the great challenges we still face
is to over come the stereotypes that still grip us. And to know
that choices for women today are such a broad array of
possibilities. And none of us should be stereotyped. None of us
should be put in the position of being told that our choices are
illegitimate. Whether we are full time homemakers, full time
career women, or engaged in the juggling act that so many of us
do, our choices should be respected for what they are. And
knowing that they may very well change in the course of our
lives.
So giving voice to ourselves, giving voice to other women
respecting and enhancing the choices that we all have, and then
finally having a vision for our own lives and the lives of our
friends, our neighbors, and the life of our community. That's
what this great gathering for me is about. Voices, choices, and
vision. And I hope that each one of us will leave here this
morning energized and recommitted with, as someone said, the
passion and purpose of an Ellie Gugenheimer (phonetic), knowing
that we can make a difference. Maybe a difference in the life of
a child, maybe the difference in the life of a co-worker, maybe
the difference in the life of a corporation or a city. But we
5
have such opportunity now. Let's use it and let's make the
agenda for the future one that we all are committed to achieving.
End
6
TPJUNE WPD
Page 1
PRESIDENT CLINTON:
U.S. - CHINA RELATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
June 11, 1998
"China will choose its own destiny. But we can influence its choice by making the right choice ourselves -- working
with China where we can and dealing directly with our differences where we must. Bringing China into the
community of nations rather than trying to shut it out is the best way to advance our own interests.'
President Bill Clinton
June 11, 1998
Today, President Clinton speaks about U.S.-China relations and the goals and objectives of his upcoming trip to
China. The President addresses areas of mutual national interest, including stability in Asia, the prevention of
weapons proliferation, and environmental protection. The President also discusses areas of disagreement between
the two nations, and why continued United States engagement on these issues is crucial.
Building Ties To Strengthen America In The 21st Century. China, already the world's most populous nation, is
also a growing economic giant and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. A stable, open, and
prosperous China that assumes its duty for building a more peaceful world is profoundly in America's interest. The
best way to encourage the emergence of China in this way is to work cooperatively where possible while dealing
forthrightly about differences. The United States and China are working together in key areas, including:
Promoting Stability in Asia. China has played an important stabilizing role in Asia:
Nuclear Testing In India and Pakistan. After India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests, China chaired a
meeting of the permanent members of the UN Security Council to forge a common strategy for moving
these two countries back from the threat of an arms race. China has joined the United States in condemning
these tests, calling on both countries to sign the Comprehensive Test ban Treaty, and encouraging peaceful
dialogue to resolve their differences.
The Korean Peninsula. China has also become a force for peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula. The
Chinese government has helped us convince North Korea to freeze its dangerous nuclear program and
played a constructive role in the Four Party Peace Talks.
Working To Stop The Spread Of Weapons Of Mass Destruction. In the past decade, China has joined the
Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention and the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, each of which contains clear reporting requirements and inspection systems.
China has also agreed to stop assistance to Iran and Pakistan on their nuclear programs. The President will continue
to press China for assistance on non-proliferation, and seek stronger controls on the sale of missiles, missile
technology, dual-use products, and chemical and biological weapons.
Partnership In Combating International Drug Trafficking And Organized Crime. Last month, a special liaison
group that President Clinton created with President Jiang of China brought together leading American and Chinese
law enforcement officials to set up cooperative efforts against organized crime, counterfeiting, and alien smuggling.
Next month, the Drug Enforcement Agency will open its first office in China.
Helping China Develop Environmental Strategies. China faces daunting environmental problems that could
spread beyond its borders -- all of its major bodies of water are polluted, and respitory illness is the number one
health problem for Chinese citizens. One year ago, Vice President Gore launched a dialogue with the China to help
them pursue growth and protection of the environment. The President will explore with President Jiang how
American technology can help improve air quality and bring electricity to more of China's rural residents.
Encouraging Open Global markets. China is one of the fastest growing markets in the world and the United
States exports $13 billion in goods to China. We must continue to press the Chinese governments to open goods,
TPJUNE 11. WPD
Page 2
services, and agricultural markets, work toward Chinese inclusion in the World Trade Organization, and renew
normal trade treatment for China.
Engagement Of China In Areas Of Disagreement Serves America's Interests. By integrating China into the
community of nations and global economy, helping its leadership understand that greater freedom profoundly serves
China's interests, and standing up for our principles, we can most effectively serve the cause of democracy and
human rights in China. Our message remains strong and constant. Do not arrest people for their political beliefs --
release those who are in jail for that reason; resume your dialogue with the Dalai Lama; allow people to worship
when, where and how they choose; recognize that our relationship will not reach its full potential as long as the
Chinese people are denied fundamental human rights. Engagement, not isolation, is the best way to make a
difference on human rights and religious persecution.
Shaping A More Prosperous And Peaceful Future. The more we share our ideas with the world, the more the
world comes to share America's ideals. By continuing to work with China in areas of agreement, and dealing
directly with our differences we help ensure Chinese inclusion in the community of nations.
Elizabeth R. Newman
06/11/98 11:42:28 AM
Record Type:
Record
To:
See the distribution list at the bottom of this message
cc:
Subject: RESEND - NO CHANGES 6-11-98 Remarks on China in the National Interest
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
For Immediate Release
June 11, 1998
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
ON U.S.-CHINA RELATIONS IN THE 21ST CENTURY
National Geographic Society
Washington, D.C.
10:32 A.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, President Fahey. I don't know what to say about starting the
day with this apparition. (Laughter.) But it's probably good practice for our line of work. (Laughter.) I try to
read every issue of the National Geographic, and I will certainly look forward to that one.
Chairman Grosvenor, members of Congress, members of the administration, and members of previous
administrations who are here and others who care about the national security and national interests of the United
States. First let me, once again, thank the National Geographic Society for its hospitality, and for the very
important work that has done for so long now.
As all of you know, I will go to China in two weeks time. It will be the first state visit by an American
President this decade. I'm going because I think it's the right thing to do for our country. Today I want to talk
with you about our relationship with China and how it fits into our broader concerns for the world of the 21st
century and our concerns, in particular, for developments in Asia. That relationship will in large measure help to
determine whether the new century is one of security, peace, and prosperity for the American people.
Let me say that, all of you know the dimensions, but I think it is worth repeating a few of the facts about
China. It is already the world's most populous nation; it will increase by the size of America's current population
every 20 years. It's vast territory borders 15 countries. It has one of the fastest growing economies on Earth. It
holds a permanent seat on the National Security Council of the United Nations. Over the past 25 years, it has
entered a period of profound change, emerging from isolation, turning a closed economy into an engine for
growth, increasing cooperation with the rest of the world, raising the standard of living for hundreds of millions
of its citizens.
The role China chooses to play in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction are encouraging
it in combatting or ignoring international crime and drug trafficking; in protecting or degrading the environment;
in tearing down or building up trade barriers; in respecting or abusing human rights; in resolving difficult
situations in Asia from the Indian subcontinent to the Korean Peninsula or aggravating them. The role China
chooses to play will powerfully shape the next century.
A stable, open, prosperous China that assumes its responsibilities for building a more peaceful world
is clearly and profoundly in our interests. On that point all Americans agree. But as we all know, there is serious
disagreement over how best to encourage the emergence of that kind of China, and how to handle our differences,
especially over human rights, in the meantime.
Some Americans believe we should try to isolate and contain China because of its undemocratic system
and human rights violation, and in order to retard its capacity to become America's next great enemy. Some
believe increased commercial dealings alone will inevitably lead to a more open, more democratic China.
We have chosen a different course that I believe to be both principled and pragmatic: expanding our
areas of cooperation with China while dealing forthrightly with our differences. This policy is supported by our
key democratic allies in Asia, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Thailand, the Philippines. It has recently been
publicly endorsed by a number of distinguished religious leaders, including Reverend Billy Graham and the Dalai
Lama. My trip has been recently supported by political opponents of the current Chinese government, including
most recently, Wang Dan.
There is a reason for this. Seeking to isolate China is clearly unworkable. Even our friends and allies
around the world do not support us -- or would not support us in that. We would succeed instead in isolating
ourselves and our own policy.
Most important, choosing isolation over engagement would not make the world safer. It would make it
more dangerous. It would undermine rather than strengthen our efforts to foster stability in Asia. It would
eliminate, not facilitate cooperation on issues relating to mass destruction. It would hinder, not help the cause of
democracy and human rights in China. It would set back, not step up worldwide efforts to protect the
environment. It would cut off, not open up one of the world's most important markets. It would encourage the
Chinese to turn inward and to act in opposition to our interests and values.
Consider the areas that matter most to America's peace, prosperity and security, and ask yourselves,
would our interests and ideals be better served by advancing our work with, or isolating ourselves from China.
First, think about our interests in a stable Asia, an interest that China shares. The nuclear threats
excuse me -- the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan are a threat to the stability we seek. They risk a terrible
outcome. A miscalculation between two adversaries with large armies would be bad. A miscalculation between
two adversaries with nuclear weapons could be catastrophic. These tests were all the more unfortunate because
they divert precious resources from countries with unlimited potential.
India is a very great nation, soon to be not only the world's most populous democracy, but its most
populous country. It is home to the world's largest middle class already and a remarkable culture that taught the
modern world the power of nonviolence. For 50 years Pakistan has been a vibrant Islamic state, and is today a
robust democracy. It is important for the world to recognize the remarkable contributions both these countries
have made and will continue to make to the community of nations if they can proceed along the path of peace.
It is important for the world to recognize that both India and Pakistan have security concerns that are
legitimate. But it is equally important for India and Pakistan to recognize that developing weapons of mass
destruction is the wrong way to define their greatness, to protect their security, or to advance their concerns.
I believe that we now have a self-defeating, dangerous, and costly course underway. I believe that this
course, if continued, not moderated and ultimately changed, will make both the people of Indian and the people of
Pakistan poorer, not richer, and less, not more, secure. Resolving this requires us to cooperate with China.
Last week, China chaired a meeting of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council to forge a
common strategy for moving India and Pakistan back from the nuclear arms race edge. It has condemned both
countries for conducting nuclear tests. It has joined us in urging them to conduct no more tests, to sign the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, to avoid deploying or testing missiles, to tone down the rhetoric, to work to
resolve their differences including over Kashmir through dialogue. Because of its history with both countries,
China must be a part of any ultimate resolution of this matter.
On the Korean Peninsula, China has become a force for peace and stability, helping us to convince North
Korea to freeze its dangerous nuclear program, playing a constructive role in the four-party peace talks. And
China has been a helpful partner in international efforts to stabilize the Asian financial crisis. In resisting the
temptation to devalue its currency, China has seen that its own interests lie in preventing another round of
competitive devaluations that would have severely damaged prospects for regional recovery. It has also
contributed to the rescue packages for affected economies.
Now, for each of these problems we should ask ourselves, are we better off working with China or
without it? When I travel to China this month, I will work with President Jiang to advance our Asian security
agenda, keeping the pressure on India and Pakistan to curb their nuclear arms race and to commence a dialogue;
using the strength of our economies and our influence to bolster Asian economies battered by the economic crisis;
and discussing steps we can take to advance peace and security on the Korean Peninsula. I will encourage
President Jiang to pursue the cross-strait discussion the PRC recently resumed with Taiwan, and where we have
already seen a reduction in tensions.
Second, stopping the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is clearly one of our most
urgent security challenges. As a nuclear power with increasingly sophisticated industrial and technological
capabilities, China can choose either to be a part of the problem or a part of the solution.
For years, China stood outside the international arms control regime. In the last decade it has joined the
Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological Weapons Convention, and
the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, each with clear rules, reporting requirements and inspection systems. In the
past, China has been a major exporter of sophisticated weapons-related technologies. That is why in virtually all
our high-level contacts with China's leadership, and in my summit meeting with President Jiang last October,
nonproliferation has been high on the agenda.
Had we been trying to isolate China rather than work with it, would China have agreed to stop assistance
to Iran for its nuclear program,? To terminate its assistance to unsafeguarded nuclear facilities such as those in
Pakistan? To tighten its export control system, to sell no more anti-ship cruise missiles to Iran? These vital
decisions were all in our interest, and they clearly were the fruit of our engagement.
I will continue to press China on proliferation. I will seek stronger controls on the sale of missiles,
missile technology, dual-use products, and chemical and biological weapons. I will argue that it is in China's
interest, because the spread of weapons and technologies would increasingly destabilize areas near China's own
borders.
Third, the United States has a profound stake in combatting international organized crime and drug
trafficking. International criminal syndicates threaten to undermine confidence in new but fragile market
democracies. They bilk people out of billions of dollars and bring violence and despair to our schools and
neighborhoods. These are problems from which none of us are isolated and which, as I said at the United Nations
a few days ago, no nation is so big it can fight alone.
With a land mass spanning from Russia in the north to Vietnam and Thailand in the south, from India and
Pakistan in the west to Korea and Japan in the east, China has become a transshipment point for drugs and the
proceeds of illegal activities. Last month a special liaison group that President Jiang and I established brought
together leading Chinese and American law enforcement officials to step up our cooperation against organized
crime, alien smuggling, and counterfeiting.
Next month the Drug Enforcement Agency of the United States will open an office in Beijing. Here,
too, pursuing practical cooperation with China is making a difference for America's future.
Fourth, China and the United States share the same global environment, an interest in preserving it for
this and future generations. China is experiencing an environmental crisis perhaps greater than any other nation in
history at a comparable stage of its development. Every substantial body of water in China is polluted. In many
places, water is in short supply. Respiratory illness is the number one health problem for China's people because
of air pollution.
