Half the Sky? - A Conversation with UN Women's Julia Broussard

Yesterday I met with Julia Broussard, Country Manager of the Beijing Office of UN Women. Julia has worked and lived in China for almost 20 years, and has headed this office for four, so she had a lot to share on the state of gender issues in China. The office's main purviews are violence against women (ending it), economic empowerment, job discrimination (stopping it), political participation (increasing it), and more generally looking at gender in Corporate Social Responsibility and in the media.

We had a great conversation that touched upon a lot of things, but I'll try and structure this post a little bit (and annotate it with some other stories and pictures). One of my main takeaways was that, on the whole, things are getting better in the gender space, but there's still a whole lot to do---not mention new challenges and opportunities that are coming up as the country changes and urbanizes.

A lot of the stuff I wrote about earlier regarding the effects of the One-Child policy remain true, particularly in the villages. An important thing she mentioned, though, is the effect of the Hukou System on women as the country urbanizes. First off, back in the 1970s, when China started to industrialize, it set up second and third tier cities (smaller than Beijing and Shanghai, the "first tier" or megacities) to host heavy and light industries. The government forced people to relocate to those cities to staff those factories---but they weren't allowed to bring their spouses or families. So these cities wound up having extremely skewed sex and age ratios. Heavy industry cities (like Dukou, which made auto parts) were male-dominated, while light industrial cities (like Jiayin, which produced textiles) were "cities of women." This imbalance had a strange consequence on the next generation's demographics.

More recently, when men alone migrate to cities for industrial work and leave their wives and families behind (because their hukou means they won't have access to any services in those cities), a greater household burden falls on the women that are left behind: not only do they now have to cook, clean and take care of the children as they did before, but they also are responsible for providing ALL of the labor for their family's agricultural and farming collective, for at least half of which the male had been responsible previously.

In other situations, when both the mother and father migrate to cities for work, they leave the children in the care of the grandparents. When this happens en masse, the whole social safety net of a village is broken. And worse, girls that have been left behind in villages often become victims of sexual violence when their parents are not around to keep them safe. That said, even if children were to migrate to cities along with their parents, because of Hukou, they would not have access to urban schools or any social services, leaving them in the streets in the daytime and perhaps victim to the same kinds of crimes. Two options to fix the situation are to increase income generating activities in or closer to rural areas so that parents don't have to migrate (this comes with other challenges of directly addressing rural poverty in a scalable way); or to relax Hukou to let families migrate together (though a sudden elimination of that sort might overwhelm urban services).

Meanwhile, heavy industry, dominated by men, pays more than light industry. The owners of light industrial operations often PREFER to hire women because they reportedly can be paid less and are retained for longer---lacking ambition to earn more money, they stay at factories even long after marriage.

In urban areas, even white-collar professions suffer from major gender discrimination. Even college education women face job discrimination, particularly in the technology, science, military-defense, and Foreign Service areas. And in education, women are required to have higher exam scores to gain entrance to these academic fields where they are less represented---a sort of reverse affirmative action. And yet, female-dominated fields like languages have quotas and lower test score requirements for men. Sort of an inverted scenario, huh?

All that said, women's representation in business and politics (by the numbers) is statistically higher than that in many other countries. In business, over 25% of senior managers are women (compared with around 21% in the US). And in politics, though most pictures of official ceremonies look like old boys clubs, with dozens of men dressed in penguin suits, the National People's Congress, the "legislative body" of the PRC, has over 22% women's representation---higher than the global average of 17% in the lower house of the legislature. We can't really know whether this has been enforced by quota or is just 'organic,' though, since the operating procedures of the NPC are so opaque. In an earlier NPC, here were a couple of the leading ladies:

They've never, however, gone above the Standing Committee level.

Speaking of opacity, let's talk about some statistics. The number of cases of sexual harassment and sexual violence per province are---well, we don't know, because official statistics of negative incidents like that are not recorded. Or, if they are, they're not openly shared. Julia says that UN Women has tried to do their own surveys to obtain their own statistics, but the government has never been keen enough on finding out to let them. Anecdotally, these kind of incidents definitely happen. They may not happen quite as often as they do in other parts of the world---Julia attributes this to a trait in Chinese culture that supposedly does not encourage as open an expression of any emotions (including lust) as they would elsewhere---but they do happen. Of course, a major reason they go unreported or underreported is that women are not as inclined to be vocal about what happens to them, for fear of their reputation (and the blowback of any legal or other subsequent actions) and also because of that issue of expressing emotions.

