Things getting worse for Chinese women says many Chinese bloggers

Left: Women's Rights Without Frontiers

Friends grieve at the funeral of a 21-year-old Chinese woman who died following a forced abortion in Liuyang City, Hunan Province, in February 2009.

Things are not so good for Chinese women according to many Chinese female bloggers and civil rights activists.  Chinese women suffer considerable discrimination in the workplace and economic hardship a report says.  There would no doubt be considerable differences in views on this depending whether you  are one of the rising but small middle class or bourgeois, or one of the hundreds of million of young women working in the factories of the south or in the rural areas of the interior.

One blogger for example wrote that,  "Chinese women are taking a clear family leadership role in today's China, citing the catchphrase "Follow the Party, do what the wife says." 

But this was not a majority view by any means.  Another writer, Zhu Jianguo said that "there was little to brag about."

"We can say that there has been an improvement in material terms," she says. "But in terms of the level of freedom they enjoy and human rights, I'd say things have got worse."

Another blogger was jailed after she wrote online about a young woman who died after being gang raped.  Radio Free Asia quotes one civil rights lawyer  who "says her clients had suffered beatings, torture, trafficking, harassment, rape and coercive prostitution, while at the same time, society was being bombarded with images of independent women."


For more on this go to Radio Free Asia the source of this story.

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This International Women's Day still finds rights and conditions have changed very little for the vast majority of women in the world:

Women account for 70 percent of the world's people who live in absolute poverty. Women work two-thirds of the world's working hours, produce half of the world's food, and yet earn only 10% of the world's income and own less than 1% of the world's property. Worldwide, a quarter of all women are raped during their lifetime. Depending on the country, 25 to 75 percent of women are regularly beaten at home. Between 10% and 50% of women report they have been physically abused by an intimate partner in their lifetime. Over 120 million women have undergone female genital mutilation. Women hold only 12% of parliamentary seats worldwide. Women account for 2/3rd's of the world's illiterate adults, and girls account for 2/3rd's of the world's children without access to education.  TheWorldRevolution.org