Early in the next century, China will surpass the United States as the world's largest emitter of
greenhouse gases, which are dangerously warming our planet. This matters profoundly to the American people,
because what comes out of a smokestack or goes into a river in China can do grievous harm beyond its borders.
It is a fool's errand 10 believe that we can deal with our present and future global environmental challenges
without strong cooperation with China.
A year ago, the Vice President launched a dialogue with the Chinese on the environment to help them
pursue growth and protect the environment at the same time. I have to tell you that this is one of the central
challenges we face convincing all developing nations, but especially China, and other very large ones, that it is
actually possible to grow their economies in the 21st century without following the pattern of energy use and
environmental damages that characterize economic growth in this century. And we need all the help we can to
make that case.
In Beijing, I will explore with President Jiang how American clean energy technology can help to
improve air quality and bring electricity to more of China's rural residents. We will discuss innovative tools for
financing clean energy development that were established under the Kyoto climate change agreement.
Fifth, America clearly benefits from an increasingly free, fair and open global trading system. Over the
past six years, trade has generated more than one-third of the remarkable economic growth we have enjoyed. If
we are to continue generating 20 percent of the world's wealth with just four percent of its population, we must
continue to trade with the other 96 percent of the people with whom we share this small planet.
One in every four people is Chinese. And China boasts a growth rate that has averaged 10 percent for
the past 20 years. Over the next 20 years, it is projected that the developing economies will grow at three times
the rate of the already developed economies. It is manifestly, therefore, in our interest to bring the Chinese
people more and more fully into the global trading system to get the benefits and share the responsibilities of
emerging economic prosperity.
Already China is one of the fastest growing markets for our goods and services. As we look into the
next century, it will clearly support hundreds of thousands of jobs all across our country. But access to China's
markets also remains restricted for many of our companies and products. What is the best way to level the
playing field? We could erect trade barriers. We could deny China the normal trading status we give to so many
other countries with whom we have significant disagreements. But that would only penalize our consumers, invite
retaliation from China on $13 billion in United States exports, and create a self-defeating cycle of protectionism
that the world has seen before.
Or we can continue to press China to open its markets it's goods markets, its services markets, its
agricultural markets -- as it engages in sweeping economic reform. We can work toward China's admission to the
WTO on commercially meaningful terms, where it will be subject to international rules of free and fair trade.
And we can renew normal trade treatment for China, as every President has done since 1980, strengthening
instead of undermining our economic relationship.
In each of these crucial areas, working with China is the best way to advance our interests. But we also
know that how China evolves inside its borders will influence how it acts beyond them. We, therefore, have a
profound interest in encouraging China to embrace the ideals upon which our nation was founded and which have
now been universally embraced -- the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; to debate, dissent,
associate and worship without state interference. These ideas are now the birthright of people everywhere, a part
of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are part of the fabric of all truly free societies.
We have a fundamental difference with China's leadership over this. The question we Americans must
answer is not whether we support human rights in China -- surely, all of us do -- but, rather, what is the best way
to advance them. By integrating China into the community of nations and the global economy, helping its
leadership understand that greater freedom profoundly serves China's interests, and standing up for our principles,
we can most effectively serve the cause of democracy and human rights within China.
Over time, the more we bring China into the world the more the world will bring freedom to China.
China's remarkable economic growth is making China more and more dependent on other nations for investment,
for markets, for energy, for ideas. These ties increase the need for the
stronger rule of law, openness, and
accountability. And they carry with them powerful agents of change -- fax machines and photocopiers, computers
and the Internet. Over the past decade the number of mobile phones has jumped from 50,000 to more than 13
million in China, and China is heading from about 400,000 Internet accounts last year to more than 20 million
early in the next century. Already, one in five residents in Beijing has access to satellite transmissions. Some of
the American satellites China sends into space beam CNN and other independent sources of news and ideas into
China.
The licensing of American commercial satellite launches on Chinese rockets was approved by President
Reagan, begun by President Bush, continued under my administration, for the simple reason that the demand for
American satellites far out-strips America's launch capacity, and because others, including Russian and European
nations, can do this job at much less cost.
It is important for every American to understand that there are strict safeguards, including a Department
of Defense plan for each launch, to prevent any assistance to China's missile programs. Licensing these launches
allows us to meet the demand for American satellites and helps people on every continent share ideas,
information, and images, through television, cell phones, and pagers. In the case of China, the policy also
furthers our efforts to stop the spread of missile technology by providing China incentives to observe
nonproliferation agreements. This policy clearly has served our national interests.
Over time, I believe China's leaders must accept freedom's progress because China can only reach its
full potential if its people are free to
reach theirs.
In the Information Age, the wealth of any nation, including China, lies in its people -- in their capacity to
create, to communicate, to innovate. The Chinese people must have the freedom to speak, to publish, to
associate, to worship without fear of reprisal. Only then will China reach its full potential for growth and
greatness.
I have told President Jiang that when it comes to human rights and religious freedom, China remains on
the wrong side of history. Unlike some, I do not believe increased commercial dealings alone will inevitably lead
to greater openness and freedom. We must work to speed history's course. Complacency or silence would run
counter to everything we stand for as Americans. It would deny those fighting for human rights and religious
freedom inside China the outside support that is a source of strength and comfort. Indeed, one of the most
important benefits of our engagement with China is that it gives us an effective means to urge China's leaders
publicly and privately to change course.
Our message remains strong and constant: Do not arrest people for their political beliefs. Release those
who are in jail for that reason. Renounce coercive population control practices. Resume your dialogue with the
Dalai Lama. Allow people to worship when, where, and how they choose. And recognize that our relationship
simply cannot reach its full potential so long as Chinese people are denied fundamental human rights.
In support of that message, we are strengthening Radio Free Asia. We are working with China to
expand the rule of law and civil society programs in China so that rights already on the books there can become
rights in reality.
This principled, pragmatic approach has produced significant results, although still far from enough.
Over the past year, China has released from jail two prominent dissidents -- Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan -- and
Catholic Bishop Zeng. It announced its intention to sign the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,
which will subject China's human rights practices to regular scrutiny by independent international observers.
President Jiang received a delegation of prominent American religious leaders and invited them to visit Tibet.
Seeking to isolate China will not free one more political dissident, will not open one more church to those
who wish to worship, will do nothing to encourage China to live by the laws it has written. Instead, it will limit
our ability to advance human rights and religious and political freedom.
When I travel to China I will take part in an official greeting ceremony in front of the Great Hall of the
People, across from Tiananmen Square. I will do so because that is where the Chinese government receives
visiting heads of state and government, including President Chirac of France and, most recently, Prime Minister
Netanyahu of Israel. Some have suggested I should refuse to take part in this traditional ceremony, that somehow
going there would absolve the Chinese government of its responsibility for the terrible killings at Tiananmen
Square nine years ago, or indicate that America is no longer concerned about such conduct. They are wrong.
Protocol and honoring a nation's traditional practices should not be confused with principle. China's
leaders, as I have repeatedly said, can only move beyond the events of June 1989, when they recognize the reality
that what the government did was wrong. Sooner or later they must do that. And, perhaps even more important,
they must change course on this fundamentally important issue.
In my meetings with President Jiang and other Chinese leaders, and in my discussions with the Chinese
people I will press ahead on human rights and religious freedom, urging that China follow through on its intention
to sign the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, that it release more individuals in prison for expressing their
opinions, that it take concrete steps to preserve Tibet's cultural, linguistic, and religious heritage.
We do not ignore the value of symbols. But, in the end, if the choice is between making a symbolic
point and making a real difference, I choose to make the difference. And when it comes to advancing human
rights and religious freedom, dealing directly and speaking honestly to the Chinese is clearly the best way to make
a difference.
China has known more millennia than the United States has known centuries. But for more than 220
years, we have been conducting a great experiment in democracy. We must never lose confidence in the power of
American experience or the strength of our example. The more we share our ideas with the world, the more the
world will come to share the ideals that animate America. And they will become the aspirations of people
everywhere.
I should also say we should never lose sight of the fact that we have never succeeded in perfectly
realizing our ideals here at home. That calls for a little bit of humility and continued efforts on our part on the
home front.
China will choose its own destiny, but we can influence that choice by making the right choice ourselves
working with China where we can, dealing directly with our differences where we must. Bringing China into
the community of nations rather than trying to shut it out is plainly the best way to advance both our interests and
our values. It is the best way to encourage China to follow the path of stability, openness, nonaggression; to
embrace free markets, political pluralism, the rule of law; to join us in building a stable international order where
free people can make the most of their lives and give vent to their children's dreams.
That kind of China, rather than one turned inward and confrontational, is profoundly in our interests.
That kind of China can help to shape a 21st century that is the most peaceful and prosperous era the world has
ever known.
Thank you very much. (Applause.)
END
11:00 A.M. EDT
Message Sent To:
Remarks: Beijing, China
http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/First_Lady/html/China/plenary.html
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton
Remarks to the United Nations
Fourth World Conference on Women
Beijing, China
September 5, 1995
MRS. CLINTON: Thank you very much Gertrude Mongella, for your dedicated
work that has brought us to this point.
Distinguished delegates and guests, I would like to thank the Secretary General
of the United Nations for inviting me to be part of this important United
Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. This is truly a celebration -- a
celebration of the contributions women make in every aspect of life: in the
home, on the job, in the community, as mothers, wives, sisters, daughters,
learners, workers, citizens and leaders.
It is also a coming together, much the way women come together every day in
every country.
We come together in fields and in factories. In village markets and
supermarkets. In living rooms and board rooms.
Whether it is while playing with our children in the park, or washing clothes in
a river, or taking a break at the office water cooler, we come together and talk
about our aspirations and concerns. And time and again, our talk turns to our
children and our families.
However different we may appear, there is far more that unites us than divides
us. We share a common future. And we are here to find common ground so that
we may help bring new dignity and respect to women and girls all over the
world -- and in so doing, bring new strength and stability to families as well.
By gathering in Beijing, we are focusing world attention on issues that matter
most in the lives of women and their families: access to education, health care,
jobs, and credit, the chance to enjoy basic legal and human rights and to
participate fully in the political life of their countries.
There are some who question the reason for this conference. Let them listen to
the voices of women in their homes, neighborhoods, and workplaces.
There are some who wonder whether the lives of women and girls matter to
economic and political progress around the globe. Let them look at the
women gathered here and at Hairou. the homemakers, nurses, teachers,
lawyers, policymakers, and women who run their own businesses.
It is conferences like this that compel governments and peoples everywhere to
listen, look and face the world's most pressing problems.
Wasn't it after the women's conference in Nairobi ten years ago that the world
focused for the first time on the crisis of domestic violence?
Earlier today, I participated in a World Health Organization forum. In that
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forum we talked about ways that where government officials, NGOs, and
individual citizens are working on ways to address the health problems of
women and girls.
Tomorrow, I will attend a gathering of the United Nations Development Fund
for Women. There, the discussion will focus on local -- and highly successful --
programs that give hard-working women access to credit so they can improve
their own lives and the lives of their families.
What we are learning around the world is that, if women are healthy and
educated, their families will flourish. If women are free from violence, their
families will flourish. If women have a chance to work and earn as full and
equal partners in society, their families will flourish.
And when families flourish, communities and nations will flourish.
That is why every woman, every man, every child, every family, and every
nation on our planet does have a stake in the discussion that takes place here.
Over the past 25 years, I have worked persistently on issues relating to women,
children and families. Over the past two-and-a-half years, I have had the
opportunity to learn more about the challenges facing women in my own
country and around the world.
I have met new mothers in Indonesia, who come together regularly in their
village to discuss nutrition, family planning, and baby care.
I have met working parents in Denmark who talk about the comfort they feel in
knowing that their children can be cared for in creative, safe, and nurturing
after-school centers.
I have met women in South Africa who helped lead the struggle to end
apartheid and are now helping build a new democracy.
I have met with the leading women of my own hemisphere who are working
every day to promote literacy and better health care for the children in their
countries.
I have met women in India and Bangladesh who are taking out small loans to
buy milk cows, rickshaws, thread and other materials to create a livelihood for
themselves and their families.
I have met doctors and nurses in Belarus and Ukraine who are trying to keep
children alive in the aftermath of Chernobyl.
The great challenge of this conference is to give voice to women everywhere
whose experiences go unnoticed, whose words go unheard.
Women comprise more than half the world's population. Women are 70%
percent of the world's poor, and two-thirds of those who are not taught to read
and write.
Women are the primary caretakers for most of the world's children and elderly.
Yet much of the work we do is not valued -- not by economists, not by
historians, not by popular culture, not by government leaders.
At this very moment, as we sit here, women around the world are giving birth,
raising children, cooking meals, washing clothes, cleaning houses, planting
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crops, working on assembly lines, running companies, and running countries.
Women also are dying from diseases that should have been prevented or
treated; they are watching their children succumb to malnutrition caused by
poverty and economic deprivation; they are being denied the right to go to
school by their own fathers and brothers; they are being forced into prostitution,
and they are being barred from the bank lending office and banned from the
ballot box.
Those of us who have the opportunity to be here have the responsibility to
speak for those who could not.
As an American, I want to speak up for women in my own country -- women
who are raising children on the minimum wage, women who can't afford health
care or child care, women whose lives are threatened by violence, including
violence in their own homes.
I want to speak up for mothers who are fighting for good schools, safe
neighborhoods, clean air and clean airwaves
for older women, some of them widows, who have raised their families and
now find that their skills and life experiences are not valued in the workplace
for women who are working all night as nurses, hotel clerks, and fast food chefs
so that they can be at home during the day with their kids and for women
everywhere who simply don't have time to do everything they are called upon
to do each day.