What's good is that the internet is changing that quite a bit. Sites like Weibo---China's version of twitter, which is locked here---are important means of complaining about or reporting sexual harassment while still maintaining relative anonymity and "saving face." And this avenue has also turned into a more open, wide-scale protest. In southwest China, women have organized to protest loudly against violence on women.

And in Shanghai a few years ago, when a woman was sexually harassed on the subway, the transit authorities posted a picture of a woman they deemed "scantily clad," and warned women that if they dress provocatively, they invite harassment. In response, a number of women dressed in head-to-toe provocative covering, with signs that said “I can be sexy, but you can’t harass me.” The protest was picked up by the media and went viral---with the organizers being given awards for standing up for womens’ rights. It was around that time---thought it wasn’t actually related---that the Shanghai government legally defined sexual harassment as a crime and identified mechanisms to enforce the laws and protected channels for women to seek redress.

(More recently, after the 17-year old son of an official was accused of gang-raping a Beijing woman, an idiotic Tsinghua University professor argued that "To rape a bargirl does less harm than to rape a good woman," presumably implying that "bar girls are more likely to consent to sex, and therefore it's more acceptable to rape them than it is to rape a normal girl." Fortunately, according to the website Shanghaist, "his message...outraged pretty much everyone.")

Workplace harassment also remains a major issue---as do equal compensation, hiring practices, and other workplace gender issues---and advocates like Guo Jianmei of the Beijing Zhongze Women’s Legal Counseling and Service Center are working with employers and the government to work against it. Both she and Julia say that it was the 1995 UN 4^th World Conference on Women, which was held in Beijing, that really put the issue of gender equality on the map in China. The term “sexual harassment” officially entered the country’s legal lexicon and official steps began in earnest.

One thing Julia is a little concerned about is the changing media landscape. More movies, TV shoes, and especially advertisements objectify women---and reshape images of women’s beauty---in ways that have been prevalent in the United States, for example, for far too long.

There’s been an increased sexualization and objectification of women in ads that may not be very healthy for gender equality in China.

But as long as more people are talking about it---and organizing for it, and advocating, and empowering themselves and others---the upward trend will hopefully continue unabated.

Turning Pork into Beef: The Effects of Urbanization on China's Food Policy

One of the things I was most excited about in China, prior to coming here, was the food. Even though NYC has some incredible Chinese food---dim sum, Sichuanese, Xian, and of course the all American General Tso’s Chicken---I figured it had to be even better live. On the whole that’s been true; check out these pictures of some delicious treats I’ve had around the country:

Xinjiang Lamb with Stir-Fried Naan (yes, delicious fried bread)

Sauteed String Beans with Pork and Sichuan Peppers

Vegetable Buns

Some kind of delicious Shrimp

But, while on a fellowship to study urban development, I’d be remiss to not talk about the implications of urbanization on agriculture, food policy, and food quality. Yes, I’m about to burst the bubble of deliciousness that I’ve just inflated…with some depressing wonking and policy analysis.

So…in the vain of Communist Revolution, Chairman Mao had organized rural China into collective and communal farms---cooperatives seized from landlords---that people would farm collectively and share in the produce. The large communes were supposed to create economies of scale that would produce enough food to feed EVERYONE. The result was quite the opposite: the Great Leap Forward diverted people from real agricultural work (and encouraged them to melt their farm tools into poor quality metal to meet steel production quotas), while those who did farm had no incentive (or ability) to actually produce efficiently. The result was famine that cost tens of millions of lives.

In 1978, Deng Xiaoping returned China to the family farming system that had served China so well before communism: households could now lease plots of land from the government and produce at least enough to meet government quotas. And they were allowed to sell their surplus at market price for a profit (incentivizing more production). Though this improved agricultural productivity and decreased rural poverty for some time, it coincided with a slow dismantling of the rural social welfare system and underinvestment in rural areas, as the governemtn began to focus on manufacturing and foreign investment around cities. Over time, a large wage gap between rural and urban areas emerged, and food production could not keep pace with the rising demand of the growing¾and increasingly rich¾urban population.

In the early 2000s, the national government enacted more reforms to help rural areas: farming cooperatives (now voluntary) were legalized, farmers were allowed to lease out or transfer land-use rights to other people for other purposes, as in urban areas. Farming accounted for 70% of China’s labor, but contributed less than 12% of GDP¾productivity was low and farming was clearly not a lucrative profession. At the same time, demand---especially for meat products and the grain to feed livestock---kept rising as city dwellers' tastes got fancier.

Because farming collectives were now able to lease their land to developers, who began to 'urbanize' it with high rise apartments and other infrastructure, farmland itself was decreasing. Other farmers left for cities when local governments requisitioned their land for development. And finally, many farmers simply leased their land to large scale (often corporate) agricultural operators while continuing to provide labor for those new venues. The hukou system, of course, made migration and and alternative futures even more difficult. The bottom line was that farming was not lucrative and farmland was diminishing---so many farmers abandoned their trade while demand continued to skyrocket.

