OPINION> Commentary
Rise and rise of the fair sex
By Ashis Chakrabarti (China Daily)
Updated: 2008-08-22 07:45

I still remember the applause she got as her name was announced. Time: a November day in 2002. Place: the Great Hall of the People. The occasion: the concluding session of the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC).

On the steps outside the Hall, Wu Yi was the cynosure of most eyes. For us foreign journalists, the only woman member of the newly-elected political bureau of the CPC was an obvious story of the day. More so because the two previous political bureaus had no women on them.

Six years later, as I watch on TV one Chinese woman after another receive her gold medal to lusty cheers from thousands of spectators at Bird's Nest, Water Cube or some other venue, I'm reminded of that November day.

Any event, big or small, leaves many images and memories for those who witness it. For the whole world, Beijing Games will certainly be remembered most for the history that Michael Phelps made there. Phelps apart, there will be plenty of other images from Beijing that people will cherish.

For me, the most memorable of the images are those of the good, gold-adorned women of China. That's my link between these August days and that November afternoon in 2002.

Come to think of it, women have earned more than half the golds for China - 20 of the 33 till my last count - and also more than half the total number of medals. They did so also at Athens, winning 24 of the 44 golds and 44 of the total 77 medals.

With such records, who can doubt the wisdom in Mao Zedong's historic proclamation, "Women hold up half the sky"? In China, they certainly do. And, they do it now much more than they did in 1968, when the late chairman made the famous remark at a gathering of women workers in Shanghai.

If Simone de Beauvoir were to write a book on this historic feat by Chinese women, I bet she'd have loved to call it The First Sex.

The rise and rise of women is one of the happiest stories of modern China. No one knows this better than Chinese women themselves.

But happy stories often have strange footnotes, if not sad endings. I've often wondered why China still has a system in which women retire from their jobs at 55, while men do so at 60. Some women, in senior and responsible positions, carry on till 60 - but that is a privilege for a few. How is this gender discrimination still there in a country where one of the first two laws passed after the founding of the PRC ensured equal rights for women. The other, as everyone knows, was "land to the tiller".

What's even more intriguing is the fact that most women I've talked to on the subject seem to be happy with this arrangement. I'm told this system was actually aimed at better protection for women's health and welfare.

Times are changing, I'm also told. Women's groups are debating the issue. On the Net more and more Chinese people are said to be favoring a change of the current system. At provincial and city levels, there's a rethink on the system. Early this year, the Shanghai local authorities raised the women's retirement age to 60. May the fair winds from the Huangpu blow across the good earth of China.

(China Daily 08/22/2008 page10)