Speaking to you today, I speak for them, just as each of us speaks for women
around the world who are denied the chance to go to school, or see a doctor, or
own property, or have a say about the direction of their lives, simply because
they are women.
The truth is that most women around the world work both inside and outside
the home, usually by necessity.
We need to understand that there is no one formula for how women should lead
their lives.
That is why we must respect the choices that each woman makes for herself and
her family. Every woman deserves the chance to realize her God-given
potential.
We also must recognize that women will never gain full dignity until their
human rights are respected and protected.
Our goals for this conference, to strengthen families and societies by
empowering women to take greater control over their own destinies, cannot be
fully achieved unless all governments -- here and around the world -- accept
their responsibility to protect and promote internationally recognized human
rights.
The international community has long acknowledged -- and recently affirmed at
Vienna -- that both women and men are entitled to a range of protections and
personal freedoms, from the right of personal security to the right to determine
freely the number and spacing of the children they bear.
No one should be forced to remain silent for fear of religious or political
persecution, arrest, abuse or torture.
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Tragically, women are most often the ones whose human rights are violated.
Even in the late 20th century, the rape of women continues to be used as an
instrument of armed conflict. Women and children make up a large majority of
the world's refugees. And when women are excluded from the political process,
they become even more vulnerable to abuse.
I believe that, on the eve of a new millennium, it is time to break our silence. It
is time for us to say here in Beijing, and the world to hear, that it is no longer
acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights.
These abuses have continued because, for too long, the history of women has
been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence
our words.
The voices of this conference and of the women at Hairou must be heard loud
and clear:
It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or
suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls.
It is a violation of human rights when women and girls are sold into the slavery
of prostitution.
It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on
fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small.
It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own
communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or
prize of war.
It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide
among women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own
homes by their own relatives.
It is a violation of human rights when young girls are brutalized by the painful
and degrading practice of genital mutilation.
It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their
own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being
sterilized against their will.
If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that
human rights are women's rights And women's rights are human rights, once
and for all.
Let us not forget that among those rights are the right to speak freely. And the
right to be heard.
Women must enjoy the right to participate fully in the social and political lives
of their countries if we want freedom and democracy to thrive and endure.
It is indefensible that many women in non-governmental organizations who
wished to participate in this conference have not been able to attend -- or have
been prohibited from fully taking part.
Let me be clear. Freedom means the right of people to assemble, organize, and
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debate openly. It means respecting the views of those who may disagree with
the views of their governments.
United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women
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Page 4
LEVEL 1 - 3 OF 3 STORIES
Copyright 1995 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
September 6, 1995, Wednesday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section A; Page 1; Column 2; Foreign Desk
LENGTH: 1326 words
HEADLINE: Women as Chattel: In China, Slavery Rises
BYLINE: By SETH FAISON
DATELINE: XIAN, China
BODY:
In the shadow of the ancient wall that still surrounds this city, several
hundred people gather each day along a muddy street to offer themselves to
employers at an unofficial labor market.
Many are young women from the countryside, and for them the market holds a
special danger: it may be the first stop on a journey that begins with the
promise of a job, sees rape and violent beatings along the way and ends in a
life of domestic slavery.
Countless women have been kidnapped from this market in Xian, from similar
markets in other cities and from bus stops and train stations in towns all over
China. Typically, a woman is lured into the custody of one or more criminal
middlemen, beaten into submission and delivered to a stranger who will call her
his wife.
The Chinese call it "the abducting and selling of women." The practice,
mixing an age-old disregard for the rights of women with a modern passion for
profit, seems to be rising at an alarming rate, Chinese advocates of women's
rights and official Chinese newspapers say.
The causes are many. Young women are more and more eager to venture outside
the safety of a home village; unmarried farmers can increasingly afford the $250
to $500 that it costs to buy them; middlemen more easily roam from city to
country to conduct their business.
At the Fourth World Conference on Women, Chinese officials are expected to
join a chorus of calls for better protection of the rights of women. Yet when it
comes to the selling of women, the authorities show a tragic indifference to
what women's rights advocates now consider the most pernicious violation of
human rights in their nation.
"This is the most horrific problem facing women in China today," said Wang
Xingjuan, president of the Women's Research Institute at the Chinese Academy of
Management Science in Beijing. "We have to do more to stop it."
Although statistics are incomplete and many cases go unreported, women's
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The New York Times, September 6, 1995
advocates say that at least tens of thousands of women are now sold into slavery
in China each year.
Many escape, but many more, ashamed to return to their families, are believed
to eventually accept their predicament.
"I know it's dangerous, but I don't have any other choice," said Fu Litong,
20, a ruddy-faced woman in a dull, peach-colored dress who traveled about 200
miles from her rural village to come to the labor market here. "I'm not going
back to the village. Life is too hard there."
Ms. Fu and several other women standing around at the market one recent
afternoon said they had heard about cases in which a woman was approached at the
market by a man saying he would pay her well for an office job, only to drive
her away, rape her and sell her.
"Every week you hear about another one," Ms. Fu said. "It's unavoidable. But
I don't think it will happen to me."
The police have little incentive to stop the trade, for when they are not
bribed to look the other way, they often meet resistance from local villagers
who, intent on protecting a neighbor, often argue that he has paid a fair price
for a woman and thus has a right to own her.
Chinese newspaper reports on the selling of women are generally limited to
success stories in which the police have rescued a woman and caught her
abductors, cases that the advocates say are statistically rare.
In a notable exception, The Legal Daily reported a particularly shocking case
and in telling it could only conclude: "Each attempt to fight the crime of
abducting and selling of women seems to end in failure."
In that case, Zhao Meimei, 32, a married woman, was abducted in a labor
market like the one in Xian, then kidnapped and delivered to a farmer named Wang
in Tianzhuang village about 400 miles north of here.
Mr. Wang kept her in a cave and frequently beat and raped her. After more
than a year of living in the cave, Ms. Zhao showed signs of mental illness,
which grew worse after she gave birth to a daughter, who was taken from her
while she was left in the cave.
No neighbors seem to have complained; a police chief in the county seat of
Yulin heard about the case only after a town official's wife visiting a relative
in the village learned of it.
The police went to the village and freed Ms. Zhao from the cave. But when
they tracked down her home village in neighboring Sichuan Province, officials
there informed them that her husband, after hearing about her baby daughter and
her mental illness, did not want her back.
The police were unable to find a home for Ms. Zhao, who was by that time
unable to care for herself. No effort was made to prosecute Mr. Wang, who never
legally married her, or to try to find the man who sold Ms. Zhao to him.
"With no other alternative, the police had no choice but to contact Wang of
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Tianzhuang village and entrust him to take responsibility, provided he could
guarantee that from now on he would no longer mistreat Zhao,' the Legal Daily
reported. "Then they handed her over to him.'
The selling of women is primarily a rural phenomenon. While many women are
abducted in cities, they overwhelmingly come from, and are delivered to, small
villages and towns in the countryside. Since the victims of these crimes are
rural women, advocates argue, they rank low on most police priority lists.
Local women's organizations, set up in most city, town and county
governments, often speak out against the trade. But their calls are frequently
muffled by the Communist Party officials who supervise them.
In some cases a relative trying to find a missing woman runs into gross
indifference, or even opposition, from the authorities.
China Women's News, in another unusual report, told the story of a man whose
wife had been abducted in Anhui Province in 1991. A provincial official said he
was unable to help the husband and became irritated by the man's persistence,
finally blurting out: "Your wife has already been abducted. You don't really
want her back, do you?"
Pursuing the case to the county level, the same man was told by a local
official: "There are more than 10,000 abducted women in this county. Some are
teen-agers who have been sold to middle-aged men. Their problems are more
serious than yours, so it will be difficult to solve your problem."
A later report in the same newspaper argued that a contributing factor to the
spread of selling women was indifference by local officials and, in some cases,
participation by officials in getting the "marriages" sanctioned.
"Not only do they not stop the villagers from abducting and selling or buying
women, but they also act as go-betweens, put themselves forward as witnesses,
provide relevant paperwork and go to the house to celebrate the 'wedding, " the
newspaper reported.
In recurring cycles of poverty and famine throughout Chinese history, women
and children have been sold by families that are starving, and in ordinary
times, marriages in the countryside usually involved a business transaction
between families.
Even after involuntary marriage was legally banned by the Communists, who
came to power in 1949, a strong emphasis on parental authority meant that few
rural women had any real choice of a mate.
Yet only in recent years has the trade in women grown to include networks of
middlemen, operating without the consent of families, and these middlemen seem
to have relatively little fear of prosecution.
"The Chinese Government did not take sufficiently serious measures against
the trade, and now the sophisticated and organized nature of this modern slave
trade makes combating it very difficult," wrote Human Rights in China, a New
York-based advocacy group, in a report issued in August.
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Although the demand for buying women has surged in recent years as ordinary
farmers make more money, it is usually those of middling affluence who want to
purchase a "wife," because they cannot afford a wedding, which with a dowry and
necessary wedding banquets typically costs more than $1,000.
GRAPHIC: Photo: Changes in Chinese society have led to unofficial labor markets
like this in Xian. But young women sometimes find danger, not jobs. (Seth
Faison/The New York Times) (pg. A1)
Map of China showing location of Xian. (pg. A10)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
LOAD-DATE: September 6, 1995
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17TH STORY of Level 1 printed in FULL format.
Copyright 1997 FT Asia Intelligence Wire
All Rights Reserved
Copyright 1998 THE NATION (BANGKOK)
November 28, 1997
SECTION: Business
LENGTH: 1972 words
HEADLINE: Trade in children thrives in subregion
BODY:
The mighty Mekong meanders through six key countries in the Southeast Asian
region: China, Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. It is a river of
life and hope for the millions of inhabitants who border its fertile banks.
It is also a river of paradoxes. While the economic growth around the Mekong
has grown exponentially in recent years bringing wealth and prosperity to the
riparian countries, the river is also a focal point for one of the most heinous
crimes against humanity: the trafficking in women and children. This
contemporary form of slavery has increased markedly in the past few years and is
growing alarmingly.
Internationally, there is no consensus on the term "trafficking". In 1994,
the United Nations General Assembly came near to a comprehensive definition in
its stipulation that "trafficking" is the "illicit and clandestine movement of
persons across national and international borders, largely from developing
countries and some countries with economies in transition, with the end goal of
forcing women and girl children into sexually or economically oppressive and
exploitative situations for the profit of recruiters, traffickers, crime
syndicates, as well as other illegal activities related to trafficking, such as
forced domestic labour, false marriages, clandestine employment and false
adoption".
Yet, the definition is incomplete. It does not include boys and men who are
also at times victims of trafficking. Moreover, the list of situations should
not be seen as exhaustive. Trafficking arises in a variety of situations beyond
the list given, including trafficking for begging and use as agents of crime. A
key element behind the trafficking is coercion. However, it is possible that
there are other situations where there is no coercion at the time of the
trafficking, but where the person arrives later in a circumstance tantamount to
slavery, such as being forced to work in appalling labour conditions. There is
often a linkage with debt bondage whereby the services of the victims are
pledged by parents and others in payment of the latter's debts. One should thus
be concerned with countering not only trafficking but also forced labour and
slavery-like practises.
All the countries of the sub-region are faced with an increasingly
challenging phenomenon in regard to the trafficking in women and children. There
is both internal and cross-border trafficking to neighbouring countries. The
countries are often concurrently source countries, transit countries and
receiving countries. There is not only trafficking within the region but across
continents. Countries which were previously less affected by the problem are now
seeing the emergence of a more extensive and pervasive problem. Given the
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Copyright 1998 THE NATION (BANGKOK) November 28, 1997
current economic downturn in many countries of the region, there is a fear of
more opportunities for exploitation via the sex trade.
The growing problem facing Cambodia has been highlighted by a number of
studies in recent years. A 1995 report by the Cambodia National Council for
Children noted that "at least one third of all commercial sex workers are 17
years and younger, with the youngest reported being forced into the sex business
by being abducted, raped, deceived or sold by people familiar to them, family,
relatives and neighbours". In a sample taken by the study, 53 per cent of the
interviewees had been sold once, 17 per cent had been sold twice, 5.5 per cent
had been sold three times, one person had been sold five times, and 23 per cent
were "not yet sold".
In the 1995 Unicef-backed publication, "The Trafficking and Prostitution of
Children in Cambodia,' the alarm was sounded on boys as a new vulnerable group.
The Two Reports on the Situation of Woman and Children Trafficked from Cambodia
and Vietnam to Thailand (1997) convey some recent startling revelations:
"Cambodian and Vietnamese sex workers who do arrive in Aranyaprathet
continue their journey towards Bangkok or Pattaya. Unlike Aranyaprathet,
Chanthaburi and Trat, where prostitution is carried out under cover of karaoke
bars and hotels, prostitution in Klong Yai is organised by three big high- class
brothels and five hotels which partly function as brothels.
"In Klong Yai, there are no Thai sex workers. The majority of the sex
workers in this place are Vietnamese, together with a smaller number of
Cambodians
The brothels in Klong Yai are either controlled by police
officers or directly owned by relatives of police officers."
There is not only a question of violations of women's rights and children's
rights, but also of racism, as implied by the following:
"According to the investigators
Cambodian girls are considered to be
less precious, partly because of their darker skin. In general, Vietnamese girls
are considered to be classier, which explains why they work in the expensive and
high standard brothels."
While some may have come into the trade initially without coercion, many
tend to land up in coercive situations at one time or another. The network for
exploiting women and children is systematic and reaches down to the grassroots
level, as shown by the most recent study supported by the International
Organisation for Migration (IOM).