To make up for the lost product, corporate farming techniques entered the Chinese marketplace. One benefit of these large, usually industrial farms was that, by virtue of their size and scale of investment and operations, they were more easily able to create economies of scale and produce more food per unit than individual farmers ever could have. Another was that they had mastered many of the technological and chemical innovations that made farming even more productive: new breeds of seeds that produced more grain per stock; fertilizers that caused vegetables to grow faster; incubators that could hatch millions of eggs into chickens that could be raised in controlled environments for easier integration into the supply chain. Without innovations like these, the world might not have had enough food to feed its rising population---and millions of people might have died of starvation or malnourishment, as the 18th century economist Thomas Malthus had predicted. A "Malthusian Catastrophe" was averted by industrialized farming.

But this system of industrialized farming has arguably been abused and run amock in many places, especially China. Farmers have been known to buy chemicals that, they were told, would boost their output. With little proof of their success or quality, they used the chemicals, with great consequences for the quality of their produce. Watermelons have exploded from being pumped with growth hormones; pigs and livestock have been plumped up with chemicals that have harmed consumers; vegetables have been filled with chemical cocktails that have caused cancer (one third of the world's cancer deaths occur in China, where cancer is responsible for 21% of all fatalities). At a weird point, extracts have been used on pork to turn it into beef. For real. (This is to say nothing of pure scams, like the one in which dumpling vendors allegedly filled their pork buns not with pork, but cardboard; or the Hot Pot restaurants that served lamb meat skewers that turned out to be made of rat). 

One of the most high profile cases of 'agricultural malpractice' has been in milk formula for infants. China's domestic producers---which have a monopoly on production and distribution---have been found to put melamine, a poisonous flame retardant, in their infant formula. Hundreds of thousands of babies were harmed. Many panic-stricken mothers stopped feeding their babies, while a huge industry has developed to fill the new demand for safe, foreign-made milk formula: smugglers have imported thousands if not millions of foreign produced milk packets from Hong Kong, which has no trade barriers with outside producers, and smuggled them into mainland China for resale. On my exit from Hong Kong airport, a sign at the check-in distinctly forbade the packing of more than two cans of formula per person. Out of desperation, smuggling of these safer products continues.

Many foreigners have cited uncertain food quality as a primary reason for why they would not live in China for longer. For the hundreds of millions of other residents of China who have no other choice, food quality presents a potentially fatal---and at present insurmountable--problem. The dilemma appears to be providing enough food on the one hand, or providing decent quality food on the other.

This is perhaps one of the worst consequences of China's rush to urbanize that the country must do far, far more to regulate. Though the loss of farmland to suburban subdivision in the United States caused similar problems, it has only been a vigilant, independent media and very active activists that have been able to curb the system's most extreme excesses. (See Food Inc and Fast Food Nation for accessible accounts of this). 

At present, these are two things that China lacks. As China foes from a net food importer to a net producer (and potential exporter), let's hope to god that this system has some better oversight. 

China's Urban Problems in Perspective

While we (I say as an American) critique this model of urbanization, we ought to recognize that there were similar vectors of development in the economic growth of the United States: displacement and forced migration of the Native populations of most of the land we settled and later urbanized; cheap labor from Europe, China, and Africa to build all the infrastructure; and displacement of Black Americans and the poor in cities for “urban renewal” projects like large highways and buildings as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, and of farms to make suburban subdivisions throughout the country since then (though admittedly, most American farmers were paid quite handsomely to sell their land to developers, though some of that land was simply requisitioned through eminent domain). And our growth, particularly after the second world war, was also driven by consumption and financed by debt and financial innovations like 30-year mortgages and credit cards.

On the environmental consequences of China’s urbanization, I’ll have another post soon, but also recall that our cities were rife with black smoke and our rivers literally caught fire because there were so many industrial pollutants emitted into them. And on food policy, again more forthcoming, but the Chinese have recently begun the import of the same fertilizers, industrialized food production techniques, genetically modified foods, and chemically-altered animal and plant products that allowed us to cope with the post-war loss of farmland to suburbanization (and a rising and increasingly wealthy population to feed).

The scale, speed, and political determination with which the Chinese are enacting policies that encourage these changes---rather than their mere substance---are probably the main points of difference. The questions we ought to be asking are (i) is it really worth it? And (ii) How could it be improved, including by learning lessons from the US experience?

