etirabys:

The only China-related blog I read posted something that deviates from its usual “just translate the top posts on Weibo” post format. It’s about the position of women in China:

https://weibo.substack.com/p/feminism-and-the-position-of-women

It and the (extremely fucking dark) post it links to in its second paragraph have been on my mind for several days. I’ve kept the browser tabs open despite having finished reading & having no desire to reread them.

I found the feminism post illuminating – things I’d 80% understood about the CCP’s “strategy” wrt gender snapped into place, and I feel foolish for not having clearly seen that angle before:

The problem, of course, is that the gender ratio in China has been off for a very long time now. Inevitably, there are going to be a lot of men who will never find a wife. And inevitably, those men are going to be precisely the most unstable elements of society—the poorest, working the most menial of jobs, with the least hopes of ever getting promoted, with the least education. Under these circumstances, relying on market forces is not an option. Women would never willingly marry those people when they have perfectly good careers of their own.

So the first step, then, is to fuck women out of careers. …

China is in an equilibrium that it cannot coordinate to get out of: if you have a daughter, you don’t want to invest in her when the norms are that her husband will provide for her / that she won’t have a career after marriage. If you have a son, you need to to invest in him, because his marital/reproductive prospects aren’t great unless he has a job, a car, and an internal passport that lets him live/work in a city, where he can have a future.

It might be a little unbelievable to you, that a country can just sacrifice half its population to stabilise the other half. … China doesn’t pass laws or enforce laws to protect women for the same reason they don’t pass or enforce laws to protect sweat shop workers. China is competitive on the international stage precisely because it is willing to look the other way while you make a sweat shop of people work unpaid overtime 80 hours a week while you pay them a quarter of minimum wage and don’t give health insurance or retirement benefits. China is competitive on the international stage because it’s willing to look the other way while you dump industrial waste right into the ocean.