The trafficking varies from small-scale operations to more extensive
networks.
Similar situations are found in other countries of the Mekong sub- region.
With regard to China, the phenomenon of trafficking is a growing concern. In
a Unicef-backed situation analysis of children and women in China in 1992, it
was noted that "occasional abduction of women and children has been reported to
still occur in some rural areas, prompting widespread education against the
practice and special legislation with severe punishment of individuals who
abduct or kidnap women or children."
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Copyright 1998 THE NATION (BANGKOK) November 28, 1997
In China's 1995 report under the Convention on the Rights of the Child
(CRC), the problem is implied by the recognition that in 1991, government
authorities made a decision "on the severe punishment of criminals abducting or
kidnapping girls and children".
The United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women said in her
1997 Report:
"In China, the incidence of kidnapping and selling women in rural areas has
been increasing since the mid-1980s so that in some countries and villages,
between 30 and 90 per cent of marriages result from trafficking. Also in
China, public security officials in Shandong province, report that 13,958 women
were bought and sold in the province in 1990; of those, 3,966 women were freed
and 1,690 individuals were arrested on charges of slave-trading. In Jiangsu
province between 1968 and 1988, 48,100 women from all regions of China were
sold. The shortage of women in rural areas, traditional views on maintaining the
family line which require all sons to marry, the high expenses associated with
weddings and betrothel gifts of non-forced marriages all contribute to the
demand for women trafficked for forced marriages in China."
More strict law enforcement has resulted in some startling developments. In
1996, in regard to the prostitution trade, a recent study said that "209,600
cases have been cleared in which 411,700 offenders were pursued".
In addition to trafficking for marriage internally, cross-border trafficking
into other regions, such as Thailand, Burma and Macau for the sex trade and
between China and Vietnam for the marriage and sex trade, has become more
insidious. As noted by a recent study:
"Recent years even saw offenders in and outside China operate in collusion
to traffick women abroad in the name of tourism and business. They trafficked
girls from Yunnan borders into Thailand via Burma to local syndicates for
prostitution.
"In 1995 and 1996, Thai police and charity institutions repatriated up to
100 girls back to China. In August 1997, Shanghai and Macau police jointly
cleared a case in which the offenders trafficked and forced six girls to
prostitute in a hotel in Macau. The victims were delivered safe and sound back
home, and the trafficking criminal suspects were arrested."
One should not forget also that Hong Kong is affected by various forms of
trafficking, including for sexual exploitation and domestic service. This is
also a stepping stone for transcontinental trafficking.
The situation in Laos is closely linked with trafficking into Thailand. In
one study carried out in 1995, the impact on children was witnessed not only in
regard to the plight of the victims in the trafficking process but also the
likelihood that they would be treated as illegal immigrants and kept in
immigration jails in the country to which they had been trafficked if they were
caught by police.
In a 1996 situation analysis backed by Unicef in Laos, there was a warning
that trafficking through Thailand to other countries might be on the increase.
The close ties with Thailand were noted, as follows:
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"The emerging issue of trafficking is a consequence of changing economic and
social values, opening borders, and having an unaware society. Here, the
cross-border situation is as important to examine as that inside the country.
Savannakhet officials report that more than 15,000 of its youth sought work in
Thailand in 1995. Most left the country illegally, and an increasing number
appeared to be girls under 15. Of those repatriated by Thailand to Savannakhet,
about 50 per cent were under 18 years old. With limited vocational skills, few
job opportunities and growing demand for consumer goods, girls especially can be
lured into prostitution."
In the 1997 Lao government report submitted under the CRC, there seemed to
be limited recognition of the problem of trafficking into neighbouring countries
in its statement that "Illegal emigration of children occurred before and in the
early days of the Lao People's Democratic Republic. No such problems are noticed
at the present time. The only legal migration is with full authorisation, and
"Child trade and abduction is not a significant problem." However, there was
some acknowledgment of the problem of child prostitution in its admission that
"prostitution occurs mainly in urban areas such as in Vientiane municipality.
Most of the young female prostitutes work as hostesses in bars, and some have
been sent for re-education several times. The causes of prostitution are a lack
of employment and a poor level of education, knowledge and skills".
On another front, the trafficking of women and children in regard to Burma
concerns Burma as a source country and as a transit country. The main receiving
country is Thailand, while many victims from the province of Yunnan in China
transit through Burma and then proceed to Thailand. It is also linked with the
rampancy of debt bondage whereby the services of the victim are used to pay off
the debt incurred by the victim or another party such as the parents. The 1997
report of the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women notes
as follows: "Debt bondage is widely used by traffickers to control trafficked
women, particularly women trafficked for prostitution. Often women are forcibly
detained in apartments, factories, homes or brothels to foreclose escape prior
to paying back their debts. Women and girls from Burma typically serve' six to
eight men per day, 25 days a month, and earn US$ 600 to US$ 2,500 per month for
the brothel owner, of which they receive US$ 1/day, or US$ 25/month."
The invidious nature of some law enforcers on both sides of the border is
self-evident.
Vitit Muntarbhorn is a professor at the Faculty of Law, Chulalongkorn
University and a contributing editor to The Nation. This article is the first in
a series on trafficking in women and children in the Mekong subregion.
Copyright (C) 1997 The Nation (Bangkok)
LANGUAGE: English
LOAD-DATE: February 20, 1998
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<M
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FROM: Bill WOODWARD
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Department of State
Washington, DC 20520
Fax: 202 736 7687
This is the pre- tripversion of
RE:
Albright's speech. In Beijing
MESSAGE: we 2dde. the China poem - -
which is on the last page I
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7 pages with cover
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SEPTEMBER 1 -- 3 P.M. DRAFT
(prepared for delivery)
"REMARKS TO THE FOURTH WORLD CONFERENCE ON WOMEN"
AMBASSADOR MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT
U.S. PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE TO THE UNITED NATIONS
BEIJING, CHINA
SEPTEMBER 6, 1995
Madam President, honored guests, fellow delegates and
observers, I am pleased and proud to address this historic
conference on behalf of the United States of America.
My government congratulates the many thousands who have
helped to organize the conference, to draft the Platform
for Action, to inform the world about the issues under
discussion here and to encourage the broadest possible
participation both of governments and NGO's. I especially
want to thank Gertrude Mongella for the fairness and skill
with which she has managed this conference.
We have come to this historic gathering to carry
forward a struggle as old as civilization itself: the
pursuit of economic and social progress for all people,
based on respect for the dignity and value of each.
We are here to promote and protect human rights and to
underline that women's rights are human rights, neither
separable nor different from those of men.
We are here to stop violence against women; and to end
the despicable notion that rape is just another tactic of
war.
We are here to find ways to expand women's
participation in political and economic decisionmaking,
because no country can develop if half its human resources
are marginalized, de-valued or repressed.
We are here because we want to strengthen families, the
fundamental building blocks of any society. We want to see
girls valued to the same degree as boys. We want to
confront the societal attitudes that contribute to the
phenomenon of "missing girls."
We believe, with Pope John Paul II, in the "equality of
spouses with respect to family rights". We want women and
men to be able to make informed judgments as they plan
their families. And we want to see the forces that weaken
families--including pornography, domestic violence and the
sexual exploitation of children--condemned and curtailed.
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We are here because we want to assure for women equal
access to education and health care; because we want to
help women protect against infection by HIV; because we
care about the special needs and value the special
strengths of women with disabilities; and because we are
determined to attack the root causes of poverty, in which
so many women and children are entrapped.
This conference is a means to make further progress
towards those goals. But real progress depends not on what
we say here, but on our actions after we leave here. This
is a conference not of conversation, but of commitments.
For decades, my nation has led efforts to promote equal
rights for women. My government is based on principles
that provide the very foundation for women's rights. Our
laws forbid discrimination on the basis of sex and we work
hard to enforce those laws. A rich network of
nongovernmental organizations has blossomed within our
borders, reaching out to women and girls from all segments
of society, educating, counseling and working for change.
The United States is a leader, but leaders cannot stand
still. Obstacles that exist elsewhere to the full and
equal participation of women in society persist in my
country. The Clinton Administration is determined to bring
those obstacles down.
Today, in the spirit of this conference, and in the
knowledge that concrete steps to advance the status of
women are everywhere required, I am pleased to announce the
new commitments my government will undertake:
First, President Clinton will establish a White House
Council on Women to plan for the effective implementation
within the United States of the Platform for Action.
Second, in accordance with recently-approved law, we
are launching a six-year, $1.6 billion initiative to fight
domestic violence and other crimes against women. Funds
will be used for specialized police and prosecution units
for sexual and domestic violence and to enhance training of
police, prosecutors and judicial personnel.
Third, our Department of Labor will conduct a
grassroots campaign to improve conditions for women in the
workplace. This campaign will seek to help at least
1,000,00 Americans by working with employers to develop
more equitable pay and promotion policies, improve access
to training, and foster new ideas for reconciling the twin
responsibilities of family and work.
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Fourth, our Department of Health and Human Services
will lead a comprehensive assault on threats to the health
and security of women--warning of the risks of teen
pregnancy, discouraging the use of cigarettes and illegal
drugs, increasing awareness about HIV/AIDS, promoting
healthy behavior and applying new technologies to the early
detection and--we pray--the ultimate eradication of breast
cancer.
Fifth, our Department of the Treasury will take new
steps to promote access to financial credit for women.
Outstanding U.S. microenterprise lending organizations will
be honored through special Presidential awards; and we will
improve coordination of federal efforts to encourage growth
in this field of central importance to the economic
empowerment of women.
Sixth, the Agency for International Development will
continue its leadership in promoting and recognizing the
vital role of women in development. Today, we announce
important initiatives to increase women's participation in
political processes and promote the enforcement of women's
legal rights.
Madam President, there is a seventh and final
commitment my country is making today. We, the people and
government of the United States of America, will continue
to speak out openly and without hesitation on behalf of
internationally recognized human rights.
My country is proud that, nearly a half century ago, a
former First Lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt,
was intrumental in drafting and gaining approval for the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We are proud that,
yesterday afternoon, in this very hall, the current First
Lady reiterated our national commitment to that Declaration
in clear and forceful terms.
The Universal Declaration reflects spiritual and moral
roots which are central to all cultures, respecting both
the wondrous diversity that defines us and the common
humanity that binds us. It obliges each government to
strive in law and practice to protect the rights of those
under its jurisdiction. Whether a government fulfills that
obligation is a matter not simply of domestic, but of
universal, concern. For it is one of the founding
principles of the United Nations that no government can be
allowed to shield its human rights record from the world.
At the heart of the Universal Declaration is a
fundamental distinction between coercion and choice.
No woman anywhere, whether in Boston, Bombay, Beirut or
Beijing, should be forced to have an abortion.
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No mother should feel compelled to abandon her daughter
because of a societal preference for males.
No woman should be forced to undergo genital
mutilation, or to become a prostitute, or to enter into
marriage or to have sex.
No woman should be forced to remain silent for fear of
political prosecution, detention, abuse or torture.
All women should be able to exercise control over the
course of their own lives and to help shape the destiny of
their communities and countries.
Let us be clear. Freedom to participate openly and
without fear in the political decisionmaking process of
your country is an inalienable and indispensable right of
every woman and man; deny that right, and you deny
everything.
It is deeply troublesome, therefore, that the right to
free expression has been called into question here, at a
conference whose very purpose is the free and open
discussion of women's rights.
It is shameful that many organizations that should have
been allowed to participate in this conference were denied
that right.
And it is a challenge to us all that so many countries
in so many parts of the world fall far short of the noble
objectives outlined in the Platform for Action.
Every nation must do better and do more--to make
equality of rights a fundamental principle of law; and to
identify and remove barriers that prevent the free exercise
of those rights.
That is why President Clinton has made favorable action
on the Convention to Eliminate Discrimination Against Women
a top priority. The United States should be a party to
that Convention.
And it is why we will continue to seek dialogues with
governments--including China's that deny internationally-
recognized rights to their citizens.
Madam President, fellow delegates, let us make this
conference a turning point. Let us leave here determined
to reject outright the forces of repression and ignorance
that have held us back; and to celebrate and use the
strength our unity provides.
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Let us breathe new life into the dream that has
animated the heroines, famous and unknown, who have
struggled through the centuries to build the platform upon
which we now stand.
Let us strive for the day when every young girl, from
the largest metropolis to the most remote village, can look
ahead with confidence that their lives will be valued,
their individuality respected, their rights protected and
their futures determined by their own abilities and
character.
Let us heed the instruction of our own lives. Look
around this hall, and you will see women who have reached
the pinnacle of power and authority. Go to Huairou, and
you will see an explosion of energy and intelligence
devoted to every phase of our common struggle. Enter any
community in any country, and you will find women
insisting--often at great risk--on their right to an equal
voice and equal power.
"It is time" said Aung San Suu Kyi, last week, "to
apply in the arena of the world the wisdom and experience"
women have gained.
It is time to unleash the untapped capacity for
production, accomplishment and fullness of life that are
inherent in us--the women of the world.
Thank you very much.
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of the work; but they don't own the land, they are not
taught to read, they can't obtain personal or business
loans and they have little or no voice in government.
It is no accident that most of those in the world who
are abjectly poor are women. Often, they are left to care
for children without the help of the children's father.
Many are trapped at a young age in a web of ignorance,
powerlessness and abuse.
Consider that more than half the murders of women in
countries as diverse as Bangladesh, Brazil, Kenya and Papua
New Guinea are committed by present or former spouses or
partners.
In Thailand, child prostitution is growing because
clients believe older prostitutes are more likely to be
infected by HIV.