From the Chinese government’s perspective, of course, this urban growth is worth it. Urbanization appears to be the most efficient way to change the currently impoverished state of rural areas---at least on the face of it. Meanwhile, an export-based economy has come with lots of vulnerabilities---namely, China is reliant on other countries’ consumption for its own growth and economic vitality. Urbanizing---and ideally, middle class-izing---China’s population will make its economy more dependent on domestic consumption and less on the vagaries and vicissitudes of foreign markets. It’s also China’s way of managing its population and population growth. The one-child policy has had many negative consequences and is slowly being relaxed in the wake of demographic shifts that are on the whole not very healthy (poor gender ratios and an aging population that will not be able to continue to power China’s economic engine). But, as described in an earlier post, the economic utility of children goes down in more dense, urban areas, where more children can in fact be greater liabilities.

To all of this add many of the points that Harvard economist Edward Glaeser raises in his 'Triumph of the City': urban areas account for more innovation; for healthier lifestyles and longer lives; and for smaller carbon footprints per capita. (This thing about greenness is only considering comparable purchasing power; i.e. a poor farmer who tills the land by hand will consume less energy than an urbanite who rides a subway and uses an elevator and other electronic appliances. However, that urbanite will use less energy than a suburbanite who drives a car to get anywhere). 

Perhaps most consequentially, urbanization may be inevitable: it is happening throughout the world due to the changing nature of global economics. Government policies (like those in China) are just expediting what the market might do anyway. 

From rural Chinese people's perspective, urbanization is a mixed bag: yes many are making money by selling their land, and yes, many are able to access more lucrative employment opportunities. But many more are being kicked off their land so that other, richer people can live more comfortably; many more are in turn forced to move to cities and staff unhealthy factories and live illegally at the urban fringe just to make ends meet; and many more are being uprooted from their families, social networks, and traditions while the social welfare infrastructure is being dismantled.

So, yes, there is definitely more China could do to specifically help rural areas and their people (much as the US hasn’t solved the issue of poverty in rural Appalachia or the Mississippi Delta) and also those that are being left out of the urban dream. But global urbanization is arguably inevitable---we might as well make the most of it and make sure it follows the best path possible.

In China’s urbanization process, what can be learned and improved? 

First off, regulation can be very helpful. The US was on a downward environmental trajectory when, after lobbying from environmental groups, President Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency in 1972, which did a great deal to reverse the trend in America by limiting pollutant emissions, mandating carpools and increasing energy efficiency, encouraging mass transit over car usage, and so forth. China really ought to take that page from the American playbook---and it slowly is putting major caps on its factories and encouraging mass transit development as a viable alternative to cars, for instance.

Similarly, only regulation can limit the harms of modified foodstuffs. There doesn’t seem to be much standing in the way of chemicals in American foods---what with the farm lobbies, Monsanto’s recent legislative victories, and the strength of the modified (and fast and junk) food lobbies. But America's Food and Drug Administration does a pretty good job ensuring that these foods aren't as bad as they could be. China could more easily plow through any such interest groups and more easily regulate the industry so that the scale of production is retained while safety and health standards are ensured.

On forced migration and displacement, I’m honestly not sure what any silver bullet might be, given Beijing’s ambitious plans and sheer determination. But, paradoxically given China's authoritarian governance system, popular (though certainly not electoral) democracy seems to be having the greatest effect so far. Political organizing---in the form of relatively large-scale protests against local officials in rural areas and farming collectives---has been a sort of feedback mechanism in China. If the amount of state usurpation gets too unbearable, local protests erupt, and local officials often tweak the policies accordingly. Sometimes, individual hold-outs remain, and development simply happens, literally, around them:

These kinds of protests have been occurring all over the Chinese hinterland in very localized ways. Consider these protesters Chinese versions of Jane Jacobs, who organized her Greenwich Village neighborhood to stop NY State developers from running highways through Washington Square Park and downtown Manhattan. Whether these local protests in China will put a dent in national policy is improbable---most are reactions to very local situations, and any effort to coordinate a national campaign for shared concerns would be difficult logistically, and would be squelched by authorities.

In the long-term, there's an argument to be made that urbanization itself might increase the amount of democracy in the Chinese political system as well. The political implications of density and shared space tend towards compromise; and common space of the sort that cities provide also serve as rallying grounds for political agitation---think of May 35th (the code name for the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests of "June 4th," a phrase that has been blocked on Chinese internet). That said, if urbanization succeeds in enriching people, it may also make them politically complacent by giving them just enough stake in the status quo to be acquiescent. And density may also make it easier for authorities to police populations and break up any budding political organization.

Nonetheless, a solution to the problems of China’s urbanization may well be democracy.