China's "Leftover" Women

A previous blog post written by Maureen highlights the Forbes Most Powerful Women in 2012. I found it interesting that there was a category entitled “Businesswoman are booming in Asia” highlighting powerful women CEOs and entrepreneurs in Asia. We’ve discussed how stereotypical femininity traits (nurturing, soft hearted) and masculinity traits (ambitious, bold) through the Martin and Nakayama readings about identity, and these powerful entrepreneurs clearly challenge the dynamics of gender identity norms as well as power struggles and inequality for women.  However, I began to wonder how—if at all— Asian professional women were subject to additional cultural struggles or prejudices as opposed to white professional women.

Throughout the Flores reading, she refers to the different stereotypes about minority women and White women when it comes to sexuality. Flores notes that minority women are often “depicted as highly sexualized” and “primitive sexualities” (Flores 386). When looking specifically at powerful Asian women in China, the following article seems to claim the opposite.

The article China's leftover women, unmarried at 27 describes the high number of unmarried Chinese professional women and explains a few reasons for this imbalance. The country has a national gender discrepency caused by selective abortions due to the one-child policy that has led to the fact that there are now about 20 million more men under 30 than women under 30, according to the National Bureau of Statistics data. Also, the article indicates that “Chinese men tend to ‘marry down’, both in terms of age and educational attainment”.

The most striking part of this article was the fact that it isn't just family pressures for women to get married at a young age, but also state-run media seem to be purporting the cultural attitude that women over age 27 who are unmarried are “leftover” women. See this excerpt from an article titled, Leftover Women Do Not Deserve Our Sympathy posted on the website of the All-China Federation of Women in March 2011. I find the language to be painfully blunt and disturbing.

"Pretty girls do not need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family. But girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult.”

"These girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness. The tragedy is, they don't realise that as women age, they are worth less and less. So by the time they get their MA or PhD, they are already old - like yellowed pearls."

What does this say about gender equality and power relations between men and women in China? How does the media in China represent powerful Asian women? Pretty Asian women? What stereotypes does it perpetuate?