In many rural societies, women perform much of the
farming and all of the child rearing, but are denied a role
in financial decisions.
And almost everywhere, women are hurt by discrimination
and by social and economic structures that are unjust.
The Women's Conference will not solve these problems,
but it will"call attention to them and it will outline a
course for further progress on issues that relate directly
to the wellbeing of more than half the people on earth.
In preparing for the conference, I happened to come
across an old Chinese poem which struck me as relevant to
much of what we are discussing here today. In the poem, a
father says to his young daughter:
We keep a dog to watch the house;
A pig is useful, too;
We keep a cat to catch a mouse;
But what can we do
With a girl like you?
For me, the Women's Conference will be a success if it
brings us even a little closer to the day when girls all
over the world will be able to look ahead with confidence
that their lives will be valued, their individuality
respected, their rights protected and their futures
determined by their own abilities and character.
We still call this the post Cold War era. But that
tells us only where we have been not where we are going.
We must refect the temptation of isolation and chart
instead at new path. Across the globe, there are
remarkable forces at work bringing us together and
voics
PIM
Record Type:
Record
To:
Christine N. Macy/WHO/EOP
CC:
Subject: Chinese Proverb
In several locations, I have found Eleanor Roosevelt's Quotes "Better to light a candle than to curse
the darkness," attributed to a chinese proverb. This could be a perfect quote to use, since it is ER
and Chinese at the same time.
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First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton
Vital Voices Speech
July 11, 1997
Austria Center, Vienna
Mrs. Clinton: I want to start by thanking Ambassador Hunt for her service to the United
States, but more than that for her leadership and commitment to human rights and the work
that she has done here in Europe on behalf of raising the voices of women so that all can hear
them. I would like to thank the other conference sponsors for supporting this very important
meeting. And I would also like to the thank the Austrian people and their government for
their willingness to serve the cause of peace and democracy. Home to the United Nations and
other critical international organizations, host to important summits of the Cold War, haven
for refugees, Austria has given the people of Europe and the world a safe place to come to
[line missing from her reading]
challenge, hear out and understand one another so that together we may shape a common
future.
This conference is held in that same spirit. We are here to advance the cause of women and
to advance the cause of democracy and to make it absolutely clear that the two are
inseparable. There cannot be true democracy unless women's voices are heard. There cannot
be true democracy unless women are given the opportunity to take responsibility for their
own lives. There cannot be true democracy unless all citizens are able to participate fully in
the lives of their country. We have seen great progress in this region of the world. Our
previous speakers this morning, from Bulgaria, Lithuania and the Czech Republic shared with
us some of the progress they have seen in their own lives. How those walls did come
tumbling down. How they were able to take advantage of new opportunities. To seek new
responsibilities on behalf of themselves and to further the cause of democracy in their
countries. We come at a point in time when the architecture of revolution is nearly complete
in Europe. The old order is being replaced by democratic institutions and open markets, of
free press, functioning parliaments, political parties. Basic rights of assembly and association
are becoming facts of life. Last month Russia joined the community of creditor nations. This
week the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland were invited to join NATO, and at the time
the announcement was made it was clear that those were the first invitations, not the last
invitations. Today my husband is in Poland and Romania to reiterate America's support for
democracy's progress. And I think it is also significant that you are gathered here in Vienna
to recognize both the crucial role that women have played and will play in continuing that
democratic progress. But also in talking and working together to devise strategies and learn
from one another about how we can continue to overcome the obstacles that still lie ahead. It
is clear, I think, to all of us, to someone like me who comes from a democracy that has been
working at perfecting its union for more than 220 years, and to those of you who come from
much newer democracies, that democracy is very hard work. You cannot flip a switch and
expect to have a democracy as we dream of. In my own country we struggle every year with
the challenges that are posed to democracy. We have to work very hard to make sure all of
our people are given the opportunity to participate fully in the life of our democracy. We
meet new challenges every day. So the work of democracy is never finished and all of us
we
face. Because even though you may have a free press or a functioning parliament, even
though you may have elections that are fair and are repeated successfully, democracy depends
on more than that. It depends on more than just a written constitution. It depends upon more
than even economic progress. Democracy depends ultimately on whether democratic values
are rooted in the hearts of men and women. Whether all citizens believe that all people are
entitled to be accorded the respect to which each of us as human beings should be able to
demand. As a Croatian writer once said, "for everyday life revolution consists much more of
the small things, of sounds. of looks and images" So even though we may look and see the
institutions of democracy functioning, even though we may see the image reflected of our
open markets and the progress we are making economically, we still and we always will have
work to do, to make sure what Alexis de Tocqueville called "the habits of the heart" that
really are at the center of a democratic institution or a democratic country are cultivated and
passed on from generation to generation.
If we look at: where we are in the world today, we see that one of the sounds that is most
important to ensuring that democracies take root is the sound of women's voices, those vital
voices that we celebrate here. On my visits to Central and Eastern Europe. I have heard the
sounds of those voices. I have heard women from many countries articulating their dreams
for the world and their lives after communism. Despite the differences between them,
everyone seemed to speak the same mother tongue. The language of freedom and hope. I
heard women's voices in Estonia when I visited a clinic that is the first in that country to offer
a broad range of health services for women. I heard them in Romania when I met with
teachers who are developing a new pedagogy that emphasizes civic participation and
democratic values. I heard them in Ukraine when I met with nurses who had just started their
own professional organization. I heard them in Hungary when I visited a center that is
helping the minority Roma community overcome barriers to education, employment and full
participation in Hungarian society. I heard them in the Czech Republic when I met with
leaders of non-governmental organizations who are involved in local projects to protect the
rights of children and to safeguard the environment I heard them in Belarus when I spoke
with women health professionals struggling to bring quality health care to the critically ill
children of Chernobyl. I heard them in Russia when I talked over the radio with listeners
throughout the country on a women-owned radio station. I heard the voices of women asking
"what do we do now? We are educated: how do we use that education to be part of
democracy?" And I heard them in Poland when I sat around a table with women representing
different political points of view and participated in one of the most important of democratic
acts, disagreeing with one another respectfully, as we debated the issues that were important
to us. And I heard women's vital voices in Bosnia where I was told by a teacher how she
kept trying to keep her students learning despite a horrific war. How I was told by health
professionals the struggles that they faced treating the wounded and how they were all
committed to rebuilding their lives. You bring these voices here, these voices that I have
heard, and now we must determine what we do with those voices.
Do we merely use our voice for our own personal advantage? Do WC take our educations, do
we take whatever fortunate advances we have been given at this point in history, and only
work for ourselves? That is a perfectly legitimate choice. To be a successful politician, to
have power for oneself, to be a lawyer or a judge, to be a business leader, to have economic
gain for oneself in a democracy - that is our choice. But I hope that the vital voices
represented here will do something else as well. To use our experience, our voices, to speak
on behalf of all people, to give voice to the voiceless. Because we know very well in my
country and in each country represented here that there are many women who do not have the
education we have. There are many women who are held down by cultural and historical
662 875310
003
traditions, prevented from exercising the choices they might want to make. We know there
are poor people who can only dream of coming to Vienna or sitting in a hotel room looking
down at Manhattan. And we know. or we should know, that we ignore the needs of all our
people at our peril, that part of the great challenge we face in our democracies is to be sure we
create conditions for all men and women to make the choices that are right for their lives.
And women particularly have an opportunity at this point in history to express that
commitment of conscience, to make clear that, yes, we want to be successful on our own, we
want to be held accountable and responsible for the choices we make because we want to be
seen as full human beings. But that is not all we want, we do want to help create societies and
a world where the opportunities for all children, young boys and young girls, are available to
them in ways we could not have even dreamed a few years ago.
When we met, many of us in this room, together in Beijing we came to declare in clear and
unequivocal terms that women's voices must be heard and we offered a clear proposition:
that a nation's progress depends on the progress of women, that the strength of a political
system depends on the inclusion of women. That the vibrancy of an economy depends on the
full contribution of women. That the richness of civil society depends on the participation of
women. That human rights are women's rights and women's rights are human rights. And I
have been asked what did I mean when I said that. And I have always been amazed that I
would be asked such a question. I was on a Voice of America call-in program one day and I
received a call from Iran, and the speaker on the other end, a man, said that he had heard that
I said that. What could I have meant? And I said, "Well, I meant what I said and if you will
just shut your eyes and imagine the rights that men have, those are the rights women should
have as well." And the reason we want those rights is not merely to make a statement, not to
be part of a political movement. but because we want our dignity to be respected as human
beings and we want to be part of building a democratic world.
We have seen changes since Beijing. Here in Central and Eastern Europe, we have seen in
Albania the birth of a parliamentary caucus devoted solely to issues affecting women. In
Bulgaria, a non-governmental organization is teaching judges and lawyers and citizen jurors
about the legal rights of women. In Ukraine, there has been a new government ministry
devoted to women's affairs. In Lithuania, new services are being given to support the needs
of elderly women. In Poland, we have seen created one of the largest micro-enterprise
networks in the world, a new agency sponsored by the Polish and American governments and
the World Bank whose sole mission is to teach women important new job skills and to help
them find well-paying jobs.
And yet, despite the progress, since the fall of the Berlin wall, since the conference in Beijing,
we have a lot of work to do. Because the transition from communism to free markets and
democracy has created new obstacles to women's realization of their God-given potential.
We have seen new stresses and sacrifices imposed on women. Throughout the region, cuts in
can
pension and childcare, kindergartens and health care has meant that women are shouldering a
double burden that was heavy enough to begin with. The oppressive structures of
Communism may have been tom down but the new structures and standards necessary to
advocate for women's rights and to protect women from exploitation are not yet fully
constructed. The hard work of building these political. legal, and economic standards and
structures must include women and it is what you have been speaking about here. That is
why this conference comes at such an important time, for it is enabling us to share practical
ideas and methods to advance the presence of women in the political. legal and business
spheres.
Exchanging ideas and strategies enables us to learn from one another and take these ideas
home. But that is too rare in our own world When I am privileged to travel as I do, I always
meet with groups of women for informal discussions. Whether I am in Bangladesh,
Romania, Poland. Nicaragua or Chile, I find that women have much more in common than
might appear on the surface. And yet I also find that even in those cities where I am meeting
with women who represent the academia or the professions or business or politics, they often
do not speak to one another. They sometimes do not even know one another. They are
surprised to learn what the woman down the street is doing to assist them in their work. We
cannot build strong civil societies without working together and creating associations that
enable us to make progress on the issues we care about. That is why this conference has the
potential for creating new networks and associations of support, within countries and between
countries.
The United States government, largely through the Agency for International Development,
will continue to support a broad range of programs that provide grants, training, and technical
assistance to citizens to strengthen democracy at the grass roots. We want to be part of
building democracy and we especially want to be part of enabling women to participate in
that process. Today we build on the commitment we have made, a commitment to local
groups that are working to protect the environment, or improve health services, or spark
economic development, teaching children basic democratic values. Working to create that
area between the market and the government which is crucial to the continuation and progress
of democracy. We call that 'civil society.' And it is only civil society that can inculcate the
values of democracy, those habits of the heart. It is only through our families, our religious
organizations, our associations at the civic and the neighborhood level, our trade unions, our
other groups where we come together voluntarily joining in forums to create better
opportunities that we will really create democracy. The market place can do better than any
other institution the work of creating wealth. But the market place, which knows the price of
everything. knows the value of nothing. That is not the market place's job. The government
has to preserve order, has to provide the basic services but it cannot reach the heart. It can stir
the emotions. It can, as we all know. create demagoguery. but it cannot in those very small
sacred places of the heart do the work that can only be done voluntarily through the civil
society. And so the United States Agency for International Development knows that, and that
is why so much of its work has been aimed at this middle, this important part of every
democratic society. And today I have the honor of announcing that the United States will
commit three million dollars next year to projects that will directly support the objectives of
this conference. These funds, which are entirely new funds, will be reserved solely for efforts
that help women enter and ascend the realms of politics, law and business. Moreover. we
will continue to see to it that women have full and complete access to the entire range of
democracy and business programs that we support. These efforts will supplement the work
of this conference and the work that you do everyday. We know what the symptoms of
inequality and oppression look like in real life. We see them when women are beaten or sold
or denied credit or refused a job because of gender or passed over for promotions or treated
with disrespect and not listened to. But we have to do what we can to alleviate those systems,
those symptoms of injustice. And yet we cannot lose sight of their root cause- disrespect for
women's spirit as human beings and citizens.
Here in Vienna in 1993, leaders from around the world gathered to craft the United Nations
Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women. This is what they called for: the
005
universal application to women of the rights and principles with regard to equality, security,
liberty, integrity and dignity of all human persons. That word dignity is essentially the
premise on which our democraric efforts in our respective countries will stand or fall. It is
time for us as a global community to understand once and for all, we have run out of excuses.
Here we are at the end of the twentieth century, at the heart of a continent that has been
scorched by war time and time again. If the history of this century teaches us anything, it is
cultural
that whenever the dignity of any group is compromised by a derogation of who they are, of
some essential attribute that they possess, then we leave ourselves open to having our own
reison
dignity questioned. Where we do not respect the dignity of others, we do not make the
dignity of any of us safe from attack. If this century has a lesson that is redeeming. it is that
by extending the circle of citizenship and human dignity to include everyone without
exception, we have the hope that can come to those of us who believe that by working
together we can create a better life for ourselves and our children. If we take seriously what
you are talking about here at this conference, and you go home and bring the message of
excitement and solidarity that you have achieved here, you will not change anything over
night But your voice and your work, added to the inexorable, incremental steps that are
necessary for change in a democracy will create the conditions for change. And then WC will
have a glimpse of seeing what a newsroom and a courtroom will look like with women fully
participating. What the corporate board room and the political back room will consist of
when women take their rightful places. We will see more clearly what can happen in the
home when women are given the respect and dignity they deserve.
I am very much in awe of the stories of many of you. I can only imagine the strength that it
took to have done what you have done in this audience. to join Charter 77, to march for
Solidarity, to expose human rights abuses. to make freedom's voice carry over the heads of
those who would silence you. I think of all this and I ask myself how you kept your focus,
through those years of totalitarian oppression, on what was most important in the human
heart. Perhaps the answer lies in a speech that was given in Austria seven years ago. just after
the fall of Communism. Part of it goes as follows:
"Many of us who in recent years strove to speak the truth in spite of everything, were
able to maintain an inner perspective, a willingness to endure, a sense of proportion.
an ability to understand and forgive others and a light heart, only because we were
speaking the truth, otherwise we might have perished from despair."
Many of you will recognize the words of President Havel, talking about the totalitarian lies
that recently prevailed in this part of the world and of the heroic individuals like so many of
you who struggled against them. Those words are just as true today, even though the burdens
and obstacles are nowhere near what oppressed Europe for so many years. But we know that
it takes strength to keep your voice heard. We know that it takes courage to stand up for
those without voices. All of you who tore down communism did so because you believed in
democracy and freedom and the human heart and spirit Now you fight for women's rights
because you believe in the same values. One barrier is rubble, the other is crumbling. With
the strength of our commitment and the power of our voices that barrier too will surely fall.
If we keep faith with those values that brought you to this day, if we work with one another, if
we enable all of the voices of men and women who believe in freedom and hope to be heard,
then the dreams that brought us here will be realized and we will be able to look back at this
conference and say to ourselves "Women's vital voices played a role in creating the kind of
world I am proud to call my own." Thank you very much.
97 15:51
662 875310
1
006
Q & A Session
after the
First Lady's Speech at the Vital Voices Conference
July 11, 1997
[First portion of this section inaudible due'to central audio feed problem]
Mrs. Clinton:
Anything we can do to create good opportunities for girls and women, I think, will
benefit many, many women. But I also believe that in many different societies for
different reasons, an individual woman's chances for pursuing her own dreams
will be enhanced if other women work together to change social, historical, and
cultural conditions that hold women back. There are many women who have attained
a good education and then are told that they cannot succeed in the area they wish to
work in for artificial reasons. So the individual woman has to do what she can to
prepare herself. but then as part of our vital voices we have to make it possible for
every women to be able to pursue whatever her ambitions or dreams might be. I also
think there is another element. and that is the sort of psychological barriers that are the
internal barriers to many women's success. Women who feel that they are not entitled
to pursue their own dreams. Women who feel that. if they make a choice to pursue an
education or to pursue a job, they are making a choice not to pursue family or
relationships. So I think we have to enable women to feel that they can attain that
balance between work and family that is so difficult in all societies, which many of us
have worked on for many years, and support young women so that they feel
comfortable making these choices.
Question:
There's 2: lot of violence on TV in America, which also influences our cultures. What
can you do to stop it?
Mrs. Clinton:
Well, I agree with that I deplore the violence that is depicted on American television
and in American movies, and we my husband and the Vice-President and Mrs. Gore
and I - have worked very hard over the last several years within the system that we
have. which is a not only a free and open-market place of ideas, but with our first
amendment to the Constitution. we have very broad protections for anything that is
characterized as speech, which most television programs and movies are. And you
may have heard that just two weeks ago, our United States Supreme Court struck
down a law that the Congress had passed and the President had signed, trying to limit
pornography on the Internet in the United States. So they take a very broad view of
what is protected under our Constitution. So, within a limit, we have tried to do
several things. The President has advocated that a computer chip be built into new
televisions so that programs can be blocked out by parents exercising authority over
their television set, so that the television set can be programmed in such a way that
certain stations and programs cannot be seen. So, that will work for younger children,
but then we know older children will spend their time figuring out how to break the
system, but at least, you know, for a few years parents will have the illusion of control
over their children again, and even an illusion in these circumstances is comforting to
some extent. And we've also worked with the television to create labels for television
programs. so that parents can make better decisions about what they permit their
children to watch. And finally, we have encouraged the entertainment industry to
create different kinds of programs. Now, I think having said all that, I am not hopeful
about being able to limit the violence on American television or in American movies.
We have too much freedom that is given for good reason to be able to prevent that.
And it sells, unfortunately. People watch it. It's like driving by an automobile
accident. You know you shouldn't, but you slow down and you look and are
interested and stimulated by such programs. So we are doing what we can from the
governmental level. In my book It Takes A Village, I urged parents and other citizens
to boycott certain programs, not to buy the products that are advertised on programs,
to use citizen action to make a statement about what programs should or should not be
seen on our television. But I think that many of you in countries with different legal
systems will have to be working very hard to try to create a situation in which you are
not flooded by the most violent television programming from our culture, and I
continue to try in the United States both to limit it and to get citizens and especially
parents to exercise more authority with children and to try to limit the effect of it. I
think it is one of our most serious problems because it is part of the conflict that is
developing between 'are we creating in our society citizens or consumers' and it is a
very difficult problem.
Question:
Speaking of your book, I liked your book about raising children. Do you agree that
women should emphasize our central role in the family even as we advocate our
rights?
Mrs. Clinton:
I do, because I am very committed to family and to my particular obligations as wife
and mother, but I don't think every woman has to become a wife and a mother. If we
are talking about democracy, it is very important to make clear that women should
have a range of choices. There are women who wish to be full-time mothers and
commit themselves to that task. That should be a respected choice. There are women
who do not choose to marry, or if they marry, do not chose to have children. That
should be a respected choice. So, the vast majority of women in our countries will try
to do both. as I have and as most of you have, to have a family and to have work that
is important and meaningful to me. That balancing act that we're all engaged in must
also be respected and more support must be given to women who are attempting to do
that. But the larger point I would make beyond individual women's choices and being
respected for these choices, is that whether or not we make any of these choices, every
one of us has an obligation to do what we can to make sure our children are well
raised, and that our children have the health care. the education, the safety, stability,
and all the conditions that will enable them to grow to their own potential. So,
whether or not a person is a parent, or however many children a person has. every one
of us will be affected in the quality of our life by how our children and the next
generation are treated So, I think that goes beyond the individual choice, and keeping
the importance of raising children central to our political and economic and social
consideration is not just a family's responsibility, it is the entire society's
responsibility.
Amb. Hunt:
Before I ask you the last question and ask you to close your remarks with that
question, I want to thank you personally for coming and I want to tell you that this
conference, which has been hugely successful, would not have happened without
some very generous help from organizations like Bank Austria, Austrian Airlines
which flew about 160 people here, Nestle Corporation, the US Government, the
European Union, the Soros Foundation, and a host of others. And I know that you are
as impressed as I am with their generosity, too. If you could just say two sentences
about the key question of this conference: What can Americans learn from our
experience as Eastern and Central Europeans? What can Americans learn from
Central and Eastern Europeans?
Mrs. Clinton:
Thank you, whoever asked that question. Because I think there is a great deal that
Americans can learn from your experiences. I think, first, that it takes courage and
perseverance to both win and keep a democracy, that the building of a democracy is
an ongoing challenge and struggle. and that we can never take it for granted. And that
many of you in this room and in the countries from which you come, have a much
clearer idea of the importance of the values that underlie democracy than many people
in my country do today. Because we have many people who have gotten very
complacent in the United States. They don't take the trouble to vote. They don't
defend the freedoms that we have fought for, and people in previous generations have
died for. So, maybe it is a good thing that a society gets to the point of the United
States and many of the European countries, where freedom is so ingrained in the
fabric of life that we don't have to worry about it or fight over it any more. I think
there's always a danger when people become complacent, because there's always the
risk that demagogues and authoritarians will assert themselves and influence the
minds of people and take over the political and economic structures again. So that is
one important thing. The second point I would make is this struggle that I referred to
earlier, in the new global economy, in the Information Age in which we are living,
how do we live as human beings? How do we ensure that we are able to deal with the
enormous number of choices that we have? Many of you came from countries where
under communism you had no choices. Now in many countries we have so many
choices that people are often bewildered about what is the right choice that they
should be making. How do we create the right conditions, the balance between
government and the marketplace, a balance of power that will create jobs and good
incomes and economic opportunities, but will also provide support for people in a
social safety net and will create an environment in which the marketplace does not
determine everything. So, as you are struggling to make those choices, we in the
United States will be watching you and supporting you. and together I hope that we
will enter into the twenty-first century with a much clearer understanding of and
commitment to those basic democratic values that we have worked on for so many
years, but that you now hold as a trust for the rest of us. Because how you deal with
democracy's new challenges will affect the United States and the entire world.
SCENESETTER: WOMEN'S ROUNDTABLE IN CHINA
The First Lady will meet with Chinese women who have
experiences to share regarding women's issues in China. The
proposed participants include women mayors and
representatives from the All-China Women's Federation, China
Women's College and "Rural Women Knowing All" magazine.
Talking Points
Thank you all for coming today. I have been impressed by
the changes that are taking place in China. The pace of
transformation is truly astonishing. The China of today
is vastly different from the China that I visited just
three years ago.
China has made great strides in the advancement of women
since 1949, especially in the areas of literacy and
economic development. Economic and social reforms of the
past two decades have brought about even greater changes,
creating both opportunities and new challenges for women.
I would like to hear your assessment of women's
advancements in China and the problems that still remain
or have emerged.
In my travels around the world, I have often found that
women's rights do not necessarily advance with economic
development. This is certainly true in our own history.
American women had to fight hard to win the right to vote
and fair treatment at the work place and in society. The
effort to achieve our ideals continues; we continue to
strive for these objectives in the U.S. and throughout
the world.
As China modernizes, Chinese women are encountering many
problems reminiscent of America's experience. Job
discrimination against women, employers' reluctance to
pay for maternity leave and child care, a predominance of
female laid-off workers from state owned enterprises, and
increasing reported cases of spouse abuse are all
concerns. Women of all countries can and must work
together to overcome such challenges. I would like to
hear your views regarding how.
The problems of women are not very different from country
to country. They may differ in intensity. One of the
debates that is prominent in the U.S. centers on family
planning practices. As the world's most populous
country, family planning is an even more important issue
in China. It is directly linked to economic development
and people's living standards.
Three years ago in Beijing at the Fourth World Conference
on Women, members of the United Nations reaffirmed in the
Platform for Action the Cairo principle that all couples
and individuals have the basic right to "decide freely
and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their
children and to have the information and means to do so,
and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual
and reproductive health."
I am glad to see that China is working in conjunction
with the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) to start a new
population program that reflects the principles of
voluntarism and non-coercion. I am convinced that Chinese
birth rates can be stabilized without coercion, through
voluntary family planning and reproductive health
services, maternal and child health services, basic
education for girls, ending discrimination against women
and generally respecting human rights. Forced abortions
and sterilization, where-ever they happen, are violations
of women's rights and human rights. We must work
together to prevent such abuses.
I know many of you here have devoted yourselves to ending
discrimination against women and to promoting family
planning education. I would like to hear about your
experiences and your insights on family planning issues
in China.
In particular, I would like to hear your ideas about how
to deal with the traditional cultural preference for male
offspring. This raises issues such as sex-selective
abortion, female infanticide, the abandonment of female
babies, and the abduction and sale of women from gender-
balanced regions to male-dominant areas.
China has had an impressive record of strengthening
women's participation in the political process. Several
of you here, as representatives of the over 500 women who
are serving as mayors in China, are testimony to that
fact. Of course, still more can be done, as is the case
in my own country. I would like to hear your thoughts on
how to increase women's political participation.
I am grateful to have the honor to share your views.
Your dedication to women's issues is inspirational. I
will take your ideas back with me to share with women in
the U.S. so that we can all work together to advance
women's rights.
Tuesday, June 30, 1998
9:15 am-
"Shaping China for the 21st Century" Discussion & Tour of Library w/POTUS
11:00 am
Shanghai Library
11:45 am-
Tour/Remarks at Project Hope Hospital w/ American Corporate Sponsors
12:45 pm
and Sesame Street [GE primary funder/co-production CTW & Shanghai
TV]
[POTUS will be doing Talk Radio from 12:00 - 1:00]
1:15 pm-
OTR/Lunch with POTUS
2:45 pm
3:00 pm-
Visit to Shanghai Girls School (OTR for POTUS)
4:00 pm
with participation of girl high school students throughout Shanghai
4:30 pm-
Down Time
6:00 pm
6:30 pm-
Reception Hosted by Mayor/Tour of Major Exhibition w/POTUS
7:45 pm
Shanghai Museum
8:00 pm-
Casual Dinner w/Mayor of Shanghai w/POTUS
9:30 pm
RON
Ritz-Carlton Hotel
Shanghai
Wednesday, July 1, 1993
10:45 am-
Visit to Shanghai Women's Federation Job Retraining Ctr for Laid-off
11:15 am
Women Workers [Center also runs the first Women's Hotline created in
China]
[POTUS has possible OTR at Internet Cafe]
11:35 am-
Speech prep/Lunch
1:30 pm
2:00 pm-
Speech
2:30 pm
Shanghai Library
3:00 pm-
Visit to Shanghai Synagogue(Harbor for Jews fleeing Nazis)
3:25 pm
(w/Secretary Albright)
[POTUS has Home Ownership Event (Open Press) from 2:15 - 3:45]
3:45 pin-
DOWN FOR EVENING w/POTUS
tbd
RON
Ritz-Carlton Hotel
Shanghai
Thursday, July 2, 1998
7:00 am
Depart Ritz Carlton
En Route Airport
7:50 am
Depart Shanghai
En Route Guilin
10:00 am
Arrive Guilin
11:00 am-
Briefing with Environmental Experts
11:35 am
11:45 am-
Statement on the Environment
12:15 pm
12:45 pm-
Boat Tour w/POTUS
3:45 pm
(visit village along boat tour)
4:00 pm
Depart en route airport
5:10 pm
Depart Guilin
En route Hong Kong
6:15 pm
Arrive Hong Kong
6:45 pm-
Down Time
7:45 pm
8:45 pm-
Meeting with Mrs. Betty Tung
9:15 pm
[POTUS will be meeting with Chief Executive C.H. Tung]
9:20 pm-
Reception or Dinner hosted by the Chief Executive w/POTUS
10:30 pm
Government House
DOWN FOR EVENING
RON
Grand Hyatt Hotel
Hong Kong
Friday, July 3, 1998
8:30 am-
Roundtable Discussion with Hong Kong Women Leaders and Sec. Albright
10:00 am
Convention Center
[POTUS will have briefing time and meeting with Martin Lee and Hong Kong
political leaders from 11:00 - 11:55]
10:15 am-
POTUS Asian Regional Themes Speech
11:15 am
Convention Center
11:30 am-
Down Time
12:30 pm
12:30 pm-
OTR/Lunch w/POTUS
2:45 pm
3:00 pm-
Walk/Meeting with Anson Chan [T]
tbd
tbd pm-
FLOTUS Down Time
6:00 pm
[POTUS Press Conference]
6:15 pm-
Down Time/OTRs w/POTUS
tbd
tbd
Ride Star Ferry to Kowloon w/POTUS
12:00 am
Depart Hong Kong
En route Washington
RON
The White House
SCENESETTER: TIANANMEN SQUARE
Tiananmen Square is located in the heart of Beijing. It is named
after the Tiananmen Gate (Gate of Heavenly Peace) that fronts the
Forbidden City. The square was built in 1958 and is one of the
largest in the world. It measures 500 meters from east to west
and 880 meters from north to south, occupying approximately 50
hectares. During the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), government
offices were located on what is now Tiananmen Square; a wide road
ran south from Tiananmen Gate. The Gate itself was used for
grand ceremonies during the Ming and Qing dynasties.
Tiananmen Gate now serves as a symbol of ruling power in China.
Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of
China from the tower of the gate. On national days, the tower is
used as a rostrum for reviewing parades. It also is where Mao
received the millions of young Red Guards who gathered in
Tiananmen Square during the Cultural Revolution. Today, a large
portrait of Mao Zedong hangs on the front of Tiananmen Gate. To
the left of the portrait is the slogan "Long Live the People's
Republic of China" and to the right "Long Live the Unity of the
Peoples of the World."
Tiananmen Square is a busy tourist attraction by day, and a
popular place for after-dinner strolls in the evening. Bordering
Tiananmen Square is the Great Hall of the People, the museums of
Chinese History and the Chinese Revolution, the Mao Zedong
Mausoleum and Qianmen (Front Gate) Standing in the center of
the square is a monument honoring "the people's heroes, i.e.
those who sacrificed their lives for "national independence and
in wars against foreign aggression."
In contrast to Tiananmen Gate's association with state power,
Tiananmen Square on a number of occasions has been a center for
large-scale demonstrations against the government. In April
1976, Beijing citizens, mourning the death of popular Premier
Zhou Enlai, staged a spontaneous demonstration against leftist
radicals in power and in support of more pragmatic officials led
by Deng Xiaoping. In 1986, students from a number of Beijing
universities gathered in the square to protest against the slow
pace of reforms.
In April of 1989, the most recent large-scale protest to occur in
Tiananmen Square took place after the death of former Party
Secretary Hu Yaobang. University students then occupied the
square in May, protesting against government corruption and
demanding political freedom. In June 1989, the government used
armed troops to clear the square and nearby Beijing city streets,
killing and injuring many.
SCENESETTER: THE GREAT HALL OF THE PEOPLE
The Great Hall of the People is located on the west side of
Tiananmen Square. It was built in 1959 to commemorate the 10th
anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.
The assembly room inside the Great Hall is the largest in China,
seating 10,000 persons. The ceiling is decorated with a red star
embedded in a galaxy of lights. The Great Hall has on display
many art objects donated by China's provinces. It also has a
series of smaller halls decorated in the local styles of each of
China's provinces, including two new displays for Hong Kong and
Macao.
The Great Hall of the People is the seat of China's parliament,
the National People's Congress (NPC). Each year, the NPC, the
highest organ of state power under the Chinese constitution,
meets for two weeks to review and approve new policy directions,
laws, the budget, and major personnel changes. The State Council
presents these initiatives to the NPC for consideration after
previous endorsement by the Communist Party's Central Committee.
Although the NPC generally approves State Council policy and
personnel recommendations, various NPC committees can discuss
possible changes in closed sessions.
The Great Hall of the People will be the site of the summit talks
and the state banquet. A 15-minute welcoming ceremony will take
place outside the east entrance of the hall, facing Tiananmen
Square. The summit talks will be held in the Eastern Hall and
have two sessions -- an expanded bilateral lasting perhaps 30
minutes, followed by a restricted bilateral meeting in an
adjoining room.
The state dinner will be held in the second floor banquet hall.
It is used to entertain visiting heads of state and can
accommodate 5,000 guests. Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush
have all dined there. Cocktails in the Beijing and Shanghai
rooms (also on the second floor) will precede dinner.
SCENESETTER: DIAOYUTAI STATE GUESTHOUSE
The Diaoyutai (DYOW-yoo-tie) State Guesthouse is located in the
western section of Beijing in a scenic area known as Old
Diaoyutai (Angling Terrace). This former imperial dwelling was
built over 800 years ago in one of Beijing's most famous gardens.
In the Jin Dynasty (1115-1234), Emperor Zhang Zong had a terrace
built for fishing; hence the name "Angling Terrace." In the
early years of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), Prime Minister Lian
Xixian built a villa -- Wan Liu Hall -- and for a time the garden
area became a favorite tourist spot. During the Ming Dynasty
(1368-1644), the villa was used to house eunuchs and imperial
kinsmen.
Emperor Qian Long had Diaoyutai restored as an imperial garden in
1774. During the reign of Xuan Tong (1909-1911), Emperor Pu Yi
gave the garden to his tutor who in turn opened it to visitors.
The People's Republic of China converted the Diaoyutai complex in
1959 into a state guesthouse for heads of state and government
and other distinguished foreign visitors. The former imperial
dwelling is essentially the same today as it was during the reign
of Emperor Qian Long.
The Chinese government has built a number of villas on the
Diaoyutai grounds since 1959. They are furnished with art
treasures from different periods of Chinese history. You will
stay in Villa 18 where Presidents Nixon and Bush have stayed.
Villa 18 has recently undergone extensive renovations. Other
members of the delegation will stay in other villas on the
compound.
SCENESETTER: TERRA-COTTA WARRIORS NEAR XI'AN
In March, 1974, farmers digging a well 22 miles east of the
city of Xi'an discovered the first of what would be an army
of terra-cotta warriors buried 14 feet underground.
Although there is no historical record of the creation of
this army, it is believed it was intended to serve as a
bodyguard for the spirit of unified China's first emperor,
Qin Shihuangdi (reigned 221-210 BC). Encased in a pounded
earth vault with a wooden roof, the figures were probably
never meant to be seen after they were interred.
Nevertheless, in 206 BC, the vault was opened by a rebel
general who set fire to the roof, collapsing it and damaging
the figures below.
The terra-cotta warriors are taller than their sculptors
would have been, each standing about 5 feet 11 inches, with
officers taller than common soldiers. Each warrior has a
unique face, an individuality of expression not seen before
in Chinese art. The faces are so carefully molded that
young recruits can be distinguished from seasoned
commanders, and individual strands of hair are visible in
the warriors' elaborate braids. One theory suggests the
terra-cotta warriors are replicas of actual soldiers in
Qin's army, and that the entire force may have sat for the
artists in lieu of being buried alive with the Emperor.
The terra-cotta army occupies a complex of four separate
underground chambers. The first, believed to hold an
infantry division, covers nearly four acres and contains
nearly 6000 terra-cotta soldiers, bowmen, archers, and
chariots with horses and charioteers. The second chamber,
the calvary unit, is estimated to contain 80 chariot units
and a proportionate number of cavalry, plus supporting
troops. The third chamber is thought to be the Emperor's
command headquarters, with the warriors facing inward in a
defensive position. The final chamber is empty, and
historians suggest work here was abandoned when the Emperor
died in 210 BC. One account states workers at the site were
pardoned by the second emperor, armed, and forced to fight
advancing rebel troops.
Although the warriors were discovered in 1974, years passed
before foreigners were allowed to visit the site. At first
only scientists, political leaders and art historians were
permitted to view the army. In 1981, the site was opened to
tourists.
SCENESETTER: THE GREAT WALL AT MUTIANYU (MOO-tyen-you)
The Great Wall stretches 3,000 miles from China's border with
North Korea on the Yalu River in the east to the foot of the
Qilian and Tianshan mountains in China's westernmost Xinjiang
Uyghur Autonomous Region.
Rival kingdoms in China built protective walls around their
territories as early as the 7th century BC. When China's first
emperor, Qin Shihuang, unified the country in 221 BC, he ordered
the walls of the defeated states to be linked and built
additional fortifications. Nearly one million men were employed
in this massive project; about one-fifth of the country's entire
work force.
The Great Wall at Mutianyu is located about 40 miles northeast of
Beijing; it only recently has been opened to tourists.
Originally constructed in the mid-6th century, it was rebuilt in
the 14th century by the Ming emperors.
The masonry at Mutianyu consists of rectangular granite covered
by gray bricks. The main castle has three connecting watch
towers -- a large tower in the center with two smaller ones on
either side. The outer and inner parapets are crenellated with
merlons, so the defenders could shoot at invaders from both sides
of the wall; this feature is unique to the Mutianyu
fortification.
The Great Wall at Mutianyu is much steeper than other parts of
the wall, and is considered one of the Wall's most scenic
sections. There is a cable car for tourists, which takes about 5
minutes to reach the top; a nearby path takes about 45 minutes.
SCENESETTER: FORBIDDEN CITY
Located in the center of Beijing, the Forbidden City is the
largest and best-preserved palace complex in China. Once the
imperial palace of the Ming and Qing emperors, it is now open to
the public, receiving over 10,000 visitors a day.
Construction of the Forbidden City began in 1406 during the reign
of Ming Dynasty Emperor Yongle. The initial structure took 14
years to complete. China's emperors governed from the Forbidden
City, rarely venturing outside the palace grounds. Twenty-four
emperors lived in the City over a span of 505 years. The last
emperor, Pu Yi, stayed in the Forbidden City until 1925, fourteen
years after the 1911 revolution that ended the Qing Dynasty.
The Forbidden City is divided into three parts: the outer court,
where the emperor received senior officials and conducted affairs
of state; the inner court, where the emperor lived with his
empresses and concubines; and the Imperial Garden, where the
family spent their leisure time. The walls of the palace are
more than thirty feet high; surrounding the walls is a moat. The
Forbidden City occupies approximately 150 acres and has 9,999
buildings (one less than 10,000, the number used exclusively to
wish the emperor long life). The buildings are symmetrically
arranged, with main halls on a meridian line and the less
important halls and houses on the east and west sides of the
line.
The Forbidden City has been looted twice in this century -- by
the Japanese during World War II and by the Chinese Nationalists
who, on the eve of the Communist takeover in 1949, removed
thousands of artifacts to Taiwan. They are currently on display
in Taipei's National Palace Museum. The Forbidden City nearly
suffered more damage during the Cultural Revolution, but Premier
Zhou Enlai ordered the gates locked to prevent Red Guards from
entering the palace complex.
You will enter the Forbidden City at Wumen, the Meridian Gate, on
the south side, and walk north along the north-south axis through
the city's main buildings, finishing your tour at the inner
court.
SCENESETTER: BEIJING CHONGWENMEN CHRISTIAN CHURCH
The first American Methodist-Episcopal church built in northern
China, Chongwenmen Christian Church was established in 1870. It
is the largest Protestant church in Beijing. One of its pastors,
Wu Wei, will visit the United States this summer under a USIA
International Visitor Program (IVP) grant. Reverend Billy Graham
preached at Chongwenmen twice and former President George Bush
attended services there.
Chongwenmen Church was burned down in 1900 during the Boxer
Rebellion. The existing structure was completed in 1904.
Chongwenmen Church is constructed in a fan-shaped design entirely
of wood. It covers 8,245 square meters. The church seats 800
people in the main hall and 400-500 in the side chapel. Rooms
downstairs can accommodate an additional one thousand
worshippers, who can watch worship services on closed-circuit
television. In 1990, the Beijing municipal government designated
Chongwenmen Church a protected, historical landmark.
Before the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949,
Chongwenmen's congregation established several hospitals and
schools, including the Tongren Hospital and Muzhen Women's Middle
School. In 1949, the Chinese government seized control of the
hospitals and schools. After all religious activities were
suspended in 1958, the authorities gave Chongwenmen Church to the
Muzhen Women's Middle School which used it as an assembly hall.
During the Cultural Revolution, the church's interior was nearly
destroyed.
In 1982, the church was renamed Chongwenmen Church of the Beijing
Christian Council and underwent extensive renovations. Religious
activities and worship sevices resumed on Christmas Day the same
year. Services today are all well-attended, and sophisticated
interpretation equipment caters to the needs of non-Chinese
speakers.
SCENESETTER: XIAHE (SHA-heuh) VILLAGE
Xiahe (SHA-heuh) village, only two minutes' drive from the
Terracotta Warriors Exhibit, is nonetheless a typical Northern
Chinese village. Generations-old, Xiahe has a population of 376
people from 92 households. Eighty percent of the households
have the same family name, "He."
Before 1982, Xiahe was a traditional agricultural village,
producing wheat, corn, cotton, sweet potatoes, beans, and some
fruit. In the era of collectivized agriculture, villagers had
to rely on government assistance or to purchase additional food.
Income was very low: about $22 a year per capita.
Though 40 percent of Xiahe's land has been requisitioned for the
terracotta digs since the warriors' discovery in 1994, its
economic situation began to improve in 1982 when land was given
to each household to plant -- of course farmers can only use the
land, not own it. The village committee set up a few village
projects, including construction crews, a building materials
factory and a brick factory, giving the village an additional
source of revenue. Finally, almost every household in the
village began to make handicrafts to sell to tourists.
Living standards have improved markedly. In 1997 the average
income for each person in the village had risen to $395. Now,
the five main income sources for the villagers are tourism,
construction (migrant work in cities), small scale
manufacturing, transportation and agriculture. Agriculture
generates only about 20 percent of total income today, but
villagers consume most of the wheat they grow, preserving
farming as the staple activity. Of the 92 households in the
village, 95 percent have second incomes in addition to
agriculture.
The five-member village committee, which is elected from three
villages including Xiahe, is located in Xiahe village. The
committee chief is from Xiahe village. The deputy chief and the
committee's three other members are from the other two villages.
Today the committee owns 12 enterprises including two gas
stations, one medicine factory, one terracotta warriors
reproduction factory, a construction crew and a public
bathhouse. Income from these pursuits has been used to install
cable TV for all the households for free, pave village roads,
and maintain the village school.
There are about 22 private enterprises, among them a vinegar
factory, some shops, two private medical clinics, and a few
restaurants.
The village's primary school has about three hundred students,
15 teachers, and a principal who has been in charge for nearly
twenty years. Village children attend the county middle school
a 15-minute walk from the village.
SCENESETTER: XI'AN
Xi'an was the capital of the Chinese Empire at various times for
1,100 years and a symbol of China's ancient history and past
glories. It is situated in the fertile valleys of the Wei and
Yellow Rivers, traditionally known as the "cradle of Chinese
civilization." The earliest evidence of human habitation dates
back more than 6,000 years to the villages of primitive Chinese
tribes.
Xi'an was China's capital during several dynasties. Emperor Qin
Shi Huang (221 BC to 207 BC), the first ruler to unify China,
built his capital of Xi'anyang just east of modern day Xi'an.
The Han Dynasty that followed (lasting 400 years) also
established its capital near Xi'an, calling it Chang'an (Eternal
Peace). During this period, Chang'an was the starting point for
the great trade caravans of the Silk Road. In 5th century AD,
the Sui Dynasty rebuilt Chang'an on the plain where modern Xi'an
now stands. By the 7th century AD, the Tang Dynasty reigned over
the Golden Age of China, and Chang'an had become the largest and
most cosmopolitan city in the world, attracting foreigners from
all parts of Asia and beyond. In 1368, the ruler of the Ming
Dynasty renamed the city Xi'an, meaning "Western Peace."
A number of important landmarks remain from Xi'an's rich history.
The city wall is one of the few in China that has survived from
ancient times. You will be welcomed Thursday night in a ceremony
at the South Gate, one of four in the wall's almost 14-kilometer
length. Other reminders of Xi'an's past include the Big Goose
and Little Goose Pagodas, built as Buddhist temples in the 7th
century AD, and Qing Zhen Si, a mosque founded in 742 AD that
still serves as the place of worship for 30,000 Chinese Muslims.
The most famous attraction in Xi'an is the Terra-cotta Soldiers.
Peasants digging a well first discovered these pottery soldiers
in 1974. They are regarded as one of the most spectacular
archaeological finds of the 20th century. The soldiers,
representing Emperor Qin Shi Huang's imperial guards, are located
1500 meters from the emperor's Imperial Tomb. The warriors have
unique facial features and an array of weapons, poses, and
heights. Over three thousand soldiers, 96 horses, and 11
chariots have been unearthed so far. Experts believe thousands
more will be discovered.
Xi'an and the surrounding area have a population of 6.5 million.
The region has been a site of intensive industrialization in
recent decades; manufactures include machinery, textiles and
light industrial products.
National Action Plans (FOLLOWING 4TH UN CONF ON WMEN)
*
The following are summaries of what specified countries planned to do in regard to the status
of women. Unless specified, it is not known how these plans have been implemented (e.g., it is
known that the Canadian Government has allocated CAD 72 million for child care facilities, but
it is not known how they plan to reform their health system).
*
Information of a factual or statistical nature is marked with a * (with the exception of the US
and China where the information is indented)
United States
* see attached
- Plan Title: America's Commitment: Federal Programs Benefiting Women and New Initiatives
as Follow-up to the UN Fourth World Conference on Women (by President's Interagency
Council on Wornen)
- Some actions taken by the US:
- $14 billion in child care for next 6 years; $4 billion for low income families; $490
million for employment, education, housing for poor; $27.3 million for urban and rural
development; $250,000 from Department of Housing and Urban Development for
education and counselling program for female home buyers
- passage of the Violence against Women Act. Additional $10 million pledged to help
governments abroad fight violence against women.
- Partnership with the Ukraine to fight traficking of women
- The Administration is committed to getting the Convention on the Elimination of all
Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) ratified
- $2.5 million to help support the women of Afghanistan, who have been brutalized by
the Taliban
- The US has implemented numerous programs and held several conferences (e.g.,
"Healthy Women 2000 Initiative", "Bridging the Gap: Enhancing Partnerships to
Improve Minority Women's Health", "America's Commitment: The UN Women's
Conference One Year Later")
- Organizations: President's Interagency Council on Women (a policy making body containing
representatives from NGOs and 16 federal departments. First Lady is Honorary Chair); The
White House Office for Women's Initiatives and Outreach (a liasion office to women's
organizations)
China
* see attached
- Plan Title: The Programm for the Development of Chinese Women (1995-2000)
- Goals of the program include:
Government:
- Enhance the degree of women's participation in decision-making and management of
state and social affairs. Place women in leading government posts at all levels.
Labor:
- Guarantee women's right to labor, prohibiting the refusal to employ women on account
of their gender
- Equal pay for equal work
- To alleviate 200,000 households from poverty
- To develop 20,000 women-headed poverty alleviating economic entities that will
provide jobs for 800,000 poor women
- To train 10 million women in poverty-stricken areas, giving them at least one applied
skill
- To ban the employment of girls under the age of 16
- Actively carry out labor supervision and crack down on enterprises discriminating
against women or treating them unjustly
Education:
- Increase the percentage of women receiving education at all levels and actively recruit
women to technical and scientific fields
- To wipe out illiteracy amng 3 milion women each year and strive to eliminate illiteracy
by the end of this century among young and middle-aged women all over the country
- To develop vocational education for women and increase their job hunting skills
Health:
- To improve the health of women and guarantee their access to family planning
- To provide health care--including good reproductive health care--to all women
- To increase the number of midwifes in the countryside
- To raise the rate of rural women's hospitalization for child delivery and decrease
maternal mortality by 50%
- To inoculate 85% of the pregnant and child-bearing age woemn against spasmotoxin in
areas with high incidence of tetanus and eliminate the infection of tetanus by new-born
babies
Violence:
- To ban violence against women, traficking women, and illegal prostitution. Use
legislation and strict enforcement
- Protect the rights of women to sue and appeal
Culture
- To expand friendly exchanges between Chinese women and weomen of other countries
- publicize the important role women have played and continue to play in China
- The National Working Committee for Children and Women under the State Council is
responsible for implemenation of the program
- In addition, corresponding mechanisms have been set up in every province, autonomous
regions and municipalities under control of the central government
Argentina
- Plan Title: Plan de Igualdad de Oportunidades 1995-1999 (Equal Opportunity Plan for Women)
- Argentina has pledged to enhance women's participation in employment and politics and to
better attend to the health needs of women.
- To accomplish this, the Executive Office of the government has created the National Women's
Council, which is responsible for the coordination, integration, and implementation of women's
policy.
* The government will make more financing available for women and for projects to enhance
women's professional training through the National Employment Fund
* The Cupos Law requires political parties to include a minimum of 30% women on their lists of
candidates for election positions
Belarus
- Plan Title: National Plan of Action for the Improvement of the Status of Women, 1996-2000
- Plan approved by Decree of Cabinet of Minister of the Republic of Belarus, 6/6/96
- Legislation: Belarus plans to revise family law and criminal codes and laws on violence. They
plan to conduct a gender analysis of legislation.
- Economics: Belarus plans to promote women entrepreneurs, train unemployed women, research
the working conditions of women, and establish a Women's Enterprise Support Centre
- Health: They plan to promote family planning and establish health centers
- Education: Belarus plans to provide family life education for young people, and vocational
training
- Belarus hopes to achieve a gender balance in administrative bodies
- Belarus plans to use the mass media to conduct publicity campaigns on human rights, violence,
media stereotyping, breast feeding, substance abuse, and reproductive behaviour
- Belarus plans to promote a comprehensive human rights program to make women aware of
their rights
- Various proposals to enact these plans are being drafted and submitted for consideration by the
Cabinet of Ministers
- Reports analyzing the status of women are to be submitted regularly to the President of the
Republic and the Cabinet of Ministers. Belarus plans to put together a statistical compilation of
"The Family, Women and Children in the Republic of Belarus" biennially.
Canada
- Plan Title: Setting the Stage for the Next Century: The Federal Plan for Gender Equality
- Plan was written by 24 federal departments and agencies. They examined their policies,
identfied actions that would improve gender equality, and devised implementation strategies.
The government plans to institutionalize gender based analysis of government.
* The Government has alloted: CAD 6 milion for child care; CAD 72 million for new child care
spaces to ensure women's economic autonomy; CAD 10 million annualy to support women's
participation in the arts
- Women's economic autonomy: federal actions to promote women's autonomy; unemployment
insurance reform; child care and tax benefits; education and training for women; improving
access to paid labor market; providing support for women entrepreneurs
- Health: reform and renew health system; breast cancer research initiative; action against
HIV/AIDS
- Reduce Violence: provide shelters; reform criminal justice system; protect women refugees;
pass legislation on firearms and weapons; institute community policing
- The Goverment also plans to combat gender steretyping and make efforts to promote women's
historical and contemporary roles
Czech Republic
- Plan Title: "Letter from the Permanent Mission of the Czech Republic to the United Nations"
- Legislation: Government plans to ensure equal treatment for women in terms of pay, working
conditions, social security, and the fulfilment of family responsibilities; prepare legislation that
embodies principles of equal opportunity, such as the laws on employment and renumeration
- Economics: Government plans to eliminate government segregation in the labor market and
promote entrepreneurial activities for women
- Violence: Government plans to combat violence against women and the trafficking of women
and "sexual tourism."
- The Government will submit a detailed report of proposals and implementation strategies
Japan
- Plan Title: Plan for Gender Equality 2000: The National Plan of Action for Action for
Promotion of a Gender-Equal Society by the Year 2000
- Japan has particularly focused on the elderly and disabled. Plan to build a system of family
care, nursing care, income guarantees, and a social structure.
- Equal Opportunity: Japan plans to get more women participating in policy, on advisory
councils and committees, and in civil services. Japan plans to train women leaders.
- Workplace: provide equal opportunity and treatment; protection during pregnancy and after
childbirth; promote women's entrepreneurship; harmonize work with family life and child care
- Human Rights: eliminate all forms of violence against women; enhance recuperative measures
for women victims; create protection and relief measures
- Health: create awareness of reproductive health and rights, HIV/AIDS, drug abuse
- Education: enchance elementary and secondary education; provide career guidance
Panama
- Plan Title: Plan Nacional Mujer y Desarollo: Operativizacion 1996-2001 (The Women and
Development Plan)
* The Government and NGOs have developed 65 projects. Estimated cost is B/ .25,604,472.
B/.7,291,992 is to be raised domestically, and Government has made an effort to invest money in
women's compensation through the Social Emergency fund. B/ .18,312,480 is to be raised
externally. UNICEF will provide some funds and the European Union will contribute B/ .13.1
million. (Government of Panama has committed to provide B/ .5.4 million).
- Mechanisms to evaluate all of these programs are operative
- Social and Legal Equality: plan to elminate discrimination and inequality guarantee the rights
provided by the Constitution
- Political Participation: plan to expand women's participation in decision-making, including
areas that affect economic policy
- Economy and Employment: plan to provide access to training, credit, and markets
- Health: plan to strenghthen women's access to helath services and information
- Education: plan to elminate sexist practices within national education system, promote
women's access to education and professional training
- Violence: assist victims of violence
Thailand
- Thailand has not yet drafted a national action plan (NAP). However, it is in the process of
doing so.
- The Office of the National Commission on Women's Affairs (ONCWA) will conduct meetings
for 100 participants from relevant agencies to seek their views on a NAP.
- The ONCWA established the National Committee on Women's Labour and Social
Development to report on relevant issues
- ONCWA has translated the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action into Thai for
publication and dissemination to Goverment agencies, NGOs, and others
* ONCWA will conduct seminars for 300 local and grassroots women's leaders in the prinicpal
cities of the 4 main regions of Thailand to enlist grassroots support for action on the